Learn+Build Software – Grand Vision

You can finally use an app that I built… granted its a bit silly but it is a stepping stone towards building something people will pay for, as Paul Graham says.

Now that I’ve setup hosting and learned how to deploy apps, my goal is to just keep grinding on the Grand Vision and continuously improve.

The name of the game is high-volume, have as many at-bats as possible. Keep playing the infinite game of building software.

🧘‍♂️ Grand Vision:

Phase 1: Use steps 1-4 below as a knowledge acquisition flywheel. Get better at making stuff! Keep it fun and exciting. Do something or learn something for my software products every day, even if it’s something small.

1. Go live with as many sites / apps as possible (somewhere between 10 and 100, as I can have up to 100 sites on my hosting plan).
2. Build each MVP super fast. Post about the MVP on Reddit to drive traffic. Let it ride for a little while and go do something else.
3. Use MS Clarity to figure out what users do with products. Add and improve MVP based on data.
4. Build new features and products when I get inspired.

Phase 2: Add payment options for features and products that are getting the most use. (more to come on this)

🤔 What have I learned so far?

Today I launched FocusFurnace.com, which is a cozy, campfire theme to-do list tracker.

I posted about it in r/indiehackers and it’s gotten about 425 impressions, and about 18 people have clicked on the link to use it.

Thanks to MS Clarity, I can see what people are doing and how they are using the app.

TBF, the data hasn’t been very good. I learned a few things, though. Here’s what I’ve learned:

1. Optimize apps for mobile. More than half of clicks from Reddit will be from a mobile device. The drag and drop feature on FocusFurnace.com doesn’t work at all on mobile! I should primarily build for mobile devices, not for desktop, because most users will end up visiting it from an iPhone or Android.
2. Make it super clear if something is a button or not. I could tell some users tried to click on different elements on the page thinking they were buttons, and couldn’t figure out what the app was supposed to do. Perhaps I could provide little instructional pop-ups in the app to help tell users what to do.
3. Streamline deployment: My hosting plan has the ability to deploy updates directly from GitHub. Similarly, VS Code which I use has the ability to deploy to GitHub repos. I can likely connect these two things so that I can develop updates / changes to my app in VS Code without having to do a lot of manually steps on my hosting provider.
4. Satisfaction with knowledge acquisition: when I woke up this morning, I hadn’t deployed a single app, didn’t have hosting, and had never used MS Clarity. By noon I had learned how to do all of these things, as well as setup Google analytics. Funny enough, I felt pretty excited for a few minutes, but the excitement soon wore off and I felt like I needed to work on the next objective, like making my app better, mobile optimized and other stuff. Making progress isn’t really a reason to get excited or celebrate unless you hit a key milestone. I need to set milestones that I’m going for.
5. Clicks are precious data. From re-watching session data on MS Clarity, I get a sense that people like the concept of the app, however unfortunately it doesn’t work on mobile and isn’t very clear what the person should actually do on the page. I think I can fix a few things to make it better.