faynd.ai

Problem

Build a place to discover AI tools: browse by category, search, and let anyone submit a tool for listing. Not a class project, this was a real attempt at a product, built and shipped with the intent of it being a going concern.

Approach

Standard Laravel MVC, MySQL, Tailwind for styling. Public-facing browsing and search, full authentication with email verification, a tool submission flow that routes through admin approval before going live, a per-user dashboard for managing submitted tools, image uploads, and a referral link system to help with organic growth.

Result

Shipped a working multi-user product. Twenty-four commits of real feature work between February and June 2024: auth and dashboard first, then search, then the tool submission and approval pipeline, then referral and account polish. Not a prototype, an actual functioning site.

What I'd do differently

The site isn't active anymore. If I revisited it, I'd want a clearer answer to distribution before writing more code, an AI tools directory lives or dies on whether people actually come back to it, and that's a marketing problem as much as an engineering one. Worth keeping in the timeline honestly: it shipped, it just didn't find its audience, which is a real and common outcome, not a failure to hide.