I'm 20 and my first SaaS flopped. Here's what I'm doing differently with the second one.
At the beginning of 2026, I built Clean Core, a focus and project management app for solo creators. I spent months on it. Built a whole website, wrote blog posts, planned a Kickstarter. Never got a single paying customer.
The problem wasn't the product. It was that I was building for a vague audience with a vague problem. "Productivity" is not a pain point. It's a category.
So I started over.
I looked at what I actually know, design, development, and enough about marketing to be dangerous, and asked what problem has a specific person in physical pain every single week.
The answer: marketing agencies logging into Meta, Google Ads, TikTok, and GA4 separately for every client, then spending hours building reports by hand.
So I built a dashboard that connects all four platforms, calculates blended ROAS automatically using GA4 as the source of truth, generates branded PDF client reports in one click, and sends real-time alerts when something goes wrong. I called it Clean Core Marketing Manager.
What I did differently this time:
Picked one specific customer: digital marketing agencies with 5-15 clients
Built around a real weekly pain: reporting overhead and platform switching
Launched fast instead of polishing forever. The app has been live for two weeks.
Did outreach before trying to grow. 17 cold emails to real agencies before any marketing spend.
I'm 20, studying Visual Communications at Ivy Tech in Indianapolis, and running Wonderworks Design Studio on the side. I have no funding, no co-founder, and genuinely need this to work.
The app is live at clean-core.app. Free forever plan, 14-day trial on paid tiers.
If you're an agency owner or know one, I'd be grateful if you tried it. If you've been through a failed first product, I'd love to hear how you turned it around.
What was the biggest lesson from the first one?
Curious whether it was a distribution problem or a product-market fit problem — those require very different fixes the second time around.
The reframe you made is the one that matters: 'productivity is a category, not a pain point.' That distinction took most founders two or three failed products to figure out. You got there faster.
The 17 cold emails before marketing spend is the right instinct. One thing that will make those cold emails land better: lead with the pain you're solving before mentioning the product. The current pitch probably describes what the dashboard does (connects platforms, calculates blended ROAS, generates PDFs). The version that converts faster describes what the agency was doing at 6pm on a Friday before your product existed -- the manual export, the mismatched numbers from three platforms, the report that goes to the client tomorrow morning.
The agencies who respond to that version are the ones who have the problem. The ones who ignore it don't. This is more useful information than a landing page conversion rate.
On the GA4-as-source-of-truth point from the earlier comment: that's worth being explicit about in your onboarding. Most agencies are used to Meta and Google Ads reporting their own attributed revenue, and GA4 tends to show a lower number. Some clients get alarmed when the report they're used to seeing suddenly shows less revenue. If you pre-empt that in the first client setup, it goes from a bug-that-needs-explaining to a differentiation that builds trust: 'we show you the conservative truth, not the platform's self-reported number.'
17 cold emails is a tiny sample. What response rate did you get, and what happened when you followed up with the non-responders?
The pivot you described is textbook — moving from 'productivity category' to 'agencies spend 4 hours a week on cross-platform reporting' is exactly the kind of specific pain that converts.
One thing worth thinking through as you scale: GA4 as source of truth for blended ROAS is a solid call, but GA4's data model is quite different from what most dashboards expect. Session-based vs event-based attribution can produce numbers that confuse clients when compared to Meta's own reporting. You may want to be upfront with agencies about that mismatch early — it's actually a feature (it shows the true view), not a bug, but it needs explaining.
I do a lot of work connecting analytics data layers for funded startups — if you ever run into weird DAX or SQL discrepancies when pulling GA4 data alongside ad platform data, feel free to ask. I wrote up a lot of the common DAX↔SQL conversion patterns here if useful: https://growthwithshehroz.gumroad.com/l/dax-to-sql-handbook
Solid execution for a 2-week-old product. Keep shipping.
This is a much sharper second attempt because you moved from a broad “productivity” category into a painful agency workflow: client reporting, platform switching, blended ROAS, branded PDFs, and alerts when spend/performance breaks.
The strongest positioning is probably not “marketing manager” though. That can sound broad and generic. The specific pain is agency reporting intelligence: one place to turn scattered Meta, Google Ads, TikTok, and GA4 data into client-ready decisions and reports.
One thing I’d watch is the Clean Core name. It worked better for the focus/project-management version, but for agency analytics it may not immediately signal performance, reporting, or client trust. If this becomes a serious reporting layer for agencies, a cleaner SaaS/data brand like Beryxa .com would probably carry the new direction better than stretching the old product name into a different category.
For those who have been through a failed product — what was the thing you changed that finally made the second one work?