DEV Community: Roberto Díaz

Anybody here doing side projects?

Roberto Díaz — Tue, 26 May 2020 15:08:26 +0000

Hey, guys!

I'm Roberto Díaz, a bullshit-free product manager that has been developing digital products for the past 10 years.

I've been covering the end to end, from inception to growth, going through design, development, team building, management, and launch, going in-depth in each of those stages.

And all this experience, mistakes made, successes, and lessons learned, are wildly having sex in my head right now.

That's why I'm taking a gap period to explore, design, and develop my ideas in cycles of 6 to 8 weeks, launch them, and see what happens.

One of the main problems I had, when I started developing digital products was that I couldn't see anybody more experienced than me doing it. And that made me lose a lot of time and, probably, great opportunities.

So I decided to tell the story, focusing on what works for me and what doesn't, to help you learn about the process.

Do you enjoy creating side projects?

Would you like to turn those that work into a business?

Then, this could interest you.

I'm sharing:

How I'm going from having an idea to launch, going through all the stages in between (analysis, validation, design, and development).
Obstacles I find, how I overcome them, and what I learn in the process.
How to apply state of the art techniques and tools, used by leaders in the industry and other successful makers.
Details and the thought process behind my strategy, goals, and roadmap.
Resources I find, or I create that help me advance.
Early access and updates to every product I'm making.

I'll be posting each edition here on Tuesdays.

And speaking of the devil:

Which is the main obstacle that stops you right now from developing and launching your ideas?

Feel free to ask.

I'll try to help you the best I can :)

🌋 S01E01 | Maker's Way 1st season starts!

Roberto Díaz — Tue, 26 May 2020 15:06:12 +0000

If you are confused about what's going on here, read this post first.

Season 1 of Maker's Way newsletter starts!: Developing a MERN web app, building a Ghost theme from scratch in a weekend, branding, and much more.

As you know, I wanted to create a different newsletter.

An email not just including the 'post of the week.' Or three links I've clicked this week.

No.

I want it to be useful to you. To let you look at the creative process behind a digital product in first person. I am showing you, not just telling you.

That's why you'll find it longer than others. I don't want it to be another email in your inbox, but a handy resource in your journey as a maker.

And since it's the first one, I'll briefly tell you how it's structured:

Built: What I've created during the week. Since I'm making mainly apps, I'll touch some technical aspects, design, product, and business ones.

Written: In parallel, I'll be writing articles or more significant pieces of content (think about handbooks, playbooks, and maybe podcasts). I'll include you a little excerpt, the motivation behind, and a link to it.

Read: I love to read, mainly non-fiction, and I think it could be useful to write about the insights I find in the books I'm reading. One of the most challenging things for me is to find good book recommendations so that it may be helpful for you.

Key takeaways: Lessons learned this week, distilled.

Resources: Tools, twitter accounts, content, etc. that I find interesting or useful, and will be included in the Maker's Vault (a curated repository of these resources and tools for makers like you).

Articles: A curated selection of exciting news/essays I've read during the week.

That's it. Let's go!

🚀 Built

Log and ROI

The launch date is coming!

Log and ROI is a simple tool that allows you to track the time you invest in your indie projects to help you decide if it's worth continue with it or do another thing.

Though is an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), it has its complexities and getting it ready for production requires to cover a lot of small use cases, as you know (like form validation, redirections, errors control, regex patterns for input fields, etc.)

I had several headaches with some components that didn' t want to re-render when required. This led me to learn quite a bit about architectural patterns in frontend.

That's why the next project I'll build will follow Flux. I've done a course at Pluralsight that explained it very well, with tons of examples (you have it in the resources section, below).

Maker's Way

I've built it with my favorite CMS: Ghost.

If you don't know it, It has a clean and well-documented API and is 'headless.' This means that you can plug whatever frontend you want, abstracting the backend leaving it in their hands.

It's open-source, it has a great community, and it's built on NodeJS and SQLite, with Bookshelf.js as ORM.

John O'Nolan, it's founder, is one of those anti-bullshit founders worth following.

I had a lot of fun designing the visual identity and the brand. The logo (or the isotype, to be precise) is an MW, representing the ups and downs you'll find in the path of making a digital product.

I love branding as a discipline, and I'll write about how to create a strong brand for your products soon.

robertodiaz.io

What a busy week!. I did several tweaks in the custom theme (a fork of Casper, the standard one in Ghost) to hone a little bit the look and feel.

I'm happy with it. It's simple, clean, functional and I've structured the "About me" section in a special way.

Let me know if you like it!

👨🏽‍💻 Written

Besides all the copywriting in Maker's Way and robertodiaz.io (around 2000 words!), I wanted to launch the blog with, at least, one article.

It's the first post of a series in which I'll go deep into the ABC of every business (yes, that applies especially to the future one you'll build or the one you already have).

Plus, this newsletter and quite a ton of tweets in which I'm talking about this week's main topic and engaging in some exciting threads with other makers.

📗 Read

I continue reading 'Competing Against Luck' from Clayton Christensen.

It was a recommendation from Ryan Singer, PM of Basecamp to deep-dive into customer pains (I'll do a quick review of the book when I finish it in this same section).

If I had to say one thing that matters above all when building a product/service, this is the key —the most important one:

To deeply understand the problem your customers have.

