How did you come up with your product idea?
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I'm amazed by the number of products that launch on PH every day. I think it would be cool to know what inspired you to build your product.
For me, I desperately was trying to solve my own problems and frustrations. For nearly 20 years that I'm building online communities, I realised that our competition didn't solve for the two most basic problems:
Organic Growth
User Retention
I mean, they did in some way. But I had better ideas. It took me about 1 year to develop my first prototype and I wondered if I should launch it.
I didn't. BIG MISTAKE!
A few years passed by and I decided to give it a try. Boom! We got paying customers.
That's my story - and I'd like to know yours. Share it below in the comments.
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Replies
Hey Kaustubh! Thanks for asking this. I think it's nice to see what drives people to build their products.
In my case, I have to admit I was super curious to see the process of taking an idea and turning it into a product - before starting to work on Lifetoon, I only had experience working with established businesses or startups that already achieved PMF.
I'm so glad to hear you ultimately decided to launch your product, even if you had a couple of hesitations! In my case, I felt quite nervous during Lifetoon's first launch. But once that first launch passed, I noticed how excited I was to start building again. While I was nervous during my first launch with Lifetoon, I'm super excited now for my second launch with Escape Velocity AI.
Do you plan on building more products in the future? Or are you keeping your focus on Jatra?
@ruxandra_mazilu - I like it and I'm sure you're enjoying the 0->1 journey of building products and launching them. I noticed you're launching soon. hit me up when you do; and I'll be happy to support.
For Jatra - it's a large product; and that's our focus for now. However, there are plans to launch small products over the course of time. There are plenty of opportunities in the community-building space.
@thebigk That's so kind, thank you! I'm working on a product that gives founders a McKinsey consultant in their browser, without the fees. Let me know if it sounds interesting and if you'd be curious to be one of our first users - nothing compares to the feedback received from the early users.
Also, yes! I also feel like there is a lot of room in the community-building space for new products and experiments. I truly believe that people will start turning more and more to communities in the future, so the opportunities to grow products in this space will only get higher. But, I'm curious to see your take on this!
MoMoney was actually born out of a single conversation with a friend.
I actually started with a totally different idea: an Instagram-style stock screener.
But through long convos and lots of customer discovery, we stumbled into a “Duolingo for the markets” concept.
So we shipped that out asap but turns out, most beginners that want to learn the markets aren’t lazy: they’re already disciplined, just overwhelmed and lacking direction. Their pain points' are the lack of sources and the lack of a seamless way to start trading & investing live. and trading & investing well. So we attacked that with our next ship.
And now we're rolling with MoMoney: an AI-powered market sandbox designed to make learning markets as humanly smooth and accessible as possible.
@dheerajdotexe Great story!
Makes a ton of sense! We're also building to solve our own problems. I noticed so many challenges with doing good market research, especially being around the startup community, so many people built before they even understood their customers. We wanted to make a survey tool that really helped flip that script so early stage founders build the right thing.
@rob_blaine That's an interesting problem to solve.
@thebigk thanks, happy to show you how it works. Always love hearing feedback!
Love this — thanks for sharing your story so openly. I’ve found the same thing: scratching your own itch tends to lead to the most durable ideas.
In my case, I was working with service-based businesses that kept sending paper waivers to clients, or using clunky PDF forms that barely worked on mobile. It was a terrible experience — both for them and their customers.
So I built Waivify — a dead-simple digital waiver tool designed for solo instructors and small teams. No fluff, just quick setup, mobile-friendly signing, and easy tracking. What started as a weekend build turned into something real once I saw people sharing it in their client onboarding flows.
Crazy how far a personal pain point can take you once you act on it.
What about you — what pushed you over the edge to finally launch?
@jordansvision - you've got a good domain; but it's throwing an error right now.
@jordansvision what’s the domain again?
NoSho.app
I have been looking to create a product I was truly passionate about for 20 years and my idea came about when myself and my partner were having problems booking last-minute availability;
I was trying to get a haircut and my partner wanted her nails done, something so simple which we all do most months using a variety of businesses. We were sick of the painful loop - checking Google, looking at reviews, viewing calendars for availability or checking Instagram, DM'ing them, viewing stories just to see if we can have a bit of their time. Usually the time had passed by the time you had done all this and you had a wasted hour of your day.
So last year I started to design and build NoSho.app, a platform to help all businesses list last-minute slots, grow a waitlist and take secure deposits. For customers, we can quickly book availability, pay a deposit if required and get notified when a slot becomes available without the back and forth.
I'm excited to share NoSho next month on Product Hunt, I hope it helps a lot of people.