I'm Alyssa X, I've built and shipped 10+ products. AMA.

@avi_nash_rao I've been asked that a lot, here's one of my replies if curious :)

@mal_2017 I have a terrible tech stack to be honest. Most of my projects (with the exception of Later, which I built using Swift) use a combination of jQuery, HTML, and CSS. For the backend my older projects used PHP and MySQL, but I made the switch to using Firebase (and on my most recent one, which I'm still working on, IndexedDB). I have been using Next.js for some of my projects, although I haven't released anything yet. I am hoping I can switch to it, although I kind of feel jQuery is really great for building things quickly and especially for extensions where I have to do very hacky things. As per how I learnt to code, well, I didn't really follow any courses to be honest. I did follow some tutorials to build specific projects, like a to do list for instance, but I mostly just kept trying to build things and looking things up to figure out how to do them, and went from there. I also liked to look into the source code of projects to see how they were made to get a better understanding of how to replicate certain things, I feel like that helped a lot.

@saurabh_daswant 1. I edited it myself, I got all of the teaser videos I made previously and just put them together in After Effects to share in a tweet. I figured it would be a good way for companies to get a sense for what I do. The specific videos themselves I also created myself, most of them are a mix of screen recordings of the products and some design elements here and there, with 3D perspective to give a bit of a fancy effect. I think it works pretty well to catch the attention of users. 2. I’m not sure, I call them product teasers myself, but promotional product videos could work too.

@alyssaxuu Thank you so much!!! this means a lot . i am also a designer and developer building projects!

@amna_habiba I don’t really do a whole lot. When I have a product that’s ready to launch I make a quick teaser video, schedule a launch on Product Hunt (typically on Wednesdays) with a thumbnail image, some images, and all the copy prepared, and schedule social media posts for Twitter and LinkedIn at 8AM SF time. I also make sure to mention to my friends that I’m launching, and I send an email through my newsletter right after the product goes live on Product Hunt to get upvotes early on. I think since I have such a big following on Twitter I have it pretty easy to get users, my tweets get quickly shared around and I’m able to connect with the right target audience for it.

@dsarkar Thank you! I don't know if I really look for prospective clients honestly. I usually tend to share things out on social media or here on Product Hunt and I'm able to connect with the right target audience fairly easily (I think it helps that I have a pretty large following), so I don't really have to cold email or seek potential users.

@ngoakor12 I shared a bit about my journey in another reply. I think I got a lot of my following from being consistent, and being a bit strategic. Early on what I focused on a lot was trying to find products to do case studies and prototypes for, explorations on what I'd do differently and what I'd improve. I got the attention of some companies this way, and it was shared around a lot. From there I just started building my own products, and with every single launch I would get at least a few hundred followers or sometimes over a thousand overnight. The reach on places like Product Hunt and Hacker News makes quite the difference too, plus if you've built somewhat of a brand, making sure all your products are linked back to you, it helps a lot with building an audience.

@auttomatta For a first project I think it's important to be realistic, avoid being too ambitious and make sure it's something you can complete. Also very important to avoid being a perfectionist, you don't want to get stuck working on the same project over and over worrying about the smallest details. The fastest way to learn is by launching and sharing things with others to get feedback, so it's better to just ship something that isn't perfect than spending ages tweaking every single thing until you get frustrated and give up on it entirely.