Converting from a Developer to a Product Founder in 10 years

A little story of a workaholic entrepreneur switching from a developer to a product founder in 10 years.

How it all started

I was a happy student when I started to develop for money. It was a lot of fun and it was super interesting: a lot of new technologies, a lot of challenges.

I had no family at that time (too early) and I had all the time to develop things. I was kind of a geek and I was always super strict to myself on deliverability.

The company I was working for was small and full of entrepreneurship or better to say startups, which was awesome, otherwise, I would leave it earlier.

But even it was a lot of fun, I decided to go further into the world of freelance. I was aiming to become an owner and boss to myself.

Owning the life being a freelancer

It always a lot of "benefits" of being a freelancer, ones could imagine a person sitting on a beach of an island drinking a mango smoothie and working on a project... This is a nice picture to imagine, but for most freelancers, it's not like this at all.

It was a long standup for me. It was necessary to produce good reviews and build a few products for free. But later I managed to find one customer, and then another.

Then accidentally I was working with 10 different customers at the same time: you know that, handling support vs active development.

Did I become super-independent? No, not really, instead of one boss on my previous job I got 10.

Yes, I have increased my income, from 3-4k to 8-12k per month.

Yes, I have increased my expertise quite a lot because I have joined more than 30 different projects in different niches, especially in e-commerce, travel-related and fin-tech.

No, I don't get any way to become happier in that setup, it didn't work for me.

So I had to quit and find a better focus for me. It is not something I liked to do forever. I didn't want to come to ordinal work at the office as well.

So it was the moment when I had to switch to the product.

How do you get to product ideas?

I believe that the best product ideas could be born at the centre of your expertise.

While working on different client projects I always repeat the same routine, again and again. Their routing is the thing that everydeloper does every day.

Every developer reinvents the wheel every day to build the bicycle.

Example: How much time it's necessary to spend to build a simple ToDo list with backend and frontend, DB, Email notifications and such?

Well it could be various, but it will take at least one day if you are familiar with the deployment, you have good knowledge and high expertise on many aspects like

• Hosting

• DNS

• Frontend Frameworks, HTML + CSS + JS

• Backend Frameworks

• Email Providers,

• Email templates

• 

• etc.

How much time do you need to spend to get such expertise and deliver faster enough?

Remember we are talking about a ToDo list, the simplest app we can imagine.

These days I met John, who is started his work on Mars. It was a nice match, he got into the same set of questions but did a step further - started to deliver a product that could solve this.

Let's build a ToDo List as quickly as possible

Let's talk about the ToDo list again.

One day I asked myself what could be the easiest option to develop a ToDo list app.

For me, the answer is: don't develop it -> Reuse something that is already developed/tested/production ready.

The question is how? From top to the bottom in terms of the amount of knowledge required

• You could find a few ready-to-go npm or *any-ecosystem* packages to get it faster

• You could build something with AI - just ask to build UI and API and then improve

• You could find a GitHub seed project

• You can use a low-code solution

• You can use a no-code solution

So which option to pick depends on many factors like

• Ability to customise

• Amount of efforts

• Running costs (cost of hosting and maintaining )

• Long-term support and improvements

Let's focus on Customisability VS Speed of development

I have tried to compare options and a simple chart

From my experience, the more you want the solution to be different to others -the more time you need to spend.

I have tried many no-code platforms, and they gave me good speed in the beginning, but I always had a lack of customisation and simplicity of updating as soon as the project grows. At the same time, the fully custom solution I have developed for my clients is something I'm not able to support as well because the amount of custom functionality the product eventually introduce is huge, you need a team to manage this, which is ok, but it creates bigger running costs.

Then I take a look at low-code platforms, it was a bit "unclear" thing for me. In simple words, it's a kind of platform where you can code, but at the same time, you can use a no-code approach. It seems like a perfect combination for me and that is where Mars is sitting.

How it works there

Everything on Mars is a micro-app. You can combine them, fork, reconfigure etc. You can do a lot of changes without coding and you can write a thing from scratch if it's necessary.

This is how I came to the product idea

Mars seemed like an awesome platform for me, but it's just a tool, the same as many others. If I want to build a ToDo list on Mars I need somebody to develop such a micro-app for me. Then I did a simple approximation on bigger products: an e-commerce store like Amazon, service marketplaces like Booksy or Renting platform like Airbnb

And I got this

Many people develop similar big and complex apps today.

And all of them repeat the logic.

Every founder pays for this.

So, to make such founders' and developers**'** lives better, I could provide them with ready-to-go reusable micro apps built by niche experts.

Being a developer myself and having quite a huge experience in many niches after 10 years of product development for clients I was in the right shape to take it off.

That is how Fleexy has been founded. Or flew up!

The Team, or Crew

Teams build things together, and Crews starts the spaceships.

From the products I have worked with, I remember a few very talented guys.

Perfect tech experience, passion to create things, open-minded and honest vision of things.

Together with Alexey and Andrey, we founded Fleexy. We aim to build the biggest foundation of micro-apps for Your Future Product.

It was a nice moment, it was always so inspiring to build a new thing, you start light, you have no dependencies, and you feel like you can fly. So we did.

But we are a self-bootstrapped company, we have no investors, that means we don't have a lot of money to burn.

That means that we have to find a customer sooner than later.

Building a product is a lot of fun

We started with an obvious thing: testing different niches, where we could be helpful.

That is how we get into 2 of them

• Services-Marketplace

• Social-Marketplace

By doing these demos we also created a solid number of micro apps we can use now for our next project/product. We were happy to share that with the world.

So we build a website and describe what we are and why. And guess what?

We got 0 visitors.

How Coders switch to Marketing

That's where we are now. We are in marketing mode. We do posts, we do tweets.

We literally spend days writing blog posts (and we still do), we do keyword analysys, and we do back-link building to get higher domain authority.

That already gave us some leads!

This helped us to get our first customers and even released one of them The Daba. It has been built on top of the Services-Marketplace solution we have. It has a lot of customisations, especially in terms of UI, and it looks and works awesome. Try it out.

Fleexy is just at the beginning of the fly

We have quite big ambitions - we want to disrupt the current way of app development. It should be faster, quicker and cheaper. The more we do this, the more I believe we will make it work.

And as for me

For sure I lost the income. It was a lot of pressure and it still is.

But I got much more:

• Having a mission I believe could impact many things tomorrow

• The crew I can trust

• Freedom to do things and be able to define my next step

• The long journey I'm happy to be part of

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