Ask HN: Did you build it, and they came?

I have built a quiz web app that enables people to play a popular Belgian TV format at home with their family and friends and with their own questions. Without any marketing, they came :). I am at 5000 active users and counting. People seem to love playing popular tv-shows at home.

I built this https://github.com/micro/micro. It's doing pretty well so far.

Yes. I wrote a trivial interface which allows parsing DNS records and writing them to Amazon's route53 infrastructure.

I then wrapped that in git, and the end result is that you can write simple text files containing DNS records, run `git push`, and your DNS updates.

I don't have hundreds of users, but I have enough to make the project a success. Even if we ignore the fact that I built it for myself.

I've been working on https://insomnia.rest for about two years, and have had steady growth since the beginning. It used to be in the Chrome Web Store, which helped attract users initially.

It's now at around 2500 daily active users.

I built a betting platform for a niche esports game and had moderate success with it. Mostly word of mouth, but it was a small dying tight-knit community desperate to attract knew players so it wasn't hard to get everyone interested.

EDIT: Working on a product for a community I was part of was definitely what helped me succeed. I worked on the problem I was familiar with, and I received a lot feedback and support from other people. It also helped me stay motivated. :)