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

@xtabbas Well, I don't really approach them at all I would say xP I don't do sales as I don't really charge for any of my products, although I plan on starting to so I can manage to work on my projects full-time instead of relying on a job. Marketing for me is just launching on Product Hunt, HackerNews, and tweeting it out, I don't really market post launch. I don't have a co-founder, I do everything solo :P Although in the future I'd love to collaborate with someone who could handle more the marketing / sales part, to build better products.

@daniel_modell1 Thank you so much Daniel!

@toshvelaga Honestly, nope, I haven't read the docs lol. I just looked specific things up for what I needed to do, for converting to GIF and MP4 specifically. Although honestly I still don't have it fully figured out, I realized the javascript version of FFMPEG does not support the OPUS audio format so it is unable to convert WEBM videos created client-side into MP4. Annoying stuff. Ended up having to do it in Node in AWS Lambda and it was a lot other headaches, tricky stuff. So yeah I can't really share any specific resources, I mostly just kept browsing all over the place and trying things out xP

@5harath Hey Sharath :) It's hard to say, especially since one of the reasons I build products is specifically to come across challenges and learn new skills. I think the most challenging one is an unreleased one (WIP), a web-based motion graphics editor similar to After Effects. I had to figure out a million different things, such as keyframing for all sorts of properties, how to animate the canvas, how to group and nest animations, masking objects, and probably the hardest one of all, how to render effectively, without it taking ages or being super expensive (especially considering I am boostrapped, so I don't have a bunch of cash from investors :P). There's solutions such as the AWS Elastic Transcoder, but it costs roughly $0.015 per minute of video, which might get expensive with lots of users & long videos. I ended up figuring it out, with a lot of different hacks to render as fast as possible, and ending up with a total render cost of ~$0.0022/minute of video, which I'm pretty happy with.

@michaeljelly Hmm good question. I do enjoy making products by itself, it's certainly fun to get an idea and be able to execute it. But it's also a way for me to get more opportunities - I actually got my first job and subsequent ones thanks to my portfolio of products, plus it's been a great way for me to improve in design and development. I think the dream for me would be to be able to build all sorts of things full-time. I've had the chance in the past to turn several of my products into companies, but I don't want to dedicate myself to just 1 thing, I feel like it would be too limiting. And I don't just mean building websites, I also have an interest in mobile apps, native apps, and particularly game development, which I used to do a lot of years ago. I've been looking into ways to make that possible, trying to get an income from my creations, possibly starting a Youtube channel, writing a book, making courses, etc. It's still unfortunately more of a side thing :)