Ask IH : How many people here are self taught programmers and have launched their product(s)?
Hi guys,
I want to know that how many founders here are self taught programmers . How much time did you spent on learning ? How was your learning flow ? Were you sharing your daily success with someone so that you could feel better ?
I've been self learning and working on my product. Still a lot of work left because the problem area is not yet clear and I am experimenting with it .
This is my 1st product and I am already feeling the anxiety for not being clear on the best idea. I redefined what the new idea will be because I researched and narrowed down the original.
How you all were sure that you were solving a right problem which was worth solving and would benefit your product ?
How did you first launched? How did you identified your channels ?
Lastly, please provide a link to your completed or WIP projects if possible 😅😄
EDIT : Thank you all for your responses. There are many among us who are here and trying their best and have learnt to progress by themselves. Many thanks for sharing.
Thank you
I'm self-taught, but took the long road to launching a product.
I sat in a library for 6 months reading books and building a toy project learning Python. It was pretty lonely, and I'm not sure it's a strategy I'd recommend to anyone else, but it got me to the point where I was a pretty terrible developer who just about knew what was going on.
After that I joined a startup in a non-technical role (I was head of analytics at GoCardless and we were 6 people at the time). As the company grew I found myself pitching in on engineering tasks more and more, just because it was the quickest way to get my stuff done. Things turned a corner when I was running the customer support team and needed to build out our admin dashboards - I started spending about 50% of my work time writing code, and getting lots of code review from the engineering team, which helped me get better fast.
Fast forward a few more years at GoCardless and I became VP Engineering and VP Product, so was working with engineers all day and pitching in doing small tasks that didn't warrant breaking the focus of the team. I had both roles because I was handy at managing people and understood engineering work well enough to do it well. By this point I'd say I was a pretty capable day-to-day engineer. The company had grown to about 100 people and it felt like the right time for me to more on and do my own thing.
That's when I founded Dependabot, which is a relatively technical SaaS. (It's a developer tool, and has to hack around with the internals of package managers in a bunch of different languages. I actually became a maintainer of Bundler, the Ruby package manager, as a result.) I built it with a friend who is way more technically capable than me, and then have run it pretty much on my own for the last year or so (coming to the end of that phase now - there are now three of us working on it full time).
The biggest pieces of advice I would give you are:
Good luck, and stick at it!
Thank you very much @greysteil and your story is truly inspiring. I learnt game dev in school. Made few games in Macromedia Flash (now Adobe Animate) and have been casually programming but this time with a product and business in mind.
Maybe i'll successfully build and ship this time .
Thanks again for the advice .
I'm a full-stack self-taught developer with a full-time job who runs http://spacedoo.com - short actionable marketing hacks.
Similar to @AndrewV I have failed with my previous 2 ideas (reason: lack of marketing )
From this experience, I have learned that very important is to find a market that you like to server and then find/solve a problem they have as before I was into just building/ coding and not paying attention whom I want to serve or if there is a real need for the product.
I know @mijustin was talking about this approach (can't find the link to this video) .
I talk about this quite a bit in Marketing for Developers.
I also talked about it in my 2017 talk at Laracon, NYC. 👍
yes, this is what I was looking for, I need to read your book!
Just bought your book last week, great read so far and it is up to date.
Thanks @slash007 for replying. Iinitially, i began with an idea of task tracking app but now i am refining it based on certain findings. I am also considering the marketing strategy for this one .
I too have failed one time, in 2017(July)-2018 (till April), with a product which we as a team of 3 people thought would be a game changer. Sadly, it never took off due to various reasons. But it was that project which i totally devoted myself in and learnt the full stack . Back-end in python/django , some web development using HTML/CSS/jquery , android for the core concept.
Basically it was a content and advertisement platform for commuters in cabs.
https://github.com/thePercept/optimus
I'm self-taught, I made a Facebook app and a Blender addon that worked quite well . But I don't live of my products (yet).
hi Gabriel @Eibriel
Congratulations for building these two products. What does your Facebook app do ? Can you share a link?
best wishes
Thanks Abhishek. In the times when Facebook had Widgets this app allowed merchants to automatically post products to their Wall. I earned money through commissions from a local market platform.
I learned an important lesson tough, the market platform stopped the commissions program killing my product.
Even if that didn't happen my product would be dead soon later due to modifications on Facebook.
But was really fun and gratifying to see people enjoying my product :)
I'm a self-taught mostly-backend, learning frontend developer. While I don't really launch groundbreaking stuff, I did, however, launched two NPM packages that got over half a thousand downloads.
I purposely called it "Sagiri" for the memes.
GitHub: https://github.com/ClarityMoe/Sagiri
npm: https://npmjs.com/package/sagiri
hi @chinodesuuu
Thanks for replying. I am checking out the packages.
I'm actually an electrical engineer so I am technically self-taught programmer. On the other hand, I've started dabbling with computer at a very young age, some (wow) 25 years ago... So programming was always somewhere in my life.
I worked solo, with friends and now with my IT company on different projects, products and side-projects with the aim of monetizing them. However, it's been a learning experience with a very steep curve and some "reality-hits" situations on the way.
After a few of the failed products (mainly we did "build it and they will come" - they didn't come), we decided to do it one of two ways:
Using the method [1] we launched just the other week https://kwiki.io - a simple and effective documentation tool. Currently, we are shyly looking for early users to see what's the feedback - so please feel free to check it out and let me know what you think :)
until a week before i was pretty much following the same route of "build it and they will come" but had stumbled upon certain posts here and there and decided to change the strategy. It's then i asked this question here dedicated to all self taught devs. Glad to know that you figured it out .
I love the kWiki logo and the nicely polished website.
