Autopsy #002 in an ongoing series. Read #001, the MailIELTS postmortem, first if you like. Standalone pages for each autopsy live at /postmortems/, and the full index is at github.com/louis-cai/postmortems.
Lifespan: Dec 2025 – Jun 2026 (6 months) Final score: 1,648 commits · ~282 PRs · 27 weekly visitors · $0 revenue Cause of death: nobody ever found out it existed
What it was
An AI portrait studio: pick a style, upload a selfie, get a studio-quality portrait back. $1 per portrait, or $4.99 a month for unlimited generations. Under the hood: Next.js 16, Cloudflare Workers, D1, R2, durable generation workflows, magic-link auth, an admin dashboard, face detection, 4K upscaling. Unit, contract, and e2e tests. Every PR through CI.
It fully worked. That was never the problem here either.
The timeline, told by commit counts
Dec 2025 ██████████████ 358 idea → full SaaS scaffold in weeks
Jan 2026 ██████████████████████ 562 peak: payments, workflows, admin, test pyramid
Feb 2026 ████████████████ 400 freemium launches: $4.99 unlimited plan
Mar 2026 ██████ 140 $10/day Meta ads test designed, $0 spent
Apr 2026 █████ 116 scoreboard finally built: 27 visitors, 0 orders
May 2026 ███ 70 polish: drawer, headers, contrast, flaky e2e
Jun 2026 █ 2 last commitThe curve says it in one line: the month I finally built a scoreboard was the second-to-last month of the project. For five months I measured everything (test coverage, Lighthouse scores, commit velocity) except whether anyone wanted the thing.
What the data said, when it finally spoke
From my own weekly scoreboard, April 2026:
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Landing sessions per week | 27 |
| Clicks on the main CTA | 0 |
| Paid orders, ever | 0 |
The $4.99 unlimited plan had been live for two months at that point. Total conversions: zero. My own freemium strategy doc opens by admitting this in its first line. Pricing went on to get redesigned three times, and all three designs faced the same audience: twenty-seven people a week.
The market never had a gap
Paid AI headshots in 2026: HeadshotPro, 196k customers. Aragon, ~2M users. BetterPic, $2.5M seed. And Google’s Nano Banana will turn one selfie into a decent portrait, free.
I priced at $1 per portrait. In a market of premium leaders, a dollar doesn’t read as accessible. It reads as a trial price. Because it was one.
Four causes of death
1. Distribution was a checkbox, never a spend. In March I designed a $10/day Meta ads test: three angles, six creatives, a production checklist, an ROAS spreadsheet. I never spent a dollar. Building the plan felt like progress. Spending felt like risk. I chose the feeling over the outcome.
2. The scoreboard arrived on life support. Five months into a six-month project, I finally measured the only metric that mattered. Twenty-seven weekly visitors. Every conversion experiment before that point was astrology.
3. Death by comfort. May, one month after the scoreboard said dead: I redesigned the navigation drawer. Aligned headers to prototypes. Fixed color contrast. Stabilized flaky e2e tests. Polishing CSS for a product nobody visits is not work, it is hiding. I did it for a month.
4. “Practice project” as shelter. The practice was real: the stack and the discipline carried into what I build now. But “practice” is also what I hid behind when the data said stop. Same words, two jobs, and I let the honest one cover for the other.
For symmetry with autopsy #001: that one died because I built for an audience of one and called it a market. This one died because I built for everyone and told no one. Same ending either way. The building was real; the contact with humans wasn’t.
What I’d tell past me
- The first 10 hours of a project go to distribution. Not the last 10, if any.
- A scoreboard built on day one is a compass. Built on month five, it is an autopsy kit.
- If nobody knows your product exists, conversion optimization is astrology.
- Working code is not a launch. Neither is a pricing page.
One line
The product was finished. The launch was never scheduled.
Written Sept 2026 · More autopsies at github.com/louis-cai/postmortems · Louis Cai, over-the-hill coder, builder of dead things and a few live ones.