September Recap: My Win, My (Epic) Fail, And A Fresh Start

It’s October 1st — time to rewind September and be brutally honest about what went right, what went wrong, and what I learned along the way.

This is actually my very first newsletter post. Zero subscribers right now, so in a way I’m just writing this for myself. But that’s okay — I want this to be the start of something. A place where I share the real side of indie hacking, not just the highlight reel.

And funny enough, this newsletter exists because of my September fail (more on that in a second).

September’s big win was finally launching VibeDebugging.pro.

The idea: as good as AI coding tools like Bolt.new, Cursor, Claude Code, or Lovable are, they sometimes do the exact opposite of helping you. You burn through tokens, spin your wheels, and watch the AI break more than it fixes.

I wanted to solve that pain. So I built and shipped Vibe Debugging Pro: a productized service where you can book me for a live session (30 min, 2 hours, or 4 hours), we jump on a call, and I help you get unstuck.

To make it fair, I added my Honest Effort Promise: if we make no progress, you don’t pay a cent!

Inspired by DesignJoy’s “Productize Yourself” playbook, it’s my first real attempt at packaging my time and skills into a product.

So far? Zero customers. But I’m still counting it as a win:

It’s not perfect, but it’s out there. That’s progress.

Now for the faceplant.

I fell for the “self-host everything on a VPS” Kool-Aid.

Inspired by Pieter Levels — a guy I respect a ton — I thought maybe I could simplify things, ditch the bloated JS ecosystem, just host everything myself on a lean PHP stack with some Javascript sprinkled on top, and avoid being featured on the serverlesshorrors.com blog as another cautionary tale of putting your app on the cloud with access to unlimited resources.

Sounds neat in theory.

In practice? TOTAL disaster.

I spun up a DigitalOcean droplet, installed Coolify, moved all my landing pages, and installed a blog powered by Ghost (an open-source CMS platform with some neat newsletter building features). I was so proud of myself with my progress that I called it a night.

However, the very next morning:

Result? Still zero traffic to my sites, a much higher bill, and way less energy for building and marketing.

That’s why you’re reading this on Beehiiv now. My original plan was to run my own self-hosted Ghost blog on my VPS. But instead of wasting more time babysitting my own server, I said screw it — I’ll use an existing platform built for this. No more SMTP headaches, no server configs.

Just writing, publishing, and moving forward.

So this post is my first ever Beehiiv entry. Out of the ashes of that fail comes this new start.

September taught me some hard truths:

1. Don’t over-engineer.
As engineers, tinkering is in our DNA. But indie hacking isn’t about playing with shiny tools — it’s about shipping and getting paying customers. And paying customers don’t give a damn about your stack. The only thing they care about is if your product solves their problem.

2. Stick with what you know.
I wasted time fantasizing about switching to a PHP stack on my own VPS because I was frustrated with React and the endless complexity of modern Javascript. But the truth is: I’ve been in JS-land for almost 10 years. I know it, I can debug it, and I already have a Firebase starter framework I can reuse. With PHP, I’d be stumbling like a beginner. So I’ve decided to stick with Javascript and host ALL my apps going forward on Firebase (since I’m already comfortable working with it and it’s an all-in-one platform that offers me hosting, auth, db, cloud functions, etc.).

3. Stop chasing the AI “tool-of-the-month.”
I bounced between Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Cursor, and a handful of others. Again, I fell for shiny-object syndrome and just had to try whatever my fellow indie hackers were saying was the BEST new AI coding companion and how you were stupid if you were still using the old stuff. I feel like a complete fool now for falling into this trap. Going forward, I’m picking one AI companion: Gemini. Since it’s trained on Google Cloud, I’m betting it’ll be the best fit to help me build and debug Firebase apps FAST. Plus, Gemini still has a very generous free tier, although there’s no telling when that will change.

So here’s the new focus for October:

That’s it. No more splitting focus. No more chasing trends. Just building simple, shipping faster, and trying to get that first paying customer.

This is the official beginning of my indie hacking journey. I’m ditching all the shiny stuff and getting back to what matters the most. If you’re reading this because you found me on X or Reddit, welcome — you’re literally here from Day 1.

👉 My question for you: what was your biggest win or fail in September? Send me a reply on social media or comment below — I’d love to hear it.

Here’s to a simpler, sharper October 🍻