2025: A Quiet Year, A Brutal One
Over the past few years, the same topics keep circulating in tech communities: AI, global expansion, SaaS, indie developers.
The buzzwords change, the narratives evolve, but for those actually running systems in production, the experience feels much more concrete—and much more unforgiving.
For me, 2025 was not a year of dramatic turning points.
There was no explosive growth, no sudden pivot.
It was simply a year of building, encountering real problems, and steadily correcting my assumptions.
This post is a modest retrospective.
It records the choices I made, the mistakes I ran into, and a few lessons that only became clear after spending a full year working on a customer support system.
1. 2025: A Year That Looked Ordinary, But Wasn’t
From the outside, 2025 didn’t feel especially turbulent.
It wasn’t like 2020, nor did it carry the uncertainty of 2022.
But underneath the surface, something had clearly changed:
Opportunities still existed, but tolerance for mistakes dropped sharply.
- Organic traffic became harder to come by
- Users were less willing to “grow with your product”
- Technical advantages turned into endurance tests
You could still ship features and release versions—but every decision carried more weight.
Reversibility became expensive.
Calm on the surface, acceleration underneath
2025 felt like a dividing line.
- Large companies narrowed their focus to highly predictable bets
- Small teams realized storytelling and funding couldn’t sustain them forever
- Indie developers either became more professional—or quietly disappeared
“It runs” was no longer impressive.
“Can it survive?” was the real question.
Technology still mattered—but it stopped being the moat
One realization stood out:
Technology didn’t lose value.
But relying on technology alone became a much narrower path.
Frameworks improved. Tooling matured. Shipping became faster than ever.
But so did imitation.
What separated products wasn’t innovation—it was:
- Stability
- Maintenance
- Boring, invisible decisions made over time
Most projects didn’t fail because they were impossible to build.
They failed because the long road after launch was underestimated.
For indie builders, 2025 was a year of clarity
The romantic phase ended.
You start calculating:
- Infrastructure costs
- Support overhead
- The real price of “free users”
And eventually you face a hard question:
Will anyone use this long-term—and pay for it?
Nothing dramatic happened for me that year.
I didn’t quit. I didn’t break out.
I just realized that if I kept going,
I had to treat this as long-term, sometimes boring work.
That’s the context in which I kept building ShenDesk
In 2025, I continued working on something decidedly unglamorous:
a customer support system.
Not because it was trendy—but because it was honest.
It demands engineering discipline.
It exposes trade-offs.
And it reflects reality very quickly.
Everything that follows comes from this premise:
2025 was no longer a “let’s try and see” year.
2. Why Build a Customer Support System in 2025?
From a market perspective, it’s a strange choice.
Customer support software is not new, not exciting, and definitely not a blue ocean.
But precisely because of that, it became a very honest problem to work on.
A customer support system is a truth machine
Support systems don’t generate growth.
They absorb problems.
They don’t shine when everything works.
They are used when things break.
That makes two things unavoidable:
- Stability and real-time behavior matter enormously
- You can’t hide behind marketing
You know whether it works within days.
“Red ocean” doesn’t mean “no real problems”
What I kept seeing:
- Feature-heavy products with fragmented long-term experience
- Great demos that struggled under real usage
- Tools optimized for sales—not for engineers
For small and mid-sized teams, the pain was consistent:
- SaaS versions felt restrictive
- Self-hosted versions were painful to operate
- Diagnosing issues was unnecessarily hard
It wasn’t about lack of options.
It was about lack of trust.
I wanted to test one thing
The question wasn’t “can this be a big product?”
It was simpler—and harsher:
If you design everything around controllability and maintainability,
can you still build something users genuinely like?
That choice forces you to prioritize:
- Observability
- Clear system boundaries
- Predictable behavior
These things don’t show well in demos.
But they show up after the 500th use.
ShenDesk is just the container for that experiment
ShenDesk isn’t a concept-first product.
It’s a long-running testbed for real-world decisions.
What to automate.
What to leave manual.
Where SaaS ends and self-hosting begins.
Most decisions weren’t best practices.
They were consequences.
Why 2025?
Earlier, I would have rushed.
Later, I might have played too safe.
In 2025:
- The tech was mature enough
- Users were more rational
- I cared less about impressing people
And more about this question:
Can this system earn long-term trust?
3. Five Technical Mistakes I Actually Made in 2025
These weren’t theoretical mistakes.
They surfaced under real usage.
Mistake 1: Confusing “feature complete” with “usable”
A support system is not a feature product.
It’s a stability product.
It’s judged by:
- Peak-time behavior
- Network edge cases
- Recovery after crashes
Checklists don’t reveal that.
Mistake 2: Underestimating real-time complexity
On paper: WebSockets + messages.
In reality: state convergence under chaos.
Ghost sessions, partial disconnects, race conditions—
hard to reproduce, impossible to ignore.
Mistake 3: Treating logs as a post-mortem tool
If you need to reproduce a support issue, you’re already late.
Without structured observability,
you’re guessing.
Mistake 4: Thinking SaaS and self-hosted were just deployment choices
They aren’t.
They are different products with different assumptions.
Mistake 5: Ignoring non-functional requirements
Performance, reliability, diagnosability—
you don’t “add them later.”
They decide whether later exists.
4. Three Product Lessons That Felt Backwards
Lesson 1: Users want fewer surprises—not more power
Predictability beats capability.
Lesson 2: The best systems disappear
Presence is friction.
Lesson 3: For small teams, control beats automation
Black boxes erode trust.
5. The Key Trade-offs I Made in ShenDesk
- SaaS and self-hosted—not one or the other
- Fewer features, clearer boundaries
- Diagnosability over clever automation
- Internationalization as a constraint, not a patch
- Building a long-term system, not a feature bundle
ShenDesk isn’t meant to prove intelligence.
It’s meant to survive reality.
6. Three Small, Certain Things I’ll Focus on in 2026
- Turning stability into a system capability
- Running real international usage—not just translations
- Defining who ShenDesk is not for
No big promises.
Only things that can be verified.
7. For Those Still Building Slowly
This isn’t a success story.
It’s a record of choosing to continue—clear-eyed.
If you’re building something quiet, slow, and hard to explain,
you’re not alone.
ShenDesk is built that way on purpose.
If it fits you, you’ll understand why.
If not, that’s fine too.
Continuing to build carefully, in this phase,
is already rare enough.
Wrapping up
ShenDesk is still evolving.
If you’ve ever built or deployed a real-time chat system, I’d genuinely love to hear your experience—
how you handled live updates, load balancing, or flexible deployment models in production.
Let’s compare notes.
If you’re curious
I’ve been building ShenDesk, a customer support chat system designed to run reliably
both online and on your own infrastructure.
- 🌐 Website: https://shendesk.com
- 📘 Documentation: https://docs.shendesk.com
You can try it for free, whether you prefer a hosted setup or self-hosting.
Feedback from developers interested in self-hosted systems, real-time communication,
and customer experience engineering is always welcome.
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