I’m 14 and have been coding for about a year now.

I love building real apps that solve problems — I made a book review app (totally shit), a SIP calculator, and now… something I’m really proud of.

Spenlys — a personal finance app powered by AI that actually gives you advice based on how you spend. Not just charts. Real tips.

I built it to learn next.js and practice but I like it so much that I kept working on it.

I worked on it for 2–3 months and finally launched it on Product Hunt.

Nothing happened.

No comments. No feedback. No upvotes.

It felt like shouting into the void.

I posted on Reddit - auto-removed.

On X - ignored.

On LinkedIn - 2 impressions.

Meanwhile, some chrome extension someone made in 6 hours was trending.

I thought: maybe my product isn’t good.

But honestly, I think I just don’t know how to reach people yet.

And that’s been the hardest part of all this - getting noticed when starting out.

Still, I’m proud.

I learned more in these 3 months than from any tutorial.

And I’m not giving up. I’ll keep building, keep launching, and someday I’ll figure this part out too.

So i recently made my first app Spenlys.com a ai powered personal finance app. But as you know ai is pretty expensive and getting initial users also kinda hard. So I made this approach - I lock some features behind a paywall (fake) when the users clicks the upgrade to premium, They get pro for free as a way of thanking for trying the app early and then I ask the user - "You got the premium for free would you have paid for it? " So I know if users are willing to pay for the features (validation) . I don't have enough data currently so I can't share it. I just want feedback if it's a good validation approach if you have already built the feature. What do you think?