Hi there! You may remember me from such films as "100 React Projects in 100 Days"- which I started on Halloween of 2020, and finished, but didn't write the last blog post for until last week. It actually took me nearly two years to finish the 100 projects challenge, and then I shied away from completing the 100th blog post for over a year and a half. Why? Performance anxiety, I guess, and the time suck of starting two new jobs in that timeframe, which pulled me away from the social media world and into actual code.

Since I started that challenge in 2020 I've become a much better developer, I landed a full-time role, was laid off after an acquisition (along with nearly all of my team), started a web development agency of my own, and have been working as a developer for design agencies, almost exclusively on custom React websites but occasionally dipping into WordPress and Webflow as well.

Today I'm here to talk about my next challenge - completing 10 products in 10 weeks#.

The challenge rules are as follows:
1. 1 week time limit: Every Wednesday I start a new product with the goal of launching it live to users in the next 7 days, by midnight the following Tuesday.
2. Marketing required: I have to market it somehow. Probably on my own website, on Twitter, on Product Hunt, and on various other channels as I find them. I really hate marketing. Most developers probably do. But this will force me to learn a bit about how it's done, and not be scared of it.
3. Monetization: A "product" is different from a "project" in that it has to be fairly usable for an end user, and it has to at least have the potential to generate revenue, whether it's through purchases (with something like Stripe) or through ad monetization (with something like Google Ads).
4. Video Proof: Written blogs are cool and all, but I think they're probably much less entertaining than video blogs. So, I'm going to blog about the experience each day of what I did that day and what's left for the project. My Youtube channel is here: youtube: alec_baldman
5. KPIs Published: It wouldn't be a product if we didn't track the numbers and try to improve them over time. Each week I'll add or revise the numbers for each project as they pertain to (1) weekly and total revenue, (2) weekly and total customers, (3) weekly and total cost, (4) weekly and total downloads or product site/page visitors, and (5) weekly and total profit.

Genuinely, I am not expecting to sell anything. In my experience, without an excellent blend of marketing, product quality, and luck it's pretty hard to actually make money. I mean, my last blog post got 1 like so that's pretty much the reach we're talking about, but I think this challenge will both make me a better developer and make the process of creating products more familiar.

A huge shout out to Levels.io and his book MAKE for inspiring me to do something like this. His challenge to do 12 startups in 12 months and his book really encouraged me to try this. Also, similar challenges by code legend Florin Pop and Jennifer Dewalt's famous 180 websites in 180 days which showed web developers everywhere how quickly they could upskill if they really, really focused on it.

Here are the technologies I want to get better at:

• Remix
• Flutter
• NextJS
• Shopify
• Node
• AWS
• Databases

And here is the list of new-project start dates:

April 24 - AI enabled npm upgrade lookup (try Llama?)
May 1
May 8
May 15
May 22
May 29
June 5
June 12
June 19
June 26

Day 1

My week 1 project is something I personally will get a lot of use out of. The idea is simple: drop the URL of a public Github project which has a package.json file into a searchbar and get an AI-generated list of all of the outdated packages, what upgrades need to be done, how out of date the project is and why. I will use this for whenever clients want to know how outdated their website is, how crucial upgrading is for security and performance, and what upgrades I'll need to do to bring back up to date. This is a huge challenge in Javascript land, where your NextJS or Gatsby project and all of its 500 NPM package dependencies might go out of date extremely quickly if you don't monitor it.

Follow me on my new-ish Twitter if you want to hear more :)
@jameshubert_com

Videos will be on Youtube with my tongue-in-cheek Youtuber handle (no, I don't want to become a Youtuber) @alec_baldman

Ta-ta for now!

Some inspiration: