What was your first product?

My first commercial product was an iOS game called Eve of Impact, I launched it 10 years ago, October 2011

Worked on it for 2 years in the evening hours. It was my first serious side project. Told everyone about it so they would ask me how things were going which forced me to push on.

Wrote a custom render engine, physics engine, and sound engine. Learned about memory management, learned OpenGLES, learned C and Objective-C. It was quite the ride.

It was priced at 3 dollars or something and I’ll never forget the joy of someone else deciding to spend money on something I made. Incredible.

My first product was a Facebook App (back in 2007) which let people embed a playlist of music on their profile. It did ~50k in ad revenue for a few years before the RIAA said take it down or we'll sue you. I was using a music search engine that claimed to be legal, but their label deals fell through and all their end users/devs got threatening letters. Was fun while it lasted! Now much prefer to work on [https://divjoy.com/](businesses that charge money).

I created my first software product in 1999, while I was at college studying computer science. It was a free, open-source membership program for a student website. As it became popular, people began paying me for customizations.

I still remember the thrill of getting that first check — for a whopping $150. It felt like a huge milestone. I soon created a paid version that started racking up downloads when it was mentioned on a SitePoint newsletter.

My brother and I published video games back in the 90s, for the Acorn Archimedes. Oddly, although I have been coding since I was seven, he did all the coding for the games except the ARM machine code routines for special effects and sprites, which was more my area.

The machines weren't popular outside of their Desktop Publishing (DTP) niche, so we didn't sell many copies! We made enough money out of our first game to purchase a legal copy of a C compiler, and spent the rest on a dodgy Chinese meal that gave both of us the runners the next day....

Technically these were my first commercial endeavours.

[Edit] Someone apparently recorded some gameplay of one of our games. The internet is an amazing place... Here's EuroBlaster

I guess the first one that I really put my all into was before single page web apps were all the rage, and in an era where people still downloaded apps for desktop with great frequency. I built a Python app (with wxWidgets for the UI) to help with writing lyrics. I connected it to a rhyming dictionary so that as you were writing your lyrics out, you could query for words that rhymed pretty easily.

I wrote it as a kid while I was in college. Didn't really go anywhere because I didn't do much on the marketing end. But it combined two of my favorite hobbies at the time, so I was super excited about it!

An HTML web page with neon flashing text and a dancing Mario

My first product was an iOS app I built when I was studying in college (about 8 years ago now). It was a life counter app for Magic: the Gathering. It ended up reaching the front page of the largest subreddit for Magic: the Gathering for a couple days, which was really cool.

Here is the image post I used to share it on Reddit:

I have built a lot of products but the serious one is currently what I am building.. Its called Fusion.

https://github.com/fusion-hq/fusion

What is it?

Its an opensource fullstack analytics and engagement solution! This gives the power of product and growth tools at Big tech companies! We are building for the future of analytics and product growth. Understanding user never done before!

My first product was a online blog in 2014 covering action sports called Cuso Sports Network.

We ended up being paid to write articles for a regional MMA organization, and was able to get media access to events like PBR bull riding and Dew Tour Breckenridge.

I don't know why these places gave us press passes; my friends and I were literally renting cameras from the school library and standing next to NBC. It also hardly made any money, and I got burned out of generating content.

But! I learned a lot of lessons by actually getting out there and doing something in the real world.

My first product was podcast cover template designs for podcasters.

http://podcastcover.info/

My first paid product is GetIpsum, a placeholder text generator for digital creatives that sits in the Mac menu bar (https://www.indiehackers.com/product/getipsum).
It has been available in the Mac app store for a bit over 4 months now, it doesn't make that much $ but it chugs along 😊

ERP for Colleges and and Training Centers back at 2004 ! I use to run this product until 2011 with great revenue then i sell it to company. Was a desktop app built with Visual Basic.

In the early days of the Unity game engine, they had just added the ability to compile your game for iOS as well as other platforms (~2009/2010).

This was a BIG deal.

