I built a product nobody wanted. Now I'm starting over — this time validating first.
3 weeks ago I started building FlowForge — a visual AI workflow builder. Spent weeks on the UI, the execution engine, the node canvas.
Then I searched the market properly.
Zapier. Make. n8n. Gumloop. All doing exactly what I built. With years of head start and thousands of users.
Killed it immediately.
Here's what I actually learned from building something nobody needed:
I can ship a real product UI fast
I know my stack end to end now
Building without validating first is just expensive journaling
So I'm starting over. New idea: NotionAudit — an AI tool that scans your Notion workspace and tells you exactly what's cluttered, unused, and slowing you down.
This time I'm validating before writing a single line of code.
Landing page is live here if anyone wants to give honest feedback: https://notion-audit-ruddy.vercel.app/
Has anyone else killed a product after building it and started smarter the second time?
One thing I'd be careful with:
The expensive mistake may not be building before validating.
It may be drawing the wrong conclusion from why the first product failed.
Those sound similar, but they can lead to very different decisions on what gets validated next.
I wouldn't make that call casually in a thread.