The $3,000 mistake I made by falling in love with my own code

Six months ago, I was convinced I had a winner.

I spent every night after my day job grinding on a SaaS tool for freelance designers. I bought the domain, obsessed over the landing page hero section, and wrote about 4,000 lines of clean, beautiful code.

I didn't talk to a single soul because I was terrified someone would 'steal' the idea.

When I finally launched, I got exactly two signups. One was my friend. The other was my ex.

It turns out the problem I was solving was a 'nice-to-have' something people complain about on Reddit, but would never actually pull out a credit card to fix. I'd built a solution for a pain point that didn't exist.

That burnout hit hard. I realized I was treating startup ideas like lottery tickets instead of experiments.

I started looking at how the founders who actually exit do it. They don't start with VS Code. They start by trying to kill their own ideas as fast as possible.

In 2026, 'build it, and they will come' is a death sentence. Now, I don't touch a single line of CSS until I've vetted the market urgency and looked at what the incumbents are actually charging.

If you're in that 'I think this is cool' phase, be careful. Your gut is usually a liar because it wants the idea to work. You need to look at the cold, hard data like Reddit frustrations and competitor pricing before you commit your next three months to a ghost town.

I ended up building something to help me stop making these expensive mistakes.

If you're curious, here is the tool I'm working on now → https://ideatolaunch.co

How do you guys decide when an idea is actually worth the dev time, or do you just ship and see what happens?