Built 6 SaaS and Got 0 Customers

Matthew Diakonov··2 min read

Built 6 SaaS and Got 0 Customers

AI agents make building software so fast that you can ship six products in the time it used to take to ship one. The problem is that speed does not fix the fundamental question - does anyone want this?

The Build Trap

With agents writing code, the cost of building dropped to near zero. A weekend project becomes a fully deployed SaaS with auth, payments, and a landing page. The temptation is to keep building because building feels productive.

But six products with zero customers is not productivity. It is expensive procrastination.

Why Agents Make This Worse

Agents remove the natural friction that used to slow down bad ideas:

  • No implementation pain - the difficulty of building used to kill ideas that were not compelling enough to push through
  • No time investment - spending two months on a product forced you to validate because the cost of being wrong was high
  • No skill barrier - anyone can direct an agent to build a SaaS, regardless of whether they understand the market

The friction was not a bug. It was a filter. Without it, every idea gets built and none get validated.

The Fix

Before directing agents to build anything:

  1. Talk to 10 potential customers - not friends, actual strangers who have the problem
  2. Sell it before you build it - a landing page with a waitlist costs nothing and proves demand
  3. Find the existing alternative - if nobody is solving this problem with even a spreadsheet, the problem might not exist
  4. Set a kill metric - "if I do not have 5 paying customers in 30 days, I move on"

Agents should accelerate validated ideas, not multiply unvalidated ones.

Fazm is an open source macOS AI agent. Open source on GitHub.

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