I did learn the KEY to make money with a project.
I shipped 25+ products in five years. The code was never the problem.
Five years.
More than 25 products shipped. Just me doing the code, the design, the marketing, all of it.
A couple even sold. A few made decent money. So no, not a flop.
But I never built the one.
The product that pays the bills every month and lets you quit everything else and go all in.
For a long time I blamed the wrong things. The code wasn’t clean enough. The design needed one more pass. Ship it again, better this time.
That was never it.
I’m a good programmer. I know product. I can design. None of that was holding me back.
What held me back was getting anyone to actually see the thing I built.
That’s distribution. And it’s pretty much the whole game.
The project that finally drove it home for me was Whisper Money. That’s where it clicked: the building was the easy part, and getting people to find it was everything.
You can build the best product on earth and watch it die quiet because nobody ever found it.
Here’s what makes it worse now. AI writes half your code. Building has never been this easy, so everyone is shipping something.
The hard part stopped being the building a while ago.
The hard part is getting found.
So if you only learn one thing this year, don’t make it another SaaS.
Learn how to put your product in front of people. Otherwise you’re just talking to yourself.