People were finally getting to play mobile games other than Snake and people wanted to compile their games to iOS to tap into this huge new market- but game devs were mainly on PC, and there was no way to build for mac without access to a mac.

I built a CI engine with rented mac minis (before it was called "the cloud") with Unity installed on them, to build the iOS binaries and ship them to you.

It worked well, but I couldn't figure out how to get people to give me their code/projects in a better way than just SCPing the files to a server somewhere. This was long before commit hooks or even giving access to a git repo (I don't even know if git was mainstream at the time- I didn't hear about git until like 2014). Unity projects had art assets that made the projects massive, it was a hard problem.

I never ended up launching because I couldn't create "the perfect" user experience. I felt shame that I couldn't find a better method than SCP. I was so inexperienced and cared too much what others thought of my solutions. The community was crying out for the tool I was writing, but I was so cheap to not want to pay for the servers while I got it up and running, and I wasn't happy unless it was perfect.

Unity eventually launched exactly this service to great applause from the community.

I created my first project at the age of 20 (2019) https://westeria.app/. A social network were we wanted to promote freedom of speech and diversity. Basically Westeria was offering easy and simple navigation among related topics, for the users to discover intriguing communities they never knew existed.
We also provided split ownership among its users, so THEY can decide what is good for the community and what is not. Thus, making public authorities, like moderators redundant.

After we launched we manage to create some early traction, but eventually we were forced to shut it down.

My first paid product is wickedtemplates.com
sooo proud of it.

but my first try out is colorsandfonts.com

My first product was Flexbox Defense, a tower defense game that teaches you CSS. I built it back in 2016 to scratch my own itch (I was teaching myself how to code), so I didn't have much of a marketing or monetization plan other than to launch it and see what happened.

Interestingly, this discussion prompted me to check, and it looks like it actually hit the HN homepage again in 2020. Nice to see it's still helping people all these years later!

My first product is http://lightgalleryjs.com/.

I wrote lightGalery to learn JavaScript in 2012. Now it is used by thousands of companies, and I earned enough to quit my full-time job.

Would you mind letting me know the name of your first product? I'm currently building a product similar to rescuetime but for personal use.

https://www.samay.live/ - I don't even have the home page ready.
But it would be really helpful for me if you could take a look at the product and share feedback based on your experience with your first product.

My first software allowed women and men to rate how good someone was in bed

My first product was an e-commerce store about 2 years ago. It was based on the concept of using clothing to pair everyday consumers with nonprofits. We partnered up with a few nonprofits and donated 50% of the profit towards them.

But, e-commerce is hard - so many competitors out there (major props to all the e-commerce and clothing store owners out there)! I learned so much from the successes and many failures :P. We closed the chapter last year and did a 180 turn towards software :).

My first product I just launched today on Product Hunt. Would love to hear your feedback, indie hackers.
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/amazing-websites

I decided to start small with a content product, based on the lower risk and learning experience. Last year I launched my first book, cutintothejamstack.com. I'm still releasing chapters, promoting, and really loving it.

I've learned a ton this go-around and would recommend that anyone interested in indiehacking start small in this manner.

In 2011 I started working on "Qwiple", which I described as social journalism. I had found that creating a blog was difficult, and I wanted to make it easier. (Not the tech aspect of it, but buiding an audience)

I used to enjoy blogging, but only if I had something I wanted to say, which would be a few times/year. Building an audience without regular content is near impossible.

I started Qwiple as a way to solve it. You, as an author, would just contribute to the blog. Content that was popular was featured on the home page. I was even working through revenue sharing with the authors.

Then Medium launched.

You see, I had the classic chicken/egg problem with content. I was buying ghost articles from Fiverr every day, but it wasn't enough.

At one point I ready Medium was paying people for content. I couldn't afford to keep up.

Anyway, after 3 years I gave up and closed it. I wish it would have gone differently.

My first product was a was the "alpha"/landing page release of log.fm. Where users will be able to create personal podcast/RSS feeds for the podcast episodes they have appeared in, either as as host or a guest. You will also be able to create custom podcast playlists and even private podcasts.

