I built four products, made $0, and ended up in the ER. Here's the bug I finally found.

6:30 in the evening, July 27th. I was in an emergency room.

Chest tightness. Couldn't pull a full breath. I was sure it was my heart giving out. They ran everything — bloodwork, a cardiac ultrasound, the full panel. It all came back clean. The doctor looked at me and said the thing I least expected and most needed to hear: your heart is fine. Stop being so anxious. Stop panicking.

Which is a strange thing to be told as a diagnosis. There was nothing mechanically wrong with me. My body was simply handing me the bill for six months of nights — and the currency it wanted was fear.

And I want to be honest about what the fear actually was, lying on that bed. It wasn't fear of dying, exactly. It was: I can't afford to break down. I have a family. I have a kid. If something happens to me, what happens to them? That was the thought going around and around while the monitor beeped that I was fine.

I'm an indie developer. I say that the way you'd admit something, not announce it.

I didn't choose this after reading some blog about freedom and passive income. I chose it because I can feel the ground moving under me. I'm not young anymore, and AI hasn't just made me more capable — it's made everyone more capable. The work I've done my whole life is exactly the kind that's getting easier for anyone to do, which means my job could stop being mine at any moment. That's the trap: too old to feel safe where I am, and the ground I'm standing on getting thinner by the month.

So I'm not chasing a dream. I'm trying to dig a second well before the first one runs dry — a second stream of income, something of my own, before the choice gets made for me. Building my own thing stopped being ambition and became insurance.

So I built. And I don't mean toys.

makelineart.com — a photo-to-line-art converter that runs entirely in your browser (nothing uploaded), with a dozen real modes: tattoo stencils, cross-stitch patterns, laser-engraving templates, pencil sketches. Actual Canny edge detection under the hood, not a filter.

omniemoji.com — AI-generated emoji packs in five styles, downloadable as PNG/SVG/GIF for Discord, Slack, WhatsApp. Free tier, Pro tier, Stripe, the works.

taplup.com — a multilingual HTML5 game portal, browser-based, no downloads, 13 languages, PWA-installable.

GrowBook — a Flutter plant-care app, live on Google Play (com.yuntai.growbook): watering and fertilizing schedules, offline reminders, even on-device AI plant identification.

Four products. Shipped, working, out in the world, in eleven and thirteen languages, with payment systems wired up and edge deployments and offline-first databases. I did all of it.

Total revenue across all four: zero.

Not "not much." Zero. I keep typing that number because part of me still can't believe it.

Here's what the ER made me stop and stare at. I've gotten good at the part I was already good at — building. I can ship. What I cannot crack, after four attempts, are the two things that actually decide whether any of this feeds my family:

How do you find a real niche — a group of people with a problem sharp enough that they'll pay to make it go away? And how do you reach them without getting flattened by the platforms?

I'm not asking rhetorically. I've tried. GrowBook literally came from a Reddit thread — someone confessing they kept killing their plants, and a hundred people replying "same." That's supposed to be the whole playbook: go where people complain, listen for the pain, build the painkiller. So I went back to the well. I spent weeks on Reddit and X, reading, commenting, upvoting, trying to be a real person in real conversations. I didn't spam. I didn't drop links. I broke no rule I could point to.

I got banned anyway. Both places. No warning I understood, no reason I could find. Whatever small standing I'd built — gone in a click I never saw coming. All that quiet groundwork, deleted.

I sat in the unfairness of that for a long time. Doing the honest version of the thing and still getting punished for it.

But lying in that ER bed, wired to a monitor that kept insisting my heart was fine while every other part of me clearly wasn't, I finally caught the real bug. It wasn't in any of the four products. It was in me. I'd been optimizing the wrong variable. My answer to "nothing is working" was always the same word: more. More hours, more nights, more products, more grinding. Push harder. Ship faster. Sleep later.

But if you pour effort into a broken method, effort just gets you to the broken result faster — in my case, with chest pain attached. The intensity was never the answer. The method was broken. And working harder on a broken method is just a faster route to the same $0.00, and a hospital bracelet.

I don't have this solved. That's the point of writing it down instead of some triumphant "how I hit $10k MRR" post I have no right to write. What I've decided is small and boring and, for me, radical: I'm going to stop being proud of hours. I'm going to spend less time building and more time on the two things I keep avoiding because they scare me and I'm bad at them — really understanding who a product is for, and finding an honest way to reach those people that a platform can't erase overnight.

So I'll ask the people who've actually done it, because I clearly haven't yet:

How did you find your niche — the one where people were ready to pay? And how do you build a presence and market yourself without your account getting wiped for reasons no one will explain?

I'm asking for real. I'm tired, I'm a little scared, and I'd rather learn from you than from another night that ends in an ER.

— building NotebookBloom in public