Happy Thanksgiving!

Given the holiday week, productivity has been at an all time low!

But, there’s still plenty to talk about.

Seems like an opportune time to recap the Twitch Hackathon results and lessons learned from building a platform.

Topics for this week:

• The Results Are In

• Lessons Learned

• The Builders Plight

• The Perfect Product

• The Final Lesson

The Results Are In

Twitch’s Streamer Tools Hackathon concluded Monday night, announcing the winners and…

We didn’t win this time.

Technically there is still a chance, though!

If we make a marketing push, we could win the bonus category for Most User Authentications with the app before February 25th, so that is still an option…

And marketing is a problem I’ve been looking to solve, so we’ll see.

There’s also a number of features I haven’t finished on the app so it would be great to see it fully realized, but maybe in the next hackathon.

Not disappointed with the results though, it was a great hack and a great time!

Lessons Learned

Despite not winning, the project was well worth the effort.

I finally ended up diving into a number of things I’d been talking about but never had followed through on.

For example, I finally got past a simple To Do List tutorial using htmx and Go, and implemented the two technologies for something a little more complicated.

I really started to get a feel for Go syntax which I’ve been meaning to jump into for a long time.

With the help of GPT and Claude Sonnet, I got a massive refresher on proper enterprise coding practice, which made me realize how rusty I’d gotten. As always, talking about it and doing it are 2 completely different things.

I learned how to properly deploy an app to Amazon’s Lightsail and integrate a Postgres database with it which was all new to me - concepts I understood in theory but had never gone through the practice until now.

I got a crash course in Authentication, OAuth, and session management. I’d never actually managed cookies before but I have a better understanding of how they work now which will be very helpful.

I became best buddies with the AI’s helping me spin up code way faster than I would have on my own, feeling very confident that I can rapidly build and deploy apps with the help of LLMs.

With all of that experience, it made me even more excited to build, but there’s one more lesson to be learned about building…

The Builder’s Plight

Another big lesson I learned is the lesson I continue to learn over and over.

You can build for months and create this awesome app that you think is great and will be a huge success, but without feedback from people you don’t know, you have no idea if anyone even wants it, or if it has features that people will actually use.

If the plan is to create a successful app with any kind of user base, then you need to know what that user base wants.

Building is fun, but without feedback, it will only remain fun, and may not progress to popular or profitable if that’s the ultimate goal.

Nothing wrong with fun if that’s why you’re building.

And this Hackathon was fun!

It was a fun idea that had some inherent validation since there was a group of us that thought it sounded like something that could be entertaining.

A profitable business wasn’t the original goal for building Hype Bid, but it’s hard not to think about creating the next trending topic that everyone is talking about for a couple days before moving on to the next big thing that week.

But it doesn’t hurt to be ready for that something like that.

Part of the motivation to keep going with the project after the submission date was to be ready to move if we did win.

No guarantee we would win, but winning would have generated some traffic creating an opportunity for to capture new users from free marketing.

If those users were immediately impressed with the app and started telling their friends, there’s the potential to grow very quickly.

Without Twitch’s advertising or the hype of winning the hackathon, we’ll have to have to do our own marketing and generate our own demand which is another entire project in itself, but I’m up for that challenge as well!

The Perfect Product

As an engineer, it’s hard not to just want to build for weeks or months on end and avoid advertising and sales all together.

After all, according to this Naval quote, if you build the perfect product, it sells itself!

I think there is some truth in that.

If you build an amazing product, it will sell itself.

People will tell their friends and you get virality.

But it’s really hard to build a product that sells itself.

You have to exactly nail what a huge group of people need and don’t have and it’s very difficult to figure out what that is.

Harder still, you have to then maintain that standard for a long time.

Either you built something so amazing when you released it that you don’t need to fix it and it just continues to be amazing, or you have to continually add updates and features that equally impress the current users that they continue to tell all their friends that still haven’t signed up that they need to get on board.

It’s possible but very unlikely, and I think most people fall into that trap unknowingly.

So if you don’t build that amazing thing, you’re going to need to market it.

Then you need to keep people using it while you’re also marketing.

And you get into the balance of making your current users happy and finding new users at the same time.

All this to say, I basically fell for that trap.

It’s easy to spend weeks or months building something and never asking a single user what they think.

At this point, I spent a long time over engineering without ever getting any user feedback.

It’s a good lesson learned to see it and realize what it feels like for the next project.

If it’s been a long time a few weeks of coding with 0 user feedback, it may be time to get some input.

I’ll be keeping that in mind for this project or the next project.

We’ll see what happens next week.

The Final Lesson

I touched on it last week, but I think the biggest takeaway from all of this is what I didn’t do.

Iterate.

Release versions and get feedback rather than build in a dark room.

But this requires solving the marketing problem.

So to solve the marketing problem, I keep coming back to this current trendy solution.

Multiple social media accounts testing what works well and drives to an app.

I’m leaning towards giving this approach a shot, iterating quickly on a few apps and marketing them quickly to get feedback.

Time to speed run this approach to see if anything comes of it.

I think this idea could work for Hype Bid as well but it would be a little trickier than some of these other app ideas.

Time to put all of my side projects together.

And that’s it for this week! A recap of my extended hackathon experience and some ideas of where to move next. Only 4 newsletters left this year!

Those are the links that stuck with me throughout the week and a glimpse into what I personally worked on.

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