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: other people had shipped similar things, and those products looked like they worked.
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.
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 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, and only then decide what to build.
"Build it and they will come" simply did not happen for me. 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?
A crowded market where many competitors already fight over the same customers. 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 learned to check how crowded a topic is before entering it after paying the tuition — I had simply never known this check existed.
Is over-engineering your first MVP a mistake?
Yes, and I made exactly that mistake: I built the website "big" by default — login, payment, an admin panel, 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. AI makes "just build it" so easy that thinking first actually gets harder — wrong ideas get implemented more efficiently too.
Domains and search indexing: the infrastructure detours
I picked cheap domains with no relation to the topic — they helped almost nothing. Search indexing was worse: I only knew "after launch, Google should find it", and I had no idea how to register a site with Google Search Console. I fumbled for months before I even found the door.
The server side was equally new. My first cloud server was Tencent Cloud — powerful, but configuration and maintenance felt tedious. Later I came across Cloudflare, and the comparison made the earlier experience feel even more troublesome.
Why I am still not discouraged
Even with no users and no product revenue, I genuinely enjoy this life. I take on some outsourcing work to cover living costs, and I would rather put that income back into indie experiments. Building itself is the reward, so the failures did not change that.
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.
My failure list and plan list (both still being validated)
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 demand and competition before building
- Treat social media as a long-term asset, while focusing on organic traffic
- Make the core value discoverable and usable first; defer other infrastructure
Quick answers
How do you judge real demand? Search keywords: volume tells me demand exists, competition tells me how much room a beginner has. Works for me so far — not a law.
Should a first product include login and payments? My lesson says no. Ship the core value first; add the rest only when real usage asks for it.
Was the detour wasted time? Not entirely — the engineering ability and the intuition for "what is a useless feature" are real. But this tuition is cheaper paid in advance.
Originally published on my blog: https://javaeye.dev/blog/first-products-nobody-used/
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.
Top comments (0)