In this article I will tell the story of how I tried to create and launch a startup, having only a little free time and a specific goal. I’m sure many developers would like to work on own project and have thought about it more than once. I hope that the description of my mistakes will help others not to do the same.

Idea

So, it was around 2016. I was working on custom development and support, that is, outsourcing. I had my own small team (3-5 developers), office and regular customers. This small business was successful, bringing income, feeding my family, and giving pleasure to projects. However, I wanted more freedom in product selection, technical solutions, financial independence. The desire to self-realization also did not allow me to sleep at night. The soul of an engineer demanded its own product, with the strategy and the roadmap as it seems right and interesting to me. And of course, the yield is a little higher than it was at the time. And it seemed that my project could give all this and make me happy, because the recruited critical mass of paid customers can provide the desired level of profitability constantly, while the outsourcer client may leave at the most inopportune moment and not always his needs will coincide with my wishes.

The idea of the project was not born out of nowhere. I had a living and constant problem in the work. This is financial accounting. Since customers paid for the working hours, there were hundreds of hours to be counted each month, reports to be issued, accounts to be reconciled with customers, income to expenses, loss locations to be identified. Tax reports and salaries were also time-consuming. Since the business was very small, it was not possible to maintain an accountant. A suitable automated system did not exist at that time. A system that will be flexible and sensitive to my country’s tax laws.
My work with finance started out simple and gradually evolved and became more complex. The table below shows how I tried to plan my income and expenses, calculate the minimum profitable cost of an hour and calculate taxes.

It was enough for a while, but there came a point when I realized I didn’t see the important details. For example, how effective each person in the team, he pays for his work or brings a loss, how justified the cost of software, courier, etc. I needed details. And gradually the table was like this:

Of course, the figures are all made up. And this is only a small part of the tables that I used, the rest unfortunately did not survive. At some point I started to miss the features of the tables. Rather, to say that the cost of their development has become very high. I started looking for some more specialized and box-based solutions that would solve most of my problems immediately. We don’t really do CRMs in tables) Although it’s possible, there are solutions.
So all my searches ended in failure. Those solutions that could be found were directed to accounting, which is different from financial. It provides very little planning and analysis. In these programs there was a recording of facts and tax calculation, it is of course also necessary and useful, but not at all what is missing and does not solve the problem.

First try

From that moment I decided that this is the idea! I am a developer and I can code it! There was a huge amount of enthusiasm, ideas and hazy vision of the final product. But I really wanted to get the first prototype as soon as possible. Although at the time I wasn’t thinking about the prototype, I was thinking about a finished product with lots of possibilities. On my first try, I took the tools I used every day. At that time it was a framework yii2 On the frontend I did not use anything except jQuery and this was enough. VueJS was released later.
I started work. I immediately ordered a logo and landing page from a familiar designer. The familiar maker quickly turned the layout landing page into HTML. And the name came up immediately) Of course bought a domain for it.

Landing page unfortunately did not survive, as well as the source code of the first version, but there is still nothing in the source code that could be of interest.
It’s been less than a month, and I’ve already started to lose enthusiasm. As time went on, I worked in my free time, and the result was very small. One more or less working section that was nothing like the multi-functional product I had imagined. As he began to solve one problem, he realized that it was blocked by two more etc. On the horizon appeared a long work for many months before the launch. All this was very demotivated and gradually the first attempt was abandoned. I was unprepared for the work and underestimated them.

Second try

However, the desire for my project still did not let go. It came to me every day and in the end six months I decided to try again. I tried to take into account the mistakes of the past and started with the prototype. In Axure I drew the end result, even worked out well. Fortunately, there were also developments from the first attempt: source code base, landing page, experience. I didn’t have to start from scratch, so I started coding again.
This time, things were going much better thanks to the prototypes. I understood more what I was doing and why I didn’t have to redo the working code because the result doesn’t look like it should from the point of view of UI/UX.
In this mode, about 3 months have passed. I continued to work in my free time. And here happens an offer, very interesting and necessary. At that time I was ready to change the format of work from outsourcing to the company. Revenues were frozen in place and stopped growing. It seems that I have reached the ceiling when to further develop from an engineer it was necessary to become a manager and an entrepreneur. And I didn’t want it at all, because coding for me was and remains more interesting. So I accepted this offer and my life changed dramatically. The income grew, but the free time ceased to be. As well as the energy. It was a period of reformatting to a new lifestyle. And of course the project was abandoned again in such conditions. This time I was not ready for the changed circumstances.

