How I made an app and pushed it live in 4 days

How I made an app and pushed it live in 4 days

ยท

3 min read

Hi guys ๐Ÿ‘จโ€๐Ÿ’ป and girls ๐Ÿ‘ฉโ€๐Ÿ’ป. In January I've made Postzy. You can use Postzy to schedule โฐ and manage your LinkedIn posts.

One of my goals for 2021 is to build some micro-products that will generate some income. I want to learn to develop an MVP as fast as possible, validate the idea, and improve it. (if it's the case ๐Ÿ˜ƒ).

Now, let's see how I managed to push an MVP for Postzy in ~4 days.

Tech Stack

My go-to stack right now for developing micro-products and fast prototyping is:

  • Next.JS for Front-End
  • Next.JS API routes for serverless back-end
  • MongoDB for database
  • Vercel or Netlify for hosting
  • Stripe for payment
  • Next Auth for implementing authentication in Next.JS
  • Plausible for analytics

In addition to this, depending on the project, I'm using all kinds of libraries or services to speed up my development process.

Planning

Before I jump and build something, I do my research. I use Notion to organize my ideas and my research. I start by defining what I want to build, why, and how I'm going to build that. Also, while I do my research I bookmark in Notion articles, tutorials, libraries, GitHub tickets, ... Basically everything that I think will help me while building the app.

Day 1

The first day was dedicated to research. I've written down what I want to build and started to see how can I build that.

Day 2

Started to set up the project, made some sketches for the app in Figma, and implemented Next Auth.

Day 3

On the 3rd day, I've implemented the core functionality of the app, using the LinkedIn API. At the end of the day, I've been able to post to LinkedIn using the app.

Day 4

On the last day, I've implemented payment processing using Stripe. I've gone with the easiest approach, letting Stripe to handle the checkout process.

Let's talk in the comments about MVP and fast prototyping.

If you have any questions or want to reach me, check out my website