After two failed products, this founder dogfooded his way to $10k/mo

Interesting. I like the dogfooed part. Shows it works!

Amazing founding growth story. Congrats Yasha.

This was a super grounded breakdown of what it actually feels like to build in AI right now – especially the mix of constant technical change + very old-school fundamentals (talking to customers, shipping fast, dogfooding).

A few things really stood out:

• Two failed products before FlowHunt – but you reused skills, context and even the SEO angle. It’s a good reminder that “failure” often just means “pre-training” for the thing that finally works.

• The honesty about technical difficulty at scale (scrapers, infra, evolving AI paradigms) vs. just “build an agent builder, ship it”. Most people underestimate that part.

• Dogfooding SEO with FlowHunt to generate and maintain thousands of pages is such a strong proof-of-value story. 2k+ pages, 6k+ keywords, 40k+ organic traffic with one copywriter is wild.

• The bit about founders doing support hits home. That’s where you discover the tiny UX traps and “obvious” things you’d never see from inside the codebase.

I’m working on a much smaller AI tool focused on improving the writing/rewriting flow, and the overlap is real:
– using our own product every day exposes UX friction brutally fast
– the temptation to over-engineer vs. “deploy fast and iterate” is always there
– reading AI updates at night so you don’t get blindsided by a new paradigm

One thing I’m really curious about in your case:

When you’re moving this fast (new models, new workflows, new use cases every week), how do you decide what not to build?
Is it mostly: “does this move a core use case (SEO / back-office / sales) forward” or do you have a more explicit filter for which ideas make it into the product vs. staying as experiments?

Thanks for sharing such a current, non-romanticized view of building an AI agent platform – it’s super useful for those of us still in the early innings.

Love seeing the honesty about the first two projects. Most people pretend those chapters didn’t happen, but they’re usually where the real skill gets built. The SEO dogfooding part grabbed me, that’s a level of commitment most teams skip entirely.

What I’m wondering is which part moved the needle the most early on: the technical flexibility or the sheer volume of automated content you pushed live?

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Really liked this story; “dogfooding your way to $10K/mo” is such a grounded path. Building for your own pain, testing in real workflows, and letting that feedback loop guide product direction is how real PMF happens. The persistence after two failed products makes the win even better.

Curious; what single feedback signal told you this one’s different? Faster onboarding adoption, consistent retention, or people hacking around limits to keep using it?

P.S. I’m with Buzz; we build conversion-focused Webflow sites and pragmatic SEO for product launches. Happy to share a short 10-point GTM checklist if useful.

This part about dogfooding really stood out.

At what point did you realize the product was finally solving a real pain

(and not just something that was technically interesting to build)?

If you'd like to try AI-powered marketing, I recommend Amplift .ai . It can help solve problems you encounter in marketing, including SEO, AEO, writing, and more.

Really impressive story, Yasha, especially how you scaled SEO by dogfooding FlowHunt itself. That level of “use it before selling it” is what separates tools that actually work from tools that just look good.

One thing I see founders in your stage often overlook, though, is Reddit. Your target users, technical founders, AI builders, automation-first operators ,are extremely active across a handful of niche subreddits, and stories like this resonate extremely well there when positioned correctly.

I help founders engineer high-signal Reddit visibility that drives real signups (not just karma), by mapping their product to the exact subreddits where demand already exists and tailoring posts so they don’t get removed by mods.

If you ever want, I can share which communities align most with FlowHunt’s audience and the posting angles that perform best for tools in the AI-automation space.

Happy to help,
Micheal (Preshtechsolution)

I spent months improving features before realizing I hadn’t talked to a single real user.

2k pages, 40k traffic: that's 20 visits per page on average. Curious how much of that is concentrated in a handful of winners vs. spread across the board.

This was a great breakdown of your journey. The part about constantly adapting to new AI paradigms (RAG → Agentic RAG → AI Agents) really resonated — the pace of innovation is intense, and it’s impressive that your platform stays flexible enough to support new workflows each week.

I’m curious how you balanced building a highly flexible system with the need to ship fast during the early stages. Did you refactor frequently, or design the architecture from the beginning assuming customers would have wildly different use cases?

The dogfooding aspect — using FlowHunt itself to generate thousands of SEO pages — is super smart. That level of automated SEO is a huge moat. Inspiring story!

I'm a developer, and since my account is new I still can't make a full post yet. But I wanted to share a bit of my experience.

