8 Years of Failed Apps: Should I Give Up or Double Down?

Eight years, tens of apps, one near-miss, and a whole lot of self-doubt. I'm an IT engineer who started building long before "vibe coding" was a thing. I've financed every single project with my own money, and the pattern is always the same: excitement, a few weeks of work, then the slow realization that what I built doesn't matter. Rinse and repeat.

The one that almost worked still stings. I was a student, built a local app for my country, no ad budget at all. It hit 3K new users every week purely through organic traffic and social media. I remember thinking, this is it. Then three near-clones showed up with proper marketing campaigns, polished features, and celebrities pushing them. My numbers went from 3K to 2K to 1K to 300 to 100 to 30. Eventually I was watching the dashboard just to see if anyone was left. Twelve months of work gone, and the worst part wasn't the money — it was knowing I was that close.

Now I've launched a new app and the trauma came back. The idea is different: it's a prompt marketplace where users don't just buy prompts — they earn from every remix. So creative people who currently share prompts for free could actually make meaningful money from their work. I trust this one more because it's not a zero-sum game for me alone. The users benefit, too.

But there are real problems. The app has API costs, and I have no marketing budget. I tried the creative route — wrote songs, made them semi-popular, and they actually brought in a little money. The app got zero attention from it. Zero. I still laugh when I think about how backwards that was.

This time I promised myself I'd fight for it and even started looking into investment programs, which I've never done before. That's where the doubt creeps back in: is this just the same old cycle wearing a new mask? I can't tell if the revenue-share angle is genuinely different or if I'm fooling myself because I want it to work.

What I'm asking for is honest feedback, not pity. If you've been through this grind and found a way to break the loop, I'd like to know how you decided between quitting and doubling down. Also, if anyone knows an accelerator or investor that actually fits a bootstrapped prompt-engineering product like this, point me there. I'm tired of launching things into the void without a real distribution plan.