Stonks

Been interviewing at other companies. Tired of working for a large company + in case Stonks app idea fails would be nice to have equity upside by joining a startup. Got an offer. Been busy with that plus other stuff like family.

But managed to pull it off and finished 95% of the app. Only thing remaining is to release it to prod :)

Changed name of the app from "Watchlist" to "Stonks" because it's a meme and sounds fun and cool.

Also purchased stonks.community for $30/yr (Google Domains) and hosted on Webflow ($144/yr) - so a total of $14.5/mo which is ridiculously cheap.

Stonks.cummunity - let's go!

So excited to be a dad now to a beautiful boy Hasan.

Now I have 3 jobs: Full-time job, Watchlist app, and being a dad.

I hope I can manage to keep working on this. I took a month of paternity leave from full-time work (Dec 2020-Jan 2021) and take rest of 3 months later next year. I promised myself and wife not to work on anything - not even my side projects - during paternity leave.

Cut out time-wasting distractions: no access to internet after 5pm and on weekends, unfollow everyone on social media to keep my newsfeed empty, etc.

Allowed me to focus better and complete 70% of MVP. Mainly backend work remaining and a few other components that I need to complete.

Being a solo founder and working on the side while being a full time employee is really, really tough already. Shipping code on iOS + Android + Backend is even tougher. So I did some research on cross platform solutions like React Native, Flutter, etc.

Flutter was extremely easy to learn and had first-class Android support (it's made by Google) so it was a no-brainer. It works flawlessly with Firebase. Very magical.

Got inspired by Reflectly who built it all out with just a couple engineers.

Spent a few months thinking hard about product and came up with design.

My goal was to first create this app only for my friend Mohammad. He's on Android while I'm on iOS so made sense to make the app for both platforms.

I knew iOS development very well (I shipped a ton of iOS code for Doordash) but needed to brush up my Android skills. Gave myself a one month to learn Android + Kotlin (using Udacity and official Android documentation tutorials).

I've been exchanging stock investment memos to my friends for almost a year, but when the pandemic hit our text messages exploded with stock ideas.

I realized that I spent a lot of time texting my friends back and forth. I couldn't really find an app that fulfilled my need so I thought of the idea to create my own app.