a client told me not to upload their photos anywhere
A client sent me unreleased product photos and said
"optimize these but don't upload them anywhere"
so i spent a weekend building a compressor
that runs entirely in the browser
that weekend turned into 2 months
now it handles 8 formats, batch 30 files, zip download
free to use, $24.99 lifetime for pro
no subscription because my server costs are zero
i'm a solo dev from china, bootstrapped,
learning marketing from scratch
turns out getting users is way harder than writing code
but i'm documenting the whole thing honestly
What stood out to me is that you didn't start by building a better compressor—you started by solving a trust problem.
Compression was the feature. Keeping sensitive files on the user's device was the reason to switch.