First Post & Project

Hi everyone,

My name is Xavier, and I'm a Fullstack engineer. I've been a long-time lurker on Indiehackers and have finally decided to take the plunge and join in on the fun. I recently quit my job and have decided to take some time to build out all the product ideas I've had but haven't had the time to pursue. I'll be sharing my progress publicly to keep myself accountable, get feedback, and help others who might be interested in similar projects. It would be awesome if one of my ideas turns into a product that I can monetize, but worst case, I'll have an awesome portfolio of projects to show future employers.

As many of us have experienced in the past, side projects start off with a lot of enthusiasm only to be abandoned halfway through. My plan is to start off with small projects that I can tightly scope, complete, and launch before my enthusiasm runs out. To start, I'll be focusing on building plugins on top of other existing platforms. The benefit of this approach is that I won't have to deal with the costs and complexities of hosting, and many of these platforms already have marketplaces for plugins, making it easier for potential users to find my product.

First Project:

I decided to start off by building a widget for Figma, which is a popular collaborative design tool with a budding marketplace for plugins and widgets. My past job involved building a popular Figma plugin, so I already have a lot of expertise with building on top of Figma. Figma recently introduced support for paid resources and in-app purchases, but you need to have had some plugins reach a certain amount of popularity and use before you get access to that program. Hoping that by building a couple of small projects, I will be able to get access to that paid program for any future monetizable ideas I have.

I haven't built a Figma widget before, so I decided to create a simple starter project to familiarize myself with the Figma Widget SDK. I wasn't interested in building another todo app, so I spent some time looking at what types of widgets were popular in Figma that I could recreate. I noticed that productivity tools are pretty popular, and that there are a few other timer plugins and widgets. I tried them out and thought I could put my own spin on it. I decided to build a Pomodoro timer that you can embed directly inside of Figma, and based the design off the iOS clock timer. A Pomodoro timer is a time management technique in which you have 25 minutes to complete a task. I spent about a week building out the Pomodoro widget. Most of that time was spent trying to figure out how Widgets work and how to get a simple javascript timer to work inside of them.

Since its launch a few weeks ago, it has racked up 16 likes and has been tried by nearly 2000 users. If you’d like to give it a try I’ve included the link to the Figma widget and have open sourced the Github repo if you want to see how it works under the hood:

Figma Pomodoro Timer: https://www.figma.com/community/widget/1217935905910572348

Github Repo: https://github.com/XavierAgostini/linear-app-figma-widget

Conclusion:

Overall, it's been great to see something I've built being used and enjoyed by so many people. I'm feeling really motivated to continue on this path and looking forward to sharing my next project soon.