My first launch took almost 3 years...

Hello there 👋,

My name is Diego, and I am surprisingly resistant to launch.

I have a background in CS. I have been creating small projects for ages, but I have never made anything public...until now.

Reading indie hackers has made me realize that this problem is more widespread than I initially thought, but it has also motivated me to take the plunge.

I also suffer from some of the same illnesses many software engineers have: we love technology, playing with it, and finding better ways to build and optimize our projects, which often leads to a lot of wasted time and not much progress when it comes to launching.

Things that I never launched:

• An app to automatically grade Python exercises
• An app to generate funny pictures of friends using AI

The lowest-hanging fruit

After several projects ended with nothing, I decided I needed a different approach. At work, we always recommend starting with the lowest-hanging fruit: something straightforward that can become a quick win and motivate you to keep going. This contrasts with beginning with a super ambitious project that will become sidetracked and probably die when things get complicated.

I decided that it was time to take my advice, and I decided to build Will AI Do This? (willaidothis.com) It is a simple website to share prompt/answer pairs of interactions with LLMs.

I work as an AI consultant, and after sharing an experiment on social media, it was hard to find the example again.

The website is simple, took me about 10 hours spread over a week to build, and is now live!

Next steps

I don't think I can make money from the website per se, but there is a pseudo-plan for commercialization.

Since the setup is 100% free (except for the domain), I can leave it up and running forever, so that's nice 🙌.

If it somehow becomes a widely used website, I might try to find a way to do affiliate links or ads for AI products, but I'm not counting on that.

Plan B is to write a tutorial explaining how to build a website like that one, host it for free, and sell that tutorial on GumRoad or something similar. I might create another website using a similar tech stack to get more insights into what works and what does not.

Tech Stack:

• DB: Google Sheets
• Frontend: HTML + Tailwind + HTMX
• Building Engine: Python + Jinja2
• CI/CD: Github Actions
• CDN: Cloudflare

Questions for the community:

• Should I launch on PH, HW, or Reddit?
• What is the best way to start building in public on X?
• Is there anything else that I should be aware of?