YC Asked for It. I Built It. It Failed Completely.

Surfing_guy — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 04:16:21 +0000

I have around 50,000 startup ideas in my head all the time. But this time, I wanted to build something that had more "proven demand," and getting some external validation before my journey sounded good.

I found this idea in the Request for Startups Fall 2026 edition. I had been playing with this idea in my mind, but seeing it so clearly on that list made it click for me.

I had too many web app projects at the moment, and being non-technical, dealing with Google Cloud and Cloudflare kind of scared me a little bit, I won't lie.

So I decided to build Alora, as YC requested it: a Claude for small software, where agents can deploy with no human intervention.

I guess this would compete with Lovable or Replit more than AWS or Cloudflare, maybe appealing to a different audience of someone sitting somewhere in between.

So I built it, making it not only good for hosting, but also for buying domains, making it easy to share with others, and getting a free link. (Everything the agent can do.)

I even built something I'm proud of: Alora allows you to connect your cloud account to your personal web project, so you can have hybrid web apps with AI, like AI calendars or AI trading agents.

I've seen those two projects because they were created by myself, and this is when it got difficult.

I know nothing about marketing, and I didn't want to spam. I kind of hate spam, but I also needed to do it. So I wrote a couple of Reddit posts in communities that allow these types of posts.

I wouln't say it got a great welcome, people didn't really liked it and I did a terrible job explaining it.

So I wanted to put some money into ads or something like that, but never got to it, and the project slowly stayed put. Like, you don't abandon it, but neither do you keep pushing it. Like lots of projects.

One month ago, ChatGPT launched Sites. I mean, it was an easy thing for them to do (and pretty obvious), so then my main target audience kind of shrank.

So now I'm trying to figure out if this was actually something worth pursuing, or if I should take what I learned from it and move on to another project.

DEV Community: Surfing_guy

YC Asked for It. I Built It. It Failed Completely.