This collection contains stories from developers and designers who shared their experience of building awesome digital products. All stories are unique, but equally powerful. Stories are categorized by type of product. Some projects aren’t online anymore but the story of making them remains very inspiring.
Stories of making web applications
Jan from topol.io writes about his experience of building and launching a tool to create beautiful email templates. After their Product Hunt launch, topol.io grabbed the attention of designers, developers, and marketers worldwide, receiving more than 1.1k upvotes on Product Hunt. In terms of having a successful product launch, Jan stresses the importance of building a great product.
CoolHue is a website with beautiful hand-picked gradients that allows developers and designers to create their own palette and work seamlessly with gradients. Nitish, its creator, writes about what he learned during his experience of building and launching CoolHue. The project was built with the simplest technologies and yet it was a huge success on Product Hunt. This made Nitish realize that solving a problem is what matters the most when creating products.
Before building Custodee, a SaaS App based on web crawling, analytics and screenshots, Tony had very limited experience with hands-on coding. Despite already working on a full-time job, Tony decided to start building this web app and learn by doing. After launching Custodee on Product Hunt, Tony got 600+ users, including his first paid users. Tony explains how Custodee is the living proof that it’s never too late to start coding, and that you don’t need a degree in CS in order to build a successful and valuable product.
Type Hero is a tool that lets you preview the entire Google Fonts library and experiment with different text colours and backgrounds. Tekeste, its maker, became overwhelmed with the positive response, after Type Hero became one of the Products of the Day on Product Hunt. However, as any maker knows, the road is tough and it’s often hard to complete personal projects. Tekeste writes about the inevitable emotional journey of creating anything and shares things that helped him overcome challenges and complete Type Hero.
Andrey is a digital nomad who had been dreaming of building his own product and creating something people would use. During his time in Bali, he decided to dive into coding and solve a real problem by creating his first ever product. He created a web app called ‘When to Surf’, which allows surfers to find the best time to surf. Andrey openly writes about the ups and down of creating his app and shares what he learned throughout the way.
Stories of making mobile applications
Jordan shares his experience of building and launching Shade, a desktop app that lets iOS developers know if their color contrast isn’t good enough. With Shade, Jordan’s goal was to build a product quick and find out if people would pay for it. He writes about the awesome feeling of creating something people are finding useful and willing to give money for.
Erik built GoSnaps, a Pokémon GO fan app to share Pokémon GO screenshots and images on a map. GoSnaps grew to 60k users its first day, 160k users on its second day and 500k unique users after 5 days. Erik writes about how crucial it is for MVP to be scalable, as there’s nothing sadder than building a successful app and seeing it fail because of technical issues.
Stories of making other products like desktop apps, frameworks, or design tools.
Cell.js, a new type of front-end web app framework, inspired by how real life cells work to construct complex life forms. In his post, Ethan presents his point of view that dependency is evil and explains how he decided to solve this problem by building a decentralized-first framework.
How Sam Soffes and Matt D. Smith made Contrast - A macOS app for quick access to WCAG color contrast ratios.
Rosita and Sergio decided to give up their financial security to follow their dreams. After several pivots they created and launched Stylepill. They made and launched it in less than 12 hours, and yet Stylepill is the most successful thing they’ve created so far. Rosita and Sergio write this incredible experience and what they’ve learned throughout their entrepreneurial journey
After visiting his family back home, Willem realized that his 93 year-old grandfather had become almost blind and couldn’t be as active as he used to. Looking at issues with existing products, Willem decided to make something better and build his very own audio book reader for his grandfather.