My Failed Startup Journey and the Truth About Indie Hacking

Watching *The Social Network* as a computer science student is a dangerous thing. You finish it feeling like the next Zuckerberg. You don't update your resume. You don't apply to jobs. You build.

That's exactly what I did.

Step 1: The AI Therapist Nobody Paid For

My first startup was PsyScribe — a personalized AI mental health assistant. My background was split between psychology and computer science, so it felt like an obvious fit. The pitch: a website where users could chat with a customizable AI therapist, available between real sessions. Three months of summer hacking. A Reddit post for distribution. A Stripe subscription as the business model.

What actually happened: I opened my Stripe dashboard and saw 40 to 50 cheap subscriptions over the product's entire lifetime. That's 50 to 100 euros per month. Not exactly enough to skip the 9-to-5.

Worse, after talking to actual psychologists and doing more research, I realized PsyScribe was probably *illegal* in the EU. The Medical Device Regulation and the new AI Act don't look kindly on apps positioning themselves as therapeutic tools. I wasn't the next Jeff Bezos. I shut it down and started sending out job applications.

Step 2: Discovering Indie Hacking

A few months into my new job, I stumbled onto the Lex Fridman podcast interview with Pieter Levels. If you haven't seen it, Levels is the guy behind PhotoAI.com, InteriorAI.com, and RemoteOK.com — all built with a brutally simple stack: PHP, HTML, CSS, and jQuery. No fancy frameworks. No team. Just a solo founder shipping fast and solving specific problems.

Something clicked. This was the indie hacking philosophy: build small, focused apps, add a Stripe paywall, repeat. It felt more honest than chasing a unicorn startup. I was in.

Step 3: The Playbook (On Paper)

The indie hacker process sounds straightforward:

• Find a problem — lurk in communities. r/NameMyCat is full of people who need help naming their pets. That's a real niche.
• Build a simple solution — something like CatNamer.ai. A focused web app or SaaS, nothing more.
• Add a Stripe paywall — ship it, promote it, hopefully profit.
• Repeat — the shotgun approach. Throw enough darts and one sticks.

Pieter Levels himself has said only 4 out of his 70+ projects ever made money. That's roughly a 5% hit rate. The math says you need to build a lot.

Step 4: More Failures

So I built more things.

crev — a CLI tool for AI-powered code reviews. Earned 73 euros from exactly one customer.

FireUp — a mobile app that generates startup ideas. Got 177 downloads. Made $13.

Promotion was its own nightmare. Post in the wrong subreddit and you're downvoted into oblivion or outright banned. Distribution turned out to be harder than writing the code — and I hadn't even written bad code.

The Part Nobody Talks About

Here's where I'll be honest with you: the indie hacker scene has a serious image problem.

It reminds me a lot of the dropshipping wave. There's a large group — maybe 95% — who are essentially selling a dream. They tweet MRR screenshots and post "I quit my job" threads, but the numbers don't hold up. There's even an app called *Fake It Till You Make It* that generates fake Stripe notifications. That should tell you something.

Then there's the top tier — people like Pieter Levels and Marc Lou — who are basically celebrities on X. Their launches work because they have massive built-in distribution. A newcomer cannot replicate that. The audience came first; the product success followed.

And then there's the 1% of products that are genuinely useful and succeed on their own merit — tools like Miro or Cal AI — where distribution wasn't the whole story.

Most people starting out are not in that 1%. And they're definitely not Pieter Levels yet.

Why You Should Still Try It

None of that means you shouldn't do it. I don't regret any of it — not PsyScribe, not crev, not FireUp.

Because here's what you actually get out of the process: you become an absurdly well-rounded developer. You handle the idea, the frontend, the backend, the AI integrations, the deployment, the marketing, the customer conversations. You learn Go because a project needs it. You get serious about your GitHub. You understand what it actually takes to put something in front of real users.

That skill set is valuable everywhere — not just in startups.

The core principles are worth internalizing regardless of outcome:

• Ship fast — don't wait until it's perfect
• Master your stack — stop chasing shiny new frameworks
• Keep it simple — Pieter Levels runs million-dollar products on PHP and jQuery
• Solve real problems — not problems you invented for yourself
• Take distribution seriously — it's harder than the code, every single time

Failure teaches you things that no course, no bootcamp, and honestly no job will. You learn by losing money, by getting downvoted, by watching your Stripe dashboard sit at zero. And then you learn to build something better.

Takeaways

The Social Network is still a great movie. Just don't let it be your only business plan.

The indie hacking scene is noisy and often misleading, but the underlying principles — ship fast, stay simple, solve real problems — are genuinely good. The hard truth is that distribution matters more than most builders want to admit, and success takes far more attempts than a highlights reel suggests.

But if you ship things, you grow. And that growth compounds in ways you won't fully appreciate until later. Start anyway.