I Spent 3 Weeks Building This — The Launch Failed | Build in public E181

All right. It has been about a week since I have launched my most recent project, project number eight of 25 for my 25 projects in 25 weeks challenge. How has it gone? It's been a disaster to be completely blunt, but it has not gotten well. So let's talk about that. But first, my random story for today. So it is Christmas time. And my life revolves around traveling. It feels like even when they don't even want to travel, I get forced to travel. So I am headed to Lithuania next week. That's right, Lithuania. And not Vilnius, the capital. I'm headed to the middle of nowhere, Lithuania. It's going to be cold. But I'm actually excited. I have some cool stuff planned. actually actually shoot some videos from like live from not live but from lithuania make it just a little bit make my videos a little bit more spiced up and interesting stay tuned for that i am hoping to really start upping the channel quality quite a bit uh i am going to start looking for a producer a youtube um editor slash producer slash partner to help me run this channel to try to kick things up a notch i've thought about this a lot so more more to come on that but i'm going to start trying to find someone make really high quality youtube videos and really step this up uh but anyway so lithuania i'm going to go because my partner is lithuanian and we're going to go hang out with her family uh in like a village i'm hoping to have some cool like videos and me do one one of my videos talking about an upcoming project live on location let's talk about big christmas tree what has happened what has transpired um it did not go well and it didn't go well for a number of reasons i still managed to get over 400 headed probably probably by this end of this weekend it'll be about 500 plus visitors not very good for the amount of work energy and stress that this has given me what went wrong so i have been relying heavily on reddit okay reddit is uh where there's curious people that want to see kind of cool stuff like this there's subreddits the biggest most successful uh posting i've done on reddit has been The internet is beautiful, subreddit. And they seem to hate me now over there. They delete my posts quite frequently now. And now I'm just blocked by Reddit, just straight up, because I've just posted too many weird URLs. And I've submitted content too much, which is pretty wild when you think about it, because I'm being punished because I'm posting interesting content, or at least I think it's interesting. A lot of people upvote, so, you know. they think some people think it's interesting and it's so fascinating how how hostile reddit has become and i don't use reddit anymore i did back in the day i stopped because i frankly think it's kind of kind of it's um it got real weird it got very uh a lot of bots influencing you could tell there's like a lot of like narrative shaping uh bots you know like trying to push a narrative, trying to, you know, promote things, upvote, you know, kind of what I'm doing, but I'm not like, I'm just trying to post a URL to my Christmas tree. Like I'm not trying to spam or anything crazy, but it just, it just that in mixed with the weird culture of Reddit, like they're desperate for money. they don't really make money like they should be for such a popular website it's just the mods like the weird stuff with mods having all this power it's just weird over there i just don't like it and it became such an echo chamber to me i just just got very pulled off over the years but there's still a lot of people to get traffic to my projects and it's so interesting how much has changed where you try to post something interesting like this and you know it's free there's no sign up it's just a cool fun thing for Christmas and you get blocked so it's pretty pretty crazy but because it because it got blocked so badly I wasn't able to get a lot of traffic to it because you know Reddit kept killing any posts that I did get on there I posted on Hacker News and just got nothing just absolutely nothing but one problem was I posted on Hacker News and so how this is built is the main model I use is Banana Nano, Google's new Gemini image model. That's just the best. So it will often make the ornaments with it. But the most important part is, so how it works is you add an ornament, it just removes the background, and it overlays just like a transparent kind of like, hey, here's what the ornament is going to look like in this spot. And then it sends off the background of the tree. And the ornament in Banana Nano like overlays it like visually with the surrounding tree to make it 3D and give it really like a really good three-dimensional effect. It will sometimes hang the ornament. Sometimes it puts leaves like kind of slightly covering the ornament. It makes it look really hyper-realistic. It's really good when it works. Sometimes it would work. stunningly well and you know just jaw-dropping I'd be like wow it looks shockingly good because it would like make the ornament hang off of a branch just like really really hyper real realistic it just looks a lot better than sticking just a kind of a 2d just or picture of an ornament it just didn't look good this made it look 3d it made it pop it just made it look so much cooler like you can kind of see here So it puts it on the background. It's kind of magic, really. And this was only possible with that model. No other model could do it quite as well. I didn't try the new ChatGPT one. So anyways, it went down. And I was using a service called Replicate. So Replicate is a hosting platform where they have all these models. They actually will run and host the models. Farm out to to like for example for Google There's like two places where they actually have an API to like connect and call the models So they will actually have like real models running But then they will also like be like a third party that kind of takes a cut and and routes it to Google They do like a combination of things So it went down. Um, it basically just stopped working and a lot of the code stupidly kind of was relying on that to like work because it would just like show the transparent ornament wait wait wait and then it