This is a true story from eight months ago.
One night around 9 p.m., I noticed a search term beginning to spike on Google Trends. It looked like people were starting to search for something new—and that there might be an opportunity.
I shared it in a group chat and asked if anyone wanted to build a product around it. No one did, so I decided to give it a try myself.
Three hours later, the website was live. The core feature, user authentication, and AI model integration were all working. It was close to 1 a.m. when I shut down my laptop and went to bed.
Just another practice project, I thought.
At around 9 the next morning, I searched the keyword on Google and saw my website at the top of the results.
I was excited, so I took a screenshot and shared it with the group. Soon, someone tried the website and told me:
“Your website has a bug. It’s throwing an error!”
I checked and found that it wasn’t a problem with the code. The API credits I had bought had already run out.
I was confused. I had just added more credits. How could they be gone after a single night?
Then I opened the user dashboard.
Just eight hours after launch, the website already had 562 registered users.
To understand why that number mattered so much to me, you need to know where I was at the time.
I had been building products independently for less than a month after working as a product manager. I had already launched five websites using AI, and none of them had attracted any attention.
But this time, it felt like I had finally made the whole process work—from spotting a need to building a product and finding users.
It was the clearest sign yet that I might be on the right track.
Why I Wanted to Build Products Myself
It all started with anxiety.
Over the past few years, AI has advanced at an incredible pace.
Last year in particular, AI seemed to be everywhere, and the tools kept getting smarter.
That made me increasingly anxious.
AI was already changing the way people worked, yet I was still mostly just chatting with ChatGPT and DeepSeek.
If the AI boom was creating real opportunities, simply chatting with AI tools wasn’t going to give me an edge. Too many people could already do that.
To get a better grasp of AI, I began studying the fundamentals of generative AI. I also learned how to build agents and workflows with Coze.
I used them to help my company produce content at scale, and they improved our efficiency.
But I soon began to question myself again:
Was writing prompts and building workflows really enough to say I understood AI?
These skills were useful, but they weren’t hard to replicate. Anyone willing to spend some time learning could do the same.
I wanted to go further.
That meant getting much more hands-on with AI. I didn’t want to use it for just one part of the process; I wanted to build a complete product on my own.
My First Month as a Solo Builder
Toward the end of last year, I came across a group of people using AI to build web products for global markets.
The playbook was simple:
- Use tools such as Google Trends to identify emerging needs.
- Build products quickly with AI.
- Acquire users through SEO.
After trying it for a few days, I managed to build a product of my own. I was thrilled, and I immediately shared it with my friends.
In the past, taking a product from idea to launch could involve at least six different roles: a product manager, a designer, front-end and back-end developers, a QA engineer, and a DevOps engineer. But now, one person working with AI could handle the entire process.
In my first month, excluding practice projects, I launched five websites. The fastest was the website from the beginning of this story. It took only three hours to go from identifying the need to launching the product.
That was the first time I truly felt it:
The AI era wasn’t on its way. It was already here.
I Thought I Had Completed the Transition
My background was in product management. My work usually involved researching user needs, writing PRDs, creating prototypes, and then handing everything over to designers and developers.
I could define what to build, but I couldn’t build it myself. Now I could research user needs, design the product, build it, test it, and launch it—all on my own. That felt like a huge leap.
For a while, I thought I had completed the transition. I had gone from working on one part of the product process to taking a product from idea to launch on my own.
But that excitement didn’t last long.
Building a Product Wasn’t the Same as Building a Business
Over the next two or three months, I continued launching products.
Most of them ended up in one of two situations:
- I had a product, but no users.
- I had users, but no one was willing to pay.
I had gone through every step of the process, but only at a surface level.
SEO, for example, looked like a clear user-acquisition channel. But in practice, it was far from simple.
Low-competition keywords often had little search volume or didn’t point to a problem people would pay to solve. Keywords with real commercial value were usually already dominated by established competitors. In the short term, it was difficult to gain even a small foothold.
Building a product quickly was one thing. Figuring out how to turn it into a viable business was another.
Even with 562 sign-ups in eight hours, I still couldn’t answer some basic questions:
- What problem were the users actually trying to solve?
- Why did some users pay while others didn’t? What were they actually willing to pay for?
- Would they return once interest in the keyword declined?
Every step in the user journey raised another question, and I had to work through them one by one.
This experience made me realize:
Traffic is not demand. A sign-up is not validation. Launching a product does not mean you have a viable business.
At the same time, AI had clearly lowered the barrier to building products.
Tasks that once required months of technical learning had become much easier with AI. Work that once required several different roles could now be handled by one person.
But that barrier had fallen for everyone.
If I could use AI to launch a website in three hours, someone more familiar with the process might be even faster.
Both knowing how to use AI and being able to build products with AI may gradually become baseline skills rather than lasting competitive advantages.
So what would actually set me apart?
Eight months ago, that question left me feeling lost all over again, right when I thought I had reached a new starting point.
Eight months later, after building more products, making more mistakes, and gradually figuring out what I wanted to pursue, I now have my own answer.
Originally published on Medium.
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