That's the job: experiment until you find product-market fit... or die trying.

And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's what a healthy economy looks like.

One time I worked for a client who entire idea for a product was "it's going to do the same as <specific popular open source dev tool>, except in Go and with GraphQL!" They literally had zero vision beyond duplicating effort for no reason. During the first meeting I sat in, I asked them directly why someone would choose to use their version instead of the existing one, and they didn't have an answer. Something like one or two years went by before they decided to end the contract with us, and I never learned what they hoped to achieve.

Well, that might be part of the reason why it's your old job and not your current one. :)