I Built a Free PDF Tool for Students in India — Here’s What I Learned 🚀

Hey DEV 👋

I want to share a small story about how I started building AeroTools — a free PDF tools website for students and professionals.

🚩 The Problem

In India, many students and job applicants need to upload PDFs for:

• Government forms
• College admissions
• Job applications
• Exams

But most websites either:
❌ Add watermarks

❌ Ask for login

❌ Limit usage

❌ Show too many ads

It was frustrating.

So I decided to build my own solution.

🛠️ How I Built It

I used:

• React for frontend
• Node.js + Express for backend
• PDF processing libraries

Main focus:
⚡ Fast

🔒 Secure

🆓 Free

📱 Mobile friendly

🚀 What I Built

AeroTools lets you:

✅ Compress PDF

✅ Convert PDF to Word/Excel

✅ Merge & Split PDFs

✅ No watermark

✅ No login

Website: 👉 https://tryaerotools.com

Free • No watermark • No login

(Please share feedback 🙏)

📉 The Hard Part: Getting Users

Building was easy.

Getting users was HARD.

At first:

• 0 visitors
• 0 feedback
• 0 motivation 😅

But I learned:

📌 You must share your work

📌 You must listen to users

📌 You must improve daily

💡 What I’m Learning

Some lessons so far:

• Simple UI > Fancy UI
• Speed matters a lot
• Trust is everything
• Marketing is as important as coding

🤝 Looking for Feedback

I’m still improving AeroTools.

If you have time, please try it and tell me:

👉 What feels confusing?

👉 What feature is missing?

👉 What should I improve first?

Thanks for reading ❤️

Happy coding!