Levi Robertson

I am a self-taught developer. I dropped out of high school and college. I have been programming since 2015, mostly React the whole time. It's been fun and paid the bills. For the past couple of years, I've been freelancing. My biggest success right now is DoubleZero, an email service you can self-host.

Can you tell about your idea that failed?

My latest failure was related to my freelancing work. Due to the economic downturn, it became really difficult to find work towards the end of last year and the beginning of this year. Inspired by DesignJoy's subscription service for design, I thought there might be a space for something similar in development.

I launched this service under my website, jamstack.consulting. It was a high-ticket price because developers can't have too many things going on at once. I wanted to make a decent amount of money and cut out the negotiation that goes into freelancing. The idea was to speed up the time from meeting until sale with no meetings and no negotiation.

I got a couple of clients through jamstack.consulting, but it wasn't enough. I made less than I did with my previous freelancing. I kept an hourly client to maintain my income. Then, I decided to lower the prices and launched a test on another website I own, Technomancy. It was the same service, marketed a little differently with lower prices. But absolutely nobody signed up for that one.

Work ran out with the current clients I had on the higher tiers, and basically, no one ever subscribed to the subscription service after that again.

How did you notice that things started to fall apart?

It took a while to hit me that this was going to be a problem. In January 2024, I ended my contract with my last client. It wasn't until early March that I realized no clients were coming. Something had changed about the industry. I used to have too much work, and now I just couldn't find anything.

I was toying around with a startup idea called Fidoforms to keep myself occupied, but there was no interest in that at all. I would keep talking about it, and nobody cared. Nobody was really joining the waitlist or interacting with my tweets.

It was a scary combo because I thought, "Oh, I'll do this on the side. Maybe it'll make some money." But nothing was coming in, and nobody cared about my website.

It took a little bit for that to hit me that I needed to figure something out.

It was devastating. I never had an issue finding clients any time I'd tried before. These months in early 2024, nobody was even talking to me. Like, two people reached out in two months and very quickly were like, "Eh, the service isn't for me."

I told my wife about the situation. We had a lot of emotional time, realizing that our entire lives might change. It was stressful, but she's been a huge help with me pivoting.

What lessons did you learn from this situation?

It changed my attitude and taught me a lot. I learned that I need to validate ideas immediately. If people weren't excited about the subscription thing, move on to the next idea. Keep it up, maybe it'll gain traction later. Don't just throw all your stuff away, keep it there. Maybe some YouTuber will find it and make a video about it. But keep trying new things too.

I learned that through the second failure, Fidoforms. Nobody was excited about that, and I just kept building it. This experience led me to discover issues with existing email services, which ultimately inspired my current project, DoubleZero.

The biggest lesson was the importance of immediate validation. Before you invest any more time in a project, you need that early validation.

All of the time spent on the forms website was essentially wasted, although it did lead to discovering the email problem.

Any advice you would share with other people to avoid such situations?

Validate your ideas. If you have an idea, make sure somebody else thinks it's good, and hopefully lots of people. Try and get someone to pay for it. That's another thing I ended up doing - a pre-sale pretty early on for DoubleZero, which is still in pre-sale. The pre-sale launch did amazing.

Let's end on a positive note. Tell us about a success. What are you currently working on?

I'm currently working on DoubleZero, which has been a great success so far. I launched it on Product Hunt, and the same day, a YouTuber, WebDevCody, made a video about it.

Through the combined attention of Product Hunt and his video, I did a limited pre-sale where you could get it for $99 for the first 50 people. That sold out so quickly, in less than 24 hours. And then it kept selling after the sale ended, which is awesome.

Given everything else I said about how my career was going, DoubleZero is what I'm doing full-time now. I've been adding a lot of features to it. It's in early access, so if you pre-order it, you can get early access to the pro version, which is not finished yet.

It's my full-time gig now. I love it, and it's doing pretty well. I'm not crushing my old freelancing rates, but I'm surviving and doing what I like, which is amazing.

Is there anyone you would like to tell about their failure?

I would love to hear from @joshcirre and @webdevcody!