My first product was a computer game that I wrote when I was 12-13 years old on my Commodore64. But that was within the curiosity of learning about new technologies.

When I was studying at the polytechnic, I opened a software house, did dozens of different projects, and tried to make my products there (including first mobile payments).

After several different projects and attempts, I managed to get pretty far with one of them. The tool was based on a web browser, which allowed for communication between the speaker and the conference participants in real-time. It changed their smartphones in the microphone, so you did not have to pass it among people in the audience. The application also allowed audio and text communication, conducting polls and surveys, and, importantly, identifying participants.

I described this history a few years ago here

Mine is a Zoom companion app that lets you bookmark important points during a video meeting and turns them into short clips. Been working on it for 2 years and finally launched it today. 2nd launch but first product I built.

If you want to check it out, here's the link

http://super-ali.com/ - It's a product research platform for Shopify dropshippers that helps them find trending products before spy tools.

This weird business niches generator :) https://nichegenerator.xyz/

I literally launched my first product yesterday (https://saassuperstore.com) it's a "Flash Sale" marketplace for indie hackers.

In short, I want to help SaaS owners make sales.

Mine was an app called Fmail that let you check your Gmail on Facebook. I created it in college with a roommate of mine. We even skinned it to match Facebook's theme at the time. It never made any money, because we never added a business model. But it generated lots of buzz. It's a bit sad that I can't find any of the old news articles now, as there were dozens, but this was back in 2007.

Though I retired the project after two years, a competitor (https://www.rescuetime.com) which was founded a year after has managed to dominate that market to date.

That's funny, I was an avid RescueTime user while I was building Fmail :)

A social media platform where you could store and share quotes from your favorite books https://www.kwotet.com

In 2007 I started a blog about playing guitar.

In 2009 I created a newsletter where subscribers received a guitar exercise every week.

In 2010 I created an e-book that contained guitar exercises for a whole year and started selling that to my email list. It sold well enough to support me through university.

I guess the e-book was my first product. In the end I stopped working on it because I wasn't passionate enough about being a teacher and writing. I learned a lot from that time though and I'm really glad that I got to get a taste of selling a digital product early on. I've been trying to make a product that both sells well and that I'm passionate about since then. 🤓

My first open-sourced product is a browser extension that handles the dark theme for Grammarly on the web (officially, there's only a light theme).

i have plenty of products, but i started doing as a service that turns into product after that. Most of it is on my website https://fajarsiddiq.com

But this year 2022, i started https://fajarsiddiq.gumroad.com hoping to create some digital products as well. Thanks for sharing this disucssion

Having a lot of fun reading through all these first product stories tbh. I'm still on my first product right now, launching on Monday! It's a community-driven, double-sided marketplace (why did I choose such a difficult model as a first product?!) for free business ebooks and guides. One side for readers, always free, the other side publishers, free to list, pay to get your leads. Book listings tied back into a social e-reader app.

We're only just getting started but I have so many ideas for it beyond business reading. Here's hoping for a hell of a ride with this one!

Created and sold programming courses. Separate from that, tried to sell products that other people made. Mylinks is actually my first software project.

My first membership product was an offline one, one of the first coworking spaces back in 2006 and we're still around today as a hybrid online/offline community (though largely online while COVID is still a concern).

My first ever business was exporting computer and console games from UK to italy.

It was right before amazon existed. There was an huuuge profit on each game (sometimes 150%), but then amazon killed everything

My first product was QueNews, we summarized news from various outlets and then converted it into Audio using Speech Synthesis tech. Launched it about 3 years ago, although thinking of reviving it 🤔

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=quenews_app.release&hl=en_IN&gl=US

My first product was a room for rent platform https://roomz.asia in Malaysia back in 2018. We started at a golden time cause the competitors were weak and not many players in the market. Although it is a side project and we're doing it remotely all these years, it's still ranked top 3 websites in the room for rent category. But, we were never able to monetize it except on listing credit, too bad.