From Product Manager to Indie Hacker: A 0-to-1 Survival Guide for Launching My Overseas Tool Website

Noble Pilot
Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:15:42 GMT
devops, nextjs, showdev, sideprojects

Hi everyone, I'm a product manager. Recently, I took on a hardcore side project: independently developing and launching a pure, ad-free online web tool suite — Web Tools Hub (web-tools.tech). The website has successfully run through the full-stack pipeline and is now indexed by Google. But the journey of pushing this project from my local machine to a production environment was paved with technical traps that nearly blew up my server. Today, I want to do a post-mortem and share why I built this site, as well as how I solved the bizarre DevOps headaches of deploying a Next.js app on a Baota (aaPanel) server. 1. Why build this web tool? As a PM, I deal with various digital assets daily and frequently rely on mini-tools for image cropping, color inversion, format conversion, etc. However, most tool websites on the market share the same frustrating pain points: Ad Minefields: You have to dodge three fake "Download" buttons just to find the real one. Forced Logins: They force you to registe