From idea to Hacker News front page and paying customers in 6 days

I'm a software engineer, I was working part-time with a startup but they went bankrupt a couple months ago. I decided not to look for clients or a new job because I wanted to bet on myself. I was contracting last year and I saved up some money in my business, so I can give myself a salary for a few months even without any revenue. It's scary as fuck but also I've been wanting to try doing my own projects for more than 10 years and I feel like it's now or never. I don't have kids yet and my partner and I want them in the near future, so I feel like this is the best time for me to try this.

My first project was doing ok, getting 200k+ pageviews a month (I had started this on the side a year ago, to be clear), but it's a bad niche and I'm barely getting $200/mo from ads. I added a paid product to it and I am selling a handful of yearly subscriptions a month but we're talking $10 each, nothing too exciting.

At the beginning of this month I started being a bit scared, looking at job sites, thinking "am I actually able to earn without clients or a job?". I still feel like this by the way, but last week I had my first real win so at least I got some confidence back.

I had read in many different places that a good way to find new ideas is to look for successful products with many 3 star reviews. I started browsing Gumroad to look for those, but I noticed it wasn't really easy to filter by mixed reviews. Plus 90% of the products don't display sales numbers, and a lot of them have prices in different currencies, so it's hard to gauge how much they made at a glance.

I thought that maybe I can code something that makes it easy. On the 9th of September I wrote the first line of code for Gumtrends. I used Laravel as I am very familiar with it, and for the frontend I grabbed a TailwindCSS template I had bought some time ago for a client. It took me 3 days to write a very barebones MVP, then another 3 to implement the payment and make a nice looking landing page.

Last Friday, 6 days after I started the project, I submitted it to Hacker News as a "Show HN". I had absolutely no expectations and I was scared I was going to get shit on - if you hang around there, you know how cynical the comments can be.

Somehow even with a few upvotes I got to #4 on the front page. I seriously went on my phone and turned WiFi off, opened an incognito tab on Chrome to check it was real.

I ended up getting 6700 unique visitors and 12500 pageviews. The conversion rate is nothing to brag about, I got 12 sales on that day. But it's the most I ever made in a day since I started my own project, and god was it a big confidence boost!

I know I haven't made big money and there's a lot of people who have done better than me in a shorter time. What I've done is not really impressive. But I just wanted to share it in case you are doubting yourself or think that even if things go well for you, it will take a long time to build something. It's not true. There's no rules!