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34 Comments

What prompted you to start building your product?

Just out of curiosity, what is your product and what prompted you to start building it?

I'm not necessarily asking what problem you're solving, I'd love to hear how the IH community got the motivation to start building your solutions. Was it an accident? Did you plan it out? Was it for fun? Did you have a co-founder?

To start it off - http://stockalarm.io/

I initially joined as a user who would day trade options in the stock market (this didn't end well), I needed a tool that would call me when my security hit a certain price or met a certain pattern so I wouldn't have to stalk charts all day. One thing led to another (I gave feedback) and I ended up joining the team a few months ago. I've been doing backend development for the platform and doing growth stuff as well.

So why'd you start?

  1. 5

    Most of my projects all stem off each other and are useful for things I'm doing in my job. I started in 2015... and never stopped.

    • I needed a web host that could do all the things I was doing, so I built it.
    • I needed a place I could quickly post notes for others to read, so I built it.
    • I needed a good storage area that let me store big files as well as know the analytics of who was visiting so I built it.
    • I wanted to keep my phone number private when calling people, so I built it.
    • I wanted to keep my phone number private when texting people, so I built it.

    And much more.

    https://notetoservices.com

    1. 3

      Woah the diversity in that list is insane, I'm messing around with some of them right now and bookmarked the page for future use.

      Also, your prices are very reasonable!

      1. 2

        Yeah, I don't sleep, I don't deal with rejection very well, and I hate wasting time. This is like gaming for me. I love figuring out puzzles, solving, and creating. I could sit there for hours playing Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, or Minecraft, but to me, it's not helping me make money nor doing anything to help me at work or sustain the lifestyle I desire.

        I work in the media and I freelance for quite a few companies, so I know their pains and often end up buidling things to solve their problems along with my own, usually building things to solve my problems ends up solving their problems, and that's how I usually stay motivated to do this.

        Instead of developing fully "custom projects" for individual companies, I build a "general product" and let them pay for the service. Way better than charging $200 one-time up front and then I'm done.... why do that when I can keep my clients paying monthly for features and maintenance.

        I build stuff that I need or want to see improved. And the services are priced affordably because it's just me. I do hire people to help me once in a while, but anyone who wants to use the products is helping me to support that particular product. I wish I could quit my day job and focus on this full-time, but once I build a product and add the initial features, I don't usually go and add more unless I see people are actually wanting more or requesting features.

        But for now... I'll keep exploring new areas and building new things! Started getting into WordPress plugin development recently so I am just about done with my quaratine project, which was something I wanted to personally see, but didn't exist, unless you have it custom built. So I streamlined it. It's still in beta and Iam waiting plugin approval, but a sneak peak: https://rewindwp.com

  2. 4

    I wanted to build something, and I wanted to share my specialist knowledge.

    It turns out, there are very frequently repeated questions here on IH that ask for my knowledge, so I've started writing that in book form.

    1. 1

      That sounds awesome, I just signed up your mailing list

  3. 3

    I built EmailThis (https://www.emailthis.me) because I wanted a simple way to save articles and web pages without having to install and log in to a zillion apps.

    I used to be a big fan of a bookmarking service called Readability but it was shut down a couple of years ago. It was after that that I decided to build something like this on my own. I ran EmailThis as a personal tool for about a year before deciding to launch it as a freemium product.

    1. 1

      Ok this is a creative tool I didn't know I needed, just downloaded it

  4. 3

    I started Snap Search because I was tired of seeing advertisements for everything I searched online. If I google searched a new song out, I'd see ads about that singer. If I searched the current exchange rate, I'd get ads about forex and so and so forth.

    I wanted a really good privacy solution. I built my own. Here it is on the store: Snap Search

    1. 1

      Wish it was on iOS as well (or a web app). Maybe add that to the roadmap?

      1. 1

        To be honest, I've already made like 20% of it. But I'm just really good at Android and I keep taking that forward and making the iOS version even more behind. I wish I was good enough to do both simultaneously at equal speeds. But iOS is coming.. Just wish it would come faster.

  5. 3

    I quit my job about two months ago not knowing it was the worst possible time to do so.

    I thought of freelancing for a bit, but after weeks of struggling to find clients (I'm a CTO / web developer) I was getting very few bites. The thing is -- people still need websites. They just can't invest the capital right now with the whole pandemic thing going on. So I put together https://financed.dev/ to offer web development financing. Big-ticket items like houses and cars are financed: You don't pay for them up-front. Why should it be different with websites, which can be just as expensive?

    It's actually an idea I had years ago but never bothered to develop until now. The difficult financial situation everyone's going through made me feel like it's needed now more than ever. Hopefully I can help some people make their dreams come true even if they can't afford to pay for it right now.

    1. 1

      Love the idea and can totally see the need for it, just visited your site. Looks great!

