Hello r/entrepreneur. Thought I’d share my journey so far coming up with a product.Late 2020 bought a new pair of blue shoes, wore them once then washed them and put them out in the sun to dry. I forgot about them until two days later when I went back to the balcony where I left the shoes and found them really dry and the original color burned away after staying in the sun for so long. The shoes were still in good condition but the color was just off-putting. I then thought of finding someone who specializes in shoes to sort of dye them. Only problem is I didn't know anyone to do it and I had no means of finding such a person. That’s when it hit me that there was probably someone around me who can fix my shoes, we just don’t have a simple, straight forward way of reaching each other.The idea: From my situation above the idea was quite simple. Come up with a system that would allow anyone to post anything they need help with and allow other people around them to see the post, apply and accomplish the task together.Validation: At this point I was quite certain there was a gap to be filled here but I wanted to see if other people felt the same way. I asked a friend what he thought of an app that could let him post any job he wanted and find people around him willing to do it. His response was, “We already have Linkedin for that” to which I responded “If you urgently need someone to come clean your house in the next thirty minutes, how would you go about finding that person on Linkedin?”. That’s when he saw my point. I proceeded to post my idea in a couple of Whatsapp groups I was in and the majority of people thought of it as a good idea.Features of the app: From the beginning my intention for Duwit was for it to be an app where anyone can post anything they can do or want done no matter how little it may seem. To effectively do this I’d focus on:An easy onboarding experience for new users. In the event that a new user wanted to create a task, they wouldn't have to go through a long sign up process.Three categories: A part where users can post anything they are willing to pay to have done, a part where users can post anything they want to be paid to do and a part where users can make posts that do not require monetary exchange.Allow users the freedom to specify their own budgets and rates for whatever they post.A messaging system for users to communicate .For the 2 parts that require monetary exchange I found it more convenient to let users handle payments themselves that way no extra charges for anything.Planning and tools for the job:The next step was to plan what I was going to create and how I was going to create it. Since I wanted to create something that’s fast and can be used anywhere. A mobile app was the better option compared to a website. The only problem was I had no clue how to make either and no money to hire a developer. But that did not worry me too much, my only determination was to get this project off the ground.I started looking for the requirements needed to make a mobile app. My search was mainly focused on frameworks that can build Android and iOS apps simultaneously. After a lot of comparison and looking at different people’s opinions regarding mobile app development frameworks, I settled on Flutter mainly because it’s purpose is to create apps for mobile, web, pc and mac using the same code base.The next step was coming up with a design for my app and finding Flutter learning materials.I started by roughly sketching all the pages I wanted the app to have. I have some experience with photoshop so that was my desired program for designing mockups from the sketches.I went to YouTube and searched for “Photoshop mobile app design tutorials”. In the course of my search, most of the results were focused on Adobe XD instead of photoshop. I later discovered Adobe XD is more suited for what I wanted compared to PS. It took me about 5 hours to create all the designs in Adobe XD and the next step was to find Flutter video tutorials for absolute beginners.Learning Process: My learning process was somewhat different from how you would usually go about learning to code. First I settled on a 20 hour flutter beginner course from Udemy. My plan was to only use what I needed for my app from the course. To do this I played the course at about 5X speed while noting down the lessons and timestamps that taught anything I thought would fit into my app based on my design. It’s after going through the entire course like this that I came back focused on videos that had what I wanted. To put this into better context, my app was obviously going to be location based so my interest would be more towards a lesson about “working with google maps in Flutter” than a lesson about “creating a calculator in Flutter”.With this approach I was able to come up with a working prototype way faster than I would have if I had focused on the entire course and did everything the instructor did.The first prototype: Fast forward to a lot of early mornings, youtube, google searches and three months later I had my first prototype that ticked all the boxes I wanted for the app:A user sign up and authentication system in the appEnable users to create and delete postsAutomatically filter posts based on locationAllow users to tweak some of the location settingsYou know how something you've made yourself always looks good when in actual sense it might not? That's how I felt at that time with the first prototype. It was working well but the UI was so off(I just didn't see it that way at the time). I showed it to my friends who appreciated the concept but everyone was telling me I needed to improve the UI.At that point I could say my Flutter knowledge was 4/10. There was a lot I still couldn't do and most of the time I had to google or go back to the tutorials for something in the app I wanted to change.A brief stop: While still trying to figure out how to improve my app’s UI. I stumbled across a job posting that required a Flutter developer with 1 year experience(I only had 3 months learning experience XD). I went ahead and applied for it and made it clear what I could do with flutter at the time and provided a link to my prototype that was live on Google Play.One week later I was at this small company’s office, with 7 other devs working on a web app. My work was to replicate the web version into a mobile version. I remember my supervisor telling me I had to use RESTful APIs to connect to their custom PHP database. I was honest with and told him I had not worked with REST APIs before. My only experience was with Firebase because that was my app’s backend. He agreed to give me 2 days to learn about REST APIs then get back to work.This was way simpler than I thought and in a month and a half my part of the project was complete. I must say I spent around 40% of my time there on google looking up most of the things the project required and implementing them. I then got back to my app with new found knowledge on how to improve my UI.Challenges: Creating an app from scratch is no easy task especially if you've never done it before and you are doing it alone. But hey, who said it was going to be easy? Here are some challenges I encountered while creating my first app:Constant thoughts of “What if it doesn't work”. I got thoughts like this a lot throughout my development journey.Having old, shitty hardware is very frustrating. You can imagine the toll running Android studio and simultaneously having more than 10 chrome tabs open would have on a core i5 laptop from 2015. Booting up android studio after shutdown takes no less than 25 minutes.In relation to challenge 2 above, as much as Flutter allows you to create android and iOS apps with one code base you still need a real mac and iOS device to test and create your app’s iOS version. That’s why my app is only available for android at the moment.Getting users for a marketplace sort of app is not an easy task. Am yet to nail this one.You can tell from this narrative that I am not a very good story teller. Hopefully I can master this as time goes by and have a good sales pitch.Lessons learned:Your brain is a powerful tool. Use it well. As much as you can learn anything you put yourself into, your mind will try to “stop” you if you push it too hard to do things it’s not used to. In my case this was when I got the “What if it doesn't work” thoughts. I countered this by telling myself “What if it works”.Not everyone will see your vision. It’s upon you to implement it and convince them to see itUse what you have to get what you want. This is in relation to my crappy hardware.IMO coding/programming is easier when you have something you are working towards. Start your own project or try to replicate an existing product that is based on what you are trying to learn.You don't have to know everything at once. Learn as you go. Ask where you are stuck.Well, that's it for my journey so far creating Duwit. The next step is finding users and pushing to iOS in the near future.If you’ve read this far, I am open to answering any questions you may have in the comments section. It also won't hurt you to try the app for yourself:Duwit on Google Play.You can also join the Duwit Subreddit to stay updated with my progress. You can also provide feedback, questions and feature requests.In my next post I will share how I created this Duwit Landing Page from scratch using Flutter. see hubwealthy.com/wealthy
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