One year later

I was working at a new company, and I was happy and interested. But one day I happen to find out that there’s a startup that’s exactly like my idea. It was like a lightning strike.

I’m sorry I can’t find a screenshot in English. Here’s a section with a list of income and expenses, and a graph and a prediction of cash breaks. Yes, it was all far from the multi-functional combine. The author of the project launched MVP and immediately it was paid and immediately he had sales. The author did not develop a bunch of features and instead made a product that could be used even now in the minimum mode.
Of course I was upset. My idea was alive and needed, and I couldn’t realize it and someone else took it.
And almost immediately, I discover a second project like this. It’s a little bit different than the first, it’s a little worse, it’s better, it’s better, but it works and it’s profitable for its founders.

It was the last straw and I decided to make a third attempt. I could not just throw away an idea that ended up being so popular.

Third try

In past attempts, every time there were serious problems in planning. It was primarily about planning the time I had and where to invest it first. I found a time for myself when I can do the project, so that there is an opportunity to pay attention to family and children too.

• Mon through Sun from 21 to 0 hours. Time when children go to bed.
• All full-time. It was decided to donate one holiday.
• 2-3 hours in the afternoon when the children were asleep. Of all this, I deducted 10% for periods when you need to rest, and such periods will definitely be. Now I have a picture of what time resource I have at my disposal. This could already allow for a more objective assessment of what I can do and in what time frame. Given the first two abandoned attempts I did not rule out that the third could go wrong. And I would not like to waste a lot of time. So I needed plan B. And I prepared it. First, the source code of the project must be used in any case. For example, put on open source and show as an example code or portfolio to prospective employers. Therefore, the quality of his writing had to be approached as responsibly as possible. The second thing I had to do was choose the technology that I could use to help me find the best jobs. At that point in the trend were Symfony and Angular and it was them I chose. Experience with them had no at all. This backup has helped me a lot since then, but about that later. After a month of Symfony, I didn’t open docs often, because I took care of this framework and just coded. But with Angular everything was more complicated. Since the frontend is not really mine, and the experience I had a little, I decided to take VueJs, which was much easier to work with. It’s been six months. I already have a more or less working prototype and a good design that I built myself and spent a lot of time on it. But, the stock of forces dried up. At competitors appeared more and more new features and to keep up with them I obviously could not and the launch was not everything. I tried looking for partners. A person who will take on some of the work, like marketing or UX or something, so I can focus on the development. But it turned out that there were no enthusiasts like me who were willing to work 60 to 70 hours a week for free. I tried to appeal to investors. But this did not suit me. First, I was not interested in very large shares for a modest infusion and hard working conditions. Second, investors wanted me to do a lot of management work instead of development, which also didn’t fit my purpose for what I was doing. Third, it is always a full time job. I could not afford such an adventure, as I already had a family at that time. The third attempt was drowned after about 7-8 months from the start. According to the report on the time spent, you can see how the enthusiasm burns and fades) In the amount of only a third attempt I spent more than 500 hours of free time. After a few years, I realized that even then it was possible and necessary to lay out the minimum functionality, even if free. The first users would certainly boost enthusiasm and perhaps now things would be different.

Conclusion

What matters in this story is not how successful the project turned out to be. The most important thing is the experience gained and the benefit I was able to derive from all this.
On the one hand, it seems that the startup failed. Yes, but that’s what I got valuable.

• Got the experience with Symfony, which eventually helped me get to work with the requirement of this framework and increase my salary almost twice. I could say that I did achieve one goal
• Looked at the development through the eyes of the business owner, the product owner and even the project manager. It allows me now to better understand these people and more often find common ground and find really suitable solutions
• I got over the idea of startup, understood all the pros and cons and now it hardly bothers me) I have become more appreciative of employers and respect their work.
• I learned to plan my work, which helped me to successfully lead my projects for a while, and it was also another useful milestone in my career.
• And most importantly, the time spent with family has become more valuable.

I am very glad that I have had this experience in my life, but I cannot recommend it to others to repeat it. Let each one decide for himself, and hope this will help him to make the right decision.

Project sources:

Backend
Frontend

I will be happy if someone could bend the rules and launch their project