Launching My Product. Part 1: Finding an Idea That Actually Works (and Keeps You Going)
This is going to be a series about building my own product.
I don’t have extra money for marketing, no team, and not much time because I already have a full-time job. My goal is simple: by the end of the year, I want this app to start making money. Ideally without getting fired and without completely burning out from working all the time — even on vacation.
I have no idea how many parts there will be. I’m not even sure I’ll make it to the end. Maybe somewhere in the middle I’ll just sit there, staring out the window, smoking, and thinking about life.
If everything goes well, there are two possible endings:
- "Launching My Product. Part X: First $1,000 in net profit"
- "Launching My Product. Part X: Going back to full-time employment"
And no — this isn’t a copy-paste of ChatGPT advice. I’ll talk only about what I actually did. If something from ChatGPT helped, I’ll mention it, but through my own experience. I want this to be honest and useful. So let’s see where it goes.
The advice everyone gives (and why it doesn’t work)
Every YouTube video and every AI-generated article will tell you the same thing:
“To find a product idea, go talk to 100 people and ask about their pain points.”
In theory, it sounds reasonable. In practice, it turns into a mess.
People exaggerate small inconveniences and tend to give socially acceptable answers. If someone says they can’t lose weight or find a partner, that’s not really a “pain point” in the product sense — it’s just something they wish for.
On top of that, you still need to understand the domain, and a lot of other things have to align. So I skipped this approach pretty quickly.
“ChatGPT, give me 10 app ideas”
At the beginning, I didn’t have any ideas at all. Just a strong desire to build something.
It’s a weird state: you want to create, but there’s nothing concrete to hold onto.
I did all the obvious things. Googled “app ideas.” Asked ChatGPT to generate lists. Read Reddit threads.
At some point it just clicked — this is useless.
An idea doesn’t come from a list. It comes from your own experience.
It’s the same with writing articles for Habr. I’ve never searched for topics somewhere “out there.” If the idea didn’t come naturally, it was never worth writing. And the same applies to products.
Failed ideas
To understand where I started, it’s easier to look at what didn’t work.
Expense tracking app
My motivation wasn’t to build something meaningful — I just wanted to build something. It was also a chance to try a new stack (React Native + Node.js), which I couldn’t use at work at Sberbank.
I built it, published it, even wrote a post about it. Then someone asked:
Why would anyone use this instead of any existing expense tracker?
I tried to come up with a reasonable answer, but honestly, the real one was just: because I wanted my own app.
I didn’t even look at competitors on purpose, just to avoid admitting I was building something that already existed.
In the end, I shipped it — and dropped it.
Mentor marketplace
This one had a clearer idea.
Experienced IT mentors could teach groups instead of 1:1 sessions. Students would pay less, mentors would earn more per hour.
On paper, it made sense. In reality, it failed at the MVP stage.
It was a classic marketplace problem: buyers need sellers, and sellers need buyers. I didn’t have the resources to kickstart both sides. On top of that, the market turned out to be toxic and hostile. That was enough to kill it early.
How I found what I’m building now
While I was stuck trying to come up with something new, I remembered an old, very personal problem.
I wasn’t good at English in school, so I started learning it seriously only in my teens. Over the years, I tried pretty much everything.
When apps became popular, I went through all of them — from Anki and Skyeng to Duolingo.
At some point I realized what actually works for me.
I don’t enjoy learning with teachers. My ideal setup is simple: consume content, practice speaking a bit, and learn vocabulary.
Content happens naturally — articles, movies, documentation, work chats. Speaking comes here and there, especially since I live in Serbia.
But vocabulary is different. You need a tool for that.
Apps with predefined word lists stopped being useful once I got past the basics. I wanted to learn phrases from real life — things from movies, expressions I actually want to use.
Dictionaries don’t really support that well.
Anki is flexible, but the experience is painful. You have to fill in everything manually, including examples.
And then I noticed something.
I was using AI to translate words, generate examples, and then manually copy everything into Anki.
At some point it felt ridiculous.
Why not just automate this?
Enter anything — a word or a phrase — and immediately get translation, examples, audio, and spaced repetition.
That idea stuck. For the first time, I actually felt excited about building something.
No validation, just a bet
This is my own problem.
I didn’t validate it. I didn’t interview users.
I just assumed the market is big enough to find people like me.
Especially since the product can work for learning any language from any language.
The “perfect idea” formula
After thinking about it, I came up with a simple rule.
A product idea must pass three filters:
- You deeply understand the domain
- You’re genuinely interested in it
- You have the resources to make it useful
All three must be “yes”.
Why didn’t I include uniqueness?
Because it’s overrated.
Sure, don’t build a copy of Excel. But you can start from something that already exists and evolve it in your own direction.
If I hadn’t abandoned my expense app, I’m pretty sure I would’ve improved it over time. Better UX, different focus, solving ignored problems — eventually it would become unique anyway.
Why these filters matter
If you don’t understand the domain, you’ll spend months just figuring things out. I don’t understand fintech or crypto well, for example. But I’ve been learning languages for 15 years — I know this space deeply.
If you’re not interested, you won’t last. I didn’t enjoy the mentorship space, and even talking to potential users felt painful. If the domain annoys you, that’s already a red flag.
Resources matter more than it seems.
One thing I like about my current idea is that it works for a single user. I don’t need to solve a marketplace problem or reach critical mass. I can build something useful for one person, and that person can already pay.
After that, it’s just scaling.
About “popular” ideas nobody needs
I’d avoid the most common ideas: meeting transcribers, to-do lists, productivity trackers.
Please. Enough.
I personally know several people building AI meeting transcription tools.
Think about who builds apps.
Mostly developers.
They live inside the IT bubble and solve their own problems. And developers are obsessed with productivity.
But most people don’t care about that at all.
So you end up building something that’s already oversaturated and useful only for a very narrow audience.
Where to actually look for ideas
If there’s one thing I’d recommend, it’s this: look outside the IT bubble.
Real problems are usually somewhere else. Or at least in adjacent areas like marketing or content creation.
For example, I recently tried building a tool that finds relevant Reddit threads where I can mention my product. I’m still not sure if there’s real demand, but it came from an actual need I had.
That’s it for now.
In the next parts, I’ll talk about building the MVP and getting the first users — not counting my mom, my wife, and myself.
And if you’re curious, the product I’m building is a mobile app called VibeLing for learning foreign words more effectively.
