What was your first ever product?
I recently tweeted about my first product which was a whole system to control and observe real-life escape rooms.
I built it while I was working as a "Gamemaster" for escape rooms and saw how awful these systems were.
The problem: I sold it for $5,000 and didn't even intend to sell subscriptions to other escape room providers, even though the whole system was very powerful (and cheap to run!)
In retrospect, a big mistake, BUT I'm not beating myself up for it since I was just 18, naive, and didn't know any better. It was my first touch with entrepreneurship, and I fell in love right away, and that is what counts for me!
What was your first product? Why did you build it, and how did it turn out?
The first "product" was a jump n run game that I developed during high school when I was about 16. C++ and DirectX - I did not sell it but it was pretty popular among my high school buddies and I even got features on a local television show that showed off hobby games.
It was around 1999/2000/2001.
Actually I want to have a look at my old code - I am pretty sure it's VERY bad. Don't know how it actually ran.
I made a time table app for local trains back in 2012. Added some live update features to it. It was a free app but made some decent cash with Adsense for almost a year before I got busy into other things.
I prepared a Project Management Kit for Notion with my friend. We launched Product Hunt and took +250 upvote and collected +1000 mail. It was a big deal for our first product...
first product was apprunner for set-top-boxes it allowed developers to write apps in xml which can than be used by apprunner to create simple apps for STB's.
Customer deployed it but didn't paid us for 2 years, this is how enterprise ensures that support is given to the apps by withholding the payments :-)
That is also the reason for expensive enterprise services that you think you can make in weekend.
There was a bug in apprunner that was exposed with the new xml and we put our foot down to release past payment before fixing anything and finally got paid.
I was however bankrupt and said bye-bye to entreprenureship and took regular corp job.
It's colorsandfonts.com, which is free but my first ever paid product was a website template store.
Sold it...
My first ever product (2010) was a tool that looked for questions in, say, Twitter posts and injected voting buttons into the post, then tallied the results. It was before Twitter polls etc. Didn't go anywhere ;)
The first tech-related thing I built was a design agency with a friend about 10 years ago whilst I was doing my Masters. I'd been doing some freelance design work for a few years whilst studying and it seemed like a logical thing to do given that I'd be graduating soon. It actually went fairly well, we made money and had a little group of clients, but we were in a small town and our work consisted of lots of small retail and B2C branding and graphic design projects, with occasional web design work.
I wasn't really that motivated by the projects we were bringing in until we picked up a client who needed an VoIP platform built for his outbound telesales company. That was the first time I'd designed software or even learned that 'UX' was a discipline etc. I was immediately hooked and afterwards I told my cofounders that I wanted to quit and go and find a job in a SaaS company and learn what that was all about. So I did! Fast forward 10 years and I've worked and loads of interesting tech companies, moved on the lead product and design teams, and now I'm building my own SaaS company (well...I've tried to build quite a few before now too haha).
What happened to the agency? Well, the remaining cofounders folded the agency 4-5 months later after falling out with one another...we're all still friends though :)