What was your 1st product and why did you decide to build it?

Sveta Bay
25 replies
I'll start! What? My first product was MakerBox Tools. It's a list of 600+ tools with great free plans for Makers https://www.makerbox.club/tools Why? We had 2 reasons: 1. We wanted to start with SaaS at first, but soon we found out that subscriptions cost too much. So, we decided to collect tools with great free plans that can help indie businesses not to spend a fortune 💰 2. It was a safe start. We spent 1 month building and testing the product. If we failed, we wouldn't lose motivation to make our products. Happily, we didn't fail.

Replies

Fabian Maume
QApop 2.0 is the first product that I build. It is built on a recurrent consulting service that I was offering. I was expecting that productizing it will help me scale the business. It did help me scale to some extent but it was much more work than expected.
Samir Al-Battran
Fedica Mobile: Social Media Growth
I have built so many tools in the past, some were free, some paid (the first when I was a teenager), some where mine, some for other companies but I think these would be irrelevant today, so I will just talk about my current startup (https://www.producthunt.com/prod...) and the first product for it At first, it wasn't really a product but rather a tool to map Twitter follower locations, I gave it away for free just like the other many free tools I built After realizing it got a lot of traction, I decided to make a product out of it, but instead of only mapping followers, it would be an all-in-one social media management tool (with a focus on Twitter). Why I built it? 1. Because it's annoying to have so many tools to manage your social media. Instead of having a tool to schedule posts for different networks, another to schedule Twitter threads, another to analyze your account, and another to analyze hashtags and another to manage your followers, another to analyze competitors, you get one tool in one place that does it all, and really well! 2. It's cheaper to have one tool, and for those who can't afford to pay anything, we have a free plan that gets them most of the way. 3. The native Twitter analytics is lacking in features, so we built algorithms to determine demographics and interests, so the service gives you data that can't be obtained elsewhere. 4. The product is focused on Twitter, so it does a lot of things that most other tools can't do. And although there are copycats, it's the first to do so many things: The first tool to allow scheduling threads, the first to allow polls, first for media tagging, the first to optimize scheduling (by best time to post and also by location), the first to segment by demographics, and so much more 5. (And this is my favorite reason) I like to build things! Especially things that haven't been built before
Sveta Bay
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@albattran adding to my Twitter tools list for future exploring!
Samir Al-Battran
Fedica Mobile: Social Media Growth
@basv awesome! Let me know when the exploration expedition begins, I can show you around :)
Rajan Verma (Aarvy)
I build dictozo.com Because I was not good at English and keep forgetting the words even after recalling them. So I build this chrome extension to keep highlighting the words over every website (with meaning) i visit once I save them. Now dictozo is doing the same for 115 languages. Unluckily I don't see it is a good market and anybody would pay for it so i didn't market.
Rajan Verma (Aarvy)
@sachin_shajan Once i used quora heavy but it got changed a lot.. especially after QPP. I don't know how to grow there. and yes I do have the audience on Instagram and I regularly post as well, but I didn't tell them about dictozo. Till now everyone liked the app after trying but still I consider it inferior, coz it just needs huge effort and i'll probably get not more than 3-5$ per user as many non english countries have low currency .. I have other projects lined up whose audience I am growing... I'll probably sell dictozo somewhere down the line.
Vatsal Sanghvi
Our first product was Twitrbnb - a twitter bot which amplifies house hunting requests on Twitter and also curates resources that help folks settle in new cities. Why? Everyone wanted to move back to urban areas and this resulted in a massive demand-supply mismatch. We believed that a community-led model would be the best way to solve this and thus twitrbnb was born. In ~4 months, we have built a community of 2800+ folks on twitter (organically) and have helped hundreds of people find flats, flatmates and helped them settle back into cities.
Hiro - Atsuhiro Teshima
My first product is LingualBox. https://www.lingualbox.com It is an online ESL school. The unique point is all our tutors are from the Philippines. So, we can offer quality classes at affordable prices compared with native speakers. I started it because I found out it is a great experience to communicate with people from different cultures while traveling around SEA. However, at that time, my English skill was not good enough to communicate well with others. So, I decided to start an affordable ESL school to help other people who are feeling the same way as I. (and I had small amount of money at the time and tutoring from native speakers are not a good option for me. ) I always work on projects for my own needs and help others who are having similar problems as me:)
