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4 Comments

I'm struggling to find where to start and make progress, what would you recommend?

Hello all!

Here is the current situation, I have my idea with core MVP features outlined (website/app that help and recommand what movie or show to watch next based on your watchlist and your watching habits and time, think of it as a binge watching assistant) and I want to implement it using a stack I am not used to (fullstack NodeJS and Vue) but feel like it will be easier to use and maintain in the long term for the core mechanics.

As I advance in my learning of the tech stack, I feel like I am entering more and more in tutorial hell and at the same time thinking about :

  • Building in public (want to post articles here and on twitter but in the tools learning phase I feel like it is unecessary)
  • SEO (keep it basic or implementing layers like Nuxt for this or if other things exist)
  • Domain and infra stuff (should I buy a domain right now and look for possible hosting service ? I am completly new about this and don't want it to be expensive and time consuming)
  • Creating a community and customer acquisition early (struggling to know when is the right time to communicate as their is no product, no landing page, website or app to start with)

And all this without starting to really working on the actual project. Just some tutorials and books reading about the future stack.

I fell like I'm looking in every direction without making clear progress. Maybe I am overthinking things as it is the first time I do this on my own. Also juggling with my day job and personal life is not easy to be honest.

How do you proceed with your products ?
Do you have a clear process or method when you start making something ?

Thanks for your help and advices !

on October 16, 2020
  1. 2

    I'd just focus on one thing for now: getting a very basic version of the app built. Forget everything else. If you want to use Vue then I think Nuxt is a wise choice. Find some good Nuxt tutorials and/or boilerplates that pull together some of the things you need, such as auth and db. You may even want to look at grabbing a template to help you get a lot of the basic UI in place. Once the app starts coming together you can start building in public and pushing some of that interest into an early-access mailing list.

    1. 2

      Thanks for your advices, really appreciated.
      I really need to stop my mind going crazy about things that does not matter at the moment.
      I use a simple trello board to organize my tasks but maybe I need more granularity to keep me going and focus on just one thing.
      Do you use another tool or framework for task tracking ?

      1. 1

        I'm using a board in Notion right now, but essentially the same as Trello. I think that's a good way to organize tasks. That said, don't get too caught up with tools. For my first year of product development I didn't have a task organizer. I just wrote down the next 3 things I needed to do on a piece of paper and then did them. Repeat.