I Lost my job, spent 3 months building something like Pinterest for links, now has 800+ users

Hey builder, here's my story of building linkcollect.io , and how it grew to around 900 (almost 1k 🤩) users.

I was working at an early stage startup till march 2023, things went otherwise. I lost my job (fired) because the company kinda went bankrupt.

Just after this happened, i started thinking of building some side projects and that's where i got this idea of building a resource aggregator because lots of people were asking me how did i learn software development and stuff again and again and i wanted to be able to just share them the resources i used. So i thought of building a tool that does this.

I went ahead, and started building linkcollect.io. the V1 MVP got ready within 3-4 weeks, which at that time was just a browser extension that helped people save and organise resources and links in folder, just like any other bookmark manager.

V1 launch did fine, i built it and launched on twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. I got around 200 people using it after 2-3 weeks of the launch.

v2 launch was pretty good, before the launch we were at around 490 something users, but as soon as we launched and started posting everywhere we could. the user base kind of started going, which means now we had more than enough users to collect feedback from to iterate for the next version.

But what i wanted to build, initially when i started is live and the fact the people are using it, and it's helping them a lot (from feedback) is amazing.