Why my businesses failed?
I built products, avoided marketing, and called it failure.
Throughout the last 1 and a half years, I have created many products. Every successful indie hacker says fix your own problem and then turn it into a product, that hasn’t worked out for me, I have fixed 10s of problems in my life, but I have not made any money out of these solutions.
The debate SaaS
I made my first SaaS around learning how to debate. Back in April last year, I talked to 5-6 people, I made a landing page, I am pretty sure the product was never completed. 2 things you can already see, I never properly finished the product, yet I know I spent many hours polishing stuff in it. My landing page and onboarding was better than whatever other products were ranking on top of Googles Search, but I never marketed it properly, I never even tweeted about it here on X, I looked into some debate subreddits, I might have made a post which most likely was flagged by reddit filters, and that was it.
I got an idea, I built it, I did not validate its need, I did not do the marketing. I got lazy.
The journalling tool
Second I worked on xfastr, and this is a story to tell. There was another one I made in July, it was a journalling tool, this one I again made for myself. I also made a post about it on a reddit sub (https://www.reddit.com/r/digitaljournaling/comments/1luskc7/being_techsavvy_i_built_and_use_my_own_journaling/) but I found many other competitors, and some indie hacker was even building some crazy shit that I felt mine wasn’t good enough. Nonetheless I gave up. Again only 1 post, 2 if you count one I made on nextjs sub as well.
Xfastr
Let us talk about xfastr now, initially I wanted it to be an analytics tool. Any profile you go to, you will see the last 3 months of history of that account with posts and activity and everything. I made a good landing page. I did a producthunt launch and I waited, I remember also making some X posts, but still only some. I got zero users. I also found https://x.com/robj3d3 who was making the same thing, but using the official API and he was doing it consistently, I looked at myself and gave up. But I called it pivoting, I turned xfastr into a reply tool. I thought it would have some potential. You would go to a post, our AI would get all the required context and would draft 3 replies. I spent around 1 month making it the best in the market.
Building instead of selling
I really engineered it well, with how Authentication worked between extension and website, how AIs drafted the post, ngl It was a decent product, I myself got around 100k impressions with it. It was not automatic, a human was part of the loop. This continued from Sep-Jan. I made it 9 different times. I put thought into 100s of ways of improving the UX, but there were no users to try it. I thought about different backends to reduce latency, my own scrapers to reduce cost and even faster LLMs. I compared 10-15 LLMs, had a system return user’s interaction with suggested replies which further decided which LLM was doing well and should be used more.
Each month, I never made a post, I never talked about what I was improving, new features I built, I thought this product went against X guidelines, I thought reddit subs would just hate on it, because it uses AI, and is a threat to privacy. Every damn time, I thought someone was watching me, but there was no one. I barely talked on X, in 1 year I got to an impressive number of 130 followers. Then again in January with new hopes and the new year, I rebuilt it. This time I made sure it was a complete product with Chrome Extension setup, subscriptions and everything. My extension was first published to chrome Web store on Sep 28th, 2025.
My first paying customer
Think about it, I was writing in my Journal in July that I needed to get this wrapped up. but it took me 2 months just to get the extension shipped. Nonetheless October and November I did not see much personal progress. Binge watching shows, scrolling all day, all night had become a common schedule. Also I was reattempting my Grade 12 exams, so I had that as an excuse as well. In December I re-engineered some of the backend and in January I again rebuilt everything. This time with a bit of Luck I had my first paying customer on February 1st. That guy cancelled the sub on 4th :) and my bad extension stopped working since his subscriptionStatus was not active, so he again paid 10$. That is the only income I have to show from my SaaS to this day.
I lied. To my friends, that I got it to 400$ MRR, how naive I was, why did I do it? Again, I did not want people to see me as a stupid little idiot who left his decent earning job to pursue some meaningless act. I got a lot of motivation seeing this money, I made a brand account for Xfastr, got a blue checkmark, made around 40-50k impressions in 4-5 days, tried to get some people to try my product for free, and then again gave up, reason partly being I had my exams from 10th Feb to 21st. But after that I again left this product to rust.
The last six months
If you average my productivity from April 2025 even to today, 9th September, it will be no more than 90 minutes. For some months it might be more than 3 hours, for some week even more than 6 hours, but come on, do you really think this is more productive than any normal corporate employee. I get that you have massive leverage when you work on your own stuff, but still you have to put more work than most people to even turn that leverage into profits. Sit back now, as I recall the last 6 months of my life. In march, I decided to add another feature to my product, you need to know that Xfastr was a product complete in trenches. X API, god the worst and the most expensive API, and they do their job well at protecting their data. I wanted a feature of knowing when top creators post so you could reply early to them and have higher chances of getting a lot of impressions.
Well maybe the interception, maybe a sudden burst of requests, but X suspended my account on 4th April. That is when I gave up on Xfastr. I did nothing productive that month, besides teaching my cousin how to prepare for his competitive exams, April and May is where I mostly experimented, I made products for my own use, I also worked on a study app, testing it on my nephew I got a lot of feedback. But again, no launch, no marketing, no plans to even make this a sustained product, I gave up. I made around 20-30 tools for my own use. I used my scraper to make a viral post in May https://x.com/pruthvithinks/status/2056696279292621100 that remains the last popular post I made on this new account.
SiftX, similar story
In June, I got new hopes and motivation, got siftxapp.com domain, and started working on another SaaS around X, it is september 9th now, I haven’t even listed it on Chrome Web Store. Same story repeating :) I also got this domain that month, and decided to finally be myself, instead of faceless internet identities. But again not much activity to show here as well till now. In August I decided to make a lot of changes, I wanted that month to be my first 100$ MRR month whatever the case may be, but as you can see, nothing to show for that. I did work on siftx extension and made twitterxapi.com but it is still all useless as no money has been made. It is now 9th of September, 114 days till 2027. I have gone through 100s of thoughts of getting to 10k MRR, in Feb this year I promised my friend that If I don’t get to 10k MRR this year I will donate 1k$ to BJPs national effort at ‘uniting’ the nation.
Did I even fail?
I will definitely feed this article into my favourite hopium maker, Claude which will say something like “You did not lose. You just found a 100 ways to fail” But can you call this failing, if I didn’t even try to succeed? Anyways this blog was originally supposed to be about Consciousness, I for one think that there is nothing after this life. All the people here, who we quarrel with, talk badly, share happiness, it will all be gone. So yes if this is my one and only life I will have to do everything that my childhood self wanted. ❤️ yall