launching dumb stuff, building less dumb stuff | makerlog 9

I launched a really dumb app last week.

it's intentionally dumb though. it's an app that let's people who are addicted to twitter vote on other people who are addicted to twitter. it's a meta popularity contest on top of twitter, itself a popularity contest.

the reason I built and launched it is because I needed a bit of a break from working on ScrollWise, but I also realized that I just straight up haven't launched anything in ages. software development is, in and of itself, an incredibly important skill to know if you're an indie developer trying to build businesses on top of web applications, but it's probably equally as important to get used to the act of pressing "publish" on something.

The Power of Pressing Publish

when I first started writing, I took forever to actually publish anything. I fact-checked everything 4 times, looked for more polished and professional and fancy wording, went into excruciating detail on every single word-choice I picked.

my audience didn't grow, both because I was not publishing writing very frequently at all and because, even after all of the nitpicking on word choice and sentence structure, I was still not a very good writer. I still look back on some of my Medium articles and cringe a bit.

when you're learning how to throw a football, you don't throw 12 perfectly executed spirals in an hour long practice session. you throw as many shitty, sloppy, garbage passes as possible within a session, and with each one, you spend a little time trying to think about why the last one sucked and how you can improve the next one.

a grand total of zero authors sit down to write their first piece of writing, send it to a publisher and land the NYT Best Seller spot. they write 30 garbage short stories, 100 chapters of books that will never see the light of day, and a couple decent books that do reasonably well, and then maybe someday they write something that really resonates.

two years ago I spent close to a year working on a cyber security B2B web application. I operated it for a little over a year, and managed to secure a single customer (one of my friends) before I shut it down. I have a lot of reasons I think it failed, but one of them is that that was the first time I'd ever released anything publicly. I don't think I had even built my own blog by that point.

I had never pressed publish before.

I never thought about how to build a launch video, how to do marketing, how to do cold emails, how to do content marketing. I had never thought about how to pivot, how to find product-market-fit. I had never thought about how to maintain a large codebase, how to do updates, how to design decent UI/UX.

so of course my first at-bat sucked.

when you press publish, you put a v1.0 on what you're publishing. you build a piece of software, or an article, or a video together and by the time you press publish you say "this is ready for the next stage." what that next stage is might be scaling, marketing, doing updates and upgrades, finding PMF, analyzing why an article or video does well and why another one doesn't. you literally cannot enter this next stage, where you learn countless lessons, until you press publish.

so I published something dumb

I published TPOT Leaderboard to break a very very long streak of not publishing. ScrollWise was going to take a while to get to v1.0, and honestly I needed a break from that codebase for a while, so I got a great idea from a friend (s/o somewheresy) to build out a Twitter popularity contest voting app.

I got the chance to try out some new tech (namely threeJS, which is pretty awesome) and flex the design skills (which... still need some work) that I'd been trying to pick up on. I also got the chance to re-learn how to create overly-edited, cringe launch videos in Resolve, which is actually fairly useful if you want to learn how to be a better video editor.

it is currently doing... embarassingly low numbers, which is fine because the primary purpose of the app was to break a non-publishing streak. it's now out there, it's public and I learned a ton from doing it

now that I've got that out of my system, what's next?

more publishing small projects, locking back in on ScrollWise

I'm going to find more opportunities to publish smaller projects, because honestly that was kind of fun. I have a couple of ideas that I'm going to riff on before I announce them.

aside from that, I'm diving back into the ScrollWise codebase. I've got a couple UI/UX tweaks to make to the injected content on the LLM pages, I'm going to add Claude support, and I'm going to add Reddit and StackOverflow scraping over the next week or two.

I also have some fun media projects I'm going to start working on, TBA.

that's about it

I'm trying to do these Makerlogs more often. I need a solid system for my writing that I'm going to work on soon. You can read the last Makerlog here.