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

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