The first version of your favorite digital products
Hey people,
Have you ever wanted to refresh your memory and see the very first version of your favorite digital products and companies? Well, this is exactly why we took onto the ambitious project (which took us a day to build) theversionone.com! The website is like a time machine, taking you back to the early days of tech and reminding you just how far they’ve come.
The aim of the project is to remind us of the importance of making the first step without getting lost in the weeds, chasing perfection endlessly - and I feel like we’ve all been there are some point in our lives!
Here are a few examples (but check out the full list on the website):
Chess.com
Spotify
It's like looking at baby pictures. You can see how they started off as awkward, clunky, and honestly, a little bit embarrassing. But we all have to start somewhere!
Enjoy!
That's pretty funny. It's difficult to feel competent when there are companies that provide excellent UI and design; it's a relief to see that.
:)
That's true, even though I do think the UI/design bar is much higher nowadays than 15-20 years ago. But the point of the project still holds - the product doesn't have to be perfect in the beginning, it just has to do the job.
Love it! Can't get over some of them haha
Dribbble is my personal favorite. The UI feels old, yet it gets you straight to the point.
Awesome website!
It's also really cool that you added the year that they were first launched!
We just launched a thesaurus of brands two days ago
We'll link to your website on ours as we're sure our viewers will be interested in seeing the first versions of the their favorite websites!
We don't have much traffic yet (600 over the last 30 days) but we hope it helps out with your website! :)
We're doing a massive update at the end of the month with a ProductHunt launch so we can also help by funneling some of our ProductHunt traffic to your site :D
We'll try to get the links to theversionone on our site before the ProductHunt launch!
Good luck with theversionone!
Glad you enjoyed it :) It was really fun building it as well!
By the way, I saw you were using Webflow for your website. What's your experience with it?
It's really rough! 😂
I've been web developer since the age 12 so like 15 years now and I gotta admit when I think of modern website editors WebFlow is too robust for me.
I've been able to start on an updated version that everyone is telling me looks much much better:
https://brands-v2.webflow.io/
I think the important thing with Webflow is to buy a theme as soon as you can cuz otherwise creating a good UX is just like making CSS classes in normal HTML except you get menus to do it XD
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In general I think Webflow is awesome for a programmatic SEO strategy like what we're doing but at the same time it definitely requires a bit of a time investment.
What we did was setup experiment goals so everytime we hit our goals we decide to spend more time on the website.
Right now we're spending dedicated time (5-10 hrs per week across product and market development) to prepare for the ProductHunt launch I mentioned.
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As a whole though I think programmatic SEO is a much more fun way to drive traffic than normal blogs. Here's a our analytics if you're interested:
https://plausible.io/brandesaurus.com
Oh, I love the second version! Looks nice and clean - well done! Yeah I have tried webflow in the past as well, but when it came down to it, I always felt I would just build it quicker with HTML/CSS. Also the pricing was a bit steep, But definitely agree it's good for that sweet SEO haha! :)
Thank you!
Yeah for indiehacking webflow is definitely expensive. The only reason we were able to get it going is thanks to our main startup.
Just made a post where you can read about how things have been going on our end
As you said the main reason we chose Webflow was for the SEO plus csv uploads, but HTML/CSS + a good CSS UI Kit would totally be a great replacement.
For our team since not everyone is a hacker/techy we have to often add front end systems that enable our artists and interns to participate more freely.
That allows us to do strong visual and language content campaigns like making this little cutey:
https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/63e16005c1ca272db1940602/6407fb867968d41d9a7d89ff_applesaurus (1).png
Looking forward to updates and future companies on theversionone! (Already saw a lot of my favorite startups on there)