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.
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.
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