What's your LATEST mistake?

Me spontaneously: "Oh, I will add just this one little cool feature. It will not affect anything."
Me 20 minutes later realising (once again) all the little flows it can introduce and how complex it can become: git revert ... back to focus on finishing the project.

Same mistake as always; launching something new without bringing an audience. I know I need to build one, but I struggle with maintaining the path to that because it's so much easier to build a thing.

Great question.

Here's a meta answer for you: My latest mistake is the one I'm not aware of yet.

I say that since things are going well on my current product, but I'm only so sure of what I'm doing. I've got tons of concerns and thoughts about what I should be doing but I'm not, but overall things seem fine. So I'm more concerned about the mistake that I don't know I'm making, if that makes sense.

Assumed my site's email was working correctly. Come to find out it wasn't, and there was a queue of 100+ emails that I had missed! 😲

Went through them all, replied to them, and apologized profusely to all the prospects and customers for the long-delayed reply.

Introduced a bug into my pricing page.

Checked logs: 100+ visits since that resulted in 500 errors.

Great.

🪳 Rushing to publish a new version right before the weekend, then during the weekend I find it has some serious bugs. Couldn’t spend the weekend to fix the bugs as I won’t sacrifice time with the kids.

Learnings:

📆 Publish on Mondays. I know very well not to publish by the end of the week, but just wanted to fix things so badly this time that I only made it worse.

🤖 Automated tests. Add automated tests to automatically check for regressions. I do TDD for when bugs are reported but I need to be a bit more proactive.

Getting lost in the tech and forgetting about the end user. We all love building amazing, clean solutions, but only 1 or 2 people will ever see the beautiful PR, but that is worthless if it brings a poor user experience.

Sinking 6 weeks of work on my game without a good marketing plan

I have this open source color picker that I developed for Vue that I just sort of forgot about. Turns out that many of the dependencies it relied on are now riddled with security vulnerabilities.

Worse, I thought I was the only one who really knew about this thing (I never promote it), yet when I returned to the npm page I was surprised to find that apparently it has quite a lot of downloads. Not sure how that happened, but nonetheless, it's distressing.

Needless to say I have a new top priority to take care of. Luckily I don't think it will take long.

I spent a month trying to leverage my GraphQL knowledge into a managed proxy to add features on top of GraphQL servers (caching, rate limiting, etc). There are players in the space and none of them have clearly "won." I built a landing page, chatting with people, helping them with their problems, etc. After the month, I came to the conclusion that it'd be hard to compete in this space because most people don't perceive these things to be problems (after all, people host unmonitored APIs all the time), and the people that have problems have VC-subsidized open source solutions fighting for marketshare. It was hard to see what I could specifically build based on all the conversations I had.

So, I'd describe my mistake as overly focusing on a market that I imagined, rather than trying to follow the thread of finding something that people need.

I'm looking into a variant now, which is providing GraphQL and REST APIs on top of data that people search heavily for. There're lots of people searching for geocoding, and I have some experience with geographical data from a previous job, so I'm seeing what happens if i get in front of that traffic.

Not being able to find Dreamhost.com’s unlimited website deal until yesterday ;)

Got out of DOGE right before the record high jumps.

But in terms of indiehacking, it was ignoring my email for a few days and missing a support ticket.

Last week we deployed custom domains to our product.

It was a requested feature by a significant portion of our leads.

When notified about custom domains, a lot of them bought our subscription.

Then, my mistake:

I spent 6 hours building a campaign about custom domains for all the other leads.

It ended up converting only one sale.

Why only one?

I assumed it was a relevant feature for all our leads.

I got excited and let this excitement turn into a mistake that cost me 6 hours of work.

That's a lot when you have a low ticket.

We often remember about mistakes that we make when we get heated and angry.

But we often make mistakes when we get happy and excited.