would like you know kind of in the ui actually allow you to kind of continue so everything was built around this and it just went down right when i launched it and so people did start to go to the site and they looked at it some people played around but they you could tell people were like this is so broken and and it was broken So I had to like frantically change a bunch of code and then, you know, just on the fly. It was like touching the database live and it was not going well. It took me like hours and hours to hack around it. And then, you know, found bugs and then introduced more bugs and then this broke and it was a real mess. I just kept finding bugs because I needed to just ship this out. And finally, when I did, it just kind of. was not all the way done because I just had to continue on. So let me show you an example. This is not supposed to happen. So somebody added one here. It's supposed to like neatly hang it off the side of the tree. But look at how it just completely fucked up the image. Really makes me upset. It looks like shit. I had code in there that like detects when it's on the edge and then it it doesn't do that overlay because when it tries to send the background image, you know, it doesn't do well. Like, look what it does to the transparent background. It just fucks it up. So I had code where it detects the edges and it doesn't do that. But then I had to like really push out kind of a hot fix because Banana Nano was down and around it, it ended up introducing the bug so it didn't quite... always detectives on the edge. I mean, it was just a real shit show. So it has not gone well. It's been a disaster. And finally, uh, Replicate actually did respond because I went to the support. I tried tweeting and I said, look, this thing is down. I have real users. I've put in real money. Like I've spent real money and they just ignored me. They got back days later and said, oh yeah, sorry. Google was down. Just fuck off. Really upsetting. So I'll never use that service ever again. And I spent a decent amount of money and not many people have come and used it. It's just, it's been such a bummer. I worked so, so hard. I've been so stressed. I've not been sleeping because I worked 12 hours a day for like three weeks straight on this. And yesterday I just decided to just take the entire day off. I didn't even look at this. I didn't touch it. but people did have added ornaments like this one there's tons of like this is somebody's this is somebody's this is somebody's um this is somebody's lots of people have added ornaments so people are trickling in and they are using it people are getting it lots of people have added lights like you can see people using it it's cool but it just has not been anywhere near as successful as i was hoping it would be It's really frustrating, especially for how much work and money I spent because I have lost money on this because I had to spend about $100 in replicate credits for Google and all the other models to build the damn thing. So I spent like about $100 on that. And then I deposited money into the tree, hoping a bunch of people would come and use ornaments, use up all the credit. And I was hoping people would donate and pick up the slack and continue to keep the tree going. And so far, not a lot of ornaments have been made. Not one person clicked donate. I didn't get any subscribers. It's been honestly a failure. And it's pretty upsetting how hard I worked. And I just was hoping for a bit more. I was hoping a couple thousand people would come. They would drain the meter. They would drain all the credits. And somebody would just buy it. Pay $5 or something and keep the project going. I was, you know, obviously Christmas isn't over. Christmas is next week. Still plenty of time, but I'm pretty demoralized. And it's just, you know, it's clear that my experiment, this 25 projects, it's not going well. It's not working. I've made no money. No one's donated a single dollar for all this hard work I've done. No one's bought merch. People are not subscribing to the newsletter. The YouTube channel here is not going well. I'd be shocked if anyone was even watching me say this. So what the fuck do I do? I don't know. I've thought a lot about it. I have some ideas, and I think part of it is I need to really up the production value here on the YouTube channel. I need to start posting to TikTok. I need to start posting YouTube shorts. I need to start doing reels. I got to really step it up with the videos because nobody wants to look at anything anymore. They just want videos. So I'm going to give it a lot of thought next week. I'm not going to stop my challenge, but yeah, it's frankly, it kind of makes me embarrassed that I spent so much money and time on this. And for what? It's been not very appreciated and used. One person, one person messaged me today. That's pretty cool. But that's it. So what do you think I should do? How could I make this better? How could I get more traffic? How do I build an audience? How do I do this? Because I'm failing at every goal in KPI. I hate to be like that, but corporate-y about it. But every goal, I'm striking out on bad. So what do you think? Did you try the tree? What do you think of the tree? I was going to fix this, these ornaments breaking. I was just like, fuck it. I'm not wasting any more damn time or energy on this. Like maybe I will, but I got to move on to the other project. I don't have a project ready for next week. So the rest of my weekend is literally just getting the next projects done. So hopefully next week I'll be able to make a few adjustments and make this better. But yeah, it's been really, really a bummer. but a tree did get filled up just really quickly there are other trees that real people came and actually put real ornaments like some of them are me some of them are like friends family but most of it is real real people they filled up this tree so people used it but yeah it's it's disappointing how how much of a disaster this launch was so anyways that's all i got for today hopefully i will be talking to you next from lithuanian so stay tuned

Well, the launch of https://bigchristmastree.com did not go well. Here is why.

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