The Ability to Finish a Project – How We Built and Launched a Simple Ping Service
Like many of you, my friend and I work regular full-time jobs as software developers - 8 to 5, Monday through Friday. After a day spent programming or problem-solving, we often found it hard to muster the energy to work on personal projects in the evenings. This led to a frustrating cycle: projects dragged on longer than expected, and more often than not, we abandoned them. Either we lost motivation, or we got distracted by shiny new ideas that seemed more exciting.
The result? We never fully finished a project. Out of 10 attempts, maybe one or two made it past 85% completion, while the rest fizzled out early. Here are a few examples of ideas we started but never saw through:
- A refrigerator/freezer item tracker app with recipes and shopping lists.
- A real-time dog walker app to log walks and track details.
- An online coaching platform with free sign-ups.
- A DCF analysis website for stocks.
Some of these ideas were relatively simple, others more complex. But we had a bad habit of overengineering everything, even when we didn’t have a single user yet. Looking back, this might have been our first mistake - failing to focus on an MVP.
Finally, we decided to change that. We made a commitment: create something simple and finish it. No overthinking, no unnecessary features, just a promise to ourselves that this project would get done and deployed.
We turned to Indie Hackers for inspiration and stumbled upon an idea: a pinging service. In our experience, when testing and deploying services in the cloud on free-tier plans (like Heroku back then), apps would go to sleep without activity. We relied on similar ping services to keep those apps alive, but most of them were packed with features we didn’t need. That got us thinking: why not build something useful but ridiculously simple, with an intuitive UI and only the essential features?
And that’s how PingPapi was born.
PingPapi is a free-to-use pinging service (for now). It’s designed to be straightforward: simple signups, simple pings, and a simple interface. That’s it. No fluff, no distractions. Whether you're keeping your free-tier apps awake or just experimenting with cloud-hosted services, PingPapi provides a no-nonsense solution that works.
For us, this project had two goals:
- Provide a clean, easy-to-use service.
- Finally complete a project from idea to implementation to deployment.
While PingPapi isn’t perfect we’re proud that it’s a functioning MVP. It’s live, it works, and it’s out in the world - a huge milestone for us as developers who previously struggled to finish projects.
Looking ahead, we’re excited to share our next project: Goatchu. Goatchu is a domain registrar tracker tailored for SaaS and enterprise domains. It’s another step forward in our journey to build and release meaningful tools. More on this soon!
Thanks for reading! Have you faced similar struggles with finishing projects? How did you overcome them? We’d love to hear your stories.
Our tech stack: Monolith architecture using Next.js, PostgreSQL, and Firebase.
