I kept building things nobody wanted. So I did something to fix that.
I've killed three side projects in the last two years. Every time the same pattern; get excited, start building, ship something, realize nobody wanted it.
The problem was never execution. It was that I never validated properly before building. I'd skim a few Reddit threads, Google around for competitors, convince myself there was demand, and start building.
After the third dead project, I built the thing I wish I'd had before all of them.
Hence I built a tool where you paste your startup idea. It scrapes across multiple layers like Reddit threads, G2 reviews, Google Trends, niche forums, Product Hunt launches, competitor websites and synthesizes everything into a structured validation report: search demand, competitor landscape, community signals, risk factors, a score, and a verdict.
This isn't one API call to some frontier LLM. It's multi-level scraping across real sources, cross-referenced and scored. Every insight links back to where it came from you can click through to the actual Reddit thread, the G2 page, or the source of the data.
See what the output looks like: https://planfirst.app/validate/cyj02ivh
Where I'm at: Launching today. Zero users. You'd be the first.
I built this to scratch my own itch. Try it/Roast it → planfirst.app
Hey Shushrut — three projects, same pattern: that actually sounds like a process problem rather than a luck problem, which is good news, because processes can be changed. The break I'd try next time: write the stop-loss down before the excitement hits, because you won't write it honestly once you're in love with the thing.
The founders who break out of this loop usually stop deciding what to build in isolation and create a systematic way to let the market pull the next thing out of them.
Practically: a lightweight tracker where you log every customer conversation - the problem they described, the exact words they used, how they're currently solving it without you. After 10-15 conversations a pattern emerges clearly. The next thing to build is already decided - you're just reading the data.
Building without this is like driving with the windshield fogged. You can still move, but you have no idea whether you're heading toward customers or away from them.
The 'building things nobody wants' loop is so common because the feedback mechanism is broken. You build, launch, get silence or polite interest, and interpret it as 'not enough marketing' rather than 'wrong thing.' So you build more.
The fix is almost always getting to the workaround earlier. Before you write a line of code, find 5 people who are actively patching the problem you want to solve - with spreadsheets, manual processes, janky combinations of tools. Those people are your market. The workaround IS the product spec.
What changed for me: treating validation as 'find the workaround,' not 'find the audience.' When I asked solo founders how they track clients, pipeline, revenue, and decisions, the answer was always chaos - different tools, no connection, things falling through. The broken system was already there. I'm just making it coherent.
Building a Solopreneur OS now, validated against that specific friction. The product is already proven by the workaround.
What was the shift for you - was it a validation method change, or finding the right market where the pain was actually acute?
The 'building things nobody wanted' trap almost always comes down to the same root cause: the builder is answering a question nobody asked, because nobody tracked what questions people actually asked.
The fix isn't just 'talk to users more' - it's having a system that captures the signal when it happens. A conversation where someone says 'I wish I could...' is gold, but only if you write it down immediately and connect it to a pattern across 5 similar conversations.
I've been building a Solopreneur OS in Notion where every client interaction that includes a pain point gets logged to the CRM database with a tag. After 20 interactions, patterns become obvious. Before that system, I was doing the same thing as you - building from memory of what I thought people said, which degrades fast.
The constraint that changed things for me: I don't start building anything until I can quote at least 3 specific people saying the same problem in their own words. Not paraphrased - their actual words. What was the thing you did that finally fixed it?
The 'building things nobody wanted' trap usually has a structural cause: building in a feedback vacuum. No regular way to test assumptions before they're baked into features, no system to capture what prospects actually said vs what you remembered, no record of which decisions led you down a dead end.
I've been building a Notion OS for solopreneurs with a Decisions database for exactly this - not just logging product decisions, but capturing validation signals alongside them. 'We assumed X because of Y conversation; here's what we learned when we shipped it.' Patterns become visible that invisible in-the-moment.
What was the specific mechanism you built to break the pattern?