After much delay, I've finally gotten a first draft of the landing page completed and published. This has been something I've been putting off for quite a while. My first mention of this becoming my priority was January 11. That was almost two months ago.

For context, the bulk of the existing site functionality was created in less than a month (the first commit was December 19).

As difficult as this simple, nonsense page took to finally get into production, I'm starting to realize that this was just blocking another task that I've been procrastinating on: figuring out who the paying customer is and getting that first dollar.

My idea is to sell job listings to companies looking for high-quality, self-starter talent. You know...that type of candidate who might have projects that demonstrate their passion and skills in tangible end-products. But being a two-sided market problem, I am coming to the realization that this might be a bit advanced for any shorter term feedback. This is going to have to be something that takes more time to grow. And the only way I know how to grow this is to grow a user base by being my own enthusiastic first customer and trying to build an audience.

Gear shift

While I do this, ProjectGallery.me development might be moving to the back burner. But I'll be an active user while fixing bugs and making small-ish tweaks in the meantime. But new major functionality will probably be frozen for a while until I can begin getting user feedback.

All that said, I'm probably going to spin up a new project of some sort. Something much smaller in scale that will hopefully be a much more beginner-friendly path to market validation. And, of course, I'll be logging the experience here on ProjectGallery.me.

Time Well Spent

Of course, this begs the question: have I been wasting my time and do I continue to do so by trying to make something work that is not within my capabilities too do so? The answer here is a firm "no".

For one, I've made several versions of a portfolio in the past. And since each one of those currently rests in a project graveyard, they were objectively wasted time. This is something that I can still leverage in the future since it was implemented as a multi-user application as opposed to a hard-coded one-off.

I spun up ProjectGallery.me relatively quickly because I leveraged functionality from previous projects as a base. And with this project, I've further refined those pieces and even expanded the functionality. Of course third party services exist to handle some of these things, such as authentication. But these often come with the caveat of having to figure out how to make these work offline. Or worry about the pricing model or vendor lock-in.

With this iterative approach, the core of the app keeps getting batter and becomes easier to leverage in the future.

Keep on Keepin' On

And with that, I think that pauses things (or rather, significantly slows down) work on ProjectGallery.me while I try to focus on my next project. Can't wait to tell everyone what that will be (including myself)!