I spent 1 year building the product before launching, is it too late?

👋 Hey Fellow IndieHackers!

It is very common practice in startup scenes to spend minimal time building a MVP (Minimal Viable Product) and launch as soon as possible. While this is true for many cases, but as a software engineer I always feel uncomfortable putting something that I worked over the weekends or over the course of few weeks time, in front of people and asking for feedback. I agreed that this is right way to validate your product before wasting your precious time going down the wrong path. But, it could varies depend on the product you are building. Some just take longer to build.

Recently, Figma was acquired by Adobe in a deal worth about $20 billion in cash and stock. Looking back at Figma's story, the founders spent 3 years silently building Figma before releasing to public (https://www.figma.com/blog/design-meet-the-internet/). At that time, UI/UX design was mostly siloed and offline. Figma was betting on online collaborative tool, similar to GoogleDocs instead of offline application like MicrosoftWord. They faced a lot of criticism, some even said if this was the future of design, they were changing careers. This was in the early days of Web2 era, where users were mostly consumers, and most applications were offline like MicrosoftOffice, Adobe and etc. Figma was changing the landscape by allowing online collaboration, users are consumers and creators at the same time. Fast forward today, a similar pattern has emerged - Web3.

Same as every new technology, feeling threatened by change is part of being human. There are a lot critics about Web3 about how there is no real use case, how it is just another fancy term to scam people and etc. And I agreed, not all things need to be solved by blockchain nor built in Web3. Imagine a Figma clone in Web3 with FIG token, is it necessary? Absolutely not, simply because Figma is already solving the design collaboration problem and it works well. What blockchain and Web3 are trying to solve is another set of problem, those that need single source of truth and transparency. For instance, supply chain, financial data reconciliation, asset tokenization and etc.

At work, I had the privilege and opportunity to involve in some of the enterprise blockchain projects in financial services. They aren't some fancy projects just because of the "blockchain" title, but are truly solving the problem, cutting down cost and improving efficiency. Although many projects are still on private blockchains like Hyperledger Fabric, with the advancement of layer 2 scaling solutions and newer interoperable chains, features like data privacy, low fees, and speed that used to drive enterprises to opt for private chains, are now feasible on open-source, public chains like Polygon, Avalanche and etc. Lots of the time, we find ourselves writing custom scripts to interact between on-chain data and internal tools. We tried bunch of automation tools out there but nothing that suits our needs.

This is why I created Outerbridge (https://www.outerbridge.io/), an open source low code automation tool, focusing on integrating both on-chain (web3) and off-chain (web2) applications. I spent a year building on it because of 2 reasons:

1. It is open source, codes are available online and I don't want to set a bad coding standard at the start (though it isn't perfect but it is something I am comfortable with)

2. It needed a good amount of different Web3 and Web2 integrations for people to find it useful.

Since releasing Outerbridge on Github (https://github.com/Outerbridgeio/Outerbridge), the tool has helped many web3 developers to integrate their existing Web2 tech stacks with Web3 apps. It also helped web2 developers to transition their way into web3 development. Outerbridge is built to be easily extensible, allowing people to build their custom integrations or extend current functionalities.

I believe a good product can find its way to market. Without any promoting (count this one out😂), developers started noticing it and are getting benefits out of it, and even a VC firm (Venture Capital) reached out for partnership and investment! I wouldn't say I had achieved great milestones but hopefully it is off for a good start 🚀🚀

Looking back the amount of time I spent building it over weekends and after work (and many more to come), does it worth it? Yes. Do I have self doubt as in will anyone use it, is it needed? Yes. Do I recommend people to try this path? It depends. Everyone is different and same goes to product you are building. I've built different products and started several ventures before but often I gave up too quickly. Two thing that I've learnt throughout the years of building, persistence and consistency, use them wisely and sky is the limit.