He's 16. He Rebuilt It Twice. He's Still Going.

Aayan is 16 years old, studying for his O-Levels in Karachi, Pakistan. He has no funding, no co-founder, and no Stripe account because Stripe doesn't work in Pakistan. He has built the same product three times.

The first version was called RivalScan. He got partway through development and then exams arrived. He put it down. When he came back, he couldn't remember where he'd left it, which features were done, which weren't, what the codebase even meant anymore.

So he scrapped it and started over.

The Gap Was Obvious. The Timing Was Right.

The idea behind SpyLens isn't complicated: businesses lose to competitors every day without understanding why. The tools that answer that question, the ones that show you what your competitors are doing right, what you're doing wrong, where the gaps are, cost $15,000 a year at the enterprise level.

Aayan looked at that number and saw an opportunity.

"AI made it possible to build the same thing for $19 a month," he says. "Obvious gap, right timing."

SpyLens does one thing cleanly. You enter your URL and a competitor's URL. Sixty seconds later you get an AI-generated report: what they're doing right, what you're doing wrong, three quick wins, and a threat level score. Competitor tracking and alerts are built in. Simple, direct, no enterprise contract required.

Three Rebuilds, Each One Faster

The first version was abandoned mid-build. The second version hit a wall during deployment when the database broke. The third version ran into a credits problem at the wrong moment and then the Stripe issue, a recurring obstacle for founders building from Pakistan.

"Each rebuild was faster," Aayan says.

That sentence carries more than it lets on. Three times he hit a wall. Three times he found a way through it. Not because the walls got smaller, but because he got better at climbing them.

He launched SpyLens three weeks ago. He's still studying for his O-Levels.

Building in Public Works

In week two, with zero outreach, a verified founder featured SpyLens publicly. It came from building in the open, sharing the process, showing the work.

"Distribution is harder than building," Aayan says. "That's the real job."

He learned that lesson the hard way. SpyLens solves a real problem, but he built what he assumed users needed rather than what they told him they needed. He skipped the customer discovery step. He's honest about it.

"Talk to customers before building. I skipped it."

The platform is currently in waitlist phase. Organic signups are coming in. No MRR yet. The first paying customer is the current goal, and he's working toward it the same way he's worked toward everything else: one rebuild at a time.

What Comes Next

The roadmap is clear. First 100 paying customers. Then SEO gap analysis and ad intelligence. The goal is to become the go-to competitor intelligence tool for SMBs globally.

For a 16-year-old bootstrapping from Karachi between exam sessions, that's not a small ambition. But Aayan doesn't talk about it like it's a big one either. He talks about it like the next step.

He's already restarted twice. A third time wouldn't slow him down.

SpyLens is live. Find it on X at @AayanBuilds.