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 :)
Top comments (58)
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.
Hi Marie! Thanks for your post - very interesting knowing how you learned to code. Llama Life is great! Haven't tried it yet, but it looks super stylish and well designed. Did you just use CSS for the layout or did you use a framework like Bootstrap or Tailwind? Looks like you really grasped Javascript and React. Where did you get the Llama illustrations - did you do them yourself?
Thanks Mark! I used React Bootstrap for the grid layout of the landing page and a few modals, but the rest is custom. The llama illustrations I got from Adobe Stock but then edited them. Adobe Stock gives you a 30 day free trial (I think) and 10 images included with that. Even if you cancel you retain the licences for whatever you download.
Ok cool. Will checkout Adobe Stock. I'll probably write post like yours about how i learned to code (mainly self-taught too). Here's the first project I did - onyourfrequency.com/
It's all vanilla Javascript - learning Vue JS now to keep the project more organized in the future.
Just took a quick look. Great stuff and congrats for pushing the project out!
I've been a full-stack developer for more than 10 years and getting a product live with paying customers is still something I've yet to achieve.
That you've taught yourself to code, shipped something and got paying customers all within a year is super impressive and inspiring.
Nice work :0)
Thanks for the encouragement!
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 :)
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.
Wow, I do low level development, and I'm always impressed by web/app developers! They can make amazing products, and generate revenue too!
I'm just starting to check it, got this detail here:
Not sure if Llama is for you? Pay monthly. Cancel anytime (Coming Janary 2021)
But it is not open yet.
It seems to be a nice project, I will give it a try this week.
Hi Haruan, yes still building out subscriptions, that's my next step. After this the Lifetime deal will be removed though ;)
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!
What was your route of “learning”? Did you learn vanilla vs frameworks?
I started with vanilla with Html, css, JS... but JS was been tough because people don’t really truly use what there teaching, it main ends at “console.log”. I then focused on React, then Django and Python. Django DRF, and now I’m focusing on MERN+ Apollo/GraphQL + Strapi CMS
Hey Bret, I did: html, css, JS. Then React and node.js/Express. I'm taking a jamstack approach, so I focus mostly on front-end. I'm using Firebase for db and authentication.
Love the post and your general energy as a human being. Signing up for a lifetime mainly as kudos because lord knows I'll probably procrastinate actually using the app :)
Thanks Nikki! That means a lot and I appreciate the support :)