Killing ProjectLink After Two Months.
Five lessons from the wreckage.
Three months ago I launched ProjectLink. Built it in around two weeks.
Eighteen months ago the same build would have cost me £50k with a couple of freelancers. I built it for a few hundred quid. That part of the story is real and worth celebrating.
The rest of it is a disaster.
Two months of meta ads and outreach. One trial. Cancelled within a week.
I’m shutting it down.
Here’s what I’m taking from it.
Solving your own problem doesn’t mean a market exists. I built the thing I needed at Pony. That doesn’t translate. We’re not a market of one. Studios operate differently, creatives price differently, freelancers think about scope differently. The fact that it works for us is evidence of nothing.
Build costs are collapsing. Acquisition costs are going the other way. This is the part people aren’t talking about enough. AI makes it trivial to ship a product. Everyone can ship now. Which means the feed is saturated, ad auctions are brutal, and every niche has ten competitors you’ve never heard of bidding on the same keywords. The bottleneck moved. It’s not the product anymore. It’s getting anyone to care.
Project management is the worst category I could have picked. Asana, Atlassian, ClickUp, Notion, Monday. They push CAC to levels that don’t make sense for a bootstrapped product. Probably don’t make sense for them either given how many are still unprofitable. Competing in their category means paying their prices for attention.
Creatives are a brutal audience to sell to. Price sensitive. Not impulsive. Suspicious of tools that promise to fix their process. They’ve been burned by too many SaaS subscriptions already. The purchase cycle is long and the willingness to pay is low.
Distribution should come before the product, not after. I built first and thought about getting users second. That’s backwards in 2026. Paid ads are probably dead for bootstrapped SaaS unless you already have an audience warming up the funnel.
So ProjectLink gets shelved. We’ll keep using it at the studio because it genuinely solves our problem. But as a product, it’s done.
Already working on something else and can’t wait to share more soon.
Building is the easy part now. The hard part is everything that comes after.
Love.
Stef