CipherCards

I mailed out a few CipherCards to friends and family. It's mostly a joke, to be honest - a throwaway project just to learn some skills and get comfortable making mistakes.

Much to my surprise, someone I knew actually ordered two!

Although it's still firmly in the "friends and family" territory, and I have no reason to expect more, there's still just a little bit of pride from getting that "first dollar".

The project can't scale (literally - it takes me 30 minutes to cut and ship each card), but I'm nonetheless proud of creating something fun.

With luck CipherCards might someday cover startup costs for other, more complex ideas.

I hacked together an embarrassingly rough website in a weekend.

I struggle to launch things. My inclination has always been to wait and plan and build, build, build until everything is perfect - a 100% guarantee of success. As an engineer, I find it painful to prioritize speed over quality.

In order to overcome this mentality, I challenged myself to pursue a random "throwaway" idea and hack it together in a weekend. This CipherCards site is the result.

Ship Something

For the duration of my "hackathon", I had a paper on my wall behind my laptop with a question and a flow chart: "Can I Order a CipherCard?"

If the answer was "No", I put the question: "Why Not?". This kept me focused on only the task at hand. Whenever I'd get distracted by something that didn't help me answer "Yes", I would write the thought down and shove it in a drawer for later.

Lessons Learned

I now feel more comfortable with making mistakes.

Case in point: I completely forgot to include the "state" in the shipping part of the order page, and had to personally follow up with someone to get that info. Even that glaring issue didn't matter much and the person ended up ordering a second card.

Sometimes as creators we obsess over our little day-to-day mistakes. They matter less than we think.