Sasha | Product Building | Software Engineering @codys_man - Twitter Profile

As promised - sharing the details of our failure: 1. We never validated the idea. We built what we thought was cool. “It’s cheap. It’s AI. People will pay.” It didn’t solve a painful problem. So nobody cared. That simple. 2. Traffic ≠ Demand. Signups ≠ Demand. Only payments do. Our channel breakdown: ∙TikTok → 0 signups ∙X → 3 signups ∙Instagram → \~6 signups ∙Reddit → \~45 signups ∙Paid users → 0 (1 payed user on the picture - is my account). Clicks don’t mean value. We chased vanity metrics for months. 3. We priced based on infrastructure cost. Yes, really. We calculated AWS + AI token costs, then added a margin. That’s it. We completely ignored: ∙CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) ∙Conversion rate ∙What the market would actually pay Our signup CAC ended up around $20. Revenue per user: $0. Infinite negative unit economics. We were paying people to not use our product. 4. “No competition” was NOT a green flag. We thought an empty market meant opportunity. It meant no demand. We completely misread the signal. 5. We over-engineered everything. I’m a principal engineer with 10+ years of experience. Also AI Engineer for the last 2 years. And I was the one who wanted to turn our product into an “engineering masterpiece.” AWS Lambda. Scalable infra. Complex AI gating logic. Optimized token usage. It was genuinely production-ready. For zero users. 6. We didn’t build in public. This one hurts the most. We stayed quiet because “we don’t have anything impressive to show yet.” Dead wrong. If we’d shared earlier: ∙We’d have gotten brutal feedback before wasting months ∙We’d have validated (or killed) it way faster ∙We’d have built an audience around the journey itself Instead, we tried to “collect subscribers” once it was ready. Nobody cared because nobody had been on the ride with us. Subscribers aren’t Pokémon cards. Stories build audiences. Honesty builds trust. 7. “It’s cheap, so people will buy.” Also wrong. We genuinely thought: “It’s a few dollars a week. Who wouldn’t pay that?” Nobody wanted to pay even $1/week. Price was never the problem. We just weren’t solving something painful enough. Here’s the rule: if you solve a real problem, people pay. If you don’t - even $1 feels expensive. Obvious, but still: you can’t price based on infrastructure cost alone. If it costs $20 to acquire a signup, you cannot sell for $3/month and survive. Cheap product + paid ads = mathematical suicide. 8. We don’t use our own product. Yeah. That one speaks for itself. So what now? Back to basics: ∙Problem first, always ∙Talk to people before building anything ∙Charge as early as possible ∙Validate CAC before scaling ∙Build in public from day one ∙Ego last The humbling part? We’re not beginners. We knew these rules. We just thought we were the exception. Assumptions kill faster than ignorance. Happy to answer questions if this is useful to anyone. Still processing the year, but figured the lessons were worth sharing.

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