Turned 24 having failed at multiple businesses. Here's my story.

I started building products, 2 years ago when I was 22.

I've always wanted to start something of my own ever since I came to learn about money & how certain assets work while you sleep (From Rich Dad, Poor dad 😂)

At that time, I was totally naive. Was fascinated by books like "Zero to One" and started out building a recruitment platform for developers with help from a friend who became my cofounder

We scrapped together a simple project and integrated with Github APIs to push code repositories in under 3 weeks. I also began doing cold outreach to over 100 companies. Finally 4 of them responded 🤩

We managed to make some revenue of $300 (charged companies for successful hires) but it turned out hard to consistently bring in candidates for every job listed by a company.

And since I was the only one focusing on business side of things, I eventually lost energy having to rent out my time for every hire 😪

Next venture - Social media for developers

Turns out I still had it within me to turn it into something else. So we made a pivot from the previous project but with a special focus on distribution which we thought might solve the hiring problem 🤔

We called it "Astramind" intended to mean, taking our community minds to the stars🤐

Our master plan was to make it a place for the most creative developers to hang out so that developers would be readily available when jobs were listed. A "productized" version of the service we used to render 😋

So we built a community platform for developers where they could share their blogs, code repositories while getting to know other developers. (It was more of a social media with features appealing to developers) 🙌

Though the plan looked good on paper, the hardest part was to make developers engage with each other and make posts. We realized that developers didn't have much to comment on other posts & were mostly reserved 🥲

After working on it for 3 months, we realized that we really couldn't make it work though we had 20 developers onboarded as users and a discord community as well.

We decided to pull the plug having to focus on developers as I found that I was not really enjoying serving my target customers & also not good at it ❤️‍🩹

Yet another one - Community for makers building in public

After taking some time off for some 2 months, it was September 2021. Both of us still had some energy (But I could see that my cofounder's energy was deteriorating with each project)

While working on the developers' platform, I interacted with a lot of founders & indie hackers, talking about what didn't work and realized that they were people I resonated with the most. And also we saw the build in public movement becoming popular on twitter.

Having built a platform before, we both decided to make a community platform for SaaS makers building in public so that they could engage with each other and easily buy products due to the trust that's built 😁

So we had the concept of products categorized as timelines with each timeline telling the build in public journey of the founders. We ranked timelines based on the engagement they received.

We used the boilerplate code from our previous project, added comments on posts, notifications to keep makers engaged.

The product seemed to be doing well in the first month. We onboarded around 60+ makers (since now I had an audience from my previous projects)

We also made a soft launch on Product hunt which went comparably well to our previous projects. We had makers posting everyday. We were done with the technical part but now had to focus on marketing.

While all was going okay, we slowly started having some issues. Growth was stagnating. Also my cofounder lost interest at that time since now work was more required on marketing and keeping the community engaged rather than adding features.

We were doing all these ventures with a full time job on the side and he personally also wanted to make a job switch due to his company issues.

So this shifted a lot of responsibilities on me where I had to continually do marketing for 2 months and also fix bugs then & there.

I had a burnout after 2 months where I couldn't focus on my startup properly. I took a break in the month of December 2021.

Coming back again I realized that it was going to be hard for me to manage a community solo. Eventually we realized that it was best that I had to part ways with my cofounder.

After working on a lot of startups, for 2 years straight, it came to an end.

End or is it?

Even after enduring all the pain, I learnt what worked and didn't work in my case. I still had the desire to have a profitable business. So in January 2022 I began looking for problems I could build a SaaS as a solo-founder.

Now I am currently building Famewall in public.

Guess a taste of freedom makes you unemployable for life :)

Thanks for reading through my entire journey patiently. I've also shared some of the lessons I learnt on twitter 🤩