From Video Producer to SaaS Founder: How I Built My First Digital Product with AI (And What They Don't Tell You)
Six months ago, if you told me I'd be launching a Chrome extension with 15,000+ lines of TypeScript code, I would have laughed. After 20 years of creating documentaries and corporate videos, my expertise was behind the camera, not behind VS Code. Today, I'm launching IVCT (Instant Video Context Tagger) - a browser extension that transforms how people retain knowledge from YouTube videos. But this isn't another 'I built an app in 2 days' story. This is the real, messy, incredibly rewarding journey of what it actually takes. The idea was simple: What if I could tag any moment in a video, get AI-generated summaries, and build a searchable knowledge library? Simple idea. Complex execution. Here's what the AI-building hype doesn't tell you: AI accelerates learning and development, but products need architecture, testing, security, and polish. Expect weeks of debugging, edge cases, and production issues you never imagined. But there's something magical about having an idea at 9 AM and visualizing it by 10 AM...