title: "I Almost Built a Startup This Week. The Evidence Said No — In One Afternoon."
published: true
description: "I found a hot marke...
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Treating a competitor's stars and PH launch as market validation is exactly the trap I fell into once. Your "marketing traction ≠ revenue" table is the part I wish I had printed. Forcing an afternoon of evidence before opening the editor feels slower in the moment and so much cheaper than six months of nights on a free-forever lookalike.
The stars trap is sticky because the signal feels so concrete — a number going up. But stars measure "developers think this is cool," which is a different population from "someone will pay," and the gap between those two is where the six months of nights disappear.
What finally broke the spell for you — the dead project itself, or something you read? For me it took shipping one before I'd believe the table.
A couple actually. 1 notable one is TUB, an employment matchmaking app, where your CV is only sent to 1 employer max, per available position, we only send 1 CV, which is in our entire finding, the single person that is best qualified for it. Great concept, great tech, dead... Because paypal cant pay out to my country...
Oof, that one stings — because the idea and the tech were both sound. It didn't die from a bad bet, it died from plumbing. And honestly, payment/payout infrastructure kills more good products in certain countries than competition ever does. Nobody warns you that "can I actually get paid" is a feature you have to validate as hard as the product itself.
The TUB concept is genuinely sharp too — one CV, one best-matched candidate per role. That's the opposite of the spray-and-pray job boards everyone hates.
Did you ever look at Stripe / Wise / Paddle as a merchant-of-record workaround, or was the whole payout rail just closed off for your region? Curious whether it was truly dead or just parked.
I did look into Wise, but the overhead of the Forex would kill the business. The one workaround I thought of was given it revolves around partnering with an EOR, that the EOR handles the payments, essentially dog-fooding. I might pick it up again though, but the paypal move promised for this year is probably the biggest thing that'll make it viable. What's good though, is since then, I used the knowledge and system from it, to build Resume Helper: github.com/UnitBuilds-CC/Resume-He... as a way to test the underlying tech and well... I got an interview from using it and hopefully come monday when I submit the 2 take-home assignments, I land the job.
That's why instead of scrapped, I rather look at TUB as shelved. I'll still start it up at some point, but when the time is right. I did write a post on it: dev.to/unitbuilds_cc/shelved-proje...
"Shelved, not scrapped" is exactly the right frame — the tech and the lessons don't expire just because the payment rail wasn't ready. And the EOR-handles-payments / dog-fooding idea is clever; you basically turn your own hiring pipeline into the first customer.
Honestly the best part of this whole reply is that TUB already paid off — it became Resume Helper, which got you an interview. That's the real ROI of a "failed" project: the compounding tech and judgment you carry into the next one. Very few people connect those dots as cleanly as you just did.
Fingers crossed for the take-homes Monday 🤞 go land it. And I'll read the shelved-projects post — that's a genre we need way more of on here.
I have quite a few I still meant to add to the series, but priorities kicked in and I had to shelve writing shelved projects... That being said, I wanna get into it again, finish up my list of shelved and also start a new series on single serving apps I made to solve an immediate problem, but decided to flesh it out, cuz who knows, someone might need it (eg. An entire installer wizard and an MSI crate, so it can do anything Inno Setup can + stuff like Ninite), or Drone, for cross-system testing.
Lets hope it goes well, 2 tasks, 1 is simple, meant as a basic POC, a simple abstract filesystem. The other is quite frankly, massive... Port pgrust to wasmer. Which is definitely not an afternoon task, cuz it involves making edits to a rust fork and compiling from source (on my system about 16 min just to compile), which has been eating at the timeframe. That being said the AFS is done, the pgrust port is functional, just needs more testing to make sure all edge cases are covered.
The "single-serving apps I made to solve an immediate problem" series is the one I'd actually read — the AFS and the pgrust→wasmer port especially, because the 16-min-compile, edit-a-rust-fork reality is the part most write-ups skip.
A dead project with the autopsy written is more useful to the next person than a live one with no notes. When you pick the shelved series back up, are you writing them as "here's what I built" or "here's why I stopped"? The second is rarer and ages better.
One question I've started asking myself is: "What evidence would convince me this idea is bad?" If I can't answer that before I start coding, I'm probably building with excitement instead of data. This article is a great reminder that validation isn't just about finding reasons to continue—it's about being willing to stop.
That's a sharper version of the whole article in one sentence, honestly. It's a pre-mortem: if you can't name the evidence that would kill the idea before you start, you're not testing a hypothesis, you're defending a feeling.
The trap I keep falling into is that once I'm excited, I unconsciously set the kill-condition to something that can never happen ("well, someone might pay"). Writing the disqualifying evidence down first, while I'm still neutral, is the only thing that keeps me honest later.
Stealing your question, by the way — "what would convince me this is bad?" is going on a sticky note above my monitor. 👊
That question is the whole article in one line. If you can't name the kill condition before you start, you're not testing an idea, you're defending one.
What makes it work is the timing:
I'd add one rule: write the answer down with a number in it. "Nobody wants it" is easy to argue with later. "Fewer than 3 of 20 people say they'd pay" isn't.
What was the last idea that question actually killed for you?
The filter that works for me is having to describe who opens it on an ordinary Tuesday, and why today rather than next month. Ideas I only want to exist cannot survive that sentence. Ideas somebody is waiting for answer it in one line.
That's a sharper filter than my whole checklist. Mine took an afternoon; yours takes ten seconds, and an honest answer usually settles it.
Running my two ideas through it:
The startup fails in one line. It's the same thing I saw with the competitor: lots of stars, no sign anyone was waiting for it.
I'm stealing "Ideas I only want to exist." 🙌
Do you run that sentence before you build, or only once you've caught yourself getting excited?