My Journey
Like many developers, I’ve had more side projects die than succeed, but one of them changed my approach entirely. In this series, I'll share my story of how a personal project, initially started as a learning experience, transformed into a small startup idea.
I've always been fascinated by the concept of Profi.ru, a platform that connects customers with local service providers. When I moved to the Netherlands in 2022, I saw an opportunity to create something similar. I conducted some research, created a survey, and even assembled a team of friends to help me with the project. We had a backend developer, a frontend developer, and I was handling the overall architecture. But, as it often does, life got in the way, and our collective motivation began to wane.
After building user and service provider registration systems and implementing multilingual support, momentum started dying out. Some struggled without mockups, while others found more pressing matters to attend to. It was a hard lesson to learn, but I realized that I couldn't rely on others to drive my project forward.
Lesson Learned
What did I take away from this experience? Should I become a better motivator? Find more reliable partners? No. I realized a simple truth: if you want to see an idea through, be prepared to carry it yourself.
This reminded me of "Naruto." In the series Indra relied on talent, Asura on teamwork. I realized that in real life, motivation rarely scales - so Indra usually wins..
Around then, ChatGPT appeared. I already knew a bit of React (I once tried building a poker web site). But I was still coding into the void, I decided to eliminate my weakest link - frontend development. Without illusions: my knowledge was limited to the boundaries of my previous projects. The next project, I would write entirely by myself.
In the next parts, I’ll share how I turned that solo project into something concrete and where I hit my next wall.
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