Hey Product Hunt! I'm Taffouxx. Here is my wild story of failing forward as an AI-assisted founder.

Hey Product Hunt! 👋

I’m Taffouxx (Serhii). Before launching my upcoming app, I wanted to introduce myself and share my journey.

Everyone is jumping on the "vibe-coding" trend right now. And I get it - it’s the new reality. Generating a simple To-Do app with a single prompt is easy. But building something complex with microservices and Docker? That’s where the AI magic stops and the brutal reality begins. I learned this the hard way.

Here is my journey:

Phase 1: The Open-Source Nightmare (Mid-2025) I was a huge Discord fan, so I decided to fork Revolt Chat (now Stoat Chat). I thought AI would just do it for me. Spoiler: it didn't. Figuring out how to run it locally cost me hundreds of prompts. When I finally bought a cheap VPS and tried to deploy it, I was hit with endless 502 Bad Gateway errors. I didn't sleep until 4 AM trying to fix basic auth issues. I eventually gave up, but it forced me to actually understand how Docker and servers work under the hood.

Phase 2: Coding in the Dark (Late 2025) I live in Ukraine. In late 2025, we had brutal 8-hour blackouts. I had exactly 2 hours of electricity a day to live, work, and code. Out of pure frustration, I used my limited uptime and AI to build a parser that monitored Telegram channels and sent push notifications 10 minutes before the power grid went down. It was built on pure stress and terrible code architecture, but I managed to deploy it to Google Play. It worked.

Phase 3: The GameDev Trap (Early 2026) With the blackouts over, I got overly ambitious. I wanted to build a game and get a publisher. I spent months engine-hopping from Unreal Engine (blueprints broke my brain) to Unity, to s&box. I was burning out fast. I realized that building a complex game purely relying on AI as a solo dev is a fast track to madness. I needed to pivot back to SaaS, where I actually had a chance.

Phase 4: The Pivot to Mutuals I asked Claude to analyze market gaps. It suggested dating apps. I hated that idea, dating apps are designed to be deleted. I wanted to build a place where people actually stay.

So, I took the deep discussions of Reddit, the real-time feed of X/Twitter, the aesthetic of early Discord, and the gamification of Steam. I removed the toxic algorithmic feeds and built topic-driven rooms.

That’s how Mutuals was born.

The Takeaway You cannot purely "vibe-code" a complex SaaS without understanding what’s happening under the hood. AI is an incredible co-pilot, but you still need to be the pilot.

I’m excited to be part of this community! Have any of you hit the "vibe-coding wall" when you first started? I would love to read your stories!