Can I learn to code by building my first product?

My thoughts are to ask yourself, is your primary goal with this project to:

Create a successful business/product?
Learn to code?
At the end of the day would you be happy if the product failed but you learned to code in the process?

If your primary motivation is to create a successful product I would say trying to learn to code before/during product creation will likely just slow you down. You may want to look into some no code/low code options to get an MVP out there for validation.

Assuming you are actively interested in learning to code beyond this one product I say 100% go for it. IMO the primary downsides are you will go slower than an established software engineer. Code breakthroughs will feel like progress on your product. In my experience, the newer someone is to coding the more likely they are to think the technical solution is value proposition/reason people will buy. Rarely is this the case, especially for an inexperienced coder. Things that are likely to make your product successful is the stuff you don't need to code to know, your unique insight into why the product should exist, who it's for, sales & marketing strategy etc.

A side project as a way to learn and stay motivated is a great but you should be honest with yourself it is primarily a learning exercise and give yourself permission to treat it as such. For me, I always learn best by trying something then visiting books/courses once I have a problem I'm stuck on. I've created side projects that I did 0 market validation on because I knew it was primarily for learning. At the end of the day just creating it was enough for me. Some personalities get a lot more value out of learning by doing rather than learning by study. If this is you, full steam ahead!

I would say that it's possible but could you enlist the people already in your network to help you out? You would move much quicker and you could probably iterate on three or four ideas with multiple co-founders in the time it would take to do everything yourself and learn to code a the same time.

I think you could get by doing the FE yourself (although it might be time consuming). As a backend engineer myself Id say that this is where you may find the steepest learning curve but it sounds like you want to focus on the FE anyway so perhaps a non issue.

To directly answer the question "Can I learn to code by building my first product?", I would say that you have to learn to code by building your first product.

People new to programming can easily get stuck in tutorial hell and never actually push themselves to learn because they're afraid to open their code editor and cut their teeth on the hard stuff. Doing is how you learn. It's great to watch tutorials and courses, but make sure that you have hands on time too.

On this point...

I have an idea for a fairly simple finance/wealth tracking app

To someone who has never coded, most things will seem simple. Once you get into the technical aspect of things is when the complexity becomes apparent. I found it funny that you said you were a product manager haha

When you think "This is crazy. It'll take me years to build this thing on my own if I have to learn how to program along the way with a full-time start up job.", you're partially right. I've been coding for 15+ years and there are still some things that I don't feel like I could even tackle by myself. It really depends on the scope of your project.

There seems to be a hard push for schools to teach people how to code and this "everyone should be a programmer" movement, but I think that's further from the truth. The people who stick with it are the people who either

a) hate it
b) love it so much it's something that they stick with and build upon their knowledge day after day

Like most things in life, consistency is key. I could barely do anything when I first started, but I stuck with it and do it every day now. I did, however, do this as a career because I knew early on that this is what I wanted to do - but there are various levels of commitment. I think so long as you're consistent, you'll make progress. If it's something that you enjoy doing, don't give up.

Hope it helps, take what's helpful and throw out the rest! Good luck!

Brandon

This is how I got started:
I committed to spend only 10 minutes a day on this.
First day I wrote down which technology I will be working with, Nodejs was something new and excite me and best fit for my first product so I went with that.
First few days were rough, slow but I never lost hope, I remind myself everyday this is a beginning to my growth phase.
I started with w3schools and finished it in 15 days
Then I started with other tutorials and since I already know basics I speed up
I started loving it but I made sure I don't go over 10 minutes a day, this increased my productivity and I could finish a lot more in just 10 minutes.

Its been over a year and I spend over 2hours daily easily on my products, learning new technologies and I am killing it.

Yep, I definitely think it's possible if you keep your expectations realistic. As a project manager you're in a great position to weigh out what's possible in the time you have, and it sounds like you've got a great support network around you. If you haven't done any FE before, I would suggest starting with React. Dont try to do everything in one push, keep your first goal super simple, i.e. laser focus on just one screen or just one feature, and once you hit that, think about your next step.

Native mobile apps are a lot more niche than browser based apps, so I would focus on the latter.

Be prepared for times when grasping certain concepts slows you down, this is natural as your brain tries to make sense of all the patterns. Don't let it demotivate you! If you haven't done any development work before, I would suggest taking one or two days to do the obligatory Todo app, it will show you how to put things together on a very small scale, and will give you a good foundation for your own project.

Payments integration can be done simply with Stripe. The only thing I wonder about is security, as it's a finance tracking app. That might need a bit of technical knowledge.

In any case, keep it simple and realistic and give it a shot. Don't put too much pressure on yourself to turn this into a business (that's when it will feel like a grind), rather find a motivating factor that makes you say, I want to build this because it's cool. The more practice you get the more it will become easier.