# What I Built in the Last Year: A List of Failures

*A list of failures.*

That's the most accurate title I could come up with. Here's the summary:

In the last year or so, I have built 4 web apps, 3 open-source tools, wrote one book, onboarded 250+ users overall, and made 25 dollars overall.

Read that sentence a few times. Eight projects and 250+ users went in, and 25 dollars came out. That isn't a monthly number or a per-project number. It's the total.

I'm not writing this to ask for sympathy, or to pretend it was all a learning experience. Some of it was. Mostly, I want the numbers written down in one place, because the gap between building something and getting someone to pay for it is easy to ignore when you only look at one project at a time.

## The web apps

These are the ones where revenue was supposed to happen.

1.  [**Bailoutt.com**](https://bailoutt.com) **- Fake AI calls and call reminders - live ~200 users, 2 paid**
    
    This is the closest thing I have to a success. About 200 people signed up, which is more than everything else combined. Two of them paid. Most of the 25 dollars came from these two people.
    
2.  **https://chunkybabies.com - Baby health tracker - 2 users, didn’t take off. Offline now**
    
    Not much to say. Two users, no traction, and I shut it down. It's the only project on this list that no longer exists.
    
3.  [Kitaaben](https://kitaaben.com) **- Book tracker, journal and AI reviews. - 60+ users - 1 active subscriber**
    
    Sixty-odd people use it to track what they read, and one person pays for it. That one subscriber is the reason it's still running, and I'm grateful to them.
    
4.  [WO Buddy](https://wobuddy.app) **- Build your exercise plan, with illustrated guide - 10 users - none paid**
    
    Ten users, none paid.
    

Put those side by side, and you get a funnel that starts wide at "built" and ends at a few coins at "paid."

## The open source tools

I never expected these to make money. They're free, they solved my own problems, and a couple of them might solve yours.

5.  **GWDAP - Automate verification and adding aliases for multiple domains.**
    
    Adding domain aliases in Google Workspace means verifying and adding each domain by hand. That's fine for one domain. It gets tedious and error-prone once you have several. GWDAP automates it.
    
6.  **COPE agent - A multi-model content repurposing tool that turns any provided source into a canonical brief, which in turn converts it into multi-format content, i.e. long form like LinkedIn, short form like Twitter, etc., carousel, both image and and pdf**
    
    You give it a source, like a messy text file. It distils the source into one brief and turns that brief into posts for different formats. This post started that way.
    
7.  **DoCk - A browser extension that routes your Google Workspace links to their respective PWAs rather than opening a new tab for each link.**
    
    I built it because I was tired of a Docs link opening yet another browser tab when I already had the installed app. It's small and narrow, and it does exactly that.
    

## The book

8.  **Dad, Debriefed - Journaled my experience as a father and turned it into a book that works as a guide to new fathers.**
    
    This one is different from the rest. I didn't start with a market in mind. I started with a journal. The journal grew into a book, and the book became something I wish I'd had when I started.
    

## So where does that leave things?

Here's the scoreboard: 8 projects, 250+ users, $25.

You can read that a few ways. Turns out I'm good at shipping. Getting anyone to pay is a separate skill, and the list shows I haven't learned it yet. Every one of these went live. Most of them found at least a handful of people. Almost none of them found people with a reason to pay.

A few things I'm taking from the year:

1.  **Shipping is not the bottleneck.** I can build things. That clearly isn't what's holding me back.
    
2.  **Users are not customers.** Bailoutt has about 200 users and 2 paying ones. That ratio says a lot about what I've actually validated.
    
3.  **One paying subscriber counts.** Kitaaben's single subscriber tells me more than its 60+ free users do.
    
4.  **Killing a project is fine.** Chunkybabies is offline, and nothing broke.
    
5.  **Not everything has to make money.** The open source tools and the book were worth doing anyway. I just shouldn't confuse them with a business.
    

So it's a list of failures, by the only number that pays rent. By the count of things that exist now and didn't a year ago, the year went better than that number suggests. Both readings are true. I'm just not going to pretend the second one cancels out the first.