Built a product to solve a personal problem. Where do I go from here?

Discussions
#1

Problem

I was building a new home setup and getting new stuff (monitors, PC components, etc.) every day and I wanted to quickly share pictures of it with my coworkers on our Slack chat and with my friends on a Skype group conversation we have.

The existing solutions involved using multiple apps (camera -> dropbox and then going to the dropbox folder on the computer to get a link), which is not to bad but not ideal.

Solution

I’ve built an app - www.vimg.co - which only feature is to take a picture and immediately get a very short link to it, meaning that you can just type it out on your computer.

This was more of a excuse to try out Swift and the whole iOS development thing (I’m a web developer by trade), but if it’s worth a shot I’d love to try and make this work for a few more people.

How do I market such a general purpose application? How do I find out if there are other people “suffering” from the same problem?

#2

Suggestion: add push notification like pushbullet does (via a Chrome extension) and it’s more likely to become a hit.

Suffering is tricky word. It’s not much of a pain to click 3 more and wait for a Google drive sync (yeah, I’m in the android world). I’d simply do some videos, upload to YouTube and post it to a few places for feedback. You mentioned Slack. Then target Slack users, for example: http://frontenddevelopers.org/

Good luck and great insight tha Swift is nice tool for web developers.

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#3

I think you’ll have to target niche situations. For the general public, sending a pic by email, MMS, whatsapp, or even just posting it to twitter/facebook is going to be the easier solution.

So you’ll have to target folks like yourself. I can say I’ve run into that situation as well, usually in a group chat/conference call and I need to share a screenshot or something. So maybe that’s your niche. Collaborative environments mixed with mobile phones.

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#4

I think this is a solution in search of a problem. Anybody with the need to send a picture to many places at once could use IFTTT or a similar solution to do it… and a lot of people do that all the time.

Most people that take personal photos are going to either text them or Facebook them to their friends and family. And most people that post public pictures are going to do it on Instagram or Twitter or somewhere like that, where there is a social network ready to admire them.

It’s a great learning experience, but I wouldn’t waste time on trying to market that as a paid solution, or even an ad-supported solution. There are so many great image sharing products out there already.

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