12 Startups in 12 Months
With more free time during the pandemic I decided to build a new paid product each month for a year. I managed to develop 5 products before shifting my focus to contract work.
Contents
Key Points
- I successfully built 5 products in just six months - 3 websites, 2 mobile apps, and even a blog.
- Each product presented its own unique technical challenges, pushing me to innovate and experiment with new marketing strategies for my apps.
- While the success of my products varied, each one taught me invaluable lessons about starting a business.
- Within 6 months, I had secured contracts with 3 international clients, prompting me to transition into full-time contract work. This new venture allowed me to triple my income compared to my previous salary.
- Overall this experience was a tremendous success for me in terms of enjoyment, developer growth, and financial gain; all despite the fact that none of the products were themselves commercially successful.
The Blog
- One aspect of this journey was to build in public so I built this blog to document everything.
- The blog was building using Jekyll and it deployed with GitHub pages.
- Over the course of my journey I posted a range of articles covering tech deep dives of the products, varying business strategies I used, and the results of my ventures.
- I'm especially proud of my Flutter series which covers how I built various technically challenging aspect of my two mobile games.
Projects
Here's a summary of each of the projects I built, along with links to the full articles.
Icing Addict
- Discover how I turned a line smoothing algorithm into a unique and engaging game mechanic for my mobile game, "Icing Addict", developed using Flutter and Firebase and available on both Android and iOS.
- Learn about my entrepreneurial journey of coding the game in just one month, including learning Flutter, and the challenges I faced while marketing it in a saturated market.
- Dive into the technical insights I gained during the development process, from dynamic SVG rendering to deploying on iOS without a Mac, all of which I've shared extensively in my Flutter series blog posts.
Squiggle Snek
- Discover how I developed 'Squiggle Snek', a fast-paced mobile game inspired by the classic 'snake', using Flutter. I launched it on both Android and iOS platforms, all in a single weekend.
- Learn about the business model behind the game, the challenges I faced, and the valuable lessons I learned about the importance of marketing and volume in the mobile apps and games industry.
- Dive into the technical aspects of the game's development. I share my experience with Flutter and how I reused code to expedite the process.
PandaSnap
- I built a service called PandaSnap, a Django app with a React-based browser extension, that allowed users to capture and collect 'snaps' of beautiful website designs. It gained over 500 signups upon launch and saw decent usage with some power users taking thousands of snaps.
- Despite the service no longer being active, the journey of creating PandaSnap provided valuable insights into the consumer market, the challenges of maintaining a browser extension, and the importance of operating at scale for profitability.
- The technical aspects of PandaSnap, from building a standard Django app and a landing page with real elements from the product, to constructing a browser extension using React and Typescript, offer interesting insights and lessons for developers and entrepreneurs alike.
PrettySnap
- I developed a user-friendly web app, PrettySnap, that enhances screenshots with beautiful backgrounds. It's built with React and features delightful animations, making it fun and interactive.
- PrettySnap has been well received by users, garnering over 100 likes on ProductHunt and over 150 stars on GitHub. It was originally built as a product advertising strategy for PandaSnap.
- The article provides a deep dive into the tech stack used, including React, Tailwind CSS, React Spring, and Cloudflare Workers. It also discusses the challenges faced and potential improvements for future iterations.
Think Out Loud
- I developed a user testing service called 'Think Out Loud' that allows companies to test their prototypes with users. It captures the user's screen and audio as they interact with the prototype, providing valuable feedback and insights.
- The technology developed for this project includes in-browser video/audio capture and video serving through Cloudflare Stream. This allows user tests to be conducted entirely in the browser, without the need for extension downloads.
- The service has been used by over 30 companies and has accumulated over 1000 minutes of real recordings. It's a passion project that continues to be maintained and may be further developed in the future.