I built a product called Leadmore AI, an AI-powered marketing tool focused on Reddit. I didn’t spend a single dollar on promotion, and after three months the product reached $30,000 MRR.

If this sounds interesting, I’ll make a full post later and share the whole story.

Crazy impressive journey—fail, iterate, dogfood, grow. Respect.

That’s impressive, but I’m curious — if you use this tool to generate thousands of websites, wouldn’t Google consider it cheating?

Never give up, learn from your mistakes. What a great story!

Congrats!. I have been on a similar journey. I like the idea of using your own tools to grow the business. You will find issues and enhancements faster this way as you test. Plus you uncover new opportunities as you go. Good Luck

Do you have a question? Need advice? Tarot can help you weigh the pros and cons of a situation, give you another perspective, and provide intuitive support. Think of a yes or no question and then click on the tarot email below for insight and direction.

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Really powerful story — turning failure into testing ground for something meaningful deserves respect. Hitting $10K/mo by dogfooding is the kind of resilience and authenticity every founder should aim for.At AltPaths.io, we’re in the same space of building for real users — AI-powered insights and crypto education. This keeps us inspired.

hello everyone.

print("Hello, world!");

I'm new here, and for some reason i cannot submit a post, so, i will write in comments somewhere, but basically i need just some attention and maybe a feedback and what i am doing last few years as developer.

First of all, thank you that you gave me a chance and still read.

My name is Dmitry, iam 33 year old programmer and artist from Greece, my main occupation is 2D Digital Art for Mobile and PC Games, and i am programmer with experience in Android, Desktop and Web developement.

It's my first time im coming to space to tell something about my projects, i write my first speech this moment :)

Okay.

1. iMeYou - Digital Book --> Android Smartbook application, that implements AI into book reading and internet surfing experience, features powerful file system, with Essentials data implementations. This is the whole new level of using your smartphone for education and smart lifestyle for everyday purpose. There are already developed and ready for version 2.0 implementations of Social Network called "CLUB" for book readers, it can guide you into social connections with people sharing your interest and reading experience. This application is ready to deploy into PlayMarket as soon as i finally decide its release strategy, so, this is the first question - how to host it and how to reach people?

2. Qwa ai <-- Desktop Tamagochi Digital Assistant. Qwa is a desktop widget (It's Wednessday, dudes!) < -- a small digital life on your desktop which have a bunch of features for everyday computer working experience, is something exceptional in terms of the usability. It has next options: Essentials <-- ALT+X <-- opens window with your digital notebook where are stored your eveyday usefull data, like phone numbers or links for favorite songs. Clipboard history <-- ALT+C <-- remembers everything what you were put in copy-paste buffer. You can store data smartly. Have a output engine that can compose a .html, .txt, .archive (for files), or just compose a folder. Available with smart search. Just imagine you never lose significant data. Everything is stored encrypted. Third is Virtual Keyoboard available on ALT+E -- evey button can copy something into clipboard, to open web link, to open programm or script, to open file or do a macros. Also there is a screenshot manager that can read QR codes, translate data from text. There is implemented chat with AI that can also return weblinks.. soo, and this is just a part of functionality. This is what i want to host as close as possible, within december this may be finished.

So, as i said, im new here. Tell me, what is next should i do? :) Because i have some more projects to share :)

I tried the BYO platform and it is pretty cool
Has anyone else here used it
Surprised there is no article about it yet

Really inspiring to see how you used your own agent builder to scale SEO. I feel like a lot of indie hackers underestimate how powerful “building for your own use case” can be.

I’ve been experimenting with something similar, using small internal tools to remove friction in my own workflow. One thing I realized is that sometimes the distribution bottleneck isn’t creating content, it’s just getting ideas online quickly.

That’s actually why I built a new feature in my product (Upsyte) that lets people create super-light mini-websites in a few minutes. I wanted a fast way to spin up pages for experiments, and it unexpectedly started helping others too.

Curious if you used a similar approach early on like spinning up lots of small SEO-focused pages before figuring out your core strategy? Would love to hear more about how you structured that.

This is such a relatable post for any founder who's developing AI. Being a solo and unfunded founder with ADHD has me constantly iterating my platform and applications. I'll dogfood it with pleasure because that's where true growth and learning happens

Really appreciate the honesty about the failed products. It’s reassuring to see that “using your own product” can still be such a strong advantage. Was there a specific moment while dogfooding where you knew “ok, this one is different”?

