Early adopter of a tool or platform that grew into something beautiful? Tell me about it

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Were you an early adopter, creator, or user of any product, tool, platform, website, or even craft that started out small and grew into something beautiful?

  1. Describe the product.
  2. If you were there from the beginning or nearly so, how did the initiative get started? Community interest? Someone’s brainstorm?
  3. What makes it so special? Thoughtful design? Careful testing? Fantastic docs? Supportive and responsive community?
  4. Were there any challenges along the way? How were those handled?

Honestly, MoT is a great example of this.Some other examples I can think of:

  • The Raspberry Pi series of products and its community.
  • QubesOS is a more recent but lesser known example.
  • Chowhound used to be like that for food and restaurant reviews, but it’s changed.
  • Metafilter as well, and they’ve faced some big hurdles over the past few years.
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Very interesting topic! I want to share my experience with FlowTest.io.

FlowTest started just as a tool for myself. I was working in banking and had to repeat a lot of manual tests for APIs, always the same steps, also with asynchronous APIs, which requires waiting several minutes between steps. It was slow and very easy to make mistakes. So I made a small tool to save time and reduce errors.
I didn’t plan to create a product, only to help myself do my job better.

One day I did a quick presentation and after some time, other colleagues from different teams were already using it to cover the whole API! They used it, gave feedback, and we improved some things together. It slowly started to be useful for more people inside the company, even for product people.

What I like most is that FlowTest was born from a real need, not just for fun. Every improvement was because somebody needed it for real work, not only as an idea.

There were challenges, like requests for many features or making the UI for non technical people. But because it was used by people close to me, it was easier to fix things and get feedback quickly.

Thanks for the opportunity to share this story!
Gerardo, Spain

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Exactly the kind of story I was hoping to hear! Congratulations on the success of your own efforts and those of your community. And thank you for sharing.

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