I spent 10yrs in a career of branding/advertising and went from knowing no programming to launching my first product in a year.
Super proud to share I just hit a personal milestone of 150 paying customers.
It's been quite an emotional ride but wanted to say if you're just starting out, keep going, it's totally worth it, whether you want to build your own business or switch to a career as a software engineer.
The biggest tip I can provide is to figure out your learning style. I tried first with books, but I'm terrible with reading and originally gave up telling myself I didn't have time. Then I moved on to watching videos and something magical just clicked.
I learned by doing a short course on Udemy and then just watching a ton of YouTube.
For context, here's what I built: https://llamalife.co
(It's a productivity application which helps provide structure and focus to get work done).
Feel free to ask anything about the journey.
Not going to lie, it was a hard slog, but extremely happy I did it. And the feeling you get from knowing you built something, by yourself, is amazing :)
Oldest comments (58)
Amazing,
Kinda bummed I didn't build something like this.
TillWhen exists but it's no where close, maybe because I never "focused" on building it to be a business model.
Nice Work, human.
Hey Reaper,
Don't be bummed! I took a look at TillWhen and absolutely LOVE your design aesthetic. Llama is no where near a successful business. Will have to see how it goes!
Thanks for checking it out :)
I'm not really bummed, just had to add the focus pun in there somehow.
Oh thanks for checking it out.
Trust me , the landing page sold me to the app instantly.
Great inspirational read! Thanks for sharing!
The site is just blank for me. Having a quick look at the console, it seems the whole JS just silently fails because I block local storage by default. No error page, no message telling me to enable it, no nothing. Just the good old
about:blank-feeling.Oh wow. That's not good. Thanks for letting me know! I'll look into that.
I'm used to it by now. Most websites just silently fail with a blank screen when local storage or cookies are completely disabled.
Many of them don't even do anything that really needs those features, which I find even more annoying.
Very few of them even start redirect-loops where site A misses a cookie and sends me to site B which tries setting the cookie (which gets blocked) and sends me back to A
In comparison, this one is a very minor oversight, as I don't expect the site could work at all without storing data locally in some way.
Nice one, Marie. Excellent stuff. What payment solution did you use for Llamalife?
Thanks Matt. Am using Stripe. Their documentation is awesome. Currently I'm using them for a one-time payment (Lifetime deal) but Stripe also handles subscriptions which will be handy as I'm moving llama to a subscription model soon.
Great Job!
But the website is not accessible through keyboard. Consider improving web accessibility for the best experience for all users!
Thanks for the tip. Will do
Congratulations!
I like the lama, If you haven't ready, indie hackers really like these kinds of stories. Maybe it will bring you a few more sales.
indiehackers.com/
Thanks Andrew! Yes am on Indie Hackers :) Just followed you over there!
the "give me focus" button is genius!! good luck in your first product launch! :D
Thank you so much. The funny thing is I almost didn't include that because was initially worried people couldn't read it 😊
I must admit, I was just about to let you know you had a fuzzy image; then realised it was of course by design :0)
haha! that was what I was originally afraid of :)
Wow, I do low level development, and I'm always impressed by web/app developers! They can make amazing products, and generate revenue too!
Very cool man. Good job!😊👊