Yasha’s persistence paid off. After a couple of tries, he built FlowHunt and grew it to $10k/month by using it to boost SEO. It’s a solid reminder that building what you need and helping customers directly can really work.

Really interesting story. I think everyone can take away 3 key things from it: never give up, talk to your customers (because asking customers can solve most of the problems you currently have in your business), and move fast. All three can be applied in your own business and I think they can be the foundation of success for any company. Best wishes for your continued growth Yasha.

I especially love how you dogfooded your own product for SEO using FlowHunt on your own site to build 6K+ pages is next level.

The interesting part here is using your own agent system to scale SEO. Most teams talk about agents but never trust them enough to run real workflows. The fact that you pushed thousands of pages through it and saw traction says more than any pitch. Curious how you deal with pages that start to cannibalize each other once the volume gets that high. That’s usually where automated SEO breaks.

Really inspiring read, Yasha! The way you turned setbacks into a system for learning , and then used your own product to prove its value is exactly what sustainable innovation looks like.

The “dogfooding” approach resonated deeply. We’ve found the same thing while testing automation on our own creative tools — you catch what users feel before they even tell you. It’s not just validation; it’s empathy in action.

Love how you combined speed, customer focus, and technical depth. Congratulations on hitting $10k MRR , this story is full of lessons for anyone building in the AI space.

Annie from the SoftlyWished Team

Great! Love the story

I've tried to channel all my work in consumer research into a simple method that changes how people think about sleep—and improves lives for just $2. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Great comeback story, Yasha. The transition from the failed scraper projects to FlowHunt feels like a natural evolution. The fact that you're using it to automate your own back-office and SEO tasks is the best kind of validation. Thanks for sharing the transparency around the failures!

The founder of this company learned from two failed products and improved it by dogfooding. The company grew to $10k per month after he tested it himself, fixed real issues, and refined features.

Really great and transparent post, Yasha.

I'm fascinated by your hybrid pricing model (60:40 split between subscriptions and AI credits).

Was this 'pay-as-you-go' for AI tokens part of the plan from day one, or was this an iteration you made based on customer feedback? It seems like a great way to align value with cost in the AI space.

Muchos founders nos escriben preguntando qué herramienta usar para automatizar atención al cliente o flujos internos.

La respuesta casi nunca es una herramienta.
La respuesta es un agente bien diseñado.

En Nexia Capital desarrollamos microservicios que trabajan como piezas independientes:
un agente interpreta, otro ejecuta acciones, otro consulta bases de datos, otro controla la calidad de la respuesta.

El resultado: sistemas más estables, más escalables y que no dependen de una sola “caja negra”.

Creemos que el futuro no es “una IA que hace todo”.
El futuro son equipos digitales trabajando junto a los humanos.

Your post makes a good point about learning from real usage. Plans look solid until people try the product and break your assumptions. I like how you focused on one fix at a time and stayed consistent. Good work with hitting 10k/month :)
Syed.

This is a fantastic and very honest story, thank you for sharing, Yasha.

Your point about the "challenge of building an AI tool" where you have to constantly read new papers just to stay relevant is something I feel on a deep level. It's like you're not just building a product, you're trying to build a raft while sailing it through a hurricane. How do you personally cope with the potential burnout from this constant race? Is it just pure passion, or do you have a system to filter the signal from the noise?

Also, huge respect for navigating from two failed projects to $10k MRR. That resilience is the real "alpha" in the founder's journey. Congrats!

It’s rare to see someone so open about the early projects that didn’t make it, especially when the later success looks so polished. The progression from scrapers to AI workflows makes perfect sense in hindsight, but it’s the kind of path you can only see clearly looking backward.

The constant iteration and dogfooding mindset stand out. It’s one thing to build tools, but another to actually live inside them long enough to understand what breaks. You can’t build in a vacuum and expect it to feel human.

Thanks for sharing your blueprint. I really want to know the automation for seo you're doing. can you please mention which tool you're using?

This is a real example of not giving up when failed but being insistent in the path to success. I am also developing an AI project and have difficulties finding customers. I developed apps before but no customers. This story inspired me.

Dogfooding is a good way to know your product limits too. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, honestly for me it didn't. Maybe there was something missing which I am still trying to figure out. Anyway your story sounds great good luck ahead.