  6. 3

    A bunch of motivations:
    1.) I saw an unfilled market need.
    2.) I thought about an open source project but figured it'd take as much work but I wouldn't get paid.
    3.) My employer was "abusive".
    4.) I need to work from home and a flexible schedule to accommodate new needs as the result of a crash.

    Interesting to read others' motivations.

    1. 1

      All good reasons on their own merit, love to hear it

  7. 2

    I started a couple of side projects before but always failed to get growth because i didn't have a userbase. Made me come up with the idea to create a sign up page where users could leave there email and get notified when my product launches. I now created a site builder to create such sites and expanded it with experimentation and metrics.

    in short:

    • I was tired of having to set up a website that would take days to create before even testing the interest
    • Not sure what text copy attracts users actually, with A/B testing i easily can
    • Keeping my contacts in one place and being able to send them mails whenever i want is easy and i don't need another tool to do that.
    • Gathering metrics to Google analytics is nice, but now i can also check what copy changes actually get's me the most users.

    https://betanotify.com/

    1. 1

      Woah love the idea & can definitely see the use case.

      Any plans for monetization?

      1. 1

        Not yet, trying to grow my customer base first so i can get a sight on what's acceptible

  8. 2

    I've always been a big fan of the Snapchat/Instagram Story UI format but I wasn't the biggest fan of the content on those applications. At the same time I wanted a single place where I could get up to speed on various topics. Something as simple as possible. I ended up combining the ideas:

    https://storystreamer.live

    1. 1

      Bookmarked!, this is really creative.

      Any plans for monetization?

      1. 1

        Thanks!

        Just focusing on making a great product and getting users at this point!

  9. 2

    Deployment from Scratch:

    • realization that people avoid systemd/SELinux (when in fact there are great tools and defaults already used by your system)
    • promotion of Fedora/CentOS systems (felt like everybody from the Ruby community just defaults to Ubuntu)
    • will to improve my own deployment for my side projects (by writing a book I have to constantly research and question everything)

    Get Tandem:

    • my need for a language exchange in Brno

    I wanted to find my own tandem partner and my brother already got the only English one that was signed up in an internal system of our International Student Club. So after realization nobody promotes language exchange in Brno I started Get Tandem and also made it default for our International Student Club. Note that this project is much older than today well known alternatives....

    1. 1

      Regarding deployment from scratch, god I love that landing page so much.

      1. 1

        Thank you for your kind words:).

  10. 2

    Stock Alarm is awesome and I can definitely relate to that. Would be great if it had crypto support!

    So far the products I've built are based around productivity and things I wish existed:

    I built https://timeblocks.co because meetings were stealing my time.
    I built https://wangll.co because it was hard for my team to stay accountable and focussed.
    I building https://getthebrief.com because I knew I had to read the news but was too lazy to do so.

    1. 1

      Thanks so much for the support, Stock Alarm does support crypto actually ! (check out BTCUSDT)

      All of these tools fit into the same category (productivity & utility). Maybe you should make a landing page where you describe each tool and then link to them? Would be cool to see

      1. 1

        Oh really? Will do!

        I actually did that on my personal site tabansi.com

  11. 2

    I was working remote in a distant country for over four years and got really sick of working in Slack. I see a green status icon so send a quick question, the teammate responds the following day. 'Sorry I was sleeping and left my computer on what's up!' What is the point in having status icons!!!!

    I was hearing about and experiencing many issues working remote and decided to build a solution.

    https://www.mydigitaloffice.io/

    1. 1

      Well done on that front, it looks awesome. I had a hard time finding the pricing model though!

      1. 1

        Thanks @yahiabakour. Flat rate pricing: $99/mo for 20 people, $250 for 50.

    2. 1

      I like the idea of this virtual "office". Well done. I also hate Slack where everybody seem to love it?

      1. 1

        Thanks! Thinking about adding a virtual pub feature soon :) Everyone knows how to use chat since AIM. So it is easy for teams to pick Slack up early. But after a while, a lot of people find issues with only chat for remote teams. There are definitely more people :)

  12. 2

    I'm basically only ever happy when I have a side-project to work on, and I had been without inspiration for a while. I was idly working on an idle brower game when I realized that every time I started a new app, I had to reimplement the same things every time - user creation/auth/management, payments, etc.

    Then I realized that I'm probably not the only person with that problem, so I transitioned what I'd learned this time into a more extendable codebase, and re-focused it to SaaS founders, since they'll likely find more value in it and be able to pay more than idle game creators.

    I'm still working on it, but I have a landing page, mailing list, branding, all that good stuff in the meantime: Nodewood - a SaaS starter kit.

    1. 1

      Love the idea, do you support multiple languages/frameworks?

  13. 1

    Curiosity is a big thing indeed!

    One other reason I make VenturesList is also because I get asked by the community a lot about the venture investing landscape. So I just put it up.

    Your product looks amazing! @yahiabakour

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