I have built three products. The first two failed for the same reason, and the third one is still working on it.

I'm writing this for anyone who is somewhere in the middle of that and tired of reading launch posts with big numbers in them. Mine has no big numbers.

Before any of this: a blog

This isn't my first attempt at making something online. Back in class 11 and 12, around 2016 and 2017, a classmate and I ran a tech content blog called Axogeek. We wrote about tech and hoped to earn from ads. That never turned into anything, but it was the first time I put something on the internet and waited for people to show up.

Product one: a link shortener

It started as a URL shortener. Nothing clever. I built it mainly to learn backend and deployment, and a shortener is small enough to finish. It was my first real product: I bought a domain and published an actual site, not just a project on my laptop.

It got more use than I expected. Most of the traffic came from South Korea, which I never planned for.…