This founder proved that persistence pays off after two failed products. Dogfooding - using his own product - enabled him to identify real user pain points, refine his idea, and create a product that people will actually use. The journey he took to achieve $10K/month demonstrates that failure can be a foundation for success if you learn from it, adapt to it, and continue to strive for success.

Amazing story Yasha! keep hustling! I'm trying to use SEO strategy too for my new startup

This was a really inspiring read, Yasha.
I like how you used FlowHunt itself to scale SEO — true example of “dogfooding done right.”
I’ve been experimenting with automated SEO workflows for smaller utility tools myself, and your hybrid model gave me some ideas to test. Thanks for sharing this journey!

“Impressive results.

Automating content at this scale while keeping customer support hands on shows a strong balance between growth and retention. Deploying fast and iterating quickly is a lesson all founders should take seriously, really valuable insights.

Gr8...test, learn, automate, and stay close to your customers. fast iteration and using your own product are the real growth levers, not just fancy features.

SEO is great, but it takes time to see results. After launching, you’re hungry for your first users - and that’s the hardest part: finding a way to actually get them.

You can use social media to market your website, but relying solely on it may limit your reach. Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn are excellent platforms for building brand awareness and driving traffic, but they work best when combined with SEO, content marketing, and email campaigns. A balanced marketing strategy will ensure consistent visibility, organic growth, and long-term success, which social media alone may not be able to achieve.

This is such a vital lesson for every founder: solve a problem you deeply understand. It's easy to get lost in building something 'cool' or for a hypothetical user. The shift from building for others to building for yourself—'dogfooding'—is what turns a generic solution into an indispensable product. The 'scratch your own itch' principle strikes again! Congrats to the founder on finding product-market fit the hard way. This is a great case study in perseverance

Yasha, that’s a masterstroke — building FlowHunt and then using it to scale itself. The story almost reads like a case study in product-market proof, not just product-market fit.

The honesty around two product failures before “making it” is so important. It’s rare to see that level of transparency

Really inspiring story 👏
Loved how you turned early failures into solid lessons and used your own product to drive real SEO results — that’s the best kind of validation. The “dogfooding” part especially stood out. FlowHunt sounds like a powerful tool with serious momentum. 🚀

Very cool story tbh

Really cool to see how your earlier “failures” ended up becoming the foundation for what you’re building now. The jump from scrapers to SEO tools to AI workflows actually feels like a natural progression when you describe it.

The part about keeping up with AI changes really resonated. I’m also building in this space and some days it feels like the entire landscape shifts overnight. It’s stressful but also kind of fun once you lean into it.

Your SEO results are super impressive too. Not many teams actually dogfood their own automation at that scale and make it work.

One thing I’m curious about:
How do you decide which customer use cases deserve to become full workflows, and which ones you let go?

That seems like the hardest part of building flexible AI tools right now.

Impressive journey, Yasha! The way you bounced back from early failures and leveraged AI for growth is truly inspiring. Your approach of dogfooding FlowHunt and focusing on fast deployment and customer support is a game-changer. Looking forward to seeing how FlowHunt evolves!

Thank you so much for sharing your journey

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Really cool to see someone dogfooding their own AI automation for SEO that’s the kind of loop that actually validates a product. I’m also exploring the agent + visual builder space with Simplita.ai. how do you see FlowHunt evolving beyond SEO use cases?

James, this is a fantastic interview and a brilliantly told story. You did an incredible job of pulling out the key lessons from Yasha's journey from two failed products to a thriving $10k/mo business.

The part about him "dogfooding" his own product to scale SEO really stood out. It's such a powerful and authentic way to prove a solution's value.

His journey is a great parallel to my own, albeit on a much earlier scale. My "failed products" were actually my first two attempts at the Google SRE interview. That failure forced me to "dogfood" a solution by building a completely new preparation system from scratch for myself.

That system is what eventually became my first product, Ace Interviews. Reading stories like the one you've shared about Yasha is huge motivation as I'm just in the early stages of launching and getting my first paying customers.

Thanks for finding and sharing such an inspiring story!

This was really insightful, I love to see how you used it on yourself to prove results. This "client 0" way of architecting cannot be undervalued. I look forward to seeing more of your growth in the future!

Loved this story, Yasha. The “dogfooding” part really stood out — using FlowHunt itself to automate SEO and scale traffic is genius. Also appreciate the reminder that founders should stay close to customers. Congrats on hitting $10k MRR — impressive work!