The Project
At one point, I decided to start a new project. I wanted to build something that already had a proven market. That was my thinking behind WebDab. Why not make something that already exists, but put my own spin on it and see what happens?
I built the whole thing myself and grabbed an expired domain called “WebDab”, it sounded brandable, wasn’t blacklisted, and had a solid .com TLD.
By the way, people often ask how I find expired domains. I usually search on https://www.expireddomains.net/—it’s a free and super useful site (not sponsored or anything). Once I find a good one, I just buy it on GoDaddy or Namecheap.
I’ve always liked data—graphs, stats, all that stuff—so this project was right up my alley. I saw a few sites offering similar products and thought, hey, I can build something better.
So I sat down and started coding. I bought an Angular template for the front end and built the microservice backend using AWS Lambda functions. It was also connected to Twitter’s API (back when Dorsey was still running things). I won’t get too technical about the implementation.
And it actually worked pretty well. The site was stable and generated reports with all the key data for any trending topic.
I even added sentiment analysis to the premium plans… yep, I was playing around with AI before it was cool.
After about three months of lockdown, the site was finally ready. I hadn’t talked to a single customer until then. Once it was live, I got a few users, there was a free tier, and people would run the free report, but nobody wanted the paid plan.
I started reaching out to users for feedback on Twitter (back when it was still called Twitter). Everyone said it was cool, but nobody really needed the full report.
That got me wondering, who would actually pay for the full report? Maybe marketers looking for campaign data, or researchers at universities. But how was I supposed to reach them? I honestly had no idea how to sell my tool or find my B2B customers.
Around that time, rumors started flying that Elon Musk was going to buy Twitter, and eventually he did. After the deal, he jacked up the price of the Twitter API so much that it just didn’t make sense for me to keep my subscription.
At that point, I figured, “Maybe I should just keep adding features,” instead of actually marketing what I’d already built. I checked out Common Crawl, thought it’d be cool to generate reports from all the data on the web. I ran some tests with cloud tools and big data setups, but building something big enough to be a real product was way out of my budget. Plus, I realized the other competitors covered all the social networks, not just Twitter. So I had to think about connecting WebDab to other APIs too.
Then life happened, I became a dad, picked up some freelance work, and honestly, I never looked for investors or partners, or even called any potential B2B customers. I just lost interest in the project and moved on to other things.
Lessons Learned
Honestly, I spent way too much time building things in isolation, just assuming someone would want to buy it. I love data and charts, but I had no clue about the social analytics market.
Looking back, I should’ve reached out to potential B2B customers first and offered custom solutions, instead of sinking so much time into building. Talking to customers should’ve come before anything else.
Another mistake: I kept adding features instead of actually trying to reach customers. I guess it’s just how my software developer brain works. I wanted to build instead of sell.
And finally, I just dropped the project. In the end, it failed because I gave up on it. I wasn’t flexible or able to adapt to changing circumstances, and I couldn’t iterate fast enough to get it to market.