I lost 80% of my income overnight...what better time to build a product?

Like many of you here I’m a software engineer, I’ve been going at it for over 10 years now, and 6 weeks ago I lost my 2 biggest clients in the same week, they amounted to 80% of my monthly income.

I know what you are going to say, I should have continued looking for more clients even if I was comfortable.

Truth be told I was enjoying being able to spend more time with my kids a lot and getting a continuous flow of work without having to worry about looking for clients out there. Also I had lost clients in the past, just not 2 at the same time and also not the biggest, and I had been able to get my recurring revenue back to a good level each time.

So I have been messaging A LOT of companies and agencies to try to get more work, but it’s been some tough weeks.

This got me thinking…

I have been wanting to build products since 2014, when I actually launched my first one and I made the sweetest $5 ever.

I never actually stuck with it, though, so I am going to try something different this time.

Enter my new product

Last year I played around with building boilerplate, now there are quite a few out there, but I have been wanting to build something that would speed up development, both for me and potential clients, so that I can build MVPs quicker, and also help other devs, founders and agencies do the same.

So I am going ahead with it and I am going to be doing it in public, something else that I have tried and failed in the past.

Another boilerplate then?

Yes, and no.

It’s not just another boilerplate, I am going to build a set of boilerplates.

Why?

I worked with themes a lot in the early days of my career and the one thing I have always hated is how bloated they all eventually become.

So I am going to build **MVPs as boilerplates ** and my goal is that whoever buys them they can just customise a few things here and there, but should be able to pretty much take the thing as is and launch it as quickly as possible.

So things like a storefront (like gumroad), a job board, a marketplace, a dashboard, a crm, a community site, an LMS, etc…

And not only in Next.js, or React, but also Vue ( I know a lot of you out there using it ), Angular (v17 is quite nice), and I will also make sure they will always stay up to date.

Eventually I want to add support for modern runtimes and one-click deploy to most popular cloud and hosting platforms, as well as optionality in terms on the libraries you’d want to use for things like email, payments, SMS, etc.

Sounds like a lot of work. Maybe, but what better place to test if others think like me.

So I am going to build one by one, I am going to do it as humanly fast as possible and like everyone here, I will do it in public.

What’s it called you ask?

Quixtack.

And I am looking for 50 early clients that would like a 50% discount on a lifetime membership, to give them:

✅ All of the boilerplates

✅ All future updates

✅ A chance to request a boilerplate, with the stack that you want, for you to use first.

What do you think? I would love to hear your thoughts, be brutally honest!

If you want to follow along, hit me up on twitter: twitter.com/hecsanchezs