🧭 Intention
Where to begin?
My main focus for 2023 is to be intentional with the projects that I build, and the things that I do in general.
For the last few years, I’ve been a sponge, soaking up knowledge from various technologies that caught my eye, and building with them just for the sake of building, with no real “business” aim. So far this curiosity has served me well in my career as a Software Engineer. I’ve reached the point where I can put together a well-architected, half-decent-looking full-stack side-project on your favorite cloud provider pretty quickly.
However, I’ve noticed with my last couple of side-projects that they’ve lacked intention.
You might be wondering what I mean by intention. With these side-projects (namely Domainpage.io & FAANG.io), they started strong out of the gate, solid traction from Product Hunt & social media. They even generated a few hundred dollars fairly quickly, but then they quickly plateaued. I realized I was building these projects to solve some problem I had, or that I felt there was a need for, and in fairness, that was me being intentional, but outside of that there was no “plan” in terms of making money from these ventures.
You might be thinking to yourself that the next steps are obvious — start doing some marketing (paid or unpaid), get feedback from users, keep shipping new features, etc., and these were all things that I did and have experience doing, but once the “honeymoon phase” of the project wore off, I was left with no sense of direction.
Thinking retrospectively about these projects, it’s obvious that something was missing — a clear-cut vision, or “North Star” if you will — of what I wanted to get from this project. And that’s what I mean when I say “intention”.
I’ve realized that starting a side-project with the goal of “reaching $1k MRR within 1 year” or “hitting 500 MAUs in 6 months” is the type of vision or milestone I need to keep pushing through the plateaus and lulls. Maybe you’re different, maybe for you those things are implied. I feel like they’ve been “implied” for me as well, but having a clear-cut goal and acting with intention hopefully allows me to reverse engineer my way to success — at least it has in the past.
Documenting my journey
In 2018 and 2019 I was consistently writing for another blog of mine, codesnippet.io, mainly about how to use certain APIs, various Javascript methods, LeetCode algorithm solutions, and other odds & ends. It still gets relatively decent traffic (I guess) with ~2k hits/mo. and I get the occasional email from a reader mentioning that a post was helpful to them which gives me a sense of joy.
In the end though, it just felt good to write. Even if no one would ever end up reading it.
As I’ve grown a little more into my career (only by a few short, jam-packed years), I’m not sure if it’s imposter syndrome (probably) or what it is, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to publish anything new. Often times I’ll be perusing some Hacker News thread and find myself thinking “Holy shit, this person is so far beyond my level of technical expertise” that whenever I get the urge to write another blog post I don’t know where I’d even begin. Trust me, I know it’s a bullshit excuse 😅.
Fast-forward to now — January 2023.
I’m getting back to writing, but this time as a means of accountability.
My goal is to build a side-project that reaches $1k MRR by the end of 2023.
This isn’t a lofty goal by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s obtainable given my current situation. My wife just gave birth to our first child (woo!) and we’re closing on our first home/rental property next week (woo!) so given that there’s a lot of stuff happening on those fronts, I think this is a reasonable goal that I’ll be thrilled to hit!
The first step
I’ve been wanting a lightweight markdown-driven blog for quite some time now. I’ve used WordPress before, I’m currently using Ghost (which is great btw) for codesnippet.io, and they both have their specific purpose. For my use case, a simple, static blog with raw markdown files is what I had in mind.
This blog…erm…journal is the first step on this journey.
I landed on this minimal Nextra project as it seemed to check all the boxes.
I’ve tweaked it a bit, so if you like it, go ahead and fork it!
👉 https://github.com/timmywheels/journal
Edit: The newest theme I’ve landed on is this one 👉 https://github.com/timmywheels/log
The next steps
Now that I have a means of documenting this journey, the next steps will be to ideate a bit on a few different projects that would be strong candidates to help reach my goal.
Follow along
I’ll be sharing with you all as I ideate, build, and grow my next project on my Journey to $1k MRR™. Subscribe to my newsletter and follow me on Twitter if you’re interested in following along with me! 👇