PM built another productivity timer

Alexgerasim — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 15:59:55 +0000

I've been a product manager for 5 years but each time my team launched a product or feature I barely understood how it actually worked (I came to PM from sales / CSM).

Also I always had an impostor syndrome and wanted to grow a successful product on my own without any resources that working in a company usually provides to a PM:

dev team
marketing
sales
vision and insights of experienced founders
getting a salary regardless of results, etc

Then I discovered a term "indie developer", someone who can build, promote, sell, and support a product on their own in a niche too small for a VC-funded startups but large enough to let the dev eating ramen. So I saved some money and decided to quit my job for a while to learn coding 3 months ago.

In indie community it is believed that one should scratch their own itches when deciding what to build. I found mine: staying focused. Every 5 min I was distracted by updating a social media feed to consume some fast dopamine. I found some apps made to help get focused but I found most of them even more distracting with cluttered and complex interface and lots of settings.

So I built Zentimer - 25 min minimalistic timer with least distractions I could keep in it. After each session the timer shows one of the advices for a proper break that I collected among 100+ top Reddit comments.

Though it's a web app built with Next JS and Tailwind, it can be installed as a PWA shortcut and it can send you web pushes when the timer is over.

I hope someone will find my short story helpful in a way. I'd love to get some feedback from experienced devs and promote my product a bit to get some initial users. The timer is free and I'm going to keep a free version of it regardless of future traction. Also they say that posting a website link here is good for SEO.

I'll be glad to answer any of your questions and I wish happy coding to everyone.

DEV Community: Alexgerasim

PM built another productivity timer