We bought an indie product in August. Here's what we learned taking it to launch.

In August, Ross and I bought N8N Chat UI from its original creator. He'd built something brilliant: the widget, streaming, voice, file uploads and the JavaScript API were all his work. Our job was to take it further and get it in front of more people.

What we've learned in the 12 weeks since:

You inherit decisions you didn't make. Pricing, free tiers, naming. Some of it we kept, and some we're still working out. It's humbling to defend a choice you'd never have made yourself, then find out why it was made.

Plugins open more doors than features do. Our first big step was meeting people where they already are: WordPress, Wix, Webflow and an n8n community node. Most people don't want an embed snippet. They want a button in the tool they already use.

Content is the product too. We rebuilt the docs and wrote step-by-step recipes (bookings, lead capture, support handoff), because "it can do anything" doesn't help anyone get started.

Launch day is the real user research. Today's comments have already changed our roadmap.

If you've ever thought about buying a product instead of building one from scratch, ask us anything. Happy to be honest about the good and the messy parts.

— Dani & Ross