Few months ago, I found an interesting blog of a man who challenged himself to create 12 startups in 12 months. Wow! It may sound crazy even, I also thought it was crazy yet he’s very successful with every startups he launched. Well, if it’s in my case, at some point it is somehow almost to impossible.
Why I am saying it’s almost impossible? Because one, I suck at coding and two, I don’t have the resources. Yes it may sound embarrassing but I really do suck in programming. I’m more of a front-end developer which has less headache compared to doing back-end development based on my experience and own opinion though, not a complete generalization.
Why bother?
I do have a daily 8 hour job with enough pay just like anybody else so why did I bother doing things like this? At some point in my work, I realized that I have been already working for a year now however, I didn’t saw any major growth on me in which I see unhealthy. When I finished my college degree, I was really looking forward to work in an exciting company where we build something awesome like Facebook, Twitter and etc. however I didn’t end up doing that.
So I continued reading more of @levelsio blog posts and later on, I was inspired somehow to also do the challenge, build something awesome, go out in my comfort zone and try more challenging things.
![](https://res.cloudinary.com/dtpbquanh/image/upload/v1441640126/challenge_accepted_qrocwr.gif)
Try to build something they say…but what exactly is that something?
Thinking for an idea for your startup is really a pain in the ass. Almost anything you can think of have already been built and already out their. So what’s the use of doing this challenge? I almost didn’t pursue this challenge until one day I found a problem that I think was very simple and common yet it seems pretty useful in the long run.
While I was planning for our trip to Bantayan Island, I ended up doing a lot of research for the most common details we need when we travel like hotels and accommodations nearby, things to do and etc.
Yes their are already a lot of sites providing this kind of information somehow, I find it at some point time consuming and very tiring to go over each and every sites with overloaded layouts. Funny how this only shows how lazy I am. Well, we all want an easy life.
![](https://res.cloudinary.com/dtpbquanh/image/upload/v1441635154/aint_hnog4t.gif)
From Zero to Hero
Basically I can’t code and build things overnight like how Mark started Facebook, but I’m young and still can learn a lot on things by doing self-study. I started doing research and studied several frameworks which are easy to learn and is scalable for future updates.
I was lucky enough to learn a lot from this framework and started building the app. Writing code now became easy and very readable.
return Books::latest()->get();
Get all the latest books from the shelf. Pretty neat right?
Anxieties
Pretty common eh? We all have anxieties. While building this app, there were several times that I almost stopped working on it because of pessimistic thoughts like, “no one will ever use it“, “it won’t generate income“, and “its just a waste of time and resources” . Somehow, I realized that I’ll never know until I try. So I pursued my mission and so far, after its initial beta launching, it doing great. This quote below inspired me.
“Chase the vision, not the money; the money will end up following you.”–Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos