My first attempt at building in public. Might help your project too!

After asking about building in public and hearing nothing but positive experiences with it I decided I wanted to give it a shot myself! I figured I'd come up with a new project so I could start fresh and share my experiences from the get go. So I went on a nice run to clear my mind and BOOM an idea came to me, what about a platform that lets you pitch your idea in a bitesize format that you could fit into a single Tweet. The average person has such a short attention span now that you need to get your idea across fast! Just like that, the idea for Slim Pitch was born.

The Pitch

"Pitch your product in 280 characters or less"

That's it. I give you a platform to pitch your idea in 280 characters or less, the size of a single tweet. Sort of an elevator pitch on steroids. The idea is to see if you can distill your idea down to its most basic form so that anyone can understand it. If you can do so, you can benefit from having your idea validated by the entire Slim Pitch audience (currently just me), receiving valuable feedback (from me), and getting free traffic to your site (again, just from me so far...).

What I've done so far

I know I said I wanted to build this entire project in public, but it is such a simple idea that I thought it'd honestly be easier to just get the basic landing page out and share that here instead of trying to paint you a word picture. And I was correct, in less than 8 hours I have the very minimal MVP ready at https://slimpitch.com.

Currently you can view the landing page or submit your own pitch. Pretty basic but all that's necessary to get started. I built the website using a GatsbyJS starter blog hosted on a free tier of Netlify. I used FormSpree to get my pitch submission and email capture forms running without having to build any databases. TailwindUI let me get my UI built quickly. I also got my Twitter set up and my first pitch sent out for Slim Pitch itself!

Whats next

Lots of code cleanup. I built fast and threw it out the door. After the dust settles I have a lot of code smell I need to go back and take care of. I want to then integrate Mailchimp and get my newsletter up and running to keep people coming back. I have a bunch of new pages that need building like the pitch list itself, contact, blog, and about pages. I also obviously need to start gathering submissions for new pitches. I have a bunch of ideas of my own that I gathered into a Notion doc but it's no fun if I'm just pitching to myself!

Well that's it for day one. I have the MVP out the door and my first pitch is Tweeted. If you want to pitch your product you can submit it at https://slimpitch.com/submit! Or if you want to help spread the word I would appreciate any like or retweets!

Thanks for listening!