Let's talk about your first product...

@de Hey! Nice idea discussion. A few years ago I wanted to teach myself some HTML and CSS. Coming from a purely design background I felt like it was time to increase my knowledge of how stuff is actually built. I signed up for Treehouse and devoured a whole load of their courses and soon enough wanted to put what i'd learnt to good use. I'd had this idea for a while about people doing drawings of their favourite album covers and sharing them online, so I set about making it. It was very crude, basically just a huge unordered list, but it was responsive which I was chuffed about. My favourite bit? Learning media queries, and enabling the sketchy little logo i'd done for it change at various different breakpoints. Is it still live? Nah, it seemed a bit frivolous to keep something online that no one looked at and that I didn't keep updated. If you want to see any of the covers though the twitter account is still around - https://twitter.com/HandDrawnLP?... Thanks!

@de the ones that I didn't plan where the ones that worked, the ones that I started on purpose didn't work. I started a small instant messenger prototype to learn more about Python and GTK and it took off and was used by hundreds of thousands of users, it grew a big community of collaborators too, until the network (MSN) closed. I started a small calculator to learn more about Erlang and it grew to the efene programming language, it wasn't a huge success but it got the attention from many people and got me into many conferences and allowed me to meet a lot of people. 9 years ago I tried to create a "startup" () with some friends, we built it and when we launched nobody came, instead of building an MVP and start looking for users we built it almost complete before launching, then we ran out of energy when the product didn't take off. I learned that you should launch early and iterate based on feedback, don't let the user acquisition for later. also that marketing matters.

@de Ah my first product, what memories 🙃 Back in college I had the idea to build a New Tab Chrome Extension that would show a random gif based on keywords to the users. I called it "Aww New Tab" and it is actually still working as of today: https://chrome.google.com/websto... What did I learn? So the fun thing about this project was that I built it _to learn._ My first version used some basic JS and was pretty simple. Then I wanted to learn about Bootstrap and such so I created a new version. Then I learned a little bit about Angular so I built another version. It's always been my "playground" project for learning new languages/technology in the browser for fun. As I said this was also built in college so we had a "demo day" type of activity that I was able to show this off at as well, so overall it hit a bunch of learning points for me that I am grateful for. Is it live? It is still live but I haven't touched it in a couple of years. Based on Google Analytics some people are still using it so it's good to see it isn't crashing 😎 I did launch it on PH a while back as a learning experience in launching and gathering feedback. I love this discussion though! I haven't checked out Aww New Tab in a while now and looking at it again...it's got me thinking what I could do to improve it 🧐

@de my first solo-product is Clarify, it came from my own personal experience of dealing with my employer and the lack of professional development initiatives or tools offered. I helped myself by logging and tracking my own professional achievements and used them to show my employer the value I had personally created for them in dollars and time, which helped me personally, grow in my career and double my salary. I employed the same tactic with a fellow co-worker, until I decided there had to be a better way execute this at scale. Our goal is to provide professionals with the right tools and data to help them manage their careers, beat their performance reviews, and their resumes. Clarify is actually built using "no-code", and although this is the case, I think my background in business analytics, and experience with VBA and Excel logic, is helping me push "no-code" to the limit. My next step is to learn API implementation so that I can push Clarify even further and expand on the possibilities of Clarify. What did I learn? Launching is easy, anyone can do it. Selling and distribution is difficult, especially if you're going at it solo, and dedication to the grind is key, but in the long run it's what separates the want-epreneurs from the entrepreneurs. I've enjoyed the ride of emotions, it's a great mental exercise is how i see it. Is it still live? Yes, and I've set aside my own fund to run this for the next 2 years at the very least.