Founder here.
A year ago, I started treating small software ideas as product experiments.
There was no launch strategy, no Product Hunt post, no paid ads, and honestly, no expectations.
I'm a web developer and designer by trade, so I spend most of my day building and auditing websites. Like most developers, I kept running into tiny workflow frustrations that interrupted my day.
Instead of looking for existing solutions, I started building my own.
The first solved a simple problem I'd dealt with for years: checking image dimensions, file size, format, and alt text without opening DevTools.
While working on layouts every day, I built another tool that made it easier to visualize margins and padding directly on a page.
Later, after spending more time learning technical SEO and Google's E-E-A-T guidelines, I built another utility to help audit pages against those signals.
None of these were intended to become a business.
They were simply small products built to solve problems I experienced repeatedly.
A year later, I looked back at the numbers:
(There's also a fourth product with exactly one active user... me. 😄)
The biggest lesson wasn't about Chrome extensions.
It was about product validation.
I spent far less time searching for "the next big idea" and far more time paying attention to small, recurring problems in my own workflow. Those problems already had people searching for solutions, so discovery happened naturally through search instead of paid marketing.
Building small products also made me better at my day job. Every project taught me something new about development, design, user experience, or search, and those lessons carried into the next product.
This experience completely changed how I think about building software.
Instead of asking, "Is this idea big enough?", I now ask, "Does this solve a real problem that someone encounters every week?"
I'm curious how other founders here validate small product ideas before investing months into building them. Have you found that solving your own workflow problems leads to better products than chasing larger market opportunities?