AI Summary
5 min readAfter launching more than 30 products that all failed, Thomas Sanis finally built Unid, a launch platform alternative to Product Hunt that now makes around $10,000 per month. His GitHub is littered with abandoned repositories—a marketplace connecting Gumroad sellers with affiliates that made $500 before he gave up, a website builder called Gridly, a plant management app he used himself for a year, a bookmark manager. None of them worked. But the pattern of failure taught him exactly what he needed to know when the right idea finally arrived.
Why Projects Fail
Thomas identifies five recurring reasons his projects died, and he sees the same mistakes in other indie hackers. The first is giving up too early. He argues that no product works overnight, and that founders need to verify the market exists and then iterate repeatedly, learning from each mistake. A product that gets abandoned after a week of zero registrations never had a chance to find its audience.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (02:30) **Introducing Thomas and His 30 Failed Projects** - Thomas Sanis, founder of Unid, explains that before his $10K/month product he launched over 30 products that all failed, and shows his GitHub graveyard of abandoned repos.
- 2 (03:55) **Reason #1: Giving Up Too Early** - Thomas argues that most people launch a project and quit after a week or two without registrations, but no product works overnight—you must iterate and confirm the market exists.
- 3 (04:26) **Reason #2: Unclear Purpose on the Landing Page** - If visitors don’t immediately understand what your product offers from the headline, they won’t scroll down—no matter how polished the design or animations are.
- 4 (04:44) **Reason #3: Loss of Momentum** - Building in public creates gradual brand recognition; if you stop posting about your product for weeks, you have to rebuild that momentum from scratch.
- 5 (05:15) **Reason #4: The “Build It and They Will Come” Fallacy** - Thomas explicitly hates this phrase, stating that without marketing and active promotion, no one will visit your site regardless of how great the features are.
- 6 (05:37) **Reason #5: Bad Timing** - A project that fails in January might succeed in July; the advice is to stay consistent and not give up because you can never predict when the market will be ready.
- 7 (06:00) **The Idea That Worked: Unid’s Origin and Pivot** - Unid started as a simple directory for front-end tools, but after reaching only 200 monthly visitors, Thomas pivoted it into a product launch platform—a move that initially felt like a failure.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
I Built 30 Projects. They All Failed Except One
Sharing ideas that make money!
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--------- Keywords: indie hacker, business ideas, make money online, app store success, entrepreneur stories, bootstrap startup
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