Most developers have a graveyard of unfinished side projects. I do too. But I also have 6 products that shipped — some of them generating real revenue right now. Six years, four industries, a lot of failures nobody talks about. Here's what actually happened.
The First One: I Built Something Nobody Needed
It was 2020. I was 19, had just gotten comfortable with JavaScript, and I convinced myself I needed to build an EdTech platform. I spent four months writing what I thought was clean, modular code. The architecture was genuinely elegant. There were zero users at launch.
Looking back, the problem was obvious: I started with a solution and then tried to find people who had the problem. That's the most common mistake first-time founders make. The product worked perfectly. Nobody cared.
Six Things I Do Differently Now
- 1.Talk to real potential users before writing a single line of code. Not friends. Not family. Strangers who would actually pay.
- 2.Define the one thing the product does that's worth paying for. Everything else is a distraction.
- 3.Ship something embarrassing first. Polish comes after you confirm people want it.
- 4.Charge from day one, even if it's $10 a month. Free users lie with their feedback. Paying users tell you the truth.
- 5.Use the boring tech. Postgres and Next.js will outlast every framework that drops this year.
- 6.Treat distribution as a product decision. Think about how people will find you before you build anything.
Gasflow Changed How I Think About Software
I met the Gasflow client through a contact in Jhelum. They were running a full LPG distribution business on paper — handwritten order slips, manual billing, delivery drivers with no route optimization. When they walked me through the operation, the problems were so obvious I was sketching solutions before the tea arrived.
That's what it feels like to build for a real problem rather than an imagined one. We shipped an MVP in three weeks. Within two months, they'd migrated their entire operation to the platform and reported a 40% improvement in delivery efficiency. That single project taught me more about software than any tutorial or course.
The best products don't feel like software. They feel like someone finally solved the problem you'd been working around for years.
When AI Changed Everything (And When It Didn't)
By 2024 I was integrating LLMs into almost everything I built. Concise Lesson — which converts audio and video into structured notes — would have been a completely different product without modern AI. What once required custom NLP pipelines and months of training now takes 40 lines of code and a well-crafted prompt.
But here's the thing nobody says clearly enough: AI doesn't fix bad product thinking. I've watched developers bolt a chatbot onto a product with zero traction and expect it to go viral. The fundamentals haven't changed. You still need a real problem, real users, and a plan for distribution. AI just makes you faster once you have all three.
2026: Six Products In, Still Learning
Concise Lesson and Meals Cloud are in active development. Gasflow and Casheir are live and used daily by real businesses. Eleventh Mind runs in schools. The AI coding tools available now mean one developer can do what used to require a team of three — and I'm using that leverage deliberately rather than just building more stuff.
- Your location is not your limitation. I work with clients from the US, UK, and Europe from a desk in Pakistan.
- The best client relationships are built on blunt honesty, not polished proposals.
- Building in public is the most underrated marketing strategy for developers.
- Fast is only good if it lasts. Quality is what keeps people paying month after month.
- The seventh product is already in planning. It never really ends.
If you're reading this as a developer thinking about your first product: start smaller than feels comfortable, charge earlier than feels right, and talk to users more than you code. Everything else tends to figure itself out.