Overcoming years of mindless building to finally making my first successful product
I've been hustling and making side-projects for years now, from an online t-shirt business to co-founding a startup with a uni friend, all of which didn't end up being anything special.
I've been building something completely different for the past 7 months, which started as a community and became a web app, which I want to eventually turn into an actual product. It's not monetised and I am exploring various ways of making it so, but so far it has been the most interesting and successful side-project I've done.
So I've made a short blog post documenting my journey so far, which I thought people might find interesting. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it and would definitely like to hear from those of you that specifically built products that fostered a strong community, or the way I did it - started building a community, which later required an actual product built around it.
Blog post is here: https://medium.com/@doutatsu/overcoming-years-of-mindless-building-to-finally-making-my-first-successful-product-3a9652bc9c68
Great writing, great story! Congrats. I ended up agreeing with all your decisions, advice, and learnings through the story.
A very interesting community tool you have built. I just would advise you to do not forget that your endeavor relies upon a third party product, Bigscreen (which looks very neat indeed). So take it into account that is a risk to build something based on another person's product.
As I see, the core of your product is a tool for managing recurrent and frequent virtual events. Remember that when building your code and deciding about the roadmap of your product.
The tool for managing VR Anime sessions through Bigscreen is the first community, the MVP, but learn about how it can be used for other situations as well (as nor Bigscreen or the Anime are your product).
When you are sure that those people also love your app (not just watching anime virtually together), then you can think about creating a SaaS, white-label version for it, where other people who run communities can use to manage their recurrent, virtual events.
And you would do well to listen to the last Indie Hackers podcast, with Ryan Hoover from Product Hunt: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/067-ryan-hoover-of-product-hunt
Two people who built successful businesses around a community, I am sure it will give you great insights.
Congrats and good luck!
Thanks for kind words Rodrigo! I've indeed been thinking of making it an actual tool for event management for others to use. It's not mentioned in the blog, but a lot of thought and most of the work really, went into the Organisers side of things, for efficiently creating events.
I am basically testing out various ideas based on event management with this specific community and when I feel like it's in a good enough shape to be used more generally, I am planning on splitting it into its own SaaS business.
I've been getting quite a few comments complimenting the website and how easy it is to use, which gave me extra motivation to continue investing my time into building it out. There are a lot of various features planned, which will make users use the website in various ways.
Finally, a great point about Bigscreen and I am definitely aware of it. I am planning to evolve the community itself as we go forward, to be more general about connecting Anime VR ecosystem and users on my site, rather than just being a ticket office for anime streams in VR.
P.S. Thanks for the podcast recommendation, I am going to listen to it now
Great blog post, think so many of us have gone through a similar path and good luck with the next stage.
Thanks, James, glad to hear you liked it.