Let's talk about one of my failed projects. Everyone brags about their wins online these days so let me do the opposite.
I built this macOS app called "Hotspot Hero" that was supposed to solve one of those classic digital nomad problems - you know when you connect to cafe WiFi but the login portal just... doesn't show up?
You're sitting there refreshing, toggling WiFi on and off, clearing your DNS cache but nothing really works. It's basically up to the WiFi god to show you that freaking portal or not.
The app would force these captive portals to appear and even had a built-in password manager for those places that give you login codes. I thought I was onto something.
I wasn't.
Here’s a demo of the landing page.
Why it failed
There’s a lot of reason why the idea failed but here are my top three.
Technical nightmare
Public WiFi portals are inconsistent chaos. Every network provider handles things differently. I ended up getting the app to work 7/10 times which was nice because it actually did make my life a little easier.
However, getting it to work reliably across different hotspots was an absolute edge case hell. Testing this thing was brutal. So many variables, so many ways it could break and you have no idea why.
I built the application in Tauri which was a cool new development experience but also I had to rip my hair out a couple of times trying to figure out how Rust works (inb4 this was pre-AI era friend).
Market too small
Turns out not enough people have this specific problem to build a sustainable business around it. Nomads definitely have this problem but I doubt it would justify the amount of time of me spending on it.
Vitamin not a painkiller
The app simply was a nice-to-have not a "OMG I need this".
You can try to force the captive modal to show up by simply visiting any HTTP (not HTTPS) website like http://captive.apple.com. It won't always work but welp... tell this to the WiFi gods not me.
What I learned
Sometimes the market tells you "no" and you should listen. I could have spent months trying to perfect this, but the fundamentals were wrong from the start.
Also, I had way too much fun making the landing page. Learned about transparent video formats, made some slick animations for the hero section...
Sometimes the marketing is more enjoyable than the actual product - probably not a great sign.
The whole experience reminded me that not every problem needs a dedicated app solution.
Anyway, here's the landing page I made. At least something good came out of this mess.
Bonus: The logo journey
To be really honest I don’t really like the logo and I probably would have spent a few more iterations to polish it up would I have released it. It was a fun learning experience though. Keep in mind this was in 2023 when the first OpenAI Dalle version came out. I tried a bunch of exploration and ended up creating the icon inspired by some of the images it generated.
