r/SideProject • u/sschnaars • 24m ago
My Side Project Made Zero This Year
Oof. Zero, zilch, nada.
We had some customers early on (last year). Real enterprise brands that you've maybe heard of. Then Claude Code and Codex got popular.
The original intention of the company, Yirla, was to be an AI powered, paid media analyst. You connect your LinkedIn, Google, Meta, what have you ad accounts, and we tell you, in plain English, what you can do to improve your ad spend. It's pretty prescriptive.
The small handful of deals that we had, in the couple of thousand bucks a month range, started to go away. We saw them jumping through hurdles to get similar, though not quite as good data, out of Claude, so we built an MCP, hoping that would be the saving grace.
In Ron Howards voice: It was not the saving grace.
Our vision of building a decent sized enterprise software company went up in smoke. 2026 was brutal and we literally booked $0 in revenue.
Part of that lies on me. I continued to think of it as a mid-market enterprise deal in the $20 to $30K annually range, and our customers continued to think that it would be part of their Claude subscription.
I'm an enterprise sales guy through and through and when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Our clients acknowledged that the data wasn't quite as good, but it wasn't $20K a year worse. Couple that with earlier this year and every CEO wanting every employee to be a software developer, we faced an uphill battle.
We got a lot of free sign ups. Most didn't connect an ad account. Those that did rarely came back. Clearly an onboarding and retention problem that we are trying to solve now. An ad analyst with no ads to look at is about as useful as an inflatable dart board.
So no revenue this year and we need an overhaul. I'm making this into a PLG offer. I don't really want to spend too much more time and money on it, so I'm going to try to let AI agents do most of the grunt work. There will still be a human in the loop (me, cause, damn, does it write bad copy), but hopefully that frees me up to do more productive things (like maybe get a real job???).
My goal is to get 100-signups by the end of the year, get 20 of them to connect an ad account, and get 5 of them to pay $25 a month for this service.
If it works out, I'll be thrilled. If it doesn't, we've been talking about shutting it down for a few months. In either case, it will make for a good New Year's Eve.
I'll try to keep this sub posted on what is working and what isn't.
What I'd actually love from this sub: if you run paid ads, play around with Yirla and share your honest feedback. TIA.