Hello Indiehackers!
My most recent failure/halt is Tazzo Website Builder
It's a drag-drop website builder that also connects to Airtable to pull in the dynamic data.
Intro
Initially, it went great. I was inspired by Sheet2Site which makes websites from Google Sheets and I was all motivated to make something like that, but for Airtable.
My vision was a drag and drop builder where you drop static blocks (or) dynamic blocks which you connect to different airtables.
Eventually, I fell into a feature-dreaming loop π€© , but although I didn't make those features, I was now changing my foundation.
I re-wrote my foundation from scratch. Twice. πͺ
As I built the site, I realized there were a lot of things I missed with theming and restyling, so I started to fix those things.
Ineffective user interviews
I then went around with a half working prototype to ask people what they think and how it goes.
I bumped into a group of users and turns out they were all hardcore fans of Webflow and didn't show much interest in this. π₯±
This heavily demotivated me... but surely there must be users around there who would be interested in this idea right?
"Because if a market for No-Code Website Builders exists, then, Airtable to Websites must exist too right?", is what I thought.
Bad Feature Decisions
Then I met a customer group who asked if this would support "Export Code"
"Yes! It will π", I said, and without a second thought, went ahead writing a transpiler which would could "Export Code"
The transpiler was working great. The codebase is exporting.
But this left other styling features incompatible and now I had to somehow re-edit my blueprint
structure.
At this point, it has already been 6 weeks of no-break full-time work on this.
I was burned out π« ... and had to take a break.
Trying to revisit
I took a break for a couple of weeks and when I went back, I had written the most messed up source code that was built on a foundation for a different use-case connected to a code exporter.
I myself found it very difficult to read the code and now, have absolutely no motivation to fix it.
As of now - Tazzo is indefinitely paused... βΈπ
What about you?
I would love to read about your failures and how it happened.
Tell it out! Write 'em below π