100 days of making

What is this all about?

I built a few projects in the past. Some of them were successful, some not. But in most cases I stopped working on them after a few months. That's probably because I have so many ideas I'd like to work on, that after I finished one I felt the need to jump on the next one. Especially if the one I worked on failed. But it's hard to tell if something really failed if you spent only a month working on it, with almost zero effort on distribution. I did that in the past with almost all of my projects.

This time, I'd like to take a different approach. For 100 days, I'll work on only one product. In the beginning I'll spend 3 days writing code and 2 days on marketing and distribution. Once the mvp is done, I'll switch that to 2 days on development, 3 on customer acquisition and marketing.

I'm not going to do this full time, but a few hours every business day. This was also a problem for me in the past. The pace at the beginning was quite fast but slowed down after a few weeks. Mainly because I ran out of energy for keeping too many things on my plate.

Why 100 days? Well, they say that if you do something for 100 days, it'll become a habit. Also because a hundred days seems like a reasonable amount of time to see if something is going to work or not. And I need some kind of virtual deadline. So, here we go 🚀

Day 020

Yesterday, I finished one of the use case articles, so I'm working on the other one today.

29 January 2022

Day 019

Last week I finished two case study articles, and I'm working on two more today.

28 January 2022

Day 018

While I was testing the field editor, I noticed a few bugs so I started the day with fixing those. I had to refactor quite a few things so it took a bit more time than expected.

27 January 2022

Day 017

Finished the submit button label update feature yesterday. Today I’m working on the part, where users can update basic settings of the form (like success and error messages).

26 January 2022

Day 016

Back to code. I'm working on the feature to update the label of the submit button.

25 January 2022

Day 015

I had to skip one day the previous week because, well, life happens. I’m still working on the article.

24 January 2022

Day 014

I'm working on an article about how to store customer feedback in a Notion database and how my tool would be useful to collect these feedbacks via a simple form.

20 January 2022

Day 013

Now the checkboxes look better as well, so I’m working on the select / dropdown field now.

19 January 2022

Day 012

I'm working on the UI of the form editor. It still looks bad but at least the inputs have a nicer look now. I know making the select fields look pretty would take some time. I definitely don't want to make custom selects as that would take just way too much time. Especially if you'd like to make one that is accessible.

18 January 2022

Day 011

Today, I’m working on the editor UI again. I’d like to finish the options to mark a field as required, hidden. If those won’t take much time, I’d like to work on the feature to update the field labels as well.

17 January 2022

Summary of the first 10 days

I'm close to check all the items on my todo list regarding the features I'd like to add to the mvp. But the UI is still a crap. I haven't spent much time working on that because my main focus was to make the functions work and then make it look pretty.

16 January 2022

Day 010

I have to change the way I feel about doing marketing vs writing code.

14 January 2022

Day 009

The form editor UI is starting to get together, but today I have to work on the distribution and marketing strategy again.

13 January 2022

Day 008

Eight days in and I just can’t tell how naive I was when I thought that this could be done in a few days. Especially when I’m not working on this full time.

12 January 2022

Day 007

The field reorder / sortable feature is done 🎉 I’d say this was the most complex part of the mvp, so hopefully, I’ll be able to move a bit faster from now.

11 January 2022

Day 006

Back to code. Still working on the editor UI. It is fascinating how many times I can fall into the same trap.

10 January 2022

Day 005

I spent some time to sign up to a bunch of apps to see how their onboarding works and I was also curious about the welcome email they are sending to their new users. I'm not good at writing these emails from scratch so I was looking for some inspiration.

07 January 2022