How I Plan To Ship Projects More Often
Hey IHers!
I've got a confession to make... I still suck at shipping projects. 😔
Can anyone relate to that?
It's been this way for as long as I can remember. Whether it was working on a detailed hot-air balloon model in middle school, or cranking out a C++ coding project in college (🤢), or even creating greenfield applications as a Senior Software Engineer in the Digital Innovation department at a fortune 500 company, I've always struggled to produce and ship work quickly.
My natural inclinations urge me to take on tasks slowly and methodically, learning as much as I can along the way. I spend hours and days analyzing my approach, calculating every move, and then slowly building something amazing. This approach has led me to create some really cool things (you should have seen that hot air balloon!), and helped me to become successful in my corporate career, but I'm afraid it's not going to cut it anymore.
As I transition into the role of a full-time Indie Hacker, who is trying to create 12 Startups in 12 months, I need to become an expert at shipping projects early and often.
Gone are the days of waiting for the next feature to be done. Gone are the days of obsessing over color palettes that no one will see. Gone are the days of analysis paralysis.
Here's my plan to get better at shipping:
- Commit code to production every day
- Engage with potential customers & communities 3x a day
- 3 new apps in production by the end of March.
I'm documenting my startup journey on Youtube. Each week I share updates on my startups, talk about problems I'm facing as a solo founder, and show you how I get stuff shipped! 🛳
Watch my latest episode here: https://youtu.be/O7Ivu688k7s
I'd love to know: How are you shipping work quickly? 🤔
p.s.
This post would have taken me hours to write and edit in the past.
Today I gave myself 30 minutes to SHIP IT! 🚀
Hey, I definitely get it. Shipping tasks can be an actual challenge. Your honesty is refreshing, and I wager many can relate to your journey. The transition to becoming a full-time, unbiased hacker sounds both interesting and demanding.
Your diagram to commit code daily, have interaction with communities, and have intention for three new apps by March sounds bold and focused. It's exceptional that you are documenting your startup experience on YouTube; sharing the highs and lows can be inspiring. That's a great instance of overcoming perfectionism. Keep that momentum going! I seem to be following your progress.
I think you're right, it's been a bit more demanding than I realized it would be at first. I could do things the other way around, and build something in silence, perfect it over months (or years), and then launch it and pray that it works... but I'm going to keep pushing myself to get out of my comfort zone and ship things quickly, learn, and iterate.
Thanks for your kind words!
What is S Brewing Company? Do you have any 🍻 available?
Im doing the exact same thing basically, currently February ends, I've shipped three products, 2 of them have currently ~1000 users, but earnings are <$100 :/
That's amazing,
If you don't mind can your share your products
Emojifyer and Cartoonifier are the ones with over 1000 users
Nice saw your products and they look pretty cool.
how were you able to market those
That's great that you are getting lots of users into your applications. I love that feeling of having real people benefit from the products that I've helped to create. 😊
What do you think is holding you back from generating more revenue?
Those >1000 user products are just "Fun" AI Wrappers, nothing else, thats also probably why.
I identify
I think starting from the user side and being ok with smoke and mirrors and broken stuff on the backend
The FE gets to complain about the BE but it's not his scope to fix, and he does reasonable stuff to hold the illusion/not to fully break the system, so the user still has some value, so what if we are loading/showing stale data as we are waiting for someone to kick the server again
Or these buttons don't work, but the user sees and can return later, a bad unreliable system is at least something to put hope into vs no system, can come back later, you can apologise
If you didn't do something wrong you didn't do anything worthwhile
Great quote! Ideally it would be great to get everything right, but you'll never know until you ship it!