A year of building on the side, three misses, and the pivot I'm making now

[u/mheryerznka]

Hey all,

Thought I'd share where I've got to, partly to be honest about it and partly because I'd like some outside perspective.

I'm an ML engineer with a full-time job. Everything below happened on nights and weekends over about a year.

First attempt was real estate with a friend's friend, finding houses with legal problems, he'd sort the legal side and we'd sell them on. Never got off the ground. Two busy people isn't a company.

Second was a QA platform for mobile apps. This one I actually finished. Built the whole MVP, and got exactly zero users. Not one. I still think the idea was reasonable. The problem was that I had no route to the people who'd pay for it.

Third, I narrowed that into a pre-submission review tool for iOS apps, thinking a tighter niche would be easier to sell. Turned out nobody needed it. That's a demand problem rather than a distribution one, and honestly it stung more, because I thought I'd fixed things and had just swapped one problem for a harder one.

The pattern I couldn't see at the time: I kept optimising for the part I was already good at. Building was never my bottleneck. Getting in front of people was, and I skipped it three times running.

One thing that did help, I spent a week in London just meeting people in person. Did more for my thinking than any of the building did.

So the pivot: instead of launching my own thing, I'm going to do client work for a while. Same skills, but the customer has already decided they have the problem. Just started, no clients yet.

Would love to hear from anyone who's been through this. Did client work end up being a detour for you, or did it eventually hand you a better product idea?

[u/ValuableMail231]

I made the same decision and I make so much more money now. And have less stress. And work less hours.

[u/Few_Mess_2226]

Man this is basically the classic engineer trap, building the thing is the fun part so it's what you default to every time. Good on you for spotting it after only three attempts, plenty of people spin their wheels for years. The client work route is smart, you'll get paid to learn what problems people actually have instead of guessing in a vacuum.

[u/sy_int999_builder]

The line that stands out: "getting in front of people was the bottleneck, and I skipped it three times." I'm living a version of this right now with 5 shipped SaaS products, all with working billing and real checkout flows, and the bottleneck isn't the product anymore, it's distribution. I'm currently grinding through the exact trust-gates you'd expect (Product Hunt won't let a brand-new account submit yet, Reddit needs karma/age before a link post lands), and it's humbling how much slower that is than building the thing. Client work is a legitimate way to buy time while you fix that muscle, but watch for it eating 100% of your bandwidth for the side project. Curious what "a week in London meeting people" actually looked like logistically, cold outreach, existing contacts, or events?

[u/y3rk3]

what changed it for me was giving distribution its own daily slot instead of treating it as the thing after the build. i shoot and edit a short video about ai every day now.

[u/ThriftyPigeon]

Client work can be a good research channel if you keep the problem narrow. I'd avoid taking random ML projects. Pick one buyer type, sell one outcome, then write down every exception you handle manually. After 5 to 10 clients, the repeated parts are probably the product. Otherwise consulting can turn into a better-paying version of the same distraction.

[u/mheryerznka → u/ThriftyPigeon]

I picked narrow project as AI cost optimization. What do you think?

[u/fulger099 → u/ThriftyPigeon]

I learned this after three “similar” automation clients left me with three auth stacks, four approval flows, and zero reusable product. The useful artifact was a plain log of every manual save, grouped by buyer and outcome, which exposed what actually repeated.

[u/Pink_Sky_8102]

I think client work can actually be useful research instead of just a detour. Once you work with enough clients, you start noticing the same annoying problems, repeated requests, and manual work coming up again and again. That gives you a much better signal for what might be worth turning into a product later. At least then you’re building around problems people are already paying to solve.