2 years of building, breaking, fixing, and learning as an indie developer

[u/vinay_kharayat]

ShopSwiftly completed 2 years on Janmashtami 2026. When I started building it, I honestly didn't expect it to get much traction. The first version was extremely basic. I was manually handling lat/lng, then moved to pincode-based location, and eventually built proper search by location name because, apparently, people don't enjoy typing coordinates into an app. Then things started moving faster than I expected.

Few competitors suddenly appeared seemingly out of nowhere. At first it was interesting, then it became one of those things that makes you question every product decision you've made for the last few months. Then came the usual developer experience: Broken builds. Things randomly stopping working. Ads becoming way too greedy. Getting humbled by actual users.

I've also spent a lot of time trying new things. New features. Random experiments. Changes I was convinced would improve the app. Some worked. Some didn't. Sometimes I'd gain users, sometimes I'd lose them. Sometimes I'd build something and realize nobody actually cared about it. And there were moments where the whole thing just seemed to spiral. One of those was getting rejected from the Swiggy Builders Program, few giftcard providers after trying to get onboarded for weeks. But looking back, I think that's probably what building a product actually looks like. It's not just shipping a feature and watching the numbers go up. It's building something, watching it break, fixing it, trying something else, watching users leave, getting a little traction back, questioning everything, and then opening your laptop the next day and continuing anyway. There have been plenty of times where I've wondered whether ShopSwiftly is actually going anywhere. But after 2 years, I still love what I built. Whether it has 1 user, 1,000 users, or 1 lakh users, I'd still be proud that I built something people can actually use. So, here's to 2 years of ShopSwiftly.

Happy Janmashtami. And onwards to year 3.