I almost spent €500 printing a product nobody asked for

Two weeks ago I launched Accent. An AI writing tool that helps people write like themselves, not like ChatGPT. I built it over Easter weekend, almost in one go — partially on my phone in Claude while I sat on the train.

I didn’t have a big launch plan, just posted on LinkedIn, Substack, X, messaged some people I thought would find it useful. A few days in, nothing moved. And I realized I was staring at the same wall every indie builder eventually hits: the distribution problem.

This is where I think vibe coding is overhyped. We’ve built a culture obsessed with shipping. But shipping is the part AI made easy. Distribution is the part it didn’t touch.

Accent has a writing game on the landing page. We show a flat sentence — “He feels sad” — and give you four rewrites that actually hit. You pick the one you think is the best. Since adding it, our bounce rate dropped 20–30%.

So I thought: what if I turned the game into a physical card game?

And then I thought: King’s Day is in one week.

For those who don’t know — King’s Day is the national holiday in the Netherlands. Everyone comes out, parties in the streets, and the best part: the entire country becomes a free market. No permits, no license, no registration. You grab a spot, lay out a blanket, and sell whatever you want.

My first idea was taking Polaroid photos of strangers with Accent stickers on the back. But it seemed too risky. I have never used the camera, and all the costs add up. Abandoned in five minutes.

The second idea stuck: a card game built from the same material as the landing page game. Two players, 20 cards, each with a flat sentence on one side and four rewrites on the other. Pick your answer, say it at the same time. Compare each other’s choices, argue whose has better taste.

I spent the entire afternoon designing it. Cream deck, dark deck, Fraunces serif for the flat sentences, gold numbers for the rewrites. I went from 5 cards to 20. It looked beautiful.

Then I started looking for print shops.

MakePlayingCards.com — too complicated, uploads one by one, ended up at €30 per deck. Print&Bind Amsterdam — max card height 60mm, doesn’t fit. Back to MPC — €16.90 per deck at quantity 1, but I needed 20 sets of 2 decks each. The quote climbed to something like €500.

I sat there looking at the number. And something clicked.

Why am I spending €500 printing cards before I know if a single person wants them?

My product isn’t even a card game. It’s a writing tool. I was so deep in the making that I forgot to check if anyone was waiting on the other end.

So I closed my laptop, went to the library, and printed one set of cards on A4 paper. No double-sided printing. No rounded corners. No 350gsm coated stock. Just words on paper.

That evening I brought four cards to a writing meetup. Real writers, people who care about language and write with pen. I thought they’d love it.

However, they didn’t. Most of them didn’t like the rewrite options — they thought they could come up with better ones. A few tried one round and left. The game wasn’t challenging, it was annoying. These are people who craft sentences for a living. Asking them to pick from four pre-written options is like handing a chef a microwave meal and asking which button to press.

But one person stayed. A non-native English speaker who writes in English every day for work. She didn’t think she could do better. She just wanted to learn which one was better. She got it immediately.

That’s when I realized I’d been building for the wrong person. Not the fiction kind of writers. Not language learners. People who write every day because they have to — founders, freelancers, anyone using content to grow their business — and don’t have time to make it sound like them.

And that’s the plan. King’s Day morning I’m waking up early, claiming a spot at the market, laying out a blanket with a stack of printed pages and a QR code. I’ll ask strangers to play. If they love it, I take their email and place a real print order. If they don’t, I saved €500 and learned something.

The cards look like a prototype because they are one.