Lessons from a Failed Startup: What Snippet Hive Taught Me.
By a first-time founder who built something nobody used, and lived to tell the tale.
I'm proud of what we built with Snippet Hive. Two developers, one idea, and a whole lot of enthusiasm. We shipped a Chrome extension, a VS Code extension, a community library, rating systems, user profiles: the works. And when we showed it to people, they loved it.
Nobody used it.
That gap between "this is awesome" and actually opening the app is where a lot of startups quietly die. Ours was no different. But rather than let it be a story I file away in embarrassment, I want to share exactly what went wrong and what I'd do differently. Because honestly, the lessons were worth more than the product ever would have been.
What We Built (and Why It Made Sense to Us).
Snippet Hive was a public library for code snippets, specifically the kind of complex, reusable blocks that take 10–20 minutes of back-and-forth with an AI to generate. Think authentication flows, hero sections, boilerplate components. The idea was simple: why regenerate what someone else has already perfected? Find it in the library, drop it into your IDE or your AI chat, customise it, and ship faster.
We built IDE integrations, browser extensions, community ratings. It was genuinely well-thought-out. We were solving a real problem. At least, a problem we felt.
That was the first mistake.
We Built a Solution, Then Went Looking for a Problem.
The classic trap. We had a solution we were excited about, and we assumed the market would feel the same urgency we did. It didn't.
When we finally listened to what people were actually saying (not the polite "I'm love it!" but the honest feedback) the pattern was clear. Developers already had AI in their workflow. They weren't looking to manage AI outputs; they were happy regenerating code on demand. The friction we were trying to remove didn't feel like friction to them.
One commenter put it bluntly: "If I'm heavily using AI to code, I wouldn't know what to search for or even know when I found it in a library." Another said it was a vitamin, not a painkiller. Both were right.
We had built something nice to have. Nobody wakes up at 2am stressed about their snippet library.
The Mom Test Problem.
We talked to people. We showed them the product. They smiled, nodded, and said they'd use it.
What we didn't do was ask the right questions. There's a book called The Mom Test that I wish I had read before we wrote a single line of code. The core idea is this: people will lie to you: not out of malice, but out of politeness. They won't tell you your idea is bad. They'll tell you it's great. So you can't ask "would you use this?" You have to ask about their actual behaviour, their actual frustrations, their actual workflow.
If we'd done that, we would have learned much earlier that most developers don't hoard code snippets; they regenerate on demand. The problem we were solving existed in our heads far more than in theirs.
Lessons I'm Taking Forward.
Validate before you build. Not validate as in "show people a landing page." Validate as in: talk to ten people about the problem before you write a single line of code. Do they have it? How often? What do they currently do about it? Have they paid for solutions before?
Make something people want, not something people say they want. Saying "I'd use this" costs nothing. Paying for it, or changing your behaviour for it, costs something real. Find the people willing to pay the second cost before you invest months building for the first group.
Build for a painkiller, not a vitamin. Vitamins are nice. Painkillers get bought at 11pm in the rain. Ask yourself honestly: is the problem I'm solving keeping anyone up at night?
Marketing is not optional. We told ourselves we'd figure out distribution once we had the product right. But the product can never be "right" without users, and you can't get users without going to find them. Half the effort, at minimum, should have been outreach from day one.
Feedback that doesn't change behaviour isn't real feedback. If someone says they love your product and then doesn't open it for two weeks, that's data. Take it seriously.
What's Next.
I'm not giving up on building. If anything, this made me hungrier, because now I know what failure actually looks like, and it's not as scary as I thought. You survive it. You learn from it. You go again.
Next, I'm starting with the problem. Not the product. Not the tech stack. Not the landing page. I'm going to find a group of people with a genuine, urgent, recurring pain: the kind they've already tried to solve and would pay to fix, and only then start thinking about what to build.
I'll be sharing the whole journey here: the wins, the losses, the dead ends, the moments of clarity. If you've been through something similar, I'd love to hear how you navigated it. And if you're in the middle of it right now, know that the lessons you're learning are real and they compound.
The product failed. The education was worth every hour.
Have you been through something similar? What did you wish you'd known before building? Drop a comment below. I read everything.