What was your 1st product?

I've created multiple products in the past, but they were more like experiments. Now I've built my first serious product: typethink.ai - a comprehensive AI workspace that serves as a powerful alternative to ChatGPT. I'm really proud of how it turned out.

So true, the hardest part is putting yourself out there. Once you do, everything shifts.

Hey,

My first product is my iOS app that I just launched. I wasn’t a developer originally, but I taught myself, and honestly, with the tools we have today, it’s really accessible.

Basically, my app is mostly a guide, a mindset to help users set simple goals and break them down into micro-habits to achieve those goals.

I’d say the hardest part is distribution and marketing strategy. Finding an idea and turning it into a product is actually the easiest part nowadays with the tools available. The real challenge is generating interest and, above all, creating user community engagement to improve the product.

Lesson learned: Reach out to your future users as early as possible and quickly build a community and excitement around the product that goes with it (Marketing first).

What was your first product?
My first product, that I currently am working on, is something that I started completely out of frustration haha.

I handle L3s, incidents, escalations at work. Every time something comes in, I have to check logs, dashboards, environment parameters. To me it was annoying to collect all the facts, try to understand, and then solve a problem. I realized that the first 2 steps can be automated easily.

So I worked on an application that analyzes all of this for me and tells me what the issue is. Kinda helps me get to issues faster than going through those data points manually. Been pretty helpful at work since even issues on development environments, I have my agents auto-report it to me and put it in a good format with solution.

PS: Please don't tell my boss this haha

What would you do differently to maintain it and make it successful?

I kinda expanded on the MVP. For my solution, it was a wrong decision because whipped something up quickly. I realized how important having good coding and architecture patterns is.

What lesson did you learn from it?

No shortcuts to development. Employ good coding standards, practices early in your product development so that its easy to scale.

JobSwipe AI was my first product—a job matching platform built on the simplicity of swiping, augmented by our proprietary "Adswipe" AI. Our core mission was to eliminate the pain of the traditional job market. To mke it successful i to heavily focus on B2B since they have ability to subscribe, I learned that Success loves speed, and speed is nothing without quality. Speed and Quality must be the key drivers to SaaS and Disrupt the market.

Product link : www.jobswipe.live

Launching Tomorrow

Depends on whether I can call my newsletter a product 😆

• I started working on Curiosity Saved The Cat (a weekly newsletter where I share internet gems in various formats for the curious souls, from OPeds, to videos, underrated news, listicles, games, and interactive websites, and I tie them to a central theme) in the beginning of February, but later in February I started working on Lifetoon, a visual storytelling platform 🫶

• I'd focus more on distribution when it comes to Curiosity Saved The Cat (I kinda started it just for fun and I didn't think about promotion until later on), and I'd do more experiments with Lifetoon to reach more audiences from the very first weeks & test more hypotheses (although we did do a couple of experiments, but I believe we could've done more)

• The lessons are mentioned in what I'd do differently from the very start

My first product in the context of expert market research was a detailed industry report on the Indian personal care sector. Similar to your experience, it was a bit daunting to share because I wasn’t fully confident about the presentation or whether the insights would resonate. I invested significant time gathering primary and secondary data, analyzing trends, and structuring it in a way that would be actionable for businesses. Pricing was modest since it was my first attempt at monetizing my research. Still, I managed to secure my first clients—companies looking for market sizing, competitor benchmarking, and growth opportunities.

Ohhh. It was not AI-based - which is not quite modern right now. A tracking system for workers, similar to Upwork but for builders, roofers, plumbers, and other tradespeople.

My first product was a kids watch to help them conceptualize time and reduce frustration leaving at playgrounds. (also chores, star tracking for good stuff)

Fun, but I will never do a physical product again.

My first product was an online jewelry website, where I created marketing campaigns and generated a customer database. I was quite young at the time, and it was the early stage of my career, so my main focus was on understanding what users wanted and finding ways to meet their needs.