u/axritu

Your siblings are everything, fun to be around and sometimes a pain in the ass. I just believe that older siblings exist to help the younger ones no matter how big or grown up they tend to be. I'm not saying you should impose instructions on them, try to help them out when necessary

My baby bro just clocked 13, while he claims to be a big boy, his room claims otherwise. I dropped by to see everything displaced, lots of ups and downs, including the sneaker box I got for him from Alibaba on his last birthday, which he promised to cherish. To him, he didn't see anything wrong.

He said he was busy with football and had to rush out to even dress his bed. I didn't mind how his room was before, but after helping him fix his room, I also tried to make him understand his room shouldn't always be this way       

Yeah they are grown up and teenagers and stuff, but that doesn't mean they totally get how life works or get to do everything themselves. Sometimes even when they don't ask for help, just check up on them or drop by and say hi.

I don't understand why men's T-shirt are going on designing same thing on everything while there are many designers out their, just imagine you see many shirts with same fonts, same boring quotes, same safe graphics. Why does everyone just accept this? seriously, is this the best we can do?

I started to designing my own shirt recently because I was tired of buying things that don’t even feel personal. I thought maybe I was the problem, maybe I just wasn’t looking well. But no. After checking multiple stores, scrolling for hours, it’s still the same recycled ideas over and over again. And then when you finally see something different, it’s either crazy expensive or the quality is bad. I even tried looking at suppliers online, even saw some options on Alibaba. Some designs looked fresh, I won’t lie, but then you read reviews and people are saying prints fade after two washes. So what’s the point?

Why are we stuck between boring designs and bad quality? Why is it so hard to get both right?

And then we wonder why small designers struggle. Everyone wants better and different designs on there shirts, but the system keeps repeating the same low effort design again and again.

Thier should be room for creativity and nobody is really pushing it.

My first two digital products failed for the same boring reason: I built them before figuring out how anyone would find them.

Both launches were basically the same story. I spent ~3 weeks building each one, wrote a landing page, posted it on Twitter and Product Hunt… and got maybe 70 visitors total. One product made $14. The other made nothing.   A few months later I realized the obvious problem. Building the product was the easy part. Distribution and idea selection were the actual work. 

One rainy weekend I was procrastinating starting another build, so instead I started researching how other founders actually got their first customers. I opened like 40 tabs of founder stories, launch posts, and directory sites.

I started looking for patterns. Where traffic came from. What keywords they targeted early. Whether their first users came from communities or directories. I kept noticing tiny launch platforms popping up that I'd never heard of. 

Everyone talks about Product Hunt, but there are a lot more. I kept seeing sites like TinyLaunch, MicroLaunch, SaaSworthy, WebAppRater, and There's An AI For That. Some of those actually rank pretty well in Google for niche software searches.   During that rabbit hole I found lists scattered everywhere, old Indie Hackers threads, Product Hunt collections, random blogs, and a launch directory list I came across on FounderToolkit. That helped me find a bunch more places I hadn't seen before.   What changed after that was simple. Before building the next product I validated the niche first. I checked if tools in that space were getting traffic from directories, looked at SEO keywords with 200-800 searches/month, and wrote 3 landing pages targeting those terms before writing a line of product code.

The result wasn't huge but it was different. When I finally launched, I already had about 15 directories lined up and a few SEO pages indexed. First week was ~420 visitors and 6 sales. Nothing crazy, but way better than the previous two launches.

Big takeaway for me: idea research and distribution research are part of product creation. Most of us skip that step and just start building.

Curious if anyone else here does this kind of reverse-engineering before picking what to build.