Saving me from myself with my new project

I got in my own way by over complicating things. Especially my tech stack.

You see, once I had a shiny new product idea, I usually found myself overcomplicating things by getting bogged down in enterprise-level tech stacks and 3rd party services integrations.

What should my landing page look like? I should make it responsive for sure. Let's go look at landing page design sites for hours. You know, for inspiration. It needs a feedback form. I need to build a waiting list thingy. It all needs to be perfect.

And payments? Probably need that. What about authentication? State management? Dark mode!? Let's build it all again from scratch! 🤦‍♂️

It would literally take me weeks to get something out before I could start sharing it and seeing if people ACTUALLY WANTED to use it.

I'd try and build the thing(backend infra and all) before even pitching the idea to my target market. Oh boy.

This was... less than ideal.
I couldn't help myself. I needed something that would actually FORCE me to not get stuck in code or stack decisions.

So, naturally, the solution I thought of is that I should build one more repo(heh, dev's gonna dev). I created a quick-start repo so that I can go from idea to soft-launch in minutes instead of days.

It has everything I need set up and ready to go. Email, payments, feedback and good-enough responsive design.

No more deliberating the best responsive landing page designs. No more rebuilding the same old feedback form flows, or setting up email integrations, TS configs, db connections... or any of that schlep. Just update a few config files and launch already 🚀

It would be config file driven, and prevent me from being tempted to waste time faffing about. I can faff when the payments come in.

The repo is build on NextJS, connected to CockroachDB cloud and has integrations with SendGrid, SendInBlue, Postmark, Paddle and LemonSqueezy.

Now, when I want to test and validate a shiny new idea, I only need to pull this repo, update some config files with marketing copy and color variables, add my 3rd party ENVs and deploy. Done. It's out.

If people like the idea, I'll know. If no one cares, I only wasted like an hour at most. Bargain.