Started Building an MVP

As a laravel developer I started building Makanaki using
laravel but along the way circumstances made me halt
the project in favor of a well developed open source project I saw on github doing close what I am trying to do, I figured that I could simply fork the project and modify it to what i am trying to do.
I took me over over 3 weeks to figure out somethings in that code, but after several sleepless nights, i finally put together the MVP of the app, and my lesson is that it would be easier for me if I built my platform from the ground up, instead using somebody's codebase because I had to rewrite the most part of the original project.