The 15 Products Challenge · 2026–2027

15 products.
12 months.
Judged by real customers.

I'm 44, I've run my own business for 20 years, and this year I'm building 15 products with AI to show you which ones live and which ones die — with real revenue numbers, real flops, no hype.

Thomas Skavhellen in his studio

The scoreboard

Month 1 of 12 · 349 days left

1 of 15 built

14 slots still open

Built before the challenge

The existing portfolio — proof this isn't day one. Together these do €10–15K/month in revenue.

ProductWhat it doesStatusLesson
QRco.noQR codes for Norwegian businessesLIVEBoring niches pay. Nobody brags about QR codes — customers just pay for them.
Profilestolist.comTurns Klaviyo profiles into SubscribersLIVEBuilt in days with Claude Code — what used to take months.
Meerkatpost.comSocial media posting on autopilotLIVEDon't rebuild what exists — it runs on top of an API that does the heavy lifting.
“AI lets anyone build a product. But AI can't tell you what's worth building — 20 years of customer conversations can.”
— The belief this whole challenge is built on
Thomas Skavhellen

Why listen to me?

I'm not a 24-year-old indie hacker in Bali. I'm 44, married, based in Bucharest, from Bergen, Norway — and I've been self-employed for 20 years.

I've spent those years talking to customers: e-commerce stores, small businesses, real people with real problems. That's the part AI can't do for you. What AI did change is the build time — products that took me months now take days. So this year, I'm putting the combination to the test: experience picks the problems, AI builds the solutions, customers decide what survives.

And yes — I'll share the flops too. My most expensive lesson so far: fully autonomous AI copywriting doesn't work. I built a business around that lesson.

20 years
Running my own company, hundreds of customer conversations
€10–15K/mo
Current revenue from the existing product portfolio
Days, not months
Typical build time per product with Claude Code
1 big flop
Fully autonomous AI copy failed — humans approve everything now

Follow the scoreboard

One email per week: what shipped, what it cost, what it earns, what died. The whole experiment, numbers included.