The trap of "I'll figure out the marketing later."

Entreel — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 11:31:15 +0000

I saw a dev tool recently that was built beautifully. The code was clean, the testing coverage was great, and the UX was solid.

But after being live for four months, it only had 31 active users.

As developers, we fall into this trap constantly. We are great at solving complex technical problems, but when it comes to getting our first 100 users, we freeze. We optimise for feature completeness and tell ourselves we will figure out distribution "later."

But later never comes, and great projects just quietly die.

I wrote a longer post on Hashnode about how to fix this structural blind spot https://istiaq.hashnode.dev/the-ideas-in-startup-ecosystem, but I'm curious, how do you guys force yourselves to stop coding and start marketing?

What I learned building my first real backend as a frontend developer

Entreel — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 16:29:51 +0000

I've always been a frontend person. React, TypeScript, CSS.

Then I decided to build a full stack product and suddenly I needed a real backend. I picked FastAPI because Python made sense given the AI integrations I needed. Here's what actually surprised me.

The hardest part wasn't the code. It was thinking in terms of data first instead of UI first. As a frontend dev I always started with what the screen looks like. Backend forced me to start with what the data looks like.

A few things that helped me get up to speed fast, reading the FastAPI docs properly instead of just copying Stack Overflow, using Supabase so I didn't have to manage my own database, and just shipping something broken and fixing it rather than trying to get it right first time.

Still learning. Still making mistakes. But the backend doesn't scare me anymore.

Feel free to ask any questions, happy to answer all :)

DEV Community: Entreel

The trap of "I'll figure out the marketing later."

What I learned building my first real backend as a frontend developer