Heading Out On A Product Development Path

In This Episode...

First, an update on some of the progress I have made since episode 4.
Then, I have a brief conversation about COVID19 and how it is impacting us.
Lastly, I describe a set of process steps you can follow to get started developing a new product and establishing your product-based business.

Dan's Product Journey Update

In the last episode, I mentioned I was feeling excellent about my product journey and that I had made some very good progress.

This episode, while I'm still making good progress, I'm also experiencing a all sorts of emotions.

In the recording, Dan has a brief discussion here about COVID19.

Following Last Episode, I Had Planned To...

Keep working through the book - Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding; and...
Get into maker-mode for a decent chunk of time. That is, focus a good amount of my available free time on building some initial parts of my product.

How Did I Go?

On Progressing Through the Book

I didn't make much more progress there.

With everything that has been happening due to enforced home isolation and schooling from home, I haven't really had much in the way of spare time to sit down and read.

In addition to that, to be honest, I have been spending a lot of my time in maker-mode, actually working on my product.

On Building Some Initial Parts of My Product

I'm quite happy with progress on this item

I mentioned last episode that it's been a few years since I've done any decent coding and that I thought I would be a bit rusty.

Well, nothing could have been further from the truth in that respect.

For the last few weeks I have been working on some very basic structural parts of the front-end of the web-app I am building and I have been moving at a snail's pace.

I spent probably too much time reminding myself about how to go about things such as:

structuring the source code;
researching available libraries and packages that might be useful;
getting productive with packages I choose by reading through their API documentation.

In addition to that, I have decided to use a front-end framework and a coding language that I haven't worked with much at all. The framework is named 'React' and the coding language is named 'TypeScript'.

There are some long-term benefits I can foresee by using React and TypeScript but they come with the cost of initially going slow while I learn them both.

Despite the slowness, I have actually made progress. I have the basic structure of the front-end of the web-app working. So, like I said, I'm actually quite happy with it, all-in-all.

And that's the progress so far.

What's the Plan For the Next Block of Work?

Between this episode and next, this is my plan:

Return to the marketing book I had previously been reading - Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding.
Continue in maker-mode and focus on building the initial front-end of web-app. I'm picking up speed now and I would like to keep things moving.

Well, that's it for the update

Next up, it's time for a discussion on the main topic of this episode...