Building 100 Websites—Am I Just Creating Garbage?
Deep thoughts on the 100 websites challenge: what makes a garbage product, how to make each project meaningful, and the failures behind success.
A few days ago, I set myself a challenge: build 100 websites.
I was excited at first, but yesterday I came across something that stopped me cold—"Don't build garbage products."
That hit me hard. I started wondering: if I actually build 100 websites and nobody visits them, nobody uses them, what am I even doing? Am I creating something meaningful, or just feeding my own ego?
💭 What actually counts as a "garbage product"?
A lot of people think anything nobody uses is garbage. But when you think about it, real garbage products are things that deliver zero value to anyone.
Here's how I see it:
Experimental work—stuff you build to learn, practice, or test ideas—not garbage.
Useful but imperfect products—things that solve problems even if the experience isn't polished yet—also not garbage.
Mechanical reproductions—projects with no thought, no improvement, just churning out quantity—that's garbage.
Half-hearted creations—things you build just to check a box, with no real investment—also garbage.
So the key isn't "does anyone use it." It's "did you learn something from building it."
🤔 If all 100 websites get zero visitors, does it still matter?
Depends on why you're building them.
If it's for learning and growth, absolutely. You'll learn frontend, backend, UI, SEO, content structure, deployment, automation... These 100 hands-on projects beat any course.
If it's for traffic or revenue, then you need to reflect—why didn't anyone visit? Wrong positioning? Poor experience? No one knew about it? Every failure is actually data.
A website with no visitors isn't scary. What's scary is building it and never thinking about why.
💡 How to make the 100 websites challenge more meaningful
Here's what I'm thinking:
Set a goal or constraint for each website. Like site #1: ship as fast as possible. Site #10: try optimizing for SEO. Site #30: use AI to generate content. Site #50: solve a real pain point. Each one teaches you something new, and your growth becomes traceable.
Write reflection logs. Document each project's goal, process, results, and lessons learned. Even failures become knowledge assets.
Go from quantity to quality. Use the first 50 for practice, refine the next 50, then pick 1-2 to really polish into products with actual users. That's how many creators take off.
Someone once said: do 100 garbage exercises to create 1 stunning piece of work.
🌟 Behind every great product are countless "failures"
You might not know this:
Musk failed many times before Tesla.
Jobs scrapped countless prototypes before the Mac.
Pieter Levels—the indie developer behind Nomad List—once committed to building "12 websites in 12 months." The first few got almost no users. It wasn't until #8 that something clicked.
He said something that really stuck with me:
"I built 11 failed projects before one worked — but those 11 were not a waste. They were training."
✨ It finally clicked for me
Garbage products aren't products nobody uses. They're products you yourself don't respect.
If you approach each website with curiosity and a growth mindset, then those 100 websites aren't garbage—they're your most valuable evolution log.
Maybe your 1st website will be dead silent. Your 10th will get a few comments. Your 50th will get people sharing it. And your 100th—maybe that's the one you were meant to build all along.
Don't be afraid of being called a "garbage maker." Because every truly valuable creator has been misunderstood that way at some point.