I went in to building Postkit (the platform for building APIs in your browser) determined to validate my idea, quickly build an MVP and launch.
As with every previous side project of mine, sitting idle on my hard drive, I spent considerably longer building the initial version than I'd hoped. It was important to me that Postkit was easy to use but that the back end was also well architected and could scale when I needed it to.
As I imagine most founders who go down this path come to realise, this was pretty much a waste of time. All the time I spent perfecting my code could have been spent marketing or reaching out to potential users. I felt like a lot of time had been wasted.
Developing a routine and sprints
When I started building Postkit at the beginning of the year, I quickly realised I wasn't going to achieve the targets I'd set if I just worked on weekends. One of the difficulties in working full-time is that you often feel so tired and worn-out in the evenings.
Some people online suggested working on personal projects before going to work in the mornings. I'm not really a morning person so I didn't do this. I imagine it might work for some and not others.
I knew that I needed to establish some consistency, a routine with which I could work on Postkit regularly. I decided to work for just 30 minutes a day. The agreement I made with myself was that I had to complete this 30 minute period every day. Doing an hour one day wouldn't cancel out another day. 30 minutes a day, without fail.
Honestly, this worked for about 2 weeks. I didn't feel overworked and I could feel happy with what I'd achieved. In thinking about the project on a regular basis, the quality of my ideas also improved. However, I often didn't feel like 30 minutes was enough to really get stuck into any serious coding. It was important that I struck a balance.
When things started to slip (for example having to work late one evening), I couldn't maintain the routine. It was important not to become disheartened and keep my focus on what I was going to do next, balancing harder problems with 'quick wins'.
Something that worked fairly well for me later on in the project was spending longer periods on it; these were more like mini hackathons. I'd set my sights on a big piece of functionality that I wanted to complete and pull all-nighters to get it done. This helped my procrastination but contributed to feeling burnt out.
Keeping the momentum going
It took longer than I'm proud to say, to have a reasonable idea of where Postkit was going and when I could expect it to be finished. I had to be intentionally pessimistic, knowing that my day job could all of a sudden eat into my free time or that something else could get in the way.
I found creating lists of immediate actions on Trello to be a simple way to organise my thoughts and focus on what was important. Breaking down larger features into smaller actions, as I've done for most of my career as a developer, made the road ahead seem a little less daunting.
Features slow you down
When I'd surpassed two MVP completion dates, I knew I had to change something. I immediately began to strip out every task I'd planned, every feature I'd planned to build that wasn't absolutely paramount to the lauching the MVP and getting to the beta. I'd simply spent far too much time making Postkit the best product I thought it could be, without actually progressing towards some tangible finish.
In reality, what I'd built was a complete unknown. You don't know whether your product is going to solve the original problem you set out to solve, or who your customers or key market will be until you launch. It's so easy to fall into the trap of perfecting your design or user experience, without really understanding how your users are going to use your product. Frustrated, I set a realistic target of 3 weeks to finish the build, create a new landing page and set up some of the 3rd-party tools I'd planned to use (Sentry, Mixplanel, Intercom etc.). I also decided to book 2 days holiday to be on hand for the launch.
Postkit has now been Live for almost 2 weeks. So far we've had about 100 people sign up and over 70 API endpoints created. I've been so happy with the response Postkit's gotten so far but if you've already signed up, I'd really appreciate it if you took our short survey. If not, Postkit is free to sign up to today.