Just launched my first solo product — a YouTube study tool built on evenings and weekends as a game dev

👋 Hey IH — I just shipped my first public product and wanted to share the journey here because this community has been part of what gave me the confidence to actually do it.

Who I am

I'm a game developer at a studio with multiple shipped titles. I just finished university. I've been building Lynote on evenings and weekends for the past several months — solo, no co-founder, no funding.

What I built

Lynote turns any YouTube video into a structured study note. Paste a link, get back a summary, key takeaways, action items, flashcards, and a clean transcript.

The problem it solves is one I had personally — I consume a lot of video content to learn and I was retaining almost none of it. I wanted a tool that treated video content like a document I could actually study from.

Stack: Next.js 16, Supabase, OpenAI Responses API, Vercel, Stripe for payments, Resend for email, Cloudflare as proxy.

Current numbers (launch day)

• Users: just getting started 🙂

• Free tier: 10 notes/day, no account required

• Revenue: £0 (token packs are live, subscriptions coming later)

• Goal: first paying customer within 2 weeks

What I learned building solo

The hardest part wasn't the code. It was the 6 moments I nearly quit. Each time, I'd hit a wall — a design decision I couldn't make, a feature that wouldn't work the way I imagined, a week where I made no visible progress — and I'd seriously consider shelving it.

What kept me going was using the tool myself every day. When something was broken, I felt it personally. That made fixing it feel necessary rather than optional.

The other thing I learned: polish is a trap. There will always be one more thing to improve. The only way out is to set a ship date and hold it.

What's next

• First paying users

• Subscription billing

• Improving output quality for very long videos

• Building in public here as I go

I'd love feedback from anyone who's launched something similar — tools for students, productivity tools, AI-powered tools. What worked for you in those early days?

And if you want to try it: lynote-ai.com. Free to start, no account needed.