I'm running out of ideas after getting stiffed on a project I built from scratch. been going in circles for weeks and need some outside perspective.

I'm a performance marketer, mostly Meta and TikTok, and I do some freelance automation on the side. A few months ago, I was tutoring a client's daughter in math (long story, but i used to tutor to make extra cash). the client owns a small wholesale business selling optical frames to opticians across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. After lessons, she'd complain about manually matching her bank statement to open invoices every month. she'd been trying to get AI to do it and couldn't. Told her not everything needs AI, and that this could be automated. Then offered to build it.

Had never built anything like that. figured it out with research and a lot of help from AI. Google Sheets plus Apps Script. It reads the bank export and accounting export, finds invoice numbers in payment references, handles messy cases like multiple invoices in one transfer, early-payment discounts, typos, and flags anything ambiguous. Tested it against over a thousand real payments. Zero wrong matches. Hours of manual work turned into one click.

never agreed on a price upfront. i know, I know. When it was done, told her to send whatever she felt was fair. thought being humble about money was the relationship-building move. She ignored that part entirely. She had also promised me a list of her business contacts so I could sell the same tool to other companies. she sent that list. About 450 addresses. And said nothing about payment.

So there's a working system inside her company, saving her time every month, and I've been paid €0.

Went through the list. It's an export from an inbox, not a curated list. newsletter senders, shipping notifications, invoicing addresses, some outright spam. About a quarter are large corporations with full accounting departments, the exact opposite of my target customer. Maybe twenty are anywhere near the industry I have a reference in. Plus, cold commercial email in Germany requires prior explicit consent. there's no B2B exemption. So even the usable addresses aren't really usable. The whole list was garbage.

genuinely thought this was a springboard. My plan was to get 10-20 clients for the same product, use that to build something bigger, learn new things, meet new people, find better ideas. and she really made me believe those 450 contacts were a gold mine. They weren't.

Have a bachelor's and a master's, and I start a traineeship at the European Parliament in Brussels in two months. So it's not like nothing is happening. But i want to build something on the side that keeps running. Want to be self-employed eventually and I'm willing to work a lot for that.

Right now it feels like the whole thing collapsed before it even started.

And honestly? I don't know what to do. Want to make money on the side, want to get paid, want to have something of my own. but I don't even know where to start. Don't know if it's just rocky at the beginning and you push through, or if I should drop the whole thing. And if I drop it, don't know what I'd do instead. Like how do I make money then? genuinely running out of ideas