1-month challenge: day 1

Yesterday I challenged myself to release a product by the end of May. Said product would achieve progress towards the goal of reducing the time it takes to build full-featured apps from 90 days to 9 days.

Today, I took the first step by doing customer validation by reaching out to devs who have used similar solutions in the past. I searched through IH, PH, reddit and Twitter, and then looked for ways to contact everyone. On Reddit I used the chat, Twitter DMs for people who have them on. Otherwise I looked for direct emails or looked people up on LinkedIn.

2/2 replied instantly via email; 2/3 accepted my connection request (with message) on LinkedIn. Twitter and Reddit were a bust, with 0/15 responses and 1/11 respectively. I'm assuming my messages are hidden for most and I'll probably see a few responses trickle in in the coming days.

What I did learn is that, unsurprisingly, most devs use those tools in order to save time. Some of the less-experienced devs also hope to learn in the process. Someone expressed wanting a way to build good UIs without design skills. The websites that were built are more like landing pages/marketing sites.

The majority of the discontent comes from wanting to use unsupported tools/libraries, needing components that don't exist yet, or needing to customize the code in a way that prompts a whole rewrite. Someone started using Webflow so that his marketing team could edit copy without his help, hence he could focus on the actual product.

All in all this isn't really the enlightening feedback I was hoping for. Some interesting data points but nothing either confirming/refuting my hypotheses. Will keep digging tomorrow!

PS I hope it's okay for me to post these updates here, it feels like a relevant place!