I've been thinking about building a motion graphics editor for a while now, since I feel like After Effects can be pretty overkill.
My idea was to combine the simplicity of a tool like Canva or Kapwing, where you can easily search and drag and drop assets into the canvas, with more powerful features like keyframing, easing, masking, and more. I decided to make it free and open source, as I might add more to it in the future.
I'm an avid Notion user, so I wanted to build something to help me be more productive. My first thought was to create a simple inline canvas to draw using a /draw command, to annotate my pages, only to realize that Notion does not allow you to create custom commands.
So instead I decided to do a bit of a workaround to implement custom commands into Notion (through an extension), and created a couple of them to draw and record your camera and audio. I also made a bit of a SDK to interact with Notion so anyone can create their own plugins with ease, and made the code open source.
Last month I created a menu bar app for Mac to solve a problem I had when traveling. I decided to write about how I came up with the idea, learnt to use Swift from zero, and how I marketed it to get thousands of dollars in sales. Hope you find it interesting!
I decided to learn Swift in a week and build an app to solve a problem I've been having for ages.
Basically what the app does is save and close all your apps in one click (or keystroke), and reopen them all later. The idea is to be able to clean up your desktop before screen sharing / making a screen recording, or just saving your workspace to switch off from work and come back another time (even by scheduling apps to open automatically some time later).
I've been trying to optimize my time lately, and I figured I could build some sort of tool to help me with it, so I decided to build Omni. It's a Chrome Extension that allows you to manage your tabs, bookmarks, browser history, perform actions, and more, using a simple interface (similar to spotlight on Mac). It also adds a few new shortcuts to Chrome (and elevates existing ones) for muting, pinning a tab, etc.
The extension is open source too so anyone can contribute new actions and features - at the moment it is integrated with products like Figma, Notion, Linear... and I plan on adding more.
Love ExtensionPay, so easy to use! I spent a while looking for ways to accept payments and most importantly handle subscriptions for Chrome Extensions, and everything felt like too much work. Super glad I came across your product, was very quick to integrate too and easy to check if a subscription is active or not. Been using it for my Carden extension, sadly no sales just yet :P
One of the things I enjoy about ExtensionPay is that it really de-risks monetizing extensions — even for my own extensions! I can just throw ExtPay in and see if it makes any sales without spending weeks on the infrastructure.
Most of my projects are fairly simple stack (either plain Javascript or with jQuery, using Firebase as a DB if necessary), but I tend to build relatively complex WebApps with it (e.g. a collaborative map editor, audio editor, motion graphics editor, animated mockup maker...).
The simplest product I've ever built in terms of code (fewest lines of code, no dependencies besides jQuery) is Omni, which is an extension that adds an omnisearch to your browser to manage tabs, bookmarks, history, perform multiple actions, add shortcuts, commands...
It's basically just an array of available actions with a simple UI to search through them and select them. I love it because it's incredibly simple to add new actions, I've also open sourced it so anyone can easily contribute: https://github.com/alyssaxuu/omni
I still don't know if it's going to do well or not, I am going to publicly launch it tomorrow, hopefully people find it useful despite its simplicity :P
I think there's people who do check out Product Hunt without posting themselves, although it's probably not a whole lot. I regularly check it out to find new products, or for general inspiration, but that said I do post in there myself.
It's worth it from experience if you manage to get in the top 5 or so, and get featured in the newsletter as well. I've personally gotten a decent amount of users and traffic by posting in there. Plus it can also help to get all sorts of opportunities, after a launch I tend to have people and companies reach out who are also in the space, or looking to partner - it's generally pretty good for networking. But it also depends on the kind of product you're launching, I've had more success with productivity tools (a task management app, screen recorder, design tool...) than with other types of products (directories, communities, niche tools...), you have to know the audience.
Definitely do agree though that it can be a bit of an echo chamber. I wish there were more platforms that were used by "lurkers" where you could post your product and reach your audience. Unfortunately many platforms discourage self-promotion, it's a shame really. I love discovering new things all the time, but it seems nowadays the only products that reach you are the popular ones, it's incredibly hard to discover niche ones. Not just for websites and apps, but it also goes for movies, books, and all sorts of other content.
