I paused development for 3 months due to a major life changing event. This morning I reviewed the code and got familiar with everything all over again. Spun it up, built it, installed on a mobile device and ran it for a few. I'm excited to be back in development with a goal of shipping by end of Q1.
I got up to date with the tools and broke ground in building the app. I got the mobile app layout up and running, I have started adding functionality, building the backend and the database. I'm still thinking seriously about how I'm going to sell and market and slowly working that out. My goal now is to focus and just work until the app is done.
So I decided to turn my text based prototype into a mobile app. I installed the framework, and my gosh it has changed extensively. I have used ionic version 2 in the past, and now they are at version 4. I was using angular version 2 and now angular is at version 8. The API has changed so much, a lot has been deprecated, it's pretty much starting all over again. So now I have to sit down and study angular and ionic so I can get to building again. I at least wrote down a few of the necessary steps I need to take. I'll now give myself end of this month to learn both tools. So just a bit under 2 weeks. I'll spend the rest of my time working on the database, some of the backend and searching for marketing channels.
Decided not to wire the mobile app skeleton to the prototype. It would allow me to move faster in terms of getting a usable mobile prototype, but it slows me down from getting an actual mobile app. It might pay off in the future for testing, but unfortunately I don't have luxury of time. So I'm just going to straight up build the app and skip the intermediate step.
Yesterday I sketched out the layout of the app. I'm going to have 4 tabs and a side menu. Nothing fancy. Today I fought through it and got something basic and very ugly up. Took the prototype and inserted it into the app and it runs in an ugly way. I have to use debug to see my output. My next goal is to wire up the prototype to the app so the app can become a true mobile prototype to play with.
My approach to building this app is not to build an MVP first, but to build a prototype that I can personally iterate over until I really understand how I wish for the app to function. I built a text based prototype just to experiment and flush out my ideas. The next phase is to turn it into a full formed product.
Found a link to indiehackers again, and noticed the product section for the first time. After looking at a few products and thinking about it. I decide it was time to stop lurking and start participating. Time to stop reading and start building.
I decided to take a different approach. I'm not going to overthink this. I'm not going to go for a big novel idea, just any small boring idea is fine. I'm doing what has already been done a thousand times over. My goal is to build something that will make $100/month so I can official be a real indie hacker and we can then figure out how to make $1k/month.
I picked a boring idea, just another child care about. No customer interviews, no testing the market to find a product-market fit. No landing pages. I'm just going to build it. My goal is to build and launch in about 4 months.