My First Project: A Rollercoaster Ride of Building, Launching, Learning and How I reached 80k visits in 2 days

I didn't launch my project recently, but since I've never shared my story before, I thought I'd give it a shot. If you're interested in building and releasing something to the public, you might find my experience helpful.

I developed a simulation tool that allowed users to explore virtually every possible outcome of turn-based events and interaction sequences. In case you are wondering, yes it is a technical tool for a rather niche audience.

How I built it (my stack for the curious devs)

When I first began this project, I had just left university and had a general idea of what I wanted to create, but I didn't focus much on the specifics. If I could do it again, I would plan things out more thoroughly. As a beginner, I made the common mistake of adding lots of extra features and redoing existing ones without proper planning.

For the backend, I chose Python because I was most familiar with it and had some past experience. I picked Django over Flask to challenge myself, as I had built stuff with Flask before. Though, I would choose FastAPI now if I were to start over.

The frontend development aspect was uncharted territory for me. I had some knowledge of HTML and CSS, but I had never employed them in actual development. I adopted a hands-on approach, opting for HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JavaScript, without incorporating any styling or JavaScript frameworks. My choice of Django for backend development greatly impacted my frontend decisions, an approach I would not advise others to follow. Interestingly, I unintentionally ended up building something akin to my own React framework, which made learning React later on much easier.

I hosted my project on Heroku (RIP). Some of you might be able to guess when I worked on this project based on that.

Launching My Project and Reaching 80k Visits in Two Days

My main strategy for launching and promoting my project was to focus on Reddit. As a regular user, I was familiar with certain communities from my frequent doom scrolling. To prepare for the launch, studied a few subreddits to identify some simple patterns, such as which types of posts received the most engagement, comments, and feedback.

I also used my tool to create simulation results and turned them into visually appealing graphics using my basic graphic design skills. I shared these on Reddit at different times to see when they got the most engagement. They also helped raise awareness about my presence in the community. Remember, Reddit users don't appreciate self-promotion, so your posts should provide value to the community.

After gathering feedback from my posts, I chose a launch day, wrote a detailed post, and shared it on Reddit. I expected around 1,000 visitors, but was amazed when 80k people visited and used my tool within just two days. Although I only promoted my project on Reddit, it was featured on other platforms, which helped drive traffic. Even without maintenance, my tool still gets 2-4k monthly visits, and at least a small portion of that comes from those other platforms.

Lessons Learned and Advice for People who want to start building

1. Don't worry about scalability and cost when starting; focus on delivering value in the beginning. Most free plans will cover your needs
2. Aim for simplicity; keep any complexity behind the scenes and not in front of users.
3. Avoid building every feature; collect feedback and prioritise. Build your product iteratively
4. Remember, it's not about the idea, but the execution that matters. No one really cares about the idea (even for high technical things)
5. Learn a framework (like React) to speed up development. The learning curve may be steeper, but the higher development speed will make up for it later.

Why I am sharing this story

I used to work on all my projects privately, but this year, I decided be more involved in the indie hacker community. I'm passionate about building and sharing my projects, and I love seeing how people use what I create.

If you enjoyed my story, consider following me on Twitter, where I plan to share more insights and upcoming projects. Bear with me as I am still new there:
https://twitter.com/onepark95

I am also interested in following other like-minded people.
Thanks for reading!