Customer's pains will be the cornerstone of my next post, in which I'll deep dive into the importance of them and the exact steps to do it properly.

💎 Key takeaways

The key business goal when developing an MVP is to move fast. But do it 'smooth' enough to limit technical debt to not have to postpone launch date.
For those suffering imposter syndrome (like me), developing your 'story' on a personal website is good therapy. I'll explore how I dealt (and still deal) with this problem along my career to turn it into an advantage.
Ghost is a powerful CMS. You can build almost every content-based use case with it. I'll explore it in the future, maybe combined with NextJS.

🔧 Resources

Photopea, a free and online photoshop alternative.
Building Applications with React and Flux (Pluralsight, intermediate level)
Ghost CMS
Flux
Sketch
Competing against luck - Clayton Christensen (not affiliate link).
John O'Nolan's twitter, founder of Ghost.
Ryan Singer's Twitter, PM of Basecamp.
My Twitter!

📡 Some interesting articles:

Any comments or doubts? Feel free to ask in the comments.

Roberto.

P.S: If you liked it what you read, I can save you time sending this weekly newsletter straight to your inbox.

42% of startup founders don't know what a business is. Are you one of them?

Roberto Díaz — Thu, 21 May 2020 16:15:47 +0000

This post originally appeared at makersway.io. It's the first one of an anti-bullshit series exploring how to properly build a digital product, going from raw idea to launch

When you have an idea for a startup, ask yourself: who wants this right now? Who wants this so much that they'll use it even when it's a crappy version one made by a two-person startup they've never heard of? If you can't answer that, the idea is probably bad. - Paul Graham

Suddenly, you feel a shiver running up through your spine.

Immediately after, a reflex makes your head move: you've found something.

Quickly, you start doing the math: at least 10.000.000 people also share this problem that I have. If each one pays $10 for the product I have in mind... Wait. $10?

I-AM-THE-NEXT-BEZOS!

All of this happens in an instant. It happens to all of us, all the time.

In this euphoric instant, you fast forward 20 years visualizing your future, getting almost high, as if you already have lived it.

During the next days (sometimes weeks or months, in the worst of the cases), that will go round in your head, keeping that idea safe as Gollum did with the ring for anyone to steal it from you.

You won't allow anyone to live the future you imagined.

Does this sound familiar?

We are humans, after all. We all have our dreams and hopes, and tons of them go through turning an idea into a great product and a successful business.

The bad news is that ideas are not as worthy as we all usually think. We all have incredible ones that are perfect in our heads (including yours).

The good news is that this series of posts are going to help you evaluate and filter business ideas as an expert founder.

This way you'll save weeks or months discarding the non-viable ones and invest your talent and effort in those that can become what you dream of.

Execution has ideas for breakfast

If you are serious about turning your side project/idea into a business or make a successful product anytime, there's something you need to tattoo on your mind right now:

The execution of an idea is a lot more important than the idea itself.

How many times have you heard "oh, I thought about that billion-dollar business too some time ago"?

The truth is that the majority of successful products already existed, though usually in a different form.

What is Whatsapp, essentially?

Internet-powered SMS. One step further, BlackBerry Messenger for all platforms.

What is Google?

A better version of what Altavista was.

Let's go personal.

Haven't you dreamed about electric cars? Why haven't you started Tesla?

Haven't you thought about a photo feed with comments below? Why haven't you created Instagram?

We can go on for four hours.

And that leads to one of the biggest myths in the entrepreneurship world:

If I tell someone my idea, they are going to steal it from me.

The worst thing that can happen to you if you talk about your idea is that people usually project their insecurity about it, trying to discourage you.

But in the majority of the scenarios (especially if they are part of the target, more on this later), you'll gather valuable insights that your enthusiasm probably hid for you.

How can you know if you should discard an idea or give it a go?

First step: Understanding what is a business (that works).

What is a business (that works)?

No matter how much we enjoy doing our craft.

At the end of the day, whatever we are going to build, needs to provide a steady and growing cash flow. It has to has its value reflected in people exchanging money against the outcome your product is delivering.

If we makers want to keep doing what we love, we need to turn our creations into a business.

So, what's a business?

A business is what happens when someone pays for a product/service that solves a problem they have.

This definition that may look obvious to you is not that clear for everyone: 42% of startups fail because they don't solve any problem.

Let's develop this a little bit:

Every business that works:

Solves a problem that a group of people has.
In exchange for a price they can afford.
Better than the existing solutions.
That provides an income source bigger.
Than the costs it incurs in to keep operating.
Every business you can imagine right now fulfills these conditions.

It's true that, especially in the tech scene, there are a lot of startups "subsidized" by piles of cash coming from VCs (i.e. your Uber Eats 50% discounts), hoping that at any point, it will be worth more than their investment. A declining trend, in favor of the maker movement.

Why I'm telling you all of this?

Ten years ago, I raised €120k to start a company in the last year of college. I wasn't dreaming about collecting yachts. I just wanted to create something worthy. To make a cool and useful product.

Give shape to my dream job: code, design, business, marketing, and everything that involves building a startup.

But, after three years of hard work, I became one of those founders making that 42% ratio.

If I correctly knew what I just told you, I could have saved €31.250 and 6 months of work.

I'll explain to you the lessons learned for you to save time and money in the second post of this series. In it, I'll dissect each of those points, starting from the most important one:

How to truly understand a problem and the people that have it.