Sometimes, Time is the answer

Failure means something different for each one of us. But I'm sure we can all agree on one thing: It's never easy to bounce back when it happens.

A few years ago, I released to the public what was just a personal experiment: a platform to enable sending tips to people on Twitter, with Bitcoin. It was called Tippin, and was just a mean to explore how The Lightning Network worked (the underlying technology behind small transactions).

It really got incredible traction, to the point of being acknowledged by Jack Dorsey, former CEO of Twitter:

I was not prepared at all, and suddenly found myself getting calls and emails from VC's and Investors. I did the best that I could, being a solo indie hacker dealing with this for the first time. However, I struggled scaling and raising funds, and eventually got surpassed by other proper startups copying my product, with a bigger team and actual investment. The nail in the coffin came when Twitter actually included the option of sending Tips natively. I was devastated.

After all this, I just felt I was never going to recover from this. It really burnt me out, both mentally and physically. I felt like I was not going to be able to find the drive to explore new ideas and build back again. But I was wrong. I just needed time.

A couple of years later, I was playing with chatGPT, when I realised I needed to build a tool for myself to make it more useful. I wanted to access it from my desktop, from a Spotlight-like window. Nothing serious. It was meant to be a personal project, something to be used in private. But that was just the spark I needed to start building again. That's how Chai was born. I bought the domain chaibar.ai, built a simple landing, and started a new Xcode project. Without noticing, after all this years, I had the strength to build in public again. And now I have an MVP. It might work, it might not. But it's here, and I'm here. I just needed time.