Heart of a Maker

I've come up with plenty of ideas over the years, and that shows no sign of stopping any time soon. They've varied in size and complexity from trivial to positively monolithic.

I once wrote a Chrome extension that simply deleted everything in a textarea if you dared to hit the backspace key: I called it, Writer's Block. The idea was to encourage uninhibited writing by discouraging premature editing.

I've written an "indestructible" CMS that has version control completely integrated (via Git); even the configuration is version controlled. Any action can be undone. It protects your writing while eliminating the need for backups. Initially written for NodeJS, I rewrote it in Angular as a progressive web app so that it works anywhere. In its current incarnation it even generates a website with free hosting. It remains a work in progress, because Git for the browser still has significant limitations.

Most recently I created a proof-of-concept for an email alias service — I posted about it here on IH. The feedback offered was incredibly helpful. Particularly, it made me realise a couple of things I should have done earlier:

• Search on specific sites for terms related to my idea
• Ask the community

Search

I initially googled around and didn't come up with any solid offerings for the service I had in mind. I immediately started thinking about how to create what I needed — because I love creating and this was a perfect excuse to do so (and typically I build out of interest, not for monetisation, so competition doesn't come into play.)

But basic googling isn't enough. A search engine is a great tool for general queries, but for more specific queries, I typically find that specialist sites yield better results (e.g. for dev questions, StackOverflow). I should have been searching sites like Product Hunt, Beta List etc., Chrome extensions and Firefox add-ons. Doing so would have given me a much better indication of what's already available.

Ask

I also should have reached out to the IH community earlier. I've been a member for two years, lurking (sounds creepy), and have hardly participated at all. While I'm warm with people I know, I'm generally very private and reserved, and find it incredibly difficult to reach out, especially when it comes to asking for help or advice. It's something I'm continually working on.

If I'd written this post just a couple of weeks earlier, there's a good chance I wouldn't have bothered with the minmail PoC. The concept didn't need further proof; there are already several services built around it. But I missed this because I didn't look in the right places or speak to enough people.

Learn

On the plus side, if I didn't go through this process, I wouldn't have had the opportunity to learn from my mistakes. But I won't make these mistakes again.

And I'm already cooking up another idea: a tool to simplify that initial search to see what's out there. Anyone interested? I might throw up a post once I've got a more concrete vision...

If you made it this far, thanks so much for reading :-)