ProfilePicture.app

It’s been 1 week since I shipped that editor tool for adding a LinkedIn #opentowork badge to your profile photo.

It’s been one hell of an intense, dopamine-fueled week trying to ride a massive, 1.3M-impression wave of virality. As feedback came in, I just kept adding features - input fields for hex color codes, better font kerning, making the placeholder editable, leveraging on SEO keywords…

And now, I have a domain – ProfilePicture.app

I can’t believe my luck with this one. Almost every other popular profilepicture.<tld> was taken. So thankful .app was still available, and on nudging from a friend on twitter, I said eff it and bought it. With this, I could redirect traffic from the old URL on a personal domain to a proper one.

Week 1 is now over.

So what’s next?

Tbh I’m still not quite sure what I’m actually cooking, but it sure feels like I’ll find out as long as I keep staying on top of that wave. Everything’s just emergent, unfolding organically.

For once, I’m not trying to make this into a life mission. Not every product has to be your baby, your bloodline. Having some neutrality, some emotional distance, might be helpful for me at least, to stay objective about things.

In the end, I’ll be happy to even make a buck from this. It’s still early days, not sure what the opportunity is here in terms of money. I know the use case is validated, but not sure about profitability… yet. So many possibilities – ads, sponsors, SaaS, affiliate marketing. Each would take the product in a vastly different direction.

I don’t have any answers.

I just know for now – act, sense, respond, analyse. Act first, not (over-)analyse. And—a big AND—keep having fun.

Sometimes we build reality, sometimes reality grabs you by the shoulders to get you to build it.

We’ll see!