u/Classic-Strain6924

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Writing the honest version because I'm tired of the screenshot posts.

Between grading papers for my TA job and prepping for my ML viva exams, I decided to actually try and launch a few side projects instead of just keeping them on localhost. Here's what actually happened.

What I shipped:

• A machine learning pipeline for data analysis – 12 visitors, 0 sales.
• A tiny study planner for college students – 3 paying users, $24.
• A second landing page after the first one died – 8 visitors, $0.
• A working MVP of a DNS resolution visualizer – 0 paying users.

Total: $24 in revenue, ~10 hours of building time, ~20 hours of trying to find users.

What I actually learned:

1. Building is not the hard part anymore. I used an AI builder (Runable) for the pages and the MVPs, which means I could ship things in an evening after my classes that used to take me weeks. We are still under-shipping because we mentally price in the old build times.
2. Zero tools helped me find a single user. I thought having a slick site would do the marketing for me. I spent twice as much time posting on Reddit and Discord trying to get people to look at my links than I did coding.
3. I was my own worst predictor. The DNS tool was my "obvious winner" and it tanked. The study planner was something I half-assed on a Sunday to avoid studying for my own exams. 3 paid users.

Who else has a realistic "what 30 days actually looked like" to share?Would love to see more of these and fewer screenshots.

Doing the honest version of the indie hacker post because I'm tired of the screenshot-my-MRR ones.

Four months ago I got obsessed with the "spin up projects and see what sticks" strategy. I’m a TA at my college and mostly do backend/ML stuff, so my default was to over-engineer everything. Here's the breakdown of what actually happened, because nobody writes down the zeroes.

The 3 that died:

• Loan Approval Predictor – Spent weeks tuning KNN and ensemble methods. Built a whole backend. 0 real users, just my friends testing my endpoints.
• Salary Processing System – Heavy Node.js/Express/MongoDB stack. Saturated market, I didn't do the 10 minutes of research.
• Subnet Mask Calculator – 14 visitors. Mostly just classmates cramming for a networking exam.

The 1 that worked: A dumb little formatting tool I made for NLogN (our college's competitive programming club) to turn raw problem statements into clean PDFs. It took me under an hour. I almost didn't ship it because "it's not a real product."It's now being used daily by about 40 people and actually got some traction.

What I actually learned:

1. Time spent building mattered way less than fit of the idea. The winning one took 45 minutes. The worst one took weeks of regression testing.
2. The only reason I got through 4 attempts is the build phase was cheap. I used an AI builder (Runable) to handle the frontends and landing pages so I could just focus on my backend logic. If each full-stack app had taken me 2 weeks of fighting CSS, I would have quit at attempt 2, and missed the winner.
3. "Iteration velocity" is the lesson, not "build more stuff."If I'd shipped 4 apps without talking to a single user, I'd have 4 zeroes.
4. The winner was the one I almost rejected for being too niche. Turns out "too niche to be interesting" is a great place to start when you don't have a distribution advantage.

Anyone else landed their winner only after building a bunch of complex stuff that failed?