Comment by aazaa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aazaa | Hacker News Reader

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From the author's description of the One Item Store:

> Don't get me wrong, I'm happy with the final product, I think its actually really cool. But building it.. it was just a bit boring. There were lots of bugs, and I started to get a bit burnt out thinking about the endless list of things required for a good online store builder.

https://tinyprojects.dev/projects/one_item_store

This is a fascinating observation. In a couple of weeks he's both built something from scratch and figured out that the work of doing it wasn't enjoyable. It takes some people years to get to that point.

To figure out what you want to do, you often have to sift through a lot of fool's gold - junk that looks appealing as an idea but isn't appealing as a part of your life. The tiny projects idea offers a way to accelerate that process.

But the key here is to finish. To have an end point in mind and then reach it. 20% completion may get you 80% of the functionality. But by god, getting that last 20% could be the hardest, grinding work you will ever do. It's going to be very difficult to finish unless it's aligned in some fundamental way with your life.

I get that with every project though, the first 90% takes 10% of the time and is the most enjoyable.

This makes a lot of sense, and I've recently experienced the same thing. You start out with a blank canvas, everything's easy, you can code what you want and you move fast. As your product evolves, so does its complexity. Suddenly you're no longer just 'quickly going add this', because the constraints of what you already built hold you back. This is especially true for supposedly small projects without a lot of planning.

There are a dozen articles a month on HN from founders or coders with websites that all say “know your customer before you write a line of code” or “find customers ready to write a check” before you start. “Sift through fool’s gold” - that’s what that advice is helping you avoid, time wasted coding a website that has no business validation. Adding features no one wants.

If the author pushed One Item Store and said “I’m going to market it cause it’s cool now, I’ll add features when people ask for them” then he might enjoy it more and be surprised to find people who will use it and pay for it as is.

Talk about misunderstanding.

GP said nothing about customers. They said to align your work with your life. I'd re-phrase what you said as: align your work with the lives of your customers. That might be fool's gold for somebody, nevermind how many HN posts assume otherwise.

Very good point. Spent a year myself on an MVP. That I abandoned bc I didn’t enjoy the industry.

My guess is that he had to deal with payment APIs (like Stripe) and it's really not fun to integrate with external APIs that take a lot of doc reading and understanding of a different field.

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