ideaisland

Description

My largest project to date, and boy does this one have a story. My friend and I had an idea to create an app that helps you come up with novel ideas using AI and a set of thinking tools, so I got to work building it. I was the coder between the two of us, and I decided that I would build the app in React as I learn the framework. I was six months into my dev journey, and it's safe to say I bit off more than I could chew, but I kept at it and ended up building the entire codebase myself. I started off using only create-react-app, but I quickly discovered that I would need a backend to send API requests to. This lead me to convert my entire project to a Next.js app and learn that as I went as well. As the complexity grew, as did my need for a global state manager, so I did a crash course in Redux and added Redux state management to the project. I then implemented Firebase authentication and a Firestore NoSQL database for user accounts and data. It was surprisingly easy to learn Firebase, but hard to master the intricacies down the road. I converted to Tailwind CSS halfway through my project, so I had a large CSS file and Tailwind on the same project (don't worry, I'll showcase ALL of my mistakes at the end of this).

Every day I would spend at least 3-4 hours watching code videos or reading books and articles to learn the new tech, then code for the rest of the day. I'd say my average day was about 10 hours of work, 6 days a week minimum. Non-stop coding for five months straight. I'm skipping a lot of details here of specific implementations, I could write a book on everything that I did for this project, but you get the idea. At the end of the five-month period, I had a working app! It worked well, loaded quickly, was secure, and had an array of features. It was well and truly, a full stack Next.js SAAS app built from scratch with my own hands. I was super proud of it and excited to show it off to potential customers. (Yup, we made the mistake of building the entire app before validating the idea or getting customer feedback, oops.)

We invited 20 beta users to try the app and give proper feedback using a Tally form I created. The results weren't great. Tons of feedback about how the navigation didn't make sense, not enough context and help menus, and overall confusion as to what it was and what it does. Disheartening to say the least. I added help menus, modified the navigation and flow of the app, and added some new things over the next two weeks, but again, the feedback was exceedingly negative. That's when I realized that it wasn't the app, it was the underlying problem we were trying to solve. I had meetings with a few entrepreneurs and asked them questions about how they come up with ideas and manage them. I learned that most entrepreneurs have way too many ideas, not too few. And that the app I built was targeted at folks that wanted to start a business, but didn't have a business idea yet. That's a tough niche to market to, and even tougher to convince those folks to pay a monthly subscription fee for a tool that could * potentially * help them create an idea. After five months of development, it took less than a week to learn that the idea for an idea maker was weak, and not worth pursuing. Ouch.

This project helped me to learn a massive amount about full stack web development, but those learnings pale in comparison to the lesson of validating projects early on and talking to customers before building. Never again will I build business apps blindly, and I intend to never go at it fully alone again. Knowing what I know now, I could build a similar app in a fraction of the time, and that knowledge gained was worth the price of admission, but barely lol.

• Only build a SAAS app if you have validated that the problem your app will solve is worth solving in the first place.

• Talk to users early and often. Their feedback should help to guide the direction of the app.

• One thing at a time. I should have learned React by building some example projects first, then gone on to learn Next.js, then built out the app. Learning them both at the same time definitely slowed me down.

• Redux is probably overkill. Atomic state is the future.

• Deciding to use TailwindCSS halfway through made styling a nightmare. I love Tailwind, but jamming it into a project that was working just fine with regular CSS classes added unnecessary complexity, especially for a beginner.

• Keep it simple stupid. I didn't need to spend four full days implementing a rich text editor, but I did. I should have kept complexity to a minimum until I knew that a feature is worth pursuing.

• Keep components small. Looking back, I'm embarrassed at the sheer size of some of the components. If I had to jump in and fix something in that file I would have no idea where to start.

• Write comments in places where the code needs explaining. I ignored this most of the time for the sake of speed.

• Rely less on npm packages. They have their uses, for sure. But I was unafraid of just tossing in another npm package willy-nilly. Not again. I will use bundle phobia in the future.

• Clean code and refactor as you go. I left a lot of commented-out code all over the place “just in case I needed it later”. Bad idea. You can always access old code from old commits, that's where it belongs. Not grayed out next to functioning code.

• Perfectionism is rarely helpful. I recall days when I would spend several hours just micro-adjusting CSS positions and colors to make it “perfect”. Perfect UI's don't exist. Get it 80% of the way there, and come back to it later if you have to. Even big sites like Apple.com have tiny imperfections.

• Burnout is real. After five months of 10-hour days six days a week with zero vacations, I was exhausted. Add on top of that the negative feedback and feeling like I was an idiot for wasting all that time, my mental state got to an all-time low. I've since picked myself up and recovered, but lesson learned.