Back on the dev train

When I first left my day to day job back in 2009, my goal (dream) was to create products that could generate enough revenue to cover my basic expenses (food, clothes, rent, etc) so I could spend more time with learning and experiencing new things without the fear of becoming homeless if something goes really wrong 😄

I wanted to reach this by the time I got 30. I’m 32 now and this goal is as far from me as it was almost 10 years ago. Well, not exactly, because I learned and experienced a lot during the last decade, but I did almost nothing to reach this “financial freedom”. Why? To tell you the truth, I’m not sure. I could have the opportunity to spend some of my time building products, but it looks like I’m not good at focusing on several things at the same time and feel that I’m doing enough. 80% of my focus on one thing and 20% on another thing doesn’t work for me.

Ok, so how to get to the original goal?

• First: full focus on this one thing.
• Second: update my development skills.
• Third: build several products and make them profitable.

Just three small steps and I’m already done with the first one 😄

I’m not sure how long the second one would take, but I spent the last 5 years in a manager position, so my dev muscles got a bit rusty. I don’t want to spend too much time on learning new technologies because I already have the skills to build MVPs (some cases you don’t even have to know how to code to create an MVP), so I will do the second and the third steps together. With every product I build, I’ll try to learn at least one new thing (new framework, new platform, etc). But I want to make sure that I avoid this:

So I decided that I must not spend more than a month on creating and launching a stable version of a product. This is not a 12 startups in 12 month challenge because it’s possible that I’ll work on the same product for two or more months, but in this case I should do a major release every month.

When I quit daily development, I was a heavy jQuery user. Back then, vanilla js was already capable to do most of the things I used jQuery for and I wanted to know how far we can go without the framework. But the webapps I built had to support some old versions of IE as well, so I sticked to jQuery to protect my nerves.

Luckily, now I don’t have to optimize my products to old versions of IE, so I started to pump up my JS knowledge with the help of JavaScript 30 by Wes Bos and in my upcoming product I would like to avoid the use of any kind of JS framework. I know the course is two years old but at least 50% of the things I learned from it was new for me.

So I can say, I already learned something new and I used this knowledge while building my first product. And I’m happy with this.

At the moment the product itself is 70% done and if nothing goes wrong, I’ll be ready with it till the end of the month. It will be free 😄 So this is not going to help me reach the original goal but I already have some ideas how to monetize it. More about that after the launch.

If you want to get notified when the product is launched you can follow me on Producthunt. And feel free to hit me on Twitter with your ideas, questions.

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Header image by Fabian Grohs