I spent months building an ecommerce from scratch. Then I realized building wasn't the hard part.

I'm a developer, so building has always been the part that feels natural to me.

I started Product #001 because I wanted to understand ecommerce by actually building one from scratch instead of using Shopify or another platform.

So I built it.

The backend, frontend, admin panel, cart, checkout, Stripe payments, Printful integration, emails, tracking, webhooks...

And every time something worked, I found something else to build or improve.

At some point I realized I could probably keep doing that forever.

But none of those features answered the question that actually matters:

Does anyone want what I'm selling?

So this September I decided to stop adding features and focus on validation.

I'm starting with one product instead of trying to validate the whole store at once. It's called One Small Bug, a T-shirt based on something I know very well as a developer: finding a bug that looks like a 5-minute fix and still being there 3 hours later 😅

Right now I'm trying to get it in front of developers and follow what actually happens:

view product → add to cart → checkout → purchase

I'm not trying to prove that it works. I honestly don't know if it will.

That's the part I'm trying to learn now: distribution, validation and understanding what people actually want.

For developers here who moved from building to selling: what helped you make that transition?