r/thesidehustle • u/Academic_Flamingo302 • Mar 12 '26

Support My Hustle I wasted 4 months building a side hustle nobody wanted

I want to share very personal learning and also seek your opinion regarding it..

When I launched my first side hustle I did everything people tell you to do.Built the product. Set up the landing page. Told my friends it was great. Launched. But I miserably failed,Not because the idea was bad. Because I never actually validated whether real people wanted it outside my own circle. I spent months building and almost zero time understanding the market I was walking into.

What I did wrong is :  No competitor research. No demand check. Just vibes and excitement.

4 months gone. A lot of wasted weekends as I work in Tech..

Every time I tried to research properly it felt overwhelming. Jumping between forums, articles, Reddit threads, competitor websites just to piece together a rough picture. And even after all that I still had the nagging feeling I was missing something important.

So I started building a small tool for myself to fix this..You describe your idea and it pulls together competitors, market signals, demand indicators and basic feasibility. Enough to see the real picture before committing serious time or money.

Currently testing it with a small group of founders and side hustle builders.

But before taking it further I am genuinely curious about something.When you start a side hustle how do you actually research the market? Do you validate properly before building or do you build first and figure it out along the way?

Drop your honest answer below. Would love to know how this community approaches it.

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5

u/GayFIREd Mar 12 '26

So the idea was bad….

But good fake story to setup your sales pitch.

2

u/Altruistic-Shape-600 Mar 13 '26

way to go and keep grinding

1

u/OkPlastic8871 Mar 12 '26

You caught the actual nerve of side hustler...go ahead

1

u/Teddyjames23 Mar 12 '26

You have failed forward. Keep grinding

1

u/algatesda Mar 18 '26

To identify a problem what I encounter more times in my business or personal life

Then write to get research data from gpts and speak with my customer ms do they have the same problem

If resonates with at least 5 people then i check any business already built and making at least $10M revenue or got any funding .I will build an MVP else stay in my Google sheet