A year in life of a SaaS enthusiast

AI Note: I wrote this post fully and then told AI to fix mistakes and rephrase where needed.

I decided to document all my failed projects from 2024 because I might revisit them someday and draw some valuable conclusions.

Last year, I had some ambitious ideas—none of which made me a dime. But at least I spent countless hours working on them! Jokes aside, I don’t actually see these as failures. Every project taught me something—whether it was a new technology or some business insight—so I never felt like my time was completely wasted.

So, here’s the list of projects and the excuses/reasons why they didn’t work out.

January 2024 - laicki

I’m a bit embarrassed about this one—first, because I can’t even explain what the name was supposed to mean, and second, because it’s the project I abandoned the fastest.

The idea was to build a news portal that would scrape content and use AI to summarize or rewrite it. I figured I could create a website that ran on autopilot and, over time, it might evolve into something bigger. Well, it took me only two weeks to drop the idea. I quickly realized that no one would probably use it, and, to be honest, I have no interest (or skill) in marketing something that provides no real value and has no clear path to monetization.

March-April 2024 - leedync

Leedsync was meant to be a marketing tool—a platform where users could import contacts and send bulk messages or promotions via SMS, Viber, WhatsApp, and other channels. I started this project thinking I could sell it as a B2B product, especially since I had a list of potential local customers who might need something like this.

However, I quickly realized it would be too expensive to sustain. The platform essentially acted as a wrapper for existing messaging services, making it difficult to price it high enough to be viable for my target customers. I even built an MVP and gave presentations to potential clients. While their feedback was mostly positive, I never got the sense that they were truly excited about it. Eventually, I decided to drop the project.

What I learned:

• I explored various CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) options, which gave me a better understanding of what's available.
• I gained insight into how Viber's messaging services work, which is more complex than some other channels.
• I got valuable experience presenting a product to real businesses—a skill that will be useful for future projects.

May - June - bootsaas, hirebalkan, starter-kit

This is where my ideas started spiraling from one into another.

First, I was tired of starting yet another project from scratch, so I decided to build a starter kit—something I could use myself but also potentially sell as a commercial product. I named it BootSaaS—a mix of Spring Boot and bootstrapped SaaS (yeah, I know, not the greatest name).

I actually built it. I even created a nice landing page and integrated LemonSqueezy for payments. But when it came time to start selling, I just couldn’t do it. I knew other developers had found success selling starter kits, but I couldn’t bring myself to market mine. So, what did I do instead? I made it open-source and never published the website with a payment link. Now, it exists as this:
👉 Spring Boot + Next.js Starter Kit

Before making it public, I decided to experiment with YouTube by creating a guide/tutorial on how I built the starter kit. That video brought some attention to the repository, and thanks to it, the project now has 120 stars. However, the YouTube experiment didn’t yield enough results to motivate me to keep going—it took a lot of effort with little reward.

Now that I had my starter kit ready, I decided to build a job board focused on companies abroad hiring people from Balkan countries. This idea came during a time when my company lost a project, and I was worried I might lose my job, too. (Luckily, that didn’t happen.)

The plan was to create a clone of Just Join IT because I really liked its approach, and I thought it would be fun to build something similar. I took the time to clone this project and make some screenshots:

Why did this one fail? Honestly, I’m not even sure. I guess I never really put enough effort into pushing it. I deployed the site, posted a few job ads as an admin (sourced from other websites), and shared it around just to see how many people would actually open them.

One of the features I built allowed job ads to be external—meaning, when users clicked "Apply," they were redirected to the original job posting. There was some traffic on the site, but most of it came from the websites I was linking to. I assume they noticed the traffic coming from my site and checked out what was going on.

Looking back, I might revisit this project in the future and try to actually make it work. But there was one major hurdle I didn’t consider at the start: payment gateways. Most providers don’t allow job boards, and being from Bosnia, my options were already limited—Stripe isn’t available to us. To monetize the platform, I’d have to register a company in a country that supports Stripe or find another payment provider willing to work with this type of business.

What I learned:

✅ Research payment providers before even starting development.
✅ Gained experience working with Leaflet.js (a mapping library).

August - December - capsai and (can't disclose)

As the year was coming to an end, I took a break from side projects—as you can see from the image above, there was a 40-day gap where I didn’t work on anything. At this point, I was feeling disappointed and a bit depressed, but this wasn’t the first time. I knew from experience that once a new idea hit me, the feeling would pass. 😏

That’s when I came up with CapsAI. With all the AI hype going around and me not being on the train yet, I decided it was time to build something AI-related. Around the same time, I also discovered Remotion, so I wanted to combine AI + video in some way.

The original idea was a simple app for adding subtitles to videos. But since I was new to both AI APIs and Remotion, there was a lot of learning involved. I discovered Spring AI, which turned out to be awesome, and I also struggled quite a bit with Remotion—but in the end, I built something really cool. (Screenshots below!)

Eventually, I pivoted the idea into a shorts generator app. Instead of just adding captions, the app could:

• Take a prompt from the user
• Generate a script
• Gather assets, voiceovers, images, and videos
• Assemble everything into a full video

Right now, I have two unfinished branches—one for the video generator and another for captions. The screenshots below show the video generator, though there’s an embarrassing bug that I couldn’t be bothered to fix… so you can’t actually see the video. 🙂

The last thing I worked on—one that I can’t fully disclose yet—was actually for someone else. Basically, it was a freelance gig. Remember those local businesses I mentioned earlier? Well, one of them offered me this project, and it’s still ongoing. The good news? I finally made some money from something I built!

That said, I always have this weird mindset—feeling like freelance work is taking time away from my own ideas, even though my own ideas have never made me any money… while this one actually did. Talk about irony.

What I learned from this:

✅ Gained hands-on experience with Remotion and various AI APIs.
✅ Realized that I suck at shipping my own software business.

And that’s a wrap on 2024. It was a challenging year—I really wanted it to be the year I finally built a successful online business, but it wasn’t meant to be.

As for 2025, new things are already in motion, and even more are on the horizon. Who knows where it will all lead? Hopefully, next year’s recap will be about projects that actually succeeded. But either way, I know one thing for sure—I’m never going to stop trying.