Learning from the Dead: What 100 Failed SaaS Products Taught Me

Instead of another shiny new tool, today we're starting by digging through a graveyard. A Reddit user analyzed 100+ failed micro-SaaS projects, and the lessons are surprisingly more useful than the latest launch announcement.

💬 What I Learned from 100 Dead Micro SaaS Projects

A Reddit user did the hard work of analyzing over 100 failed Micro SaaS launches to find the common patterns that lead to failure. It's a goldmine of what not to do.

Why I'm excited: This is the opposite of the survivorship bias we're usually fed. Instead of another story about a unicorn, this is a practical, no-BS roadmap of the real-world traps that sink good ideas. It's immediately actionable and more valuable than 10 'how to succeed' articles.

Who should care: Anyone building a product, especially solo founders or small teams. This is your 'don't do this' checklist. If you're thinking of launching a side project, read this first.

Reality check: This is based on public 'post-mortem' posts, so it's not a controlled scientific study. Still, the patterns are so consistent that ignoring them feels like a very expensive form of optimism.

Check out What I Learned from 100 Dead Micro SaaS Projects →

AI Builders vs. The Hangover

Everyone is racing to build with AI, but there's a growing conversation about the fallout. Are we just building tomorrow's tech debt today? This feels like the hangover after the initial hype party.

The 'Ship Fast, Abandon Faster' Dilemma

This Reddit thread nails the anxiety of the current moment. We can build faster than ever, but if it leads to unstable, quickly-abandoned products, we're just creating a new kind of technical debt based on broken user trust.

Golex AI: From Idea to Website in a Flash

Tools like Golex are the rocket fuel for the 'ship fast' debate. The ability to generate a full, clickable website prototype from a simple prompt is incredible for validation, but also makes it easier to create digital ghost towns.

Frigade AI: An AI Brain for Your Product Onboarding

Frigade is tackling the 'ship fast' problem from the other side. Instead of better documentation, it uses an AI agent to learn your product and provide real-time, personalized help. It's an attempt to fix the messy user experience that often results from rapid development.

Your Digital Life Gets an Upgrade

While some are debating build-speed, a whole other category of tools is trying to make sense of the digital clutter we already have. It's less about building new things and more about making our existing digital lives more intelligent.

Memories.ai: A Searchable Brain for Your Videos

Okay, this is actually cool. It's basically a search engine for your entire video library. The idea of asking 'show me all the clips where my dog is doing something funny' instead of scrubbing through hours of footage is a future I can get behind.

Tender: Tinder for Your Favorite Photos

In a world of endless camera rolls, this feels surprisingly mindful. It's a 'right-swipe only' app for photos of your loved ones. A simple, positive way to actually appreciate the photos you take instead of letting them drown in a sea of screenshots.

Google Photos Gets an AI Glow-Up

And of course, Google is getting in on the action, adding AI tools to animate your static photos. It's neat, but also feels like it's trying to turn every quiet memory into 'shareable content'. Jury's still out on whether this adds value or just more noise.

Quick hits

How the Pros at Anthropic Use Claude: Pro-tip from Anthropic's own engineers: they only get usable code from Claude on the first try 33% of the time. A helpful reality check for the rest of us.

The 1000 Job Application Experiment: A developer used AI to automate 1000 job applications, landed 240 interviews. Is this a genius productivity hack or a sign of the apocalypse? You decide.

Scratch Your Own Itch, Get Paid: Turns out if you solve a real, nagging problem for yourself, other people might pay you for it. This dev made $900 from a simple Chrome extension they built for personal use.

Chord: AI Joins the Group Chat: This tool lets you invite different AI models like ChatGPT and Claude into a single group chat with your friends. Seems perfect for settling debates or collaborative brainstorming.

My takeaway

The real tension in tech right now isn't about human vs. AI, but about building vs. sustaining.

We have an explosion of tools that make it ridiculously easy to *start* something, but the hard-won lessons from failed projects show that starting is the easy part. The real challenge is navigating market demand, pricing, and your own psychology to build something that lasts longer than the initial hype cycle.

The most valuable skill is shifting from 'what can I build?' to 'what is worth sustaining?'. That's a question no AI can answer for you.

What's one micro-SaaS mistake you've either made or seen up close? I'm genuinely curious to hear stories from the trenches.

Drop me a reply. Till next time, this is Louis, and you are reading Louis.log().