A Podcast Addiction → A 24 Hour Startup Challenge Project 🎧

16 Nov 2018

Why my love of podcasts made picking a project easy.

We’re in the golden age of podcasts, and I am absolutely loving it. I remember when iTunes first launched podcasts support, and boy, do I remember how few and far between good podcasts were back then.

Fortunately, times have changed from those dark, early days, and my listening habits have changed with them (to a point it's almost embarrassing to show my Pocketcasts stats). There is a limitless trove of incredible podcasts to choose from, but the market is so saturated that finding the best new ones can often be difficult. It's the classic problem of too many options leading to indecision, and just like picking a new restaurant to try, often, I'd rather somebody pick for me. In this case, I think that someone can be a simple web app. A web app that simply plays selections of podcasts similar to my current tastes that I might like, and one that I can put on in the background and maybe find some new favorites to subscribe to.

This desire lead me to choose to work on Podshuffler for my 24 Hour Startup challenge project. It's a domain and an idea I've been sitting on for a while, and one I'm thrilled to implement. Saturday starting at 9 a.m. EST, I'll begin working on Podshuffler, and I'd love for you to follow along on my Twitch stream. You can also watch my progress on my Trello board.

My plan is to split the implementation into three phases: an alpha, a beta, and an MVP version. I have no idea how far I'll get into these three, but hopefully by limiting the scope of the project into blocks, I can ensure that something is releasable by the end of the challenge. During the stream, I'll talk about how I plan to implement my features, share some thoughts on indie hacking, and hopefully chat with a few people in Twitch to bounce around ideas. Happy hacking, and I hope to see you in the chat on Saturday!

Stream starts here at 9:00AM EST tomorrow!

24 Hours to Launch 🚀

13 Nov 2018

Why I'm participating in the 24 Hour Startup Challenge

I've always loved building things. As a kid, there was nothing more exciting than a new Lego kit — new parts meant new possibilities. As an adult, software development has provided me the joy of building in a limitless environment. Parts are no longer a limiting factor. Today, when I'm building, my limiting factors are entirely mental.

My biggest mental hurdle is one that is all too common among programmers: I too easily abandon one project to start a new one. My Github profile is a graveyard of abandoned projects, all at various stages of incomplete. Recently, though, one project has stuck. Timely Reviews was born out of a problem that plagued my team at work daily. The team was scaling quickly, and our pull request review process felt like it wasn't scaling with it. The communication flow in our PR process started to break down, and I realized I had a solution to this problem.

In addition to solving a daily problem for me, another factor really has made me stick with Timely Reviews. About a year ago, I discovered the Indie Hackers community. It opened my eyes to a type of entrepreneurship I’d never considered. While studying computer science in college, I only ever heard about one type of coding-based entrepreneurship — the classic Silicon Valley unicorn-or-bust model. Before joining Indie Hackers, I didn't even think about bootstrapping a software business in the more traditional sense. Now that I’ve opened my eyes to this possibility, all I needed was an idea that made sense as a business. Timely Reviews feels like my first swing at that possibility.

This now brings me to why I couldn't be more excited to be participating in the 24 Hour Startup Challenge:

Reason One: Every side project needs a side-side project.

Timely Reviews has been a joy to work on, but in my never ending focus to try to get a version 1.0 out before starting on another project, I've built up a bit of a backlog of other things I'd like to try to build. Having a 24 hour period to try to complete a lean MVP sounds like the perfect opportunity to stretch some of those new project muscles.

Reason Two: Project focus and limiting of scope are skills, and I need practice.

Narrowing a project down to a lean MVP often feels impossible. Without a true deadline, scope creep is inevitable. It's extremely easy to convince yourself that one feature that wasn't in your initial MVP plan is now absolutely essential. The huge benefit of having a tight deadline like this 24-hour event is that it is excellent practice to develop a simple, lean MVP and be forced to stick to it.

Reason Three: It's long overdue that I become a contributing member of the Indie Hacking community.

Pat Walls and crew have started an amazing movement with this initiative, and I couldn't think of a more fitting way to become a more active member of the maker/indie hacking community! The days of lurking on the Indie Hackers forums and reading wip.chat to-dos are over, and I look forward to this being a fun first step into becoming a regular contributor to the community!

I can't be sure what my project will look like at the end of the challenge, but I do know that it's going to be a ton of fun building it! I’m excited to see what my fellow participants produce this weekend, and I can't wait to see the the impact it has on the indie hacking community long term. Looking forward to seeing everyone in Twitch chat on Saturday, and happy making!