I am not insane. At least, not yet...

After yet another burnout from making the same mistake over and over —spending weeks building a (super complex) app, burning out, giving up before finishing, and never launching it—I've decided it's time to change my approach and avoid the madness.

The new plan: spend a maximum of 4-5 days building a functional MVP of anything. Then, dedicate a couple more days to polishing the design, buying a domain, and deploying it.

After that, I'll commit the same amount of time I used for development to marketing. So, if I spent 36 hours building and launching, I'll spend 36 hours promoting it.

My goal is to build, finish, and launch it, so I can later improve my marketing skills with a small, manageable app that I can actually promote.

Yeah, this article is part of the marketing 😉

I just wanted to build something — no overthinking strategies, no idea validation— just spend the next few days working on something I think could have value for someone: a progress bar generator.

So, let's brush up on my HTML, CSS, and vanilla js with some jQuery skills and build a functional app backbone. I only have a couple of hours available today of me.

My startup does not even have a name yet, it is called a progress bar generator for now 😄

I managed to get a full day of work to refine yesterday's code. Hopefully, I'm almost done with the functional requirements.

The app's design is horrible, but I'll address that after the functional MVP is complete. I see the app's design as a kind of marketing feature: it's there to give users a sense of professional quality and, in turn, boost the conversion rate.

I could only work for an hour today, so I made just a few small improvements.

Today was a full day of work.

The functional part is almost done, this time, it's for real! I'll polish and ship what I have and add no more features. The app can already generate the CSS and HTML to embed the progress bar. 🙂

Even though I spent four days working on it, it's still not completely finished. It always takes twice as long as I initially plan to build something..

I am coding in plain JavaScript with jQuery, HTML, and CSS. No frontend frameworks. I used an external library called clipboardjs to copy the generated CSS & HTML.

I've coded for 18 hours so far. Tomorrow, I'll probably spend another 1 or 2 hours polishing the functional code before moving on to design, deployment, and everything else as planned.

I'm doing marketing because I'm bored of coding, so I'm writing this article based on my notes from the past few days. 😄

Update: In the evening I actually finished to polishing the functional code. 💪. I've coded for 20 hours so far, and I'm satisfied with my app's features.

Sick 🤒 but I managed to work 1 hour to brainstorming and sketchup the app's design

Back to working on UI design for a couple of hours 💪

This is my 7th day working on this mini startup. I am trying to stick to the original plan, so even though there were a couple of days when I didn't work full-time on the app, I'm still counting them as full days. I've noticed that the amount of momentum you have only pushes you for a certain number of days, regardless of how many hours you put in. Internal motivation has an expiration date.

Maintaining motivation to work on the same tasks many days in a row has been challenging since my last burnout. My plan for today is to wrap up what I've done by creating a decent UI and finalizing development. I still need to purchase a domain and deploy the project before starting marketing, but those steps should be quick. 🤞

I don't have high expectations for this startup it's more or less a simple toy. However, I want to finish it for the sense of accomplishment and to have something I can use to learn more about marketing.

So true.

It took me around 9 days and 28 hours, instead of the planned 4-5 days, and still missing deployment. ☹️

I always find it hard to choose a name and domain, so I started looking at domain names with the help of ChatGPT."

I also asked X about an idea I had while searching for the domain.

Does anyone know if the result of such kind of #ChatGPT prompts are accurate for seo?
"Give me an ordered list of 30 keywords for a 'banner generator' based on estimated popularity. Use your training data to estimate the popularity."

— Anthony van Alchaest (@alchaest) October 28, 2024

I registered the domain barbuilder.app and configured the DNS entries. 🎉

I deployed the app and integrated Google Analytics. 🎊 Now the app is live!

Plan for the Next days: improve the look & feel of the up as adding some color, and start marketing (finaly!)