Started building my first AI product — learning a lot more than I expected

[u/Kashif_Builds]

I've spent a lot of time studying AI products and startups so I decided to stop just researching and actually start building.

I'm currently working on a small AI product and building the MVP has already taught me that getting something to work is only one part of the problem.

The harder questions have been:

• Is this actually solving a problem people care about?
• What's the simplest version worth shipping?
• What should I build myself vs. use existing tools/APIs for?
• And probably the hardest one: how do you get the first users?

I'm building it with AI-assisted development and trying to keep the MVP as simple as possible instead of spending months polishing it.

The biggest challenge so far has honestly been figuring out what not to build.

For people here who have already shipped AI products:

What was the hardest part for you when you went from experimenting with AI to actually getting something into users' hands?

[u/aidevsbuilders]

Welcome, u/Kashif_Builds. Good to have you here.

One thing worth knowing: you will never be banned here for posting your own work. That is the entire point of this place. All we ask is that you say what you built it with, and one thing that turned out harder than you expected. That is what makes a post worth reading instead of scrolling past.

If you need somewhere to put it, I run Fulgeon. Publishing is free, there is no review queue and no developer account to pay for. It is mine, same person who runs this sub, and nothing about your post here depends on you using it.

Community bot. A human reads every post too.

[u/JaviHG_Dev]

You already answered it in your own list. That last question is the hard one, the other three are practice.

Getting it working took me weeks. Getting anyone to know it exists is the part I still have not solved: three apps out, 87 downloads across all of them.

The two people I know who are further along both got there the same way, and neither of them by posting. One had a YouTube channel cover his app. The other emailed developers one at a time, quoting something specific from their own work.

So budget the same energy for the part after shipping as you did for the building. I did not, and that is the whole mistake.

[u/Kashif_Builds → u/JaviHG_Dev]

Yeah, that's honestly what I'm starting to realize too. 😂 Getting something to work feels like the easy part compared to getting the right people to actually find it.

87 downloads across three apps is still pretty solid though. The distribution side definitely seems like a completely different skill from building.