Reflecting on my indiehacking journey building Clipio

After over a year of development, I finally launched Clipio — a browser extension that lets you save web content effortlessly into Notion. This article is a reflection about my journey with highs and lows and lessons I have learned the hard way.

First some numbers:

Over 1 year of development, 18 upvotes on ProductHunt and #33 product of the day, made exactly 1 sale.

Not an impressive numbers.

But here’s the thing: I don’t count it as a total failure either, because I have learner a ton of things I wouldn’t otherwise.

Let’s be real: the money didn’t pour in. But Clipio still gave me something more important — validation, exprience and connections.

• That first sale was an important validation for me that I can make money online (but probably not with Clipio).
• I use the product myself — and it solves a problem I actually care about.
• I walked away with a huge list of blog and content ideas - both technical and non-technical.
• I learned a lot knowledge in backend, software architecture, product management, sales and marketing.
• And the most importantly, I’ve got few concrete ideas for what to build next — and how to do it better.

Not everything went smoothly. Here’s a breakdown of the biggest mistakes — and what I learned from each.

I put in the effort, tried to stir some buzz. But in the end it didn’t worked.

• 18 upvotes. Very small traction.
• These days all the top products were all AI-based — it almost seems like if you don’t have AI, you have no chance.
• Without being featured or a huge following before the launch, you will most likely don’t get much upvotes.

Lesson: Be better prepared. Build a following before the launch. And yes, AI-first products are dominating PH right now.

I’ll admit it: I struggle with marketing.

It feels awkward and is heavily outside of my comfort zone. I tried with things, but nothing really worked.

Aside from that I had a hard time putting together a good value proposition to actually get the interest and explain the value to the potential users. I fully realized this when preparing for ProductHunt launch when I spend unreasonable amount of time creating description for the launch. This can signal that the product is not a good fit as well and might need some pivot.

Lesson: Think about value proposition first and validate that. Nex time I will try to create fake ProductHunt lunch () to realize what am I actually offering and selling.

I use Clipio and it solves my own problem. That’s the first step to build good and successful product. But you still need to sell it. Pair that with my marketing skills and that’s where I met some troubles.

• My target audience was almost completely outside my network.
• I mostly know developers — not exactly heavy Notion users.
• I failed to generate interest or even validate interest early.

Having poor overlap between my audience and my target group didn’t really help with marketing the product. And I also had a problem deciding whether I want to pivot and start writing for Notion users or stick with my current audience and not market my product very well.

Don’t get me wrong. I totally believe you can build a great product even for group outside of your network. But it will be harder.

This is called “Founder-Market Fit” and you can read more about it for example from Jorge Medina in his post on LinkedIn

Lesson: Build for an audience you already understand and have access to. For me, that means devs, indie hackers, or small business owners — groups where I already have reach. It will make marketing and selling much easier.

I underestimated how much time it will take me to build a Clipio. Initially I thought I will build a first good version in 3 months. But slowly this become a year.

As development dragged on, my updates slowed. Initially I posted daily or weekly about my progress on social media and send a monthly update to the people on the waitlist. But as the time progressed my frequency dropped. In the end it almost stopped.

This was just another proof that my motivation dropped a lot over the long year development.

You should really try to ship some thing as fast as possible and get feedback/validation from the users. Without it, your energy will slowly vanish (and you might just waste your time).

Lesson: Ship fast while you’re still excited. Consider validating something in a week or two, then double down or move on. Momentum matters.

Lesson: You’ll always underestimate how long it takes. Be ready to cut scope and compromise. Use existing tools, even if imperfect.

At one point, I spent hours debugging weird build issues — Nx configs, Tailwind quirks, Vite version mismatches, etc. So instead of a productive day I was fighting issues without any value.

Lesson: Stick to battle-tested stacks. Avoid unnecessary custom configs. Don’t build what you can buy — unless it’s your core value prop.

Building a Clipio was a great experience and I have learned a lot. Especially today, with the AI hype this was a great way to broaden my skills and validate that I can build something people will want to use.

Of course I have made a mistakes along the way, but I have learned a valuable lessons thanks to that. I have wrote this article to reflect on this journey and share those lessons with you so you can learn from my mistakes.