Filterout

Filter Out was built during my first-year summer break in 2024 as a way to solve a problem I had personally struggled with during my JEE preparation. Whenever I opened YouTube to watch a lecture, I would inevitably get distracted by eye-catching thumbnails and recommendations that had nothing to do with what I intended to study. I kept wondering why I couldn't simply decide what my YouTube homepage should look like.

That question eventually became Filter Out.

I built it with a friend Ayush Gupta from the BITS Pilani campus whom I met through a common internship during my first year. Even though we were from different campuses, we collaborated remotely and built it.

More than the product itself, Filter Out was my first real lesson in building software that people actually use. It was the first time I thought, "Maybe software can actually be sold." I spent my time talking to users, figuring out go-to-market, experimenting with positioning, and learning how important it is to niche down before trying to build for everyone.

To reach our target audience, we built a Telegram community of JEE students, where we shared the extension and gathered feedback. We eventually grew Filter Out to around 70 active users.

We ran into limitations with the YouTube API that prevented us from taking the product much further. While we couldn't continue building it the way we had envisioned, the experience was invaluable.

Filter Out introduced me to product thinking, user feedback, distribution, and the reality of building something from scratch.