I Had No Plan, Then I Had a Plan I Couldn't Follow

I have photos of a wall in my old room. A picture of a red Mazda, cut out of a newspaper before lockdown even started. I'd told myself I'd own that exact car someday. A note from somewhere in the middle of lockdown: "Work hard in silence. Let the success make noise." Misspelled, because I was a lazy writer back then, and my handwriting wasn't much better. And later, in 2023, a real plan. "Data Science in 6 months, before April 2024," written out step by step, sources and curriculum and all.

All three are still up there. The car picture faded years ago. I stopped noticing the "work hard in silence" note a long time before I stopped believing it. And the six-month plan lasted about a week.

That's the real starting point of this story, not the part where Debnix launches.

Years of switching

I learned to code before AI tools existed, mostly from YouTube, with no IT background and nobody guiding me. I fell in love with Python first, five months of real, focused learning. Then I hit the wall everyone hits: too many directions, no way to know which one was right. One week I'd learn Django. The next, I'd switch to data science, pandas, numpy, matplotlib, seaborn. Then MongoDB. Then SQL. Then HTML and CSS and JavaScript. Then back to Django. I wasn't learning anymore, I was just switching.

Then COVID happened. School went online, I got a phone, and somewhere in there I stopped touching code entirely and started making memes on Facebook instead. That page grew to 100,000 followers. For two years, that was the thing I did instead of tech.

The wall, and then the wandering

In 2023, in class 12, I decided it was time to be serious. I deleted the Facebook page. I wrote the plan, the one on the sticky notes. And within a week, I'd stopped following it. It's still on my wall. I never took it down.

What came after wasn't really trying, it was drifting. IELTS classes I attended without studying. PTE the same way. A full year gone. Then German, I actually stuck with that one for six months, moved into a hostel for it, made real progress. Somewhere in the middle of that, a friend suggested I start an Instagram account, so I did, mostly reposting memes I found around the internet rather than anything original. One video hit close to a million views, around 980,000. Then the account got a strike. I realized copying other people's content wasn't something I wanted to keep doing, so I stopped. I don't have that account anymore. Some days I wonder if it would've helped Debnix's reach now, having something like that already built. No use dwelling on it.

But exam dates got hard to book, and slowly I stopped reviewing vocabulary, stopped practicing grammar, until eighteen months later I'd let it go entirely too.

I remember sitting in my room after that, feeling like I couldn't finish anything.

What brought me back

What actually pulled me back toward tech wasn't a plan. It was talking to some IT college students at the hostel. When I mentioned what I used to know, they didn't believe I'd never formally studied it. That stuck with me. My syntax was gone, but the logic wasn't, and by then AI tools had arrived, which meant the gap between "I remember the logic" and "I can build something real" had gotten a lot smaller.

I still hadn't fully let go of German. I told myself I'd try again in six months, that I'd finally pass B1/B2 if I gave it everything. I never got a date. And around that same time, scrolling my feed with nothing else to do, I came across a handful of posts, six or seven of them, from Shopify sellers complaining about inventory. I didn't know Shopify well. I didn't do deep research. I just saw a real problem, and instead of researching whether a solution already existed, I started building.

The plan I actually wrote, and immediately abandoned

This time I did write a real plan first. A full business and technical document, target customer, competitive positioning, tech stack, even a list of possible names. StockPilot, RestockIQ, ShelfSense, NeverOut, none of which I used. I scoped it at six months.

None of those names are the one I actually picked, and the real one didn't come from that document at all.

A few days before I registered the domain, I was on a bus heading home. A little girl a few seats away kept making this sound, over and over, "deu deu deu deu," and her mom and the people around her started teasing her by copying it back. I don't have much experience talking to kids, so I just sat there watching, quietly finding it funny. But the sound stuck. I caught myself repeating "deu deu" in my head the whole way home, and it was still there by the time I sat down to actually pick a domain name.

"deu.com" didn't sound right. So I asked an AI to generate variations, using voice mode. I said "deu" out loud, and it heard "deb." That gave me options like Debfy and Debstack. None of them landed. I'd noticed a lot of tech products end in "-nix" and "-hub." I tried "Debhub" first, which didn't sound right. I typed "Debnix" too, but it didn't quite land for me either, not that day. I was tired of looking, so I didn't pick anything. The next day, when I came back to it, "Debnix" was still sitting there on my list. Something about it felt right this time. I searched the domain. It was available. I bought it.

I didn't think twice. I bought it.

With AI doing the heavy lifting on code, I built the first working version in one month.

Almost nothing else went according to that plan. I'd written that I should validate the problem with ten different Shopify sellers before building anything. I asked exactly one. They told me they were using spreadsheets and starting to scale past what spreadsheets could handle. That was enough for me. I kept building. Consistency, more than the plan, is what turned it into something real.

Launch, and the wrong assumption

100 days ago, I launched. I genuinely believed that if I built something good, people would find it and love it on their own. I kept posting daily updates without really understanding how anyone was supposed to discover any of this.

So I tried to force it. I posted about my app on r/shopify, got banned. Posted on the Shopify Community, banned there too. I started actually replying to other people's threads instead of pitching my own, and that's when I noticed something. I wasn't the only one doing this. There were dozens of other developers pitching their own tools in every thread, some even posing as satisfied customers of their own product. It was everywhere, once I started looking for it.

One honest reply changed my direction. A developer told me, plainly, you should be on the Shopify App Store. I made a new plan, assuming it would take months. It took weeks. I submitted the listing, it was reviewed the same day, and rejected, with a clear reason why. I fixed it, resubmitted the next day, and it was approved six hours later.

Everything I tried after that

I posted daily. I wrote blog content. I offered free lifetime access to the first five users. I tried different offers, different framings. Around day 75, tired of posting the same dashboard screenshots over and over to barely any engagement, I decided to try something different. Crows and other birds kept landing on a window in another room, so I went to look. A parrot was sitting there. I moved toward it slowly, got one photo, tried to get a better shot, and it flew off before I could. I posted that first photo anyway. It didn't do any better than the screenshots did.

I launched on Product Hunt. I listed Debnix in every directory I could find.

One real seller installed, synced 378 real products, and paid for a subscription. Seven days later, they uninstalled.

Where it actually stands

That's not the ending I expected to be writing at Day 100, and I'm not going to pretend it is one I'm satisfied with. But something real has started moving underneath it. Organic search traffic that didn't exist three months ago is compounding now, on its own, without me forcing it. I just ran my first paid ad. And somewhere in a database, there's a real record of a real store that synced 378 products and paid me, which means the thing I built actually worked well enough for one real person to trust it with their business for a week.

I don't know yet if Debnix becomes the thing that finally doesn't get abandoned. But I know the difference between this attempt and the sticky notes on my wall. I'm still here on day 100, still shipping, still posting the days that go badly along with the days that go well. That's the only plan that's actually held.