Since I was 14, I’ve been searching for ways to make my own money online. What I didn’t know at that time, it would be 4 years later when I made my first $ online.
Either way, I’m glad I started thinking about making money early, I wouldn’t be where I am now if I hadn’t. Lot of the skills I have now, I learned because it was necessary for one of my projects.
Over the years, I come up with 19 different ideas, and each time I thought, I will be rich from it.
The Projects
Here are my projects, a brief backstory, and why they failed.
2019
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Logo Design Services on Fiverr
I was 15, and I wanted to buy a 3D printer, but I didn’t have money. After watching a few dozen videos on YouTube, I found out about Fiverr. Another dozen videos later, I started practicing logo design, made an account, put up my gig, and waited. No one ordered.
Why it failed: The niche was too saturated. There were thousands of logo design gigs on Fiverr already + I wasn’t skilled enough to stand out.
2020
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3D Printed Fishing Lures
Back then, fishing was the big hobby of mine, and I carved my own wooden lures before that worked well. After I bought my 3D printer, I thought I would be able to mass-produce them, then sell them. I designed a few prototypes, printed them, tried them in the lake, they didn’t swim well. I gave up.Why I gave up: Printing them took too much time, and after printing it still required lot of mauall work to finish them. The plastic I printed them was to heavy, made the lures swim bad.
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3D Printed Guitar Wall Hangers on eBay
I had a 3D printer, guitars, and walls, so I designed a 3D printable guitar wall hanger, printed a few prototypes, and one of them still holds one of my guitars today. I took some product photos, but never listed them on eBay. The complications of producing, packaging, and shipping them scared me off.
The problem was: Printing them took a long time + the material wasn’t cheap -> the end product should have been too expensive. I had no idea how could I package and ship them.
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Webshop for 3D Printed Guitar Picks
I have been printing some custom guitar picks for myself, and they seemed the perfect product to sell, because they could easily fit in an envelope. This was also the time I started learning web development, so I started building a very simple webshop with only HTML, CSS and the PayPal payment link. I never finished the site.Why I didn’t finish it: I had doubts about the product: the picks had printing artifacts. + I wasn’t sure people would pay for them extra, and if I were being honest, $2 picks from the music store were probably better.
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Selling 3D Models
Around this time I started learning Blender, I got into low-poly modeling. I mostly modeled classic race cars, and uploaded a few of them on different platforms for $3. I’ve got a sale, but never got paid, it didn’t hit the minimum payout threshold.
Why I stopped: I got bored of modeling, I couldn’t put a high price tag on my models, platforms took a big cut, and I didn’t know how to market them.
2021
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Web Dev Services on Upwork
I was learning web development, and I thought I could make some money on Upwork. I got a job, but I couldn’t make the requested changes, it was some weird website builder, then I forgot about Upwork.
Why I stopped: It looked like my HTML/CSS skills weren’t enough, and it was very hard to get a job without any reviews.
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3D Printable Files Webshop
At this point I had some 3D printable models, like mini RC drift car, training balisong knife, model rocket parts, and I thought someone might buy them. I started building a “webshop” for them, but never launched the site.
Why I didn’t launch: I had other more interesting projects that pulled me away from this one.
2022
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Developing Indie Games
I got a bit into game development, and started building little 2D games. I finished 2 games for game jams, I had fun with them. But after months of ideating what game should I build that could be sold on Steam, I lost motivation.Why I gave up: I couldn’t come up a simple but great game idea. Developing games solo takes months, and I didn’t have the patience.
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Web Dev Agency
By this time I learned the basics of React and Node.js, and made a website for my father’s business. I saw some yt videos about why agencies are the best business model, so I started figuring out how could I start one. I made designs in Figma, and built them like 3 times in Nextjs, Svelte Kit, and Nextjs again 😅. Launched the website and nothing happened.
Why it didn’t work: As I learned: I need visitors on my website to get orders, just deploying it, creating a business Instagram and Twitter accoung isn’t marketing.
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Platform for 3D Printable Files/Models
I wanted to start a big platform. Thingiverse is very popular, and I thought I can do better than that. I started designing the platform in Figma, but never got past that.
Why I gave up: I just lost passion for the project.
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3D Printed Plant Pots Webshop
I saw a few videos on YouTube on how people make money with building a 3D printing farm at home and selling 3D printed items. I designed plant pots, printed prototypes, and started building a webshop for them. Also this was the first time I tried to validate the idea: My brother had a camera, and we took some product photos, they looked great. I posted them on Facebook Marketplace: lot of views and bookmarks, but no one bought.Why it failed: They were too expensive to produce, a simple pot doens’t worth $20 for most people.
2023
This year I got familiar with indie hacking, and also ChatGPT was released. I started focusing on coding projects that could be sold as a SaaS.
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SlideNotes: AI Note Taking from PPT Presentations
I was bored of taking notes in history class from my teacher’s boring ppt presentations, so I built a tool that could take notes from a ppt presentation with AI in seconds. I bult over 2 weeks, got some nice feedback on Reddit, but it wasn’t really that good. Never monetized it, shut it down after a few months.Why I gave up: It wasn’t that much better than ChatGPT + I didn’t know how to get users for it.
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SaaSStorm: SaaS Idea Generator
I learned that I shouldn’t look for SaaS ideas, but look for problems first, then build the solution. I wasn’t able to notice any problems around me, so I built a tool that could help me brainstorm SaaS ideas starting with niche -> problem -> solutions. I posted about it on Reddit and Twitter, got some good feedback, also got a few email subscribers, but never monetized it, it just wasn’t valuable enough.What happened: I tried to pivot into a SaaS idea validator tool based on feedback.
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Business Idea Validator
After talking with a few users of SaaSStorm, I found a feature they would have payed for: actually validating the generated ideas. I started building a tool that would scrape Reddit for posts and comments to prove there is a demand for a product. I built a quick prototype, but it didn’t work right.
The problem was: There wasn’t enough data to validate niche product ideas.
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LeoAI: AI Chatbots as a Service
This is the project that worked out, and it’s still running and growing slowly (here is the landing page). I built this with a friend, after we saw the success of SiteGPT, Chatbase and other similar services. V1 was pretty bad, we overcomplicated it and took like 3 months to build. Since then we rebuilt it 2 times, and now it’s working well, MRR is growing slowly.Why it worked: The product was already validated by others, we just built for our local market.
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SpanishAI: AI chat app to learn Spanish by speaking
I was started learning Spanish, and the best way to learn a language is to speak it. Built an MVP where you could have a conversation with AI in Spanish in any simulated situation. After a few months SEO kicked in and I got a lot of signups.Why I didn’t go forward with it: It being a B2C product, I would have needed a lot of users to make it profitable, and also I just wasn’t happy with it, the conversations weren’t realistic enough.
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vSites: Web Dev Agency
At this point my friend and I felt stuck with LeoAI, so we decided to start a web design & development agency.We designed and built a landing page, but never launched.Why we didn’t launch: We started focusing more on LeoAI.
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CaloryAI: AI Calories Tracker This time OpenAI released vision capabilities for GPT-4, and one night I couldn’t sleep, at 3am I had the idea to build an app that could track your calories by taking a photo of your food. I started building the MVP, but after 2 days I realized would never use such an app, and I stopped working on it.
Why it wouldn’t have worked: It wouldn’t have been accurate, and I as the creator wouldn’t have used it.
2024
- Fluxify AI: Flux image generator studio
After Flux.1 was announced, I wanted to try it out, but I didn’t find a single website that felt trustworthy or professional. So I bought the a domain, build a waitlist page over a weekend and deployed it. You can check it out here.