12 years in the RAF, now trying to figure out if building products can be my actual career

I want to build products for a living. I have no idea how to actually get there.

Spent 12 years in the RAF: firefighter, then a commissioned officer flying RPAS. I'm currently being medically discharged, not by choice. So I'm starting a second career from zero, at a point where most people my age already have ten years of civilian experience under their belt.

What I've actually found, almost by accident: I love building things. Over the last couple of months I taught myself to build a real product, not just an idea, an actual working app, from a rough concept in a chat window through to a live site with a waitlist. I didn't know how to code properly when I started. I still don't, not in the traditional sense. I've been leaning heavily on AI tools to get there, learning as I go.

The thing I built (Microcosm) came out of my own transition. I had a big vision for my life and no idea how to break it into steps, so I built a tool to do that for myself. Somewhere in the middle of building it, I realised I liked the building itself more than I expected to.

What I don't know: how someone goes from "built one thing solo, taught myself as I went" to an actual sustainable living doing this. Do I need to formalise the coding skills? Try to get hired somewhere first to build a track record? Keep going solo and try to make the product itself work? Some mix of all three?

If anyone's gone from a completely unrelated career into building or making products for a living, especially later, or from a non-technical background, I'd genuinely love to hear what the actual path looked like for you, not just the highlight reel.