In 2019, I tried "indie hacking for a year", aiming to build 10 products in one year and generate $1,000 per month in passive income. I made the entire journey transparent: sharing my thinking process, product source code, and revenue publicly. That commitment is where the website name originates: t9t - short for transparent.

At the end of that year, I hadn’t earned any significant passive income, so I declared the experiment a failure. Looking back now, it was a good failure. It brought me many valuable things: I actually built 10 products from scratch - from idea to implementation, to launch, and simple promotion. These products have fortunately served millions of users. Additionally, since most of these products were launched globally, they gave me opportunities to be discovered and hired by employers in higher-paying regions around the world. They also led to collaborations with people I initially thought were out of reach.

Five years have passed since the experiment ended. During these five years, besides remote work, I occasionally made some product attempts. From a financial perspective, most of them failed the same way, and failure is always painful. But the more I failed, the better my mindset became. Each attempt is like scratching a lottery ticket - different reward amounts, with zero being the worst case. The more tickets you scratch, the more you know what kind of lottery suits you and how to scratch for potentially higher returns. Now, every time a project seems to have "failed," I excitedly tell my wife: Great, time to start a new failure!

In recent years, AI has been developing incredibly fast - it feels like the "Xth Industrial Revolution," especially for creators. Building a product now might take 90% less development time compared to 5 years ago. For my last small project, I probably didn’t write more than 10 lines of code myself. I used to think I loved coding, but now I understand that what I love is creating things. If I can create without coding, even better.

It’s time for Transparent Startup Experiment 2.0. Let’s see what will be different this time.

What do I want to do this time, and what’s different?

I have an idea list with probably over 100 ideas recorded, but most of them have been sitting there for a long time without motivating me to implement them. I can’t find a product I’m really eager to build.

So I’m thinking, since I don’t have great ideas at the moment and my product-building capabilities are "overflowing," why not start a challenge: Find 100 people with real pain points and turn their ideas into products together.

I firmly believe that if a product can genuinely solve someone’s problem, it has the potential to help thousands of others. This isn’t just about developing products - it’s about 100 stories of "how to make life a little better."

If you’re troubled by a problem in your life or work and want to solve it with a product, feel free to reach out:

• 💡 Submit an Idea
• 🪧 Idea Board
• 💬 Discord

A note on selection: I’ll prioritize ideas with "lasting vitality" that can benefit more people.