The Story
Thomas is the founder of Uneed - a Product Hunt alternative that makes $10K/month. But before this success, he launched more than 30 projects that all failed.
As Thomas admits: "I failed way more often than I ever succeeded."
His GitHub is a graveyard of abandoned repositories: "We can have a look at my GitHub account and yeah, as you can see, I have a lot of repositories and most of them are abandoned."
The key difference with Uneed? Timing, persistence, and finally understanding what makes an idea worth building. "Yeah, it started to grow step by step until I reached $10,000 of revenue last month."
Key Insights
The 30+ Failed Projects
- •Gum Affiliates: "Marketplace to connect Gumroad sellers with affiliates. I think I made something like $500 from it, but I just gave up after 2 years."
- •Frisbee: "A platform to exchange feedback about your product, but never published it"
- •Gidley: Simple website builder (abandoned)
- •Cidi: "A simple web app to manage your plans. Actually, I used it for maybe a year or two for myself."
- •Bookmark manager (abandoned)
- •Simple Twitter feed (abandoned)
- •"And yeah, there are a lot of things on my GitHub profile."
The Uneed Pivot
- •Started as a simple directory for front-end tools
- •"I think I reached to $200 per month at some point, but that was my best month"
- •Pivoted to a launch platform (Product Hunt alternative)
- •"At first, it was a huge failure. I was scared because my revenue went down a lot."
- •"A few months after the pivot, my revenue started to grow up again"
5 Reasons Why Projects Fail
1. Giving Up Too Early
"I often see people launching a project and giving up after a week or two because they haven't had any registrations or sales. But I don't think a product will ever work overnight. We have to make sure the market exists and we have to kind of iterate and iterate again."
2. Unclear Purpose
"I've seen hundreds of landing pages that may look great with a lot of animation details, but if people don't understand exactly what your product is offering when they read your headline, it's a lose and lose situation. Nobody's going to scroll down if they don't understand your headline."
3. Loss of Momentum
"If you build in public, every time you post about your product on social media, you create momentum. Step by step, people will see the name of your product, your name in their feed. They'll end up remembering you. If you stop talking about your project for a few weeks or a month, you have to start again to build this momentum."
4. "Build It and They Will Come" Mentality
"I just hate that phrase and I think it's very wrong. People won't come to see your product because it has amazing features. No matter what your product is, if you don't do any marketing, if you don't talk about it, no one will come to your website."
5. Bad Timing
"Timing is important when launching a project. If your project doesn't work in January, it doesn't mean it won't work in July. Stay consistent and don't give up because you don't have the right timing."
The Timing That Made Uneed Work
"If I had pivoted Uneed from a directory to a launch platform maybe a year before I did it, it could have been a huge failure. I took advantage of drama around Product Hunt and a few indie hackers who were complaining on social media about the fact that they couldn't be featured on Product Hunt... That was the right moment to launch an alternative. I don't think it would have worked without this timing."
What Makes a Good Idea
1. You Know How to Sell It
"The better thing that makes an idea a good one is that you know how to sell it. That could be because you know the market, because you have a huge distribution channel, or because you have a great marketing idea. But if you don't know how to sell your idea, it's a bad one."
"With Uneed, it was a bit different because I knew Product Hunt, I knew indie hackers, I knew launch platforms, I knew the market. I started to have a great distribution channel, my Twitter account. I knew how to sell my idea."
2. You Have Competitors
"Not having competitors means that there's no market. So, you won't be able to sell anything to anyone. You're not Steve Jobs. Creating a new market is nearly impossible. So if you don't have competitors, you don't have a market and your idea won't sell."
Business Numbers
- •$8K-10K/month revenue (fluctuates based on marketing)
- •40,000 users on platform
- •2,000 paying customers
- •30,000 unique visitors/month
- •10,000 clicks redirected to listed products last month
Tech Stack
- •Next.js (full stack - frontend and backend)
- •Supabase (database)
- •Bentop (emails and automation)
- •Hetzner VPS with Coolify (hosting)
- •Plausible (self-hosted analytics)
- •Ferno (customer support)
- •Typefully (social media scheduling)
- •Polar (merchant of record)
Key Advice
"You don't have to lock down in your bedroom and code and market for months without seeing anyone. You just have to pick your time and find a way to make it sustainable in the long run."
"Don't forget your personal life and realize you're in this game for the long run and you have as much chances of becoming rich in a month as winning the lottery. You can think of it as a marathon, not a sprint."
Resources
- •Uneed: https://www.uneed.best/
- •Follow Thomas: https://x.com/music_music_