If you want to make money (at least break even the opportunity cost of a programmer), you need to work backwards: build things that you will be comfortable to pitch to your connections. Selling home-made chilli sauce to friends&relatives is unironically a better business model than building an app for most people.

    > For example I'm building something cool, a no-code visual regression tool. 

Basically understand how your solution fits into that market and how you'll differentiate and make money.

some time ago i skimmed around notion of Wardley maps and bookmarked it but did not pay (enough) attention. The other day there was another post on the topic, now with some basic resources, and i got hooked.. and read half of that book [0]. But right now have nothing on my mind to play with. May be that is a way? Map-and-try-predict the battlefield (needs lots of reconnaissance and "feeling" of the "landscape" and what-else-is-there). Mail me if you want a sparing partner - i want to learn this technique. But Anyway, have fun.

[0] https://feststelltaste.github.io/wardley-maps-book/#_the_fir...

(IMO, read chapter 2+ then 3~4 first, then restart from beginning)

Customer don’t exist in hn, ph, twitter, they exist in their own offices, on Zoom, and your local coffee shops.