a directory of embarrassing first versions
You're comparing your day one to their year fifteen.
“If you aren't embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've shipped too late.”
— Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn
▶ STRAVA · 2009
STRAVA · 2026 ◀Drag the handle — Strava, 2009 → 2026. See the whole story →
Featured ugly start
Strava2009
Before: a plain website where ~20 cycling friends uploaded Garmin data to see who was fastest up a climb. No app, no running. Now: 100M+ athletes recording runs and rides from their phones — still chasing the same segment leaderboards. Read the file →
The whole catalog — browse by tactic
Ugly v1 (12)
CraigslistCraig Newmark started it as an email to friends — and 30 years on, it still looks like one.Est. 1998GoogleLarry Page and Sergey Brin's homepage stayed bare partly because they didn't do much HTML.Est. 1998AmazonJeff Bezos ran it out of a garage, with a bell that rang on every sale — until it wouldn't stop.Est. 1999BoldVoiceAnada Lakra's first lessons were filmed on a phone, in the coach's apartment, in one language.Est. 2021AragonWesley Tian shipped AI headshots so bad most users got nothing usable — then fixed them by hand.Est. 2022Nomad ListPieter Levels' product was a public Google Spreadsheet — strangers filled it in, so he turned it into a business.Est. 2014GumroadSahil Lavingia built Gumroad in a weekend — a file uploader bolted to a credit-card form — to sell one icon.Est. 2011PlausibleUku Täht built Plausible in the open on Indie Hackers — every beta, price, and milestone posted as he went.Est. 2019ShipFastMarc Lou had 16 flops behind him — so he stopped inventing and just sold the boilerplate he kept rewriting, glued together in a week.Est. 2023Better SheetsAndrew Kamphey built Better Sheets in one day — a Carrd page and a stack of Loom videos — just to prove he could ship something fast.Est. 2020DysonJames Dyson built 5,127 prototypes of his vacuum — the first from cardboard and tape — and 5,126 of them failed.Est. 1993MacroFactorBefore MacroFactor was a slick app, it was Greg Nuckols' buggy spreadsheet — one he admits 'worked about 75% of the time.'Est. 2015
Did things that don't scale (9)
AirbnbBrian Chesky and Joe Gebbia couldn't make rent, so they put air mattresses on their floor — and a craigslist clone online to fill them.Est. 2008Spot & TangoRussell Breuer's delivery network was him — on the 5 a.m. subway, holding the boxes.Est. 2019StravaMark Gainey and Michael Horvath went inch-wide, mile-deep — building Strava for Garmin-owning cyclists, one friend at a time.Est. 2009DoorDashTony Xu and three Stanford classmates were the entire delivery fleet — a $6-a-drop page, and them behind the wheel.Est. 2013Indie HackersBefore any community existed, Courtland Allen hand-collected ten founder interviews — and launched on those alone.Est. 2016ConvertKitNathan Barry almost killed ConvertKit at $1,337 a month — then saved it by hand-emailing bloggers and migrating their email lists for free, one copy-paste at a time.Est. 2014FeedbackPandaArvid Kahl and Danielle Simpson grew FeedbackPanda to ~$55K MRR with two people and zero ad spend — launched on one helpful comment in a Facebook group, thank-you notes mailed by hand.Est. 2018Starter StoryPat Walls hand-wrote Starter Story one founder interview at a time, from a Starbucks after work — most posts got under 100 views.Est. 2018WazeUri Levine and his co-founders launched Waze with a near-empty map — and let the users pave the roads themselves, one drive at a time.Est. 2012
Sold it before building it (2)
Duct-taped the demo (3)
DropboxDrew Houston's MVP wasn't an app — it was a three-minute video, packed with in-jokes for Digg.Est. 2009Amigo AIAli Khokhar hadn't written a line of code — so he faked the entire product in a video editor.Est. 2024ZapposNick Swinmurn sold shoes he didn't own — photographing them in local stores, and buying each pair at retail only after someone ordered.Est. 1999
Shipping ugly right now
No one's shipped here yet — fitting, for a wall about going first. Be the first →
One ugly start, every Friday
// TODO: real screenshots, write better jokes, design an actual logo
// shipped anyway · 2026-06-13
// shipped anyway · 2026-06-13