Michal Jackowski
What? My first product is BacklinkManager (https://backlinkmanager.io). It's a robust CRM for link-building operations to help digital marketing agencies and other SaaS content-teams to track their link-building efforts and scale them. Why? 1. I wanted to get into the SaaS space with my developer experience and I wanted to stop working for other people 2. My partner was running a startup's marketing team and couldn't manage their link-exchange requests in Google Sheets anymore - it seemed like a great problem to fix at the time.
Jonathan Nass
What? My first (and only) product is Outdone where we're using Ai to transform the entire gift shopping experience — how people find inspiration, receive recommendations, and discover new brands. Why? Shopping for gifts is super stressful and it's a problem that virtually everyone faces multiple times a year, yet there was no tool out there adequately addressing the issue. Birthdays and holidays are stressful enough as is — finding the perfect gift doesn't have to be. We're gearing up to launch an awesome new version of our site in the near future. So give us a follow if you'd like to stay in the know! https://www.producthunt.com/prod...
Sveta Bay
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@jonathan_nass you have a great product, waiting for the updates!
Jonathan Nass
@sneha_saigal thanks, I really appreciate it! Feel free to throw me or Outdone’s page a follow to stay in the know!
Jonathan Nass
@basv thanks for the kind words! We’re hoping the new version is worlds better. Stay tuned!
Sneha Saigal
@jonathan_nass Super interesting, Jonathan! Looking forward to the launch.
Sanghita Dey
My first product was completely from my own experience. As a leaders building seevral global team, finding employee with right attitude was extremely difficult. Hence, built a product which just works like bumble of hiring.
Sneha Saigal
Awesome work, Sveta. How was your experience building for the indie businesses? I'd love to connect as I am exploring that space with my product GEXPR https://gexpr.com/home What? Need-based advice via 1:1 direct calls with experts. Indie founders could connect over a micro-consulting session with experienced indie creators and learn more about anything they need help with - from ideation, nocode, product hunt launches, getting first sign-ups, and first paying customers to sell on sites like microacquire. Why? Indie businesses need to move fast and don't have large budgets to hire consultants on contracts or full-time projects. Experienced indie professionals get a lot of DMs where people want to "pick their brain" over a "coffee chat". Our tool makes it contextual and convenient to connect!
What: My first product was BRAVO. Bravo is a personalized employee reward ad recognition platform. Why: I decided to build Bravo because I wanted something different that is low cost and reliable. Which can help us reward our employees and keep them motivated. You can Follow Bravo for more updates: https://www.producthunt.com/prod....
Sveta Bay
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@qudsia_ali wow, you have a great product! I wish I had it when I worked in corporation. Probably It would prevent my burnout 😅
Rich Watson
NVSTly: Social Investing
NVSTly: Social Investing
first and only product. a social trading app for retail traders to collaborate, share analysis or ideas, copy trade top ranked traders, share trades to social media instantly thetradehub.net
Rehan Choudhry
Mine wasn’t a product in the traditional sense I guess… but my first was a music festival called Life is Beautiful. Why? People ages 14-22 were facing the highest rates of suicide during that time (still are?). I had a hand in the entertainment business and met with festival owners across the country asking them to add mental health services to their events. When they all said no, I said “fuck it” and started my own.
Sveta Bay
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@rehan_choudhry1 I think that's an extremely needed idea. I notice that nowadays a lot of teenagers start therapy early and it helps them on their life path
Huudle AI Project Assistant
I'll follow then :) What? Our first product is Huudle. It is an app to increase your team performance by discussing, making decisions, and executing actions on the focus of team interactions! Why? To stop never-ending pointless meetings and waiting for others to make decisions. Support making faster and better collective decisions, you can easily initiate decisions, and include your colleagues in collective decision-making. Increase engagement in the organization and make everyone part of the discussion, decision, and action process 💫 If you want to learn more, you can subscribe --> https://www.producthunt.com/upco...
Huudle AI Project Assistant
@sachin_shajan Thank you, Sachin :) Do you want to subscribe to it so, we can contact you for the following steps?
Isaiah Trotter
What? I decided to build a platform that guarantees work for freelancers. Why? The reason being that 60%+ of freelancers struggle creating consistent work and predictable income. And no one has previously made a scalable solution that addresses this massive hole in the market.