Building my first app as a non-technical founder

My journey as a non-technical IH, learning to code

At the start of the year, I committed to opening up and sharing my journey as an fledgling indie hacker so here it goes! I’m hoping that by sharing my journey I will be able to motivate others in a similar position as me, just as I have greatly benefitted from others sharing their stories. I’m also hoping to make more connections within the community to help keep me motivated and to build a support network (cos I’m definitely going to need all the support I can get!)

A bit about me

I’m a 31 year old husband and dad, recently relocated to a small island called Jersey in the Channel Islands (in between England and France). I’ve been married for over 5 years and have a 2 year old son. My wife and I both work demanding day jobs in financial services so finding time to pursue my indie hacking whilst prioritising family life has its challenges, as I’m sure many can relate.

I’m non-technical in the sense that I am not a developer, but I do love technology and try to stay abreast of new developments in the space. I recognise that coding is a skill set I really need in order to be able to build and iterate on ideas rapidly; so I am actively working on that as I build out my first project.

Learning to code

Starting out, one of the most difficult things for me as someone who was time poor was figuring out the best (i.e. most time-efficient) way to learn how to code. I struggled to find consensus online about how to go about it so I set out to narrow down the options by process of elimination.

Coding bootcamps

This was the first to go because I didn’t have a bunch of money to spend and I wasn’t looking to get a job as a developer. I just needed to know enough of the basics to enable me to start out and google my way to solutions whenever I got stuck.

YouTube videos

Not suited to me as a complete novice because I needed to do exercises rather than just watching someone explaining concepts and/or writing code. I could generally grasp what was being explained but I could never apply it to my own projects - never really knew where to start.

Blogs

Again this is useful for solving specific problems but never found one for complete a beginner.

Books

Not keen on just reading for hours on end so this was a bit of a non starter. I was learning evenings and weekends so I had no appetite for reading technical textbooks at that time.

Udemy/online courses - this is what worked

I ended up signing up for a bunch of top rated courses on Udemy, over the span of 4 years or more. First some iOS courses, then front end web development. I would get about half way through but never really committed to actually doing the projects. They were typically pretty simple so I just ended up sitting through the lectures and skipping the project/tasks. Looking back, this was why my initial attempts to learn to code were a failure

Finally, I signed up for the Flutter Bootcamp course by Angela Yu, and decided that I would actually finish the entire course and actually attempt every single task / challenge properly like I was getting paid for it. This is what worked to get me to a point where I can read and write code.

Why learn Flutter?

Flutter is a great framework that uses Dart and enables you to build for iOS, Android and soon web and MacOS. As I’m a bit lazy and have limited free time, I wanted to maximise my leverage by learning the least whilst keeping my options as open as possible, so Flutter ticks the box in that I can learn one language and framework, and potentially build products across multiple platforms.

So far my experience with Flutter and Dart has been great. I finally feel like I can actually build something from scratch that I can be proud of, and this is my first major milestone!

I’ll be writing more about my experience building out a small app with Flutter and how exploring ideas to scratch my own itch in the coming weeks and months. I’ll also write a post about how I basically failed with another project where I got a freelance developer to build for me before truly validating the product / market.