Going from 0 to launch in 48 hours and learning to build and ship FAST with React/Next.js.

Over the past 2 weeks I challenged myself to build 7 products (one every 2 days) from 0 to a Product Hunt launch. Here’s what I learned:

No one cares what you’re doing.

• Don’t be afraid to post your progress updates and failures, no one can succeed 100% of the time and sharing what went wrong will help you learn from your mistakes and get people interested in your journey
• Sharing my progress allowed me to do a quick validation on each feature I was building by dming a few people who were interested.
• I couldn’t have done this if I was scared that someone would steal my idea or if I didn’t want to overpromise on Twitter.

Lesson: Share things freely with your network and start gathering your first potential customers when you have the idea vs when you finish building.

Perfection always takes one more day.

• The entire time I was building I was convincing myself that if I had one more day I would have the perfect amount of time. I think this is actually a perpetual mentality which is present regardless of the state of the project or the time spent building. The beauty of such short deadlines was that I had to optimize to the extreme, and I was forced to launch before I felt ready, without being feature-complete. This made me work harder and smarter than I would have otherwise, Example: building a scraper that would set up a project for me with Firebase Auth, Firestore, Stripe, Vercel hosting, Github, analytics, etc. all integrated into a ready-to-go website. See video:

• By doing this I could start each project with a ready-to-go website and not have to worry about testing auth, checkout flow, user creation, etc.
• The only reason why I was so pressured by my deadlines was because I told everyone about it.

Lesson: Set deadlines for everything you create, share this deadline with others so you stay accountable, and you’ll be surprised how much you can create.

Automation and delegation of processes is the most direct path to true passive income.

• The most useful shift in my mindset through this challenge has been to build things for maximum reusability.
• This seems pretty obvious but it’s easy to forget. If you build many products I highly recommend keeping a personal central repository of webpage elements. Here are a few of mine: BillingCycleSwitch.js, WaitlistSignUp.js, Pricing.js. I can now drop these into any project and just connect the relevant overrides in 5 minutes rather than spending 30 minutes rebuilding a component.
• Processes are everything. Everything you do should be dictated by a documented process. That process will get improved every time you do it, and on off days you can take a process from your process directory and automate it.

Lesson: If something needs to be done more than twice, work to actively remove it from your manual tasks. Either by automation or delegation. If you can automate 1% of your work every day, it only takes 70 days to 2x your output, 40 days to 3x, and so on (exponential growth).

Building isn’t even half the battle

• Take it from a builder who ignored this before: Marketing is at least as important as building. I used to think that building a good product would be enough, and that word of mouth would do the rest. This is in most cases not true. A good low-effort strategy here is to just build in public and engage with people on Twitter.
• If you put equal time into marketing and building (rather than 100% on building), you’ll end up wasting less time through building unwanted features and early product validation.
• in 99% of cases marketing is absolutely critical for a business to grow, in 1% of cases it will just help a LOT.
• Write up a few marketing swipes and post them in 3 different places every day. Twitter, slack/discord groups, newsletters you run, Indiehackers, hacker news, cold emails, facebook groups, LinkedIn, reddit are all great places to post as long as you don’t spam. Takes 15 minutes and is super low effort when you have a ton of projects.
• Shift your mindset when marketing from “try MY product” to “I want to help you solve YOUR problem”
• I don’t like marketing, but I’ll devote 30 minutes per day to improving my strategy. The trigger point for when to start my session is when I find myself pacing around thinking about cool features/ideas.

Lesson: If you aren’t going to market yourself, you might as well just call indie-hacking a hobby. To turn your hobby into a business you need the attention and feedback of others. I guarantee that it isn’t really that hard, it just takes brute force practice.

To build that fast and ship that often, you need incredible stamina.

• I found the hardest thing to be the context switching every 2 days.
• Working on a new thing while getting bug reports and feature requests on the last project is super distracting when you need to ship quick. So while shipping 1 product in 2 days is possible, I’d say it’s impossible to run this more than 3 times in a row, and was eventually part of the reason that I had to call off the hackathon to work on maintaining the old projects.
• Another reason that I didn’t finish the hackathon was because I found that I didn’t enjoy building a product JUST to launch it. 90% of the fun of a side project comes from engaging with users and obsessing over the project post-launch. As soon as I realized I wasn’t enjoying the work I knew it was time to stop.
• The biggest superpower you have is to be enjoying what you do, because nothing else will give you the same long term motivation.

Lesson: At the end of the day, if you aren’t enjoying what you’re doing - re-evaluate FAST and pivot your life. Prioritize long-term happiness over short-term profit.

If I were to do this challenge again I would do 7 projects in 7 weeks, where 2 days are spent building, 1 day is spent launching, and the other 4 days are spent responding to feature requests, bug reports and working on process improvement for the next projects.

That’s all for now, I hope my learnings help you in your projects and feel free to reach out to me on Twitter if you have any feedback or questions.

Leave a comment if you have any other learnings, eager to learn 😎