I Built a Few Products Nobody Used: An Honest Retrospective From a Beginner Indie Developer
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 did these ideas feel “safe”?
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 actually happened after launch?
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 did building before validating cost me?
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.
Why was this a red ocean I could not see?
Later, once I had the keyword-research lens, I looked back at my original topics and my heart sank: 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.
How did I over-build a product nobody asked for?
In the early days I made a classic mistake: I built the website “big” by default. Login, payment, an admin panel — a complete system with everything a real product should have. 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.
What went wrong with domains and search indexing?
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.
Why am I 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 am I trying differently now?
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 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:
- Building before validating demand, and having nobody show up.
- Entering a mature market without checking competition.
- Building login, payment, and admin for zero users.
- Using cheap unrelated domains, plus months of detour on search indexing.
What I plan to try:
- Keyword-first topic selection: check whether demand exists and how competitive it is.
- Treat social media as a long-term asset, while focusing on organic traffic.
- Make the core value discoverable and usable first; defer other infrastructure.
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
Do you still use social media for promotion? Yes, but I will not measure my success by it, at least until I actually learn how it works. For me social media is a long-term asset, and a quiet early stage is almost expected. My main energy currently goes to organic traffic, because its feedback feels more certain to me.
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.
This article was created with the help of AI