8 microstartup founders like Oren Aksakal, irek.khasianov, and Joel Dare share how they came up with their startup idea. Latest answer 1 year ago.
I was working in e-commerce company and wondered why content from our Instagram account not used on website.
I previously worked at Netflix, Meta & startups as a lead & founding designer, so design was an obvious choice for me.
I struggle with organizing and reading tweets I bookmarked a lot. There were lots of gems regarding development tips, business tweets, and lessons from indie hackers. But they were almost buried and I can't connect to my daily learnings.
When I tried a few tools available in the market, none suits my need. My requirement was not just a bookmark manager but to be a system to curate and read regularly. Having this will help me curate high-signal tweets from Twitter and connect it to my learnings.
That's how the idea of Tweetsmash came.
My wife was working as an x-ray technician and wanted to get into back-end development. I couldn't find an existing platform that checked all the boxes for her. I wanted a platform that was:
Inexpensive
Gamified
Focused on CS and back-end tech
Interactive (writing real code and doing real projects)
I was working as a contractor, and was looking after a growing number of periodic processes (data imports, backups). I wanted to get actively notified if any job starts to fail (for any reason: bug in code, external system down, out of disk, out of memory, whole VM destroyed by error, ...). I knew the concept of Dead Man's Switch from Wikipedia surfing, and it clicked.
I did not start with the intention of building a microstartup. It started as a fun weekend prototype, then a side project, and over time grew into my main job.
My co-founder Emme came up with the idea after he had struggled to keep up with all notifications on Twitter. The UI and UX was just not right and also it is too crowded with different stuff, that you usually don't even need, like ads and topics. So he decided to change that and to make his own product.
On the 4th of July my Granny asked me to send her photos of my kids. Not on a screen, but "actually printed and delivered". This gave me the idea, and 1 month later I launched Joyline.io !
As a freelancer I needed to build chat for many customers. However, building chat on my own was hard and all the products out there were $500+ per month.
I wanted something freemium, fairly priced, had great documentation and practical tutorials. If a tool like that existed I'd still gladly be freelancing!