Road to $1000 in 2 weeks Day 3

Hey folks I'm building underlineme.com

I'm doing this as a part of a challenge to validate, build and market a full product in 2 weeks time.

Previous article here:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/road-to-1000-in-2-weeks-day-2-2381dd37d9
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/shash7s-road-to-1000-in-2-weeks-c642a2f991

Before we dive in, a few clarifications:

Unlike other case studies which leave out a lot of details, this is happening in real time.
I'm publishing this to keep myself accountable. I shouldn't hope to setup my own business if I can't lay everything on the line and sacrifice 2 week's of time on a single project.
Read the past articles before commenting. It will clear up a lot of questions.
Don't take the Day 3 part literally. It just means its my third day of posting this. In reality about a week has passed from day 1 to day 3. See the calendar on day 1 for deets.

Lastly, thank you for all the support I got on my last post. Helps keep the motivation up.

Let's do this.

Day 3

I spent the next 4 days working fullstop on the extension. I also did a bit of marketing but my main focus on keeping up with the deadline and pushing this extension out on Chrome webstore(CWS from now on).

My project was structured into 4 seperate repos:

The actual website. Built on top of nuxtjs and published via Netlify. The most straightforward part of the project.
A backend built on expressjs. While there's no need for a backend, when it comes to developing extensions there are many cors issues so its good to have a backend even if it doesn't do much. I use it for license key verification atm.
The actual extension package. Built on top of vue-cli-plugin-browser-extension. Really helpful plugin for setting up a extension package.
The widget(the highlights you make on a page) is built in its own seperate repo and exported as a web component. The main reason is that all styles are encapsulated inside the webcomponent so I don't need to worry about leaks and stuff. On the downside it introduces a lot of friction between the extension repo and this widget.

Also I did a few things differently this time:

I had a solid focus on writing the business logic of the extension from day 1. This was really helpful as it laid a solid foundation of the extension.
Literally the first few hours were focused on setting up a solid store.js(Vuejs terminology, brains of the app) and then focusing on the routing, content scripts, background scripts, etc.
I focused on building only a selected few featured and refining them instead of developing a lot of features which are crappily implemented. I learnt from my past failures that a crappy feature is worth less than that feature not being there. And you can't remove a feature once its implemented.
During this time I was also using my competitor's apps side by side. Really helped me make a lot of micro decisions which I would've taken ages on and I could clearly see where I need to make improvements.
Lastly, I setup'd a gumroad page for accepting pre-orders. Why Gumroad? I already have an account with them and their cut is so low(after the $10) that I would need to make a crapton of sales before I can justify using stripe or something similar.

Ultimately I'm really proud of building this and am quite enjoying using this for myself atm.

During this 4 day blaze I also did a bit of marketing. Luckily Indiehackers twitter mentioned me and I also got a few subscribers from there.

From a psychological point of view I had a few setbacks:

Had a severe case of corona blues. Where I'm based, we are back in lockdowns for 6 weeks. So I'm back in my apartment again.
As much as I tried to focus on the essentials, I drifted off to making unnecessary product enhancements like fancy animations and such. Overall it wasn't as bad as my past products as I've been focused on making the core product more functional than introduce more features.
I would keep thinking about future success and extra product enhancements. Luckily the deadline is so tight that I can't even think about that crap - I need to push this out as soon as possible.

Looking back, I wish I had partenered with someone. I could've kept banging away at the code and someone else could've kept the marketing fire on. Its really hard doing both rn, especially since with the lockdowns my productivity is kinda down.

Also, this whole timeline got delayed by a day. Turns out, I spent 6 hours(no joke, it do be like dat) debugging a bug which was corrected by swapping 2 words.

I also(kindof) got my first product validation. 2 seperate users said they won't mind beta testing this app and also added they would pay for this.

Rn the extension is up on CWS. If you're work is based on aggregating and curating content(like maintaining newsletters, writing blogs, etc) and want to beta test this, I'm keeping 5 slots open for this audience for beta testers. Dm me directly on twitter @ shash122tfu or here.

Next writeup coming up in a few days.