Good luck for your product :)
Self taught. Took some graduate level CS courses but didn't finish the program and wouldn't say the course-work was particularly relevant.
Talk to your customers...that's how you know you're solving the right problem. Build a spreadsheet of potential solutions, email ideas to some "friendlies" and get their feedback. Ask them to prepay.
Start collecting feedback as soon as possible and avoid building until you've really narrow in on the solution. A spreadsheet, landing page built with landen.co, wix, or Squarespace are all great places to start. Don't over complicate it.
Channel identification is more difficult. Read https://medium.com/@yegg/the-19-channels-you-can-use-to-get-traction-93c762d19339 and start to do experiments. Many channels can be ruled out instantly due to budget constraints. Start with asking your friends and customers for intros and referrals.
https://asciiprints.com
thank you soo much for the resources. The one which mean a lot to me at this moment is that medium blog . All of the methods in one place and briefly explained.
asciiprints website is nicely done. congrats !!
All the best
I'm self-taught, but probably not in a way that's useful to you. I started programming on an Apple 2e as a teen, and kept learning with Visual Basic, C/C++, then PHP and web languages after I started working in tech support for a web hosting company. Back then, just used IRC to talk to people, try to build and share stuff, and learn.
But programming is a separate topic from being a good entrepreneur. I would say I'm a pretty skilled developer, and that hasn't helped me build a great product :)
I've built 3 apps that all failed, a combination of bad ideas and lack of marketing. My latest might also be in that group - an open source organizer/productivity app, https://brisaboards.com.
I would suggest joining a community in the area you plan to develop a project. Actually talk to people before deciding what app will help them (and make you money), try to help them, maybe even try to build simple little projects that will help individuals. I should also follow my own advice ;-)
great advice . i am now researching enough and experimenting
thank you
✋
I spent 40 hours a week learning (this was in middle school and high school.) Back then, it was mostly silly apps for AIM or a P2P network to share homework with my friends.
After high school I planned to pursue neuropsychopharmacology. But sooner or later I found myself not in college and working in restaurants while I ran a successful-enough web hosting company with a friend.
But then I sold a TV to a guy who had a shitty work website. I told him his website sucked and that if he wanted a better one, to hit me up. He did, and I built him a new one. He then needed a CRM and something to manage his fleet of workers. So I built him one. This was in PHP and probably......... 2010? 2011?
Then I realized I could make money doing this so I bounced around a bit. There's a couple long stories between then and now.
The most important thing when teaching yourself anything is keeping an open mind and exploring. Don't waste time doing short exercises to "practice your code" — go build something.
The rest will take care of itself.
hi Josh @joshmn.
Surely, learning by building something is a great way. I had tried last year and failed but again I am trying by learning of what not to do and where to focus more.
Thank you for sharing your story :)
Hi, self taught here.
I've launched a few products, learning as I went. Building upon with each one and learning all the pieces which I can now put together.
I now have launched Easy Writer, a cloud enabled, online and offline Markdown app for Windows 10.
https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9NX9T1MT590V
It took me over 18 months to get to this point, studying and experimenting at night in the hour or so each night I had to myself after my wonderful family and the day job.
I launched this app on ProductHunt, and got an unexpectedly good response. https://www.producthunt.com/posts/easy-writer
Since launch there has been significant updates still as I learn and grow.
It's all progress mate. It all teaches us something. Don't be afraid to fail; be afraid of not throwing your hat in the ring.
Rob.
hi Rob @Valley_Software. Congratulations for Easy Writer and your Product hunt journey.
Thank you for these wonderful quotes . I too want to reach PH with my finished product so i will definitely work my way through :)
Hey, this is me! I'm self-taught!
I taught myself programming because I couldn't convince anyone to build my idea for free with the prospect of making 50% of 0. Who would of thought! lol.
What ended up happening for me is that I was more excited about going home from my actual job to write code. I realised that maybe I should consider doing this coding thing full-time. About 6 months later after building a portfolio of small github repos I applied for a job.
Been a front-end developer for two years now and am applying those skills and learning some back-end skills to build my next idea.
My first product failed abysmally because talking to people is hard and selling things is hard. I would almost certainly say the marketing side is way harder and arguably more important than the programming side.
My tact for this new product[1] is different. I'm building something I want for myself and I am reasonably confident it will solve a need for others. At the end of the day - I will already have one customer: myself.
[1] www.albertrm.com
thank you @patrickgordon. My best wishes for your next venture . I hope you figure out the product market fit .
Also , it's great to know that you're trying hard being a self taught person.
Folks who've shared, can you also share a roadmap that's worked for you?
care to elaborate what you mean?
For someone who's a non-techie, I've tried doing a Udemy course on Web Dev, but it's far from the pretty websites that I see around here.
Any particular roadmap that you guys could share around how one can enter this and build?
My advice is don't compare yourself as someone new to people who do things for a living. Be accepting of your skill and work to improve.
The way I learned best was by trying to build my own product. I knew what I wanted it to do but not how to do it so I just kept googling/finding videos/reading blogs until I was able to get it semi functional.
Thanks @patrickgordon that makes sense! It's a longer road but worth it I guess :)
I think design is a totally different discipline than web development. I think the shortcut to 'pretty' websites is CSS frameworks (Bootstrap, Tailwind, etc.). That allows techies to make pretty sites without knowing much about design.
Thanks Jordan, pretty new to this but will definitely look it up! I've learnt basics of HTML CSS and JS and used a template to modify my personal website - www.suhasmotwani.com
Now I'd like to learn how to build things like this or actually even simpler but from scratch and on my own!
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Bro , you've been successful already with jpopasia . Getting that many visitors shows the success. I congratulate you for that and being a self taught completely is a great personal achievement for you.
Thank you for commenting :)
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