What I Actually Built, and What Broke: Product Slice HQ, Product Nerve AI, and AttriHub

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I have built three real things this year using AI-assisted tools. Not prototypes I abandoned after a weekend. Actual products, each one solving a problem I personally had. I want to walk through what each one was, why I built it, and what went wrong along the way, because the broken parts taught me more than the parts that worked smoothly.

Product Slice HQ

This was the first one. For years, I had been mentoring and training people in product, growth, and tech, and every resource I created lived somewhere different. Templates sat in a Google Drive folder. Articles were written for LinkedIn, which meant they belonged to LinkedIn, not to me. If that account ever disappeared, years of writing would disappear with it. I wanted one place my mentees, and anyone else who never had the chance to be mentored directly, could come back to.

I built the first version on a prompt-to-app tool, and it worked well enough to prove the idea mattered. People used it. Then it started breaking in ways I could not see into or fix, which is what eventually pushed the entire rebuild into a different kind of tool, one where I could actually see and control what was happening underneath.

Product Nerve AI

This one came out of a very specific frustration. After finishing Founder Institute and a few other accelerator programs in 2025, I kept running into the same problem while mentoring founders, both inside those programs and outside them. It was a persistent issue, the kind that came up in conversation after conversation, and nobody seemed to be solving it directly.

So I built something for it. The early days of building Product Nerve AI were genuinely difficult. There were stretches where I sat with a bug for days, trying to understand why something that should have worked simply did not. That was the first time I really understood what people mean when they say a project has to be worth fighting for, because fighting for it is exactly what building it required.

AttriHub

This one is smaller, and I have not even made it public yet. It came from a problem I kept running into on a particular job. I needed to run GTM campaigns quickly, and every time I needed something tracked properly, I was stuck configuring Google Analytics, setting up custom events, and waiting on developers who had their own priorities. Developers becoming the bottleneck for something that should have taken an afternoon was the final push.

So I built a simple analytics and UTM tracking tool for myself. Nothing complicated. Just something that let me set up tracking and run campaigns without waiting on anyone else calendar.

What all three taught me

None of these three started as a business plan. Each one started because I personally needed the thing to exist. That turned out to matter more than I expected, because the moments where a bug took days to fix, or a feature refused to work the way it should, were exactly the moments where having a real stake in the outcome kept me from giving up.

If you are trying to figure out what to build, I would not start by researching ideas or scanning what is trending. I would start by paying attention to what keeps frustrating you personally. That frustration is a much better compass than any market research you could do from the outside.

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