I spent six months programming To-Do List and got 0 users
For six months I spent my free time from studying and work on my project, which brought me nothing but experience.
In this article I will talk about my path in IT, the idea of a startup, the development process and the mistakes I made.
Disclaimer: The article was written by the author of the blog “POV startup” based on an interview with Egor Tokarev, the creator cubical done.
Introduction to IT
At 12, my mother sent me to a web design club. I liked it there. In the first year, I learned HTML, but CSS seemed difficult to me, so I spent the rest of the time playing tanks with a friend.
At the age of 13, Yandex.Lyceum came to our school. Instead of computer science lessons, we attended its Python course, where we were given the basics of the language.
After Yandex, I went back to a web design club, where I finally learned CSS, but successfully gave up on JS.
Covid and the first job
When Covid happened, I found myself locked in the village. At some point, I realized that I wanted to stop playing computer games and start doing something useful.
I thought for a long time about what I should do, and then I remembered: “Aha, I did this HTML stuff.” It seemed logical to develop towards the web, so I taught myself JS and Vue.js.
To gain experience, I went freelance. I faked my age and completed my first order, a consultation, for which I was paid 500 rubles. The second order was for the development of one screen, after which I was offered a full-time job.
I remember how nervous I was when I told him my age – 16. To which I received a calm answer: “Okay.” That's how I started working for hire.
How the idea for the startup came about
Now I combine full-time work and studying at a university. There are many tasks, and to unload my head, I decided to find a todo-box for myself. However, all existing services were overloaded with functionality: comments, subtasks, priorities, labels, etc.
I just wanted a todo list with a list of tasks, projects and a calendar. So I decided to create my own service.
Development process and errors
Initially, I made the service only for myself, so the data was stored in IndexedDB. The frontend was written in Vue.js.
Later I realized that I wanted to have access to the service from a mobile phone. So I developed a mobile application on React Native, and wrote a backend on tRPC for data synchronization. The data was stored in PostgreSQL.
Unfortunately, it was not possible to publish the mobile application either in the App Store or in Google Play.
To avoid writing my own authorization, I used a ready-made solution – clerk. Clerk is free for up to 10k users per month and provides all the necessary functions: password reset, registration, etc.
Spoiler: In the end, I wrote my own authorization. Clerk does not officially support tRPC integration, and I had to spend a lot of time to integrate Clerk into my project.
The next problem arose when I tried to integrate Raycast into the project. Clerk also does not support this integration.
I ended up spending over 20 hours trying to use Clerk, but eventually gave up on it.
Marketing
I planned to publish information about my service on free platforms and, if I saw positive feedback, invest in marketing.
I decided to publish information about the project on Product Hunt, Reddit, and Elon Musk's social network.
What are the results:
I had 6 people follow me on Product Hunt, and one of them left a nice comment. 53 people clicked on the landing page, but no one clicked on the service itself.
On Ilona's social network, 10 people viewed my post, but again – 0 clicks.
Reddit yielded a similar result.
I shared my startup experience in a YouTube video that got 40k views. Thanks to this video, about a thousand people registered in my service.
What advice would you give yourself before creating a startup?
Apart from abandoning Clerk and the mobile app, I would have two pieces of advice: release faster and do onboarding. Onboarding deserves special attention.
As Yandex.Webvisor has shown, users are unaware of many functions. For example, to attach a task to a project, you need to specify the project name in the title through “#”.
Plans for the future
I have a list of ideas for services that I want to implement, but I don’t want to spend more than a month testing hypotheses. There is also a backlog for cubicdone.
Disclaimer: The article was written by the author of the blog «POV startup» based on an interview with Egor Tokarev, creator of cubicdone.
If you want to share your startup experience, feel free to write.
