The app is actually really good too.
I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)
81–90 of 101 posts
Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not really clear from the blog post, but it seems like it was a side project. That's why it took so long. Personally, I've gotten a lot of mileage out of doing freelance work 2-3 days/week and working on my own projects in the remaining time.
How do you get freelance work?
Networking, in the broadest sense of the word. Gone to tech meetups, gotten to know a lot of people in my particular niche (sound and image processing).
Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)
#83I use boring stacks in all my software development including jQuery, also 5 years programming and not a dime of revenue. American software development not easy. Even though I offer free account, how messed up is that.
Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)
#84I love reading posts and comments like these, as it gives me better insights and questions what I have been doing wrong as I can relate to this shiny new attachment syndrome very much myself.
Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)
#852.54:1 contrast for text which spectacularly fails any accessibility specs. Please don’t do this
I’d noticed it as 2.58 in Firefox’s dev tools, so when you say 2.54, I’m curious. #ab9ea2 on #ffffff. https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ says 2.57, https://contrast-ratio.org/#%23ab9ea2-on-white says 2.57 and on hover expands that to 2.5785676343306743. I presume Firefox is rounding, while the other two are truncating. Truncating actually feels more useful for how people are too likely to use such things—t…
Most likely some typo on my part
Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is definitely hard to break the "but... I'm a professional" mindset. It is good to remember that your code isn't you. If you get PMF, just re-write everything from scratch.
As an argument on the other side - so long as you're making enough to live comfortably enough, then there's no real need to abide the business logic though, even if you think it absolutely does maximize income in the longrun. If you spend years working on something and it turns out somehow nobody else likes it, well at least you have something that you're presumably satisfied with, and you often learn an immense amou…
Yes, agree. Definitely, follow your heart. My comment is aimed more at the situation where your curiosity does lead you to a desire to create a successful product.
Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)
#87> Yes, you guessed it, let's go with Electron and CoffeeScript. > The main tech stack is still CoffeeScript, but we changed the UI framework from React to Riot.js. > I've installed Babel, Mocha, ESLint, and added libraries via npm. > I've rewritten my entire code base from CoffeeScript to ES6. > The introduction of MobX, a state management library, and the introduction of Flow, a type checking system. > So I rewrote…
Exactly. Using a boring stack like jQuery would have been already good enough to let them concentrate on solving business problems rather than stack ones
> Using a boring stack like jQuery would have been already good enough to let them concentrate on solving business problems rather than stack ones
One quick look at the UI (https://signal.vercel.app/_next/static/media/screenshot.dc00...) and with the experience of developing bigger stateful UI applications with jQuery (and Backbone.js, and AngularJS, and React, and...), I would wager that if they were using jQuery at this point, they'd be fighting way more than they ended up doing.
I agree with grand-parent though that it seems like an excessive amount of rewrites, don't get me wrong.
Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
>In my experience reducing features is better to begin with. This is right approach. Lean. If you don’t have PMF, reduce your features until you find it. Pivot. Maybe pivot again. Eventually you’ll find a market to serve. Just don’t fall into the sunken cost fallacy. Time box your market exploration.
How do you mark the difference between pivoting and adding new features?
Pivoting involves picking a different problem to solve. Or who to solve it for. Or rarely, a radically different way to solve it (usually involving starting anew).
Features and other product work is tweaking on the solution side, assuming there is nothing wrong with the chosen problem.
Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)
#89I built a deep search for financial research in 2023 and learned that 2025 would have been the year to launch it.
are you aware your posts are visible to paid users only? Why if it is intentional?
Re: I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)
#90How do you guys get funding to build things for such a long time? Rent, food and health insurance in my area costs $50k per year. If feels I have no choice but to earn a salary. Dropping a quarter of a mil on an app that might not pan out seems out of the question.
It's not really clear from the blog post, but it seems like it was a side project. That's why it took so long. Personally, I've gotten a lot of mileage out of doing freelance work 2-3 days/week and working on my own projects in the remaining time.
Surely a side project. It is actually really good too.
There is quite a problem with creativity being stifled by the infinite possibilities of a modern DAW.
Everything feels super fast and responsive on it too. I am going to spend a good amount of time in this.
Helio is a desktop app that is down this line but more complicated and not as easy to use. This just all makes sense if you know how a piano roll is going to work.