Giving up

I have been working on Shillguard on and off for the past month. At the start, it was going fine. I managed to get a functional MVP to test within the first few days and submitted it to the Chrome Store.

However, instead of jumping straight into active marketing (DMs etc) I decided to try free tool marketing while the review period for the extension was underway. I wanted to see if I could rank for SEO by building small, useful web apps.

The cool thing about AI is that it accelerates the product stage of any build. Free product marketing is actually a lot of fun because you can blast through an ideas list without worrying about whether it will make money.

This is where it all went off the rails. My extension got rejected from the Chrome Store. This meant I had a two-week period between the initial submission and when it finally went live where all I was doing was building free tools.

That is a lot of time, especially when you are doing it for eight to ten hours a day solidly. I quickly ran out of ideas related to indie hacking or Shillguard. I decided to start making some products that I had thought up during my masters, back when I was a biologist.

I ended up building a seed mix generator, a carbon credit calculator, a biodiversity corridor visualiser and about five more ecological ideas. I had so much fun diving into the specifics of these that it brought my love for the environment back to the surface.

This is one of my free tools, which uses mapping software to allow you to find the optimal seed mix for your local areas.

With it came a wave of realisation. I am not actually that passionate about building some generic SaaS to earn $10k per month like everyone else seems to want to do.

Fast forward to last week and my Chrome extension was finally approved. I was about to get right back into marketing it when I tried to install it from the store as a test. I was hit with a warning saying that my extension might be malware. I built it, so I know this isn't true, but Chrome requires around 25–30 installations to clear that flag.

As you can see, Chrome does not like my extension

This is not feasible. Nobody wants to install malware. The bounce rate is around 90% for tools with this label. For the first time in a long time, I just sat down and decided that I didn't want to keep going.

The product solves an issue I face, but the thought of slogging through difficulty after difficulty just to get this LLM wrapper out to people who might just decide to rebuild it themselves started to feel like too much. So now I'm here, and in all honesty I think I'm going to junk the product.

It feels like a wasted month, but I also built nearly 25 products. Some of them are low value, but the process allowed me to see what I really want to work on for the next 10 years of my life.

It feels scary to jump off the AI hype train because of how fast things are progressing. But if I just keep tabs on it and integrate the newest tech (like the AI agents from openClaw) while working on a meaningful industry like the environment, I'll probably end up being more fulfilled. For me, that means focusing on insetting and carbon credits rather than owning the 300th AI SEO tool of the month.