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Month #1: Building a Startup From Scratch

Every year I set myself new unattainable goals for the new year! I never achieved the goals! Year by year passed! I looked at tons of “How To Make Money!” videos on YouTube! I was a failure! But this year everything should change. I set myself one goal:

Building a Startup From Scratch

Along the way, I’ll be documenting and sharing the whole process on IndieHackers and Twitter. This should serve as a motivation for others but aswell for me.

My Background

I’m a self-taught developer who learned the wrong programming languages😅. Several years ago, I started to learn HTML, CSS, and PHP. I don't regret learning HTML and CSS. However, I regret learning PHP. At the time of learning it, PHP was the future! Now, in 2022 PHP is basically dead! Over the last two years, I have learned Python, Machine Learning, and Web Security/Penetration Testing. My current knowledge of design, marketing, and building a startup is zero! Additionally, I have a job, so I will be a part-time Indie Hacker.


Week 1:

This week the challenge has officially started! 52.1428 weeks left (365 days)!
I already have a rough idea about what I want to build. My idea in a nutshell: a web app where users can create/save their tools, programming languages, etc., and monitor the cost of those tools.

To begin with, I created a Twitter account with the username @DigitalGreyHat. For the profile picture, I chose a slightly more eye-catching and creative profile picture than other accounts.

I created the 3D model on ReadyPlayerMe.me and then I used pfpmaker.com for the background/border of the profile picture.

During the first few days, I sticked with an account banner made by a generator. It had a solid color background and some text on it, which looked pretty bad! So I decided to design my own banner in Figma. I kept it simple by only making a gradient and adding my 3D character over the follow button. Simplicity is the key to success! 😃

Left: old account banner; Right: new account banner Left: old account banner; Right: new account banner

Last but not least, a well-written bio on Twitter is very important. To write my bio I took inspiration from bigger Indie Hackers on Twitter. I rewrote my bio 5 times because I felt like the bio didn’t reflect my personality and my goal.

The last question I asked myself was what to post on this account. I decided to post helpful stuff about JavaScript, Design, Growth, and my journey of building a startup. My hope is to get most of my customers from my Twitter account when I launch!

Fun Fact:
On Sunday I got an invite code for IndieHackers, and in the evening IndieHackers was not invite-only anymore. I wrote an article about it on IH and it got a good amount of views, even the founder of IH replied to my article! This gave me a lot of confidence and motivation!

Likes Count on IndieHackers

Week 2:

In order to stay organized, I need a place where I can keep all my stuff and be able to manage it all. Therefore, I started the week by setting up a structured Notion.so workspace. It contains everything from design to growth!

This is how the main part of my notion workspace looks!

This is how the main part of my notion workspace looks!

To get some basic knowledge on how to build a product/startup, I did some research on the internet. I came across some awesome blog posts on medium.com! Here are the steps you need to follow when building a product based on what I learned from the blog posts:

  1. 📊 : Market Research → look at what people need
  2. 💡 : Collect ideas for product → analyze the problems and find a solvable problem
  3. 🍀 : Validate idea → ask people what they think of it, look at the competition, etc.
  4. ✨ : Build a beta version → build a beta version and invite people to test/give feedback
  5. 🛠️ : Improve by feedback → improve your tool by hearing the beta testers feedback
  6. 📢 : Make a hype → try to build a hype about your product (best case)
  7. 🚀 : Launch!!! → on ProductHunt, Twitter, ...

Once I had a basic knowledge of building a product, I got into the design part of a product. The design is an essential part of a product! It determines whether you win or lose a customer.

Although I want to create a great, pixel-perfect design, I have to keep an eye on myself. Perfectionism is my enemy!

I learned this in the book “RefactoringUI” by Adam Wathan & Steve Schoger. The book helps me to get a basic understanding of the design process and design principles. I read about three or four pages of it every day.

Week 3:

I learned the basics of design last week, and now I am applying them to my project. I used dribbble.com and behance.com for design inspiration. I copied any image that caught my eye into Eagle. Eagle is an awesome tool for organizing reference images and working with them! I may write a separate article about it since it has so many features!

Then I gave each design I liked a tag, such as "sidebar" or "header", and I wrote a short description of what I liked about it. After I gathered all my inspiration, I made folders for each tag. All images with the same tag are sorted and collected in the appropriate folder.

My “sidebar” folder/collection in Eagle

My “sidebar” folder/collection in Eagle

The next step is to draw the wireframes. First, I attempted to draw a wireframe in Microsoft Whiteboard, but that didn't work well. The Microsoft Whiteboard does not allow you to draw shapes and does not have a font selection.

I found an open-source alternative called tldraw.com! Completely free of charge, no need to sign up and it’s privacy-oriented! Made by @steveruizok a fellow Indie Hacker.

tldraw.com worked like a charm. It made my life a bit easier and the wireframes turned out really well! In my opinion...

