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What a first year of building products nobody used taught me

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I spent my first months as a full-time indie developer building small products that almost nobody used. Since October 2025 I have shipped a few tools, earned zero revenue from them, and learned four expensive lessons: building before validating demand, entering red oceans, over-engineering, and ignoring domains and search indexing. This post covers all four mistakes, plus why I am still not discouraged.

Why do beginner indie developers pick “safe” ideas?

At the beginning, I picked businesses I thought were easy to understand. A debugging tool, a relationship quiz — products with clear boundaries, where I did not even have to imagine the demand. Public cases already existed on social media: other people had shipped similar things, and those products looked like they worked.

My development tool was Kimi K3, an AI coding assistant. I had tried Claude Code and GPT before; Kimi K3 stuck because it is cheaper and easier to access from China. With AI-assisted development, cloning an existing idea and adding my own twist took very little time. From a product perspective, this felt like a low-risk path: the direction was proven, the build was fast, and the remaining steps seemed to be “ship it, tell people, wait for users.”

What happens when you launch a product nobody wants?

The products went live, and then nothing happened.

No users, no feedback, and almost nobody knew these products existed. I did promote them on social media, and the effect was very limited — very few people were willing to even click and try. After several months, the investment was real and the output was close to zero.

That silence was the part I had no plan for. I knew how to build; I had no idea how to be found.

What happens if you build before validating demand?

Looking back, the whole process may have been backwards from step one.

My approach at the time was: decide “I can build this”, build it, and then hope someone needs it. The order I lean toward now is the reverse: search keywords first, see what people are actually searching for, infer possible demand from search behavior, and only then decide what to build. “Build it and they will come” simply did not happen for me. I want to be clear that this is my own experience, not a law — but it is the most expensive lesson of my first year.

What is a red ocean market, and why is it hard for beginners?

A red ocean market is a crowded market where many competitors already fight over the same customers, and for a beginner it is usually a losing fight before you even enter, because promotion and features decide the outcome rather than effort alone. I only saw this in my own topics later, once I had the keyword-research lens: relationship quizzes and similar tools were already a red ocean, with many people doing them well.

For a new product with weak promotion and average features, entering a market like that brought no surprise result. The concept of competition — checking how crowded a topic is before entering it — was something I only understood after paying the tuition. I had simply never known this check existed.

Is over-engineering your first MVP a mistake?

Yes — over-engineering your first MVP is a mistake, and I made exactly that mistake in the early days by building the website “big” by default: login, payment, an admin panel, everything a real product should have. MVP here means minimum viable product, not “most valuable player”. The problem was that I could not clearly explain what pain point the business actually solved. In hindsight, I was mostly using AI development to keep polishing something I wanted to build.

In the end, nobody even knew the core function existed, so the login and admin panel meant nothing. My current view is that before demand is validated, those features serve imaginary users. AI makes “just build it” so easy that thinking first actually gets harder — wrong ideas get implemented more efficiently too. I learned this one the expensive way.

Does a domain name matter for SEO, and how do you get a new site indexed?

Another category of detour was infrastructure. I did not understand what a domain meant for a product, so I picked cheap domains with no relation to the topic — looking back, they helped almost nothing.

Search indexing was worse. I only knew that “after launch, Google should be able to find it”, but I had no idea how to register and submit a site to Google. I fumbled for several months before I even found the door of Google Search Console.

The server side was equally new. My first cloud server was Tencent Cloud in China — my first contact with cloud servers after October 2025. My first impression was powerful and useful, but configuration and maintenance felt tedious. Later I came across Cloudflare, and the comparison made the earlier experience feel even more troublesome. To be fair, some beginner knowledge only sticks when you touch it yourself — I just could have saved a lot of time by knowing these things in advance.

Is being an indie developer hard? Why I am still not discouraged

Honestly, reviewing this pile of mistakes, there is not much pessimism in me.

Even with no users and no product revenue, I genuinely enjoy this indie developer life. I take on some outsourcing work to cover living costs, and I would rather put that income back into indie experiments — buying tokens, trying ideas. The money spent is real, but it is money I was happy to spend. I like trying new things, and building itself is the reward, so the failures did not change that. Sharing is part of the same thing: a success is worth sharing, and a failure is equally worth sharing.

I have come to think this might be a hidden threshold of indie development. If only success can keep you going, the long silent beginning is very hard to survive. For me, writing code, making products, and fiddling with new tools is the payoff, so I can keep sitting here.

What I am trying differently: keyword research before building

Now I am trying to reverse the flow. Before building, I search keywords to see which words might represent real demand and how competitive they are, and only then decide whether and what to build. For distribution, I currently plan to prioritize organic traffic — in my own assessment, it is the path I can actually reach.

Social media, I will keep doing, but I do not pin my expectations on it. My background is development and project management; I am good at making things, not at social media operations. That field is new to me and I can only learn it by doing. My current understanding is that a quiet early stage is normal, not a failure signal.

My indie developer failure list and my plan list

I am not an expert. The following is not advice — it is my personal checklist, and both parts are still being validated.

What has failed so far:

What I plan to try:

With the recent AI wave, many programmers are trying indie development, and I am one of them — the type who starts coding before understanding the game. This post is an archive point for myself: record what failed, write down what I plan, and revisit it later to see what got validated and what new pits appeared.

Frequently asked questions

How do you judge whether a direction has real demand? My current method is search keywords: search volume tells me whether demand exists, and competition tells me how much room a beginner like me has. This method works for me, but I have only just started practicing it. Whether it suits everyone, I cannot say.

Should a first product include login and payments? My own lesson says no. My first version had login, payment, and admin all built out, and in the end nobody even knew the core feature existed. I now prefer to ship the core value first and add the rest only when it is truly needed. That is the road I walked, not a conclusion.

Was the detour wasted time? Not entirely, at least for me. The engineering ability and the intuition for “what is a useless feature” are real capabilities earned on the detour. But this kind of tuition is cheaper when paid in advance — reading other people’s retrospectives costs less than hitting every wall yourself.

What tools do you use for development? I use Kimi K3 as my main AI development tool; I had tried Claude Code and GPT before, and Kimi K3 won on price and accessibility from China. My first server was Tencent Cloud, and I am now exploring Cloudflare for new projects.

What is an indie developer? An indie developer is someone who builds and ships products without a company behind them: no funding, no team, just one person choosing the direction, writing the code, and owning the outcome. I went full-time indie in October 2025, and for me the label is less about revenue than about who makes the decisions.

What is a red ocean market? A red ocean market is an existing market where many competitors already fight over the same customers, so a newcomer competes mostly on price and promotion. The relationship quiz tools I built entered exactly that kind of market. I only learned to check how crowded a topic is before entering it after paying the tuition.

How do I get my new site indexed by Google? For a new site the entry door is Google Search Console: it is where you register the site and ask Google to look at your pages. I spent months fumbling before I even found that door. My own order now is to register the site first, publish real pages, and then ask for indexing.

What is over-engineering in a first product? Over-engineering is building more than the product needs before anyone is using it. In my first version I added login, payment, and an admin panel while the core feature had zero users. I now treat those as things to add only when real usage asks for them.

This article was created with the help of AI. AI was not used to write the content; it assisted only with translation and grammar checks.