THE HONEST PORTFOLIO REVIEW
Five products, one person
One sold, one open source, three alive. What actually transfers between projects when you build everything yourself, and what dying products are for.
My portfolio currently reads: one product sold, one open source, one in beta, two live. Five shipped things, built by one person. Here is what that actually taught me, including the parts that do not fit on a landing page.
The list, honestly
- Local Waifu is a local-first AI companion for Mac and Windows. Live, selling, actively developed. The weird one.
- First Person Viewpoint is an AI narrative app for iOS and Android where you step into a story as its main character. Live on both stores.
- Postsider is social publishing for humans and AI agents. Private beta, first users onboard.
- Formto is an open-source, self-hosted form backend. I stopped developing it. It works, it is MIT, it is on GitHub. Someone forks it now and then, which is exactly what open source is for.
- Articfly was a blog-article generator born from my automation work. Six months, zero paying customers, dead. Then someone offered to buy it, I said yes, and it was not mine anymore.
Plus the thing that funds all of it: an AI content automation service for B2B clients.
What actually transfers
Shipping is a muscle, not an event. The first launch is terrifying, the fifth is a checklist. Every product on this list shipped because shipping stopped being special.
Products hide inside client work. Articfly came out of a workflow I was selling to clients. Postsider came out of watching my own pipelines struggle with the last mile of publishing. I have stopped inventing product ideas from nothing. Client work keeps handing them to me pre-validated.
Dead is not the same as worthless. Articfly failed as a SaaS and still ended in a sale. Formto is abandoned and still useful to strangers. A failed product with working code, real users, or a real lesson is an asset. The only total loss is the thing you never shipped.
The weird bet keeps you sane. Local Waifu is the product people raise an eyebrow at, and the one they remember. When everything you build is sensible, you disappear into the noise. One deliberate oddball in the portfolio is marketing, therapy, and R&D at once.
The service funds the products. No investor money, no runway anxiety. B2B automation work pays the bills, and the products get built regardless. Slower than a funded startup, but nobody can cancel it.
The uncomfortable part
Solo means every weakness in the operation is your weakness. My graveyard is real: a product that never found paying users, an open-source project I walked away from. The portfolio page says [SOLD] and [OPEN SOURCE]. Both tags are true, and both are also polite words for “it did not work the way I wanted”.
That is the actual skill of building alone. Not avoiding failures, but converting them into something: a sale, a public repo, a lesson, a blog post like this one.
If you are sitting on a half-dead project, ship it, sell it, or open-source it. Just do not let it rot in a private repo teaching nobody anything.
