3 ms·
Show HN: I made FocusTube to skip YouTube's homepage and avoid rabbit holes
Like many devs, I often open YouTube to look up a tutorial.
Instead, I land on the homepage—shorts, drama, randomness—and lose 20 minutes before I even type a search.
So I built FocusTube: a minimal search interface that skips YouTube’s homepage and drops you straight into search results.
At first, I was building it out like a full product—login system, access control, gated content.
But integrating Stripe, Microsoft B2C took to long as my evening hours were not sufficient. I paused and asked: what’s the real problem? And how can I validate it quickly without overbuilding?
So I removed the gate, and now I just email the working search link using Zapier after someone buys support through BuyMeACoffee.
It’s a small MVP stack that actually shipped.
How I built it:
- Static Angular frontend
- BuyMeACoffee support
- Zapier to email the distraction-free link
- No backend, no auth, no fluff (yet)
The original version kept the link private. For Hacker News, I’m skipping that:
Try the distraction-free search directly: https://focustube.info/search https://focustube.info/search
If it’s useful, awesome. If not, that's still feedback.
Would love to hear if others deal with this kind of “homepage hijack” or have built similar scratch-your-own-itch tools.
Main site: https://focustube.info https://focustube.info
- MrCoffee7 1y agoI have my Youtube watch history turned off, which I think accomplishes about the same thing as what your tool does. Am I missing something in your tool?