What's the first thing you ever tried building?
I'm sending you down memory lane!
Do you remember your first attempt at indie hacking?
And what happened to the product?
Is it alive and kicking? Or is it resting in peace?
I'm sending you down memory lane!
Do you remember your first attempt at indie hacking?
And what happened to the product?
Is it alive and kicking? Or is it resting in peace?
Real-time 3D video game. Company was alive for 15 years.
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Two brothers were looking for a tech lead to start a video game studio that would become Hydravision (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mighty_Rocket_Studio). I was 20 years old and jumped on the opportunity. Meeting in Cafes, offices in their parents garage, riding a bicycle with dozens of floppy disks in your MacGyver-style pants ... like on TV except we never thought about it. We were just trying to get the 3DSMax models into the real-time 3D engine, get to a playable demo, figuring out how to make realistic smoke, ...
I left when the company started to grow significantly for a position in Silicon Valley - Eh, 22 years old and the chance to play in the major league (https://www.forbes.com/sites/rakeshsharma/2014/07/21/america-is-tres-bien-for-frence-entrepreneurs/), who could resist?
I have never written about those times, nor the four other companies I co-founded after that. It is only recently that I started to blog - sporadically - about the entrepreneurship journey (http://djaodjin.com/blog/typical-day-building-boutique-hosting-platform.blog.html), mostly because I shifted from the technical co-founder to the business guy :).
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The first thing I ever built was a site for arguing with friends for fun. I designed and developed everything on the site, launched it and got 10k views after sharing it with 40 people. Then I realized that it wasn't the right project for me at the time as it would take a whole content team and advertising strategy I wasn't prepared for.
Tons of fun though!
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Thank you! It technically is still live. But I'm not working on it at the moment. Honestly one of the most fun parts about it was having these questions as icebreakers.
My friend LOVED the site, and would ask everyone at parties/in ubers/wherever questions from the app. We'd immediately get into such incredible discussions.
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That's a great idea! I've talked about revisiting it down the line. I'm currently fully engaged on a different product, maybe after it's cruising.
I didn't have enough content to go for best of, but there are definitely crowd favorites.
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The first thing I ever built was a cofounder matching platform wayyyy back in college.
It's still alive and pretty popular, having gone through several iterations and new owners since my early MVP.
Just for the record, cofounder matching platforms are a terrible idea!
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A video game delivery service. The idea was to utilize Uber drivers and deliver games, extra controllers, etc to feed people's retro cravings. I built the webapp but never launched cause it didn't make since on paper. Good learning experience!
Simple CRM, because I have a sales background, that was for learning purpose.
When I was in third grade, my friend and I started an eraser tattoo shop.
Our fellow students would give us their plain white pencil erasers and we would tattoo any design they would like onto it. We charged $1 for each tattoo.
We made enough to support our sweet tooth, but safe to say it's no longer alive and kicking
Built "GUU - an online design magazine" (2003) together with two designers (the project lasted a few years). I was the programmer of a home made CMS built with PHP4 allowing designers to share links to cools sites they loved with a comment. We discovered quickly that the "feed/timeline" of small stories was what made people come back to the site so I made a leaderboard in the CMS so the moderators was motivated to post more which again lead to more posting and activity in the tiny feed on the site.
I started programming for real a few years before that, but this was a team effort and something that got attention at the time and we had a lot of fun.
Do you remember the time nested tables was used for HTML layouts? :D
RIP here: https://web.archive.org/web/20030803131146/http://guu.nu/
Hey Rosie !
Well, my first ever is Colors & Fonts
( colorsandfonts.com )
While I keep getting users I struggle to increase the number.
Since the launch on PH 2 months ago it went from between 15 and 40 users daily to between 80 and 200 daily talking round round numbers.
I started to announce ( "spamm8ng" almost ) the site on FB...and well here we are.
Revenue, 30 € at month ( i haven't even pass google ads threshold )
I submitting the site in directories, launch pages.
From IH comes a big portion thou.
Have a good one Rosie !
Whilst at uni I built prizeprofile.com a website with aggregated to-free-enter competitions. We also built an integration for twitter so you could enter competitions in one click instead of having to manually RT, Follow, Comment etc. Still running but slightly neglected!
I tried to create a website to share Netflix accounts but it never made it to production because of the legal issues.
I made a site that sold posters for gyms, it did a few sales but it never got past ramen profitability so I canned it!
I tried to create a motorcycle classified ads site. It's dead. Didn't spend enough time building an audience before building/launching a product. It's beyond dead.