Collabifi

5 months, two pivots, zero customers. My first real startup attempt.

Collabifi was an attempt to automate team-based coding competitions. The format came from BitCamp, a coding school running online olympiads where students formed teams and built websites from supplied designs — it worked, but mentors ran it by hand: creating GitHub repositories, assigning students, opening group chats, and distributing briefs one at a time. Collabifi automated that pipeline. It ran from November 2024 through two pivots and closed without a customer.

ProductHunt · f6s.com · Linkedin

Problem

The first version was B2C: developers signed in through GitHub OAuth, were bucketed into teams of four, and built projects from supplied briefs — the BitCamp format opened to anyone on the internet. It launched on Product Hunt in November 2024.

The first week showed traffic. It then flattened and did not recover. Strangers do not assemble into teams to build things unprompted, and nothing in the product created the reason to.

Solution

January 2025 brought a pivot to B2B, built as a parallel stack alongside the original. It targeted the mentor's workload directly. Creating a competition now:

- provisions a GitHub repository per team under the organization - invites each member as a collaborator - opens a group chat seeded with a welcome message - attaches the brief — stack, difficulty, Figma file

Submitted repositories were then walked file by file and scored by GPT-4o-mini on code quality, functionality and design, with strengths and issues written back per team.

Sixteen coding schools and camps received cold emails. Two replied — SCSA and BitCamp. Both were positive, both said they would think about it, and both went quiet. Three follow-ups produced nothing. Not even a free pilot closed.

Outcome

675 commits across two repositories produced a working product and no customers. Building it was the easy half; distribution was the actual problem. B2B sales at 19, with no network and no credibility behind the pitch, is close to impossible — I underestimated that completely. The product worked. The distribution did not.

Features

  • Automated team assignment
  • GitHub repo setup
  • Competition management
  • Real-time chat
  • Design brief distribution

Lessons

  • Building something cool doesn't mean anyone will use it.
  • B2B sales needs relationships and trust. Cold outreach from a 19-year-old doesn't cut it.
  • Validate before you build. I should've gotten one school to commit before writing a single line of code.
  • Still one of the best periods of my life. The intensity of working on your own thing is addictive.

Stack

  • Frontend: React, TypeScript
  • Backend: Node.js
  • Database: MongoDB

Timeline

  • Oct 2024 — Started building Collabifi
  • Nov 2024 — Launched B2C on ProductHunt
  • Dec 2024 — Pivoted to B2B, cold-emailed coding schools
  • Feb 2025 — Shut it down — zero customers, $0 revenue