Building the MVP as a Busy Parent - Coding at the Playground

September is the most hectic part of the year. Kids go back to school and extracurricular activities dot the afternoons and evenings. After a restful summer everyone is full of energy and ready to start new things. Regular work kicks back into full gear.

I've built side projects before. The difference is that back then I had more free time. This time around, with three wonderful kids and all the commitments that come with them, time was very limited.

In times like this, two things are necessary: prioritize ruthlessly and find the leverage.

Prioritization was key. I sketched out a map to MVP, starting with core functionality, and building a shell around it until it became something that someone could use to do simple email monitoring. Minimal integrations. Minimal UI. But usable.

Ruthless it was. I would catch myself regularly thinking or wanting to work on something that was not on the critical path to MVP. Luckily I was able to muster enough discipline to stop and put that work into the "later" bucket on the TODO list. The "now" and "next" were only for things that led directly to the MVP.

I decided to lean into AI coding tools for leverage. I am (was?) an AI sceptic. Coding is an art as much as a science and I doubted how much help AI tools could provide. It turns out, they were very helpful. I was positively surprised.

One day I was with my kids at the playground and was mulling the data model around in my head. I decided to see if I could get ChatGPT to write it. I was blown away. I was able to work up a data model iteratively, and shape it through a typed conversation. It's as if I was chatting with a super-quick junior-but-quite-knowledgable programmer. It made silly assumptions, but corrected things when I explained better what I wanted. When I was done the data model was ready for pasting into a Django project. All from a bench at a playground.

I found my leverage. I could use AI tools in places where I had no keyboard and screen to push the implementation forward in tangible ways. I talked to ChatGPT while driving to build a marketing plan. I rough-coded a bunch of integrations while sitting on a train. I could get something 90% done at various times of my day. When I had time, I'd sit down at the computer, paste it into the IDE, and refine it all the way.

Then, I discovered cursor. My mind was blown. I could code wide swathes of the basic functionality by carefully describing what I want. I could ask it to change things I did not like. It did a pretty good job, and saved me hours of typing.

Over roughly two weeks I was able to get a solid MVP. This was about half as much time as on prior side projects of similar complexity, and with less available time-at-keyboard.

With the help of AI, the code is in better shape and with more documentation than it would have been had I typed it all out myself. I can focus more on what I want the app to do and spend less time typing out the boilerplate.

wasitsent.com is now live. It feels good. Next step is to move away from building and put on the marketing hat. It's going to be tough and will require a lot of learning, but I'm off to see where this will go.