Four mistakes I shipped
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Commute Impact · Builder's notes
Building commuteimpact.com, a commute cost calculator for Chennai and Bengaluru. One was caught by a stranger on Reddit. All four are documented.
What this is
What went wrong, and what it cost.
I build this on nights and weekends. The calculator tells you what your commute costs you and what it costs the city.
This deck covers the decisions that were wrong, what each one cost, and what caught it.
Mistake 1 · Strategy
My first revenue plan: sell guilt relief.
Tree adoption. Pay, adopt a tree, feel better about your commute. I built all of it: payment flow, four database tables, subscription pages. Then I looked at what I was selling: the vendor's list price was $3.49 a tree, B2B only, and roughly 44% of tropical saplings die within five years.
I was about to sell people a way to feel better about a problem I wanted them to fix.
The correction: Deleted the whole feature in May. The tool tells you what your commute costs. Selling forgiveness was never its job.
Mistake 2 · Expansion
4 calculations from Manila, five weeks after the May launch. I added a third city to prove the tool was global. Users did not need it. I needed it. Meanwhile it kept costing me: fare tables, holiday calendars, Philippine privacy law.
The correction: Froze Manila. No new city until people are actually finding the existing ones.
Mistake 3 · Product
The tool recommended a metro that does not exist yet.
"Take Metro" on a Bengaluru corridor where the line opens in December 2026, priced off road distance and a flat fare. A user caught it on r/bangalore, in public.
The correction: Nine days later the fix shipped: real transit itineraries, cited station fares, and when no transit exists, the tool now says so. That Reddit thread brought more usage than a month of SEO.
Mistake 4 · Distribution
I kept building instead of being found.
The old site, chennaitrafficcalc.in, ranked number one for Chennai traffic searches. I rebranded to commuteimpact.com to go beyond one city. The redirects were done right. The rankings still did not carry: a new name earns authority from scratch, and the new pages sit around 7th to 12th, where almost nobody clicks.
My response to all of this was to build more features.
The correction: Distribution is now scheduled work, every sprint, same as code. Rankings I once owned have to be earned again, and building more pages is not what earns them.
The pattern
None of these were coding mistakes.
Every one was an assumption I never tested: that revenue was ethical, that expansion was progress, that my recommendations matched the real city, that building more was the answer.
So every public number now gets a fact-check pass before it ships, verified against the live site on the day it is used.
Try it
Check what your commute costs.
Free, no sign-up. commuteimpact.com
If a result looks wrong, tell me where. That is how most of this deck got written.