My 1st wireframe on tldraw.com

Week 4:

As part of my weekly routine, I tried to tweet something every day. I failed this week. On Tuesday, I suddenly saw blurry in one eye! I went to the doctor for treatment. Due to the amount of time I spend in front of the computer, one of my eyes was really dry, which caused the blurry vision.

I drastically reduced my screen time the next few days and couldn't get anything done. I tried drawing wireframes on normal paper, but I messed it up completely! So I was writing this blog post in the remaining days of the week.

Statistics 📈

Twitter:

My Twitter Stats

IndieHackers:
+4 Followers (✅)
+46 Points (✅)

Dev . to:
+0 Followers (❌)
+0 Unicorns (❌)

✅ = Growth, ❌ = Negative-Growth


Learned from Mistakes 💡

  • Expect the unexpected! → I never expected that I would see blurry in one eye!

Plans for next Month 🔎

  • More engagement on Twitter
  • Finish remaining wireframes
  • Design the project page in Figma

Special thanks to: 🎁

@foliofed - He gave me the IH invite code & help me with some questions!
@marmooznet - Got the inspiration for the profile picture from him & he reviewed this article!
@tbll75 - Gave me feedback for this article!
@MeetKevon - He tweets about great stuff, learned much from him!


I am so glad you stayed with me all the way to here! I would love to hear your feedback on my first monthly article!

Check out my Twitter to see weekly work updates!

  1. 4

    PHP is dead ? I didn't knew.

    I am using it from many years on all my products and freelance projects. Making good revenue.

    No one told me about dead of PHP. When did it die ? What happened ?

    1. 3

      My thoughts too. PHP is not dying... still powers up many large corporations.

      1. 3

        But it's not cool!
        Who cares that it powers over half of the world wide web.

        People hating on PHP either can't use it properly or never really used it.
        It's just "hip" to hate on PHP and Jquery these days.
        If someone needs 16 frameworks, 11 services, and 7 times more time to perform simple tasks - cool.

        I'll stick with LAMP.

      2. 3

        Yep. People who say PHP is dead did one of the below

        1. Tried using in it in 2004 and built their perception. Never cared to re-evaluate it
        2. Have used only core PHP.

        They have not used powerful frameworks like Symfony and Laravel. They must try using any one of these frameworks, they will understand how good and powerful PHP is...

  2. 3

    Great post, looking forward for follow up !!

  3. 3

    Best of Luck for this year. But PHP is not that dead. It depends actually. I don't regret yet. BWT your designs are great.

    1. 0

      Thank you, many people have already told me that. It is good to know PHP is not dead! Still, I don't intend to do it in PHP because this year is a new chapter in my life. In addition, I want to start from scratch, since others don't have the advantage of having already learned a programming language.

  4. 3

    Great post! Your wireframe looks so good :) Hope your eye is doing better!

    1. 2

      My eye is recovering well, thanks!

  5. 2

    Have you talked to 10 users? Seriously before you do anything else, talk to 10 users. Please.

    1. 1

      Yep, I did actually talk to 10+ users! The majority of respondents liked the concept behind it and said they would pay for it. In terms of competition, there are a few companies out there who do basically the same thing as I do.
      Btw, I just realized that I haven't written about the validation process!😅 I apologize!

  6. 2

    best of luck in your venture! can't wait to see how it turns out :)

  7. 2

    Cool update. And thanks for including Potion.

    1. 2

      When I was making the wireframes, I immediately thought of potion.so! That name is somehow stuck in my mind! 😅😂

      1. 2

        Well thats great! I do like the name. :)

  8. 2

    Good luck! Waiting for the next update! 🚀

  9. 2

    Haha starting with PHP was a bold choice. I wouldn't regret it though I am sure it helped you pick up the engineering mindset more. As for python, I have been using it professionally for the past 4 years and love it. Stick with learning python it is so rewarding and fun! Good luck with you journey and hey maybe this year is your year!

  10. 2

    Thank you for this article! It gave me much motivation to start a business by myself!

  11. 2

    Hi @DigitalGreyHat

    It's great that you have decided to document your founder's journey.

    "a web app where users can create/save their tools, programming languages, etc., and monitor the cost of those tools."

    Sorry I didn't read beyond this point. Other than looking at the pictures. May I know why this is a problem worth solving? Is this a big problem for you?

    There are products to save links. There are products to track subscriptions. I'm not a developer, so not sure whether this is a problem faced by developers. Keen to understand more about the problem you are solving.

    I've been building https://skilledup.life on the public since 1st Aug 2020. I'm not a developer. I put the site together using a CMS and hacked it to deliver what I wanted over 3 days. We publish metrics on https://skilledup.life/metrics, and I've publicly said we will go from a few customers starting on 1st Nov 2021 to £10k MRR by end of Oct 2022.

    Keen to understand the problem.

    1. 2

      I greatly appreciate your honest feedback! Perhaps I explained my idea a little too briefly. I will write a longer version under this comment or in the next post.

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