Idea to launch in two months and learning from past mistakes.
I spend a lot of time building products and i've made a ton of mistakes along the way.
Last year I finished a project that took about two years to complete. I was so invested and naively assumed due to the hours put in it was guaranteed to get somewhere. I sent thousands of emails, wrote blog posts, posted on product hunt, reddit, IH and... nothing.
It was like shouting into the void and it hurt.
My mistake? I didn't know my audience and I solved a problem I only assumed existed. I told myself I did market research but googling for similar products and saying "I can do better than that" doesn't really cut it. I developed in silence and guided the product development based on my own misguided assumptions.
I needed to educate myself.
Since then I've taken a few months off to reflect on the failure. I read books like the lean startup and reevaluated what I really wanted build.
During this same time I created a devtools extension to solve my own problems whilst developing with GraphQL. I built this for myself only. With no promotion at all it now has over a thousand users and something finally clicked. Solve your own problems and you'll likely solve others problems too. Obvious I know. But maybe you have to feel the sting of failure to really learn.
With this enlightenment I've built a new product in under two months that solves my own problems. I'm launching early to iterate and gain valuable user feedback. I won't assume what customers want, I'll let them tell me.
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CloudCapture lets you transform and serve highly optimised images over a global CDN.
Hook it up to your S3 bucket or any public URL and convert high res images on-demand.
The next steps are building out a suite of high-quality components connected to the service to provide drop-in support for all things images.
Image upload, optimised rendering, galleries etc.
I want to be able to simply drop a component into my app and everything just work. No need to setup your own CDN, build components or sign URLs with your own server.
Thanks for reading!
New Product
https://www.cloudcapture.io
Old Product
https://tomorrowapp.io
Devtools extension
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/graphql-network-inspector/ndlbedplllcgconngcnfmkadhokfaaln?hl=en-GB
