Idea to Launch in 4 Hours — ScriptHunt.io

I love Product Hunt, I really think it’s one of the best ways to discover the newest products and most importantly it is curated by an active community of early adopters, VCs, and entrepreneurs. Product Hunt, Hacker News, and other social discovery tools seem like an evolution of the way people find out about new tools, news, growth hacks, etc. However, I saw a gap in developer tools — sure, the trending GitHub repositories are a good source of what’s new… but not everything is a GitHub repo. Sometimes there are great threads on Stack Overflow or Quora, simple links posted on twitter, and new APIs get released daily.

I’ve been a fan of the Lean Startup concept for a while, and while it is not right for every startup it sure makes sense for some. Here is a quick breakdown of how my day went and how I got from idea to launch in about 4 hours.

Hour 0: Started playing around with Snabbit.js, which I found on Product Hunt. Thought “wouldn’t it be great if more developer tools, scripts, gists, etc were listed on something like PH, but without clouding up the valuable products on PH.”

Hour 1: Did some whois searches for scripthunt, codehunt (apparently Microsoft owns the .com for this one), and a few other ideas — because if you can’t name a startup you might not want to build one. Found scripthunt.io and purchased the domain. While I was waiting for the registration to go through I set up DNS zone through AWS Route 53, and got email ready to go. I started registering for things like Twitter, got my social logins set up through Facebook and Twitter, and added the product to my CrunchBase profile. Added a private GitHub repo, cloned from the fantastic Telescope (which is built on Meteor).

Hour 2: Decided it was time to get some branding done so I went back to Product Hunt (where else) to remind myself of a quick and easy logo service called Withoomph, then off to Coolors to generate a quick color scheme. OK, now it’s time to get some work done… open up Sublime Text and remind myself what telescope looks like. Pretty great, just needed to do a few customizations here and there, started adding API keys and such.

Hour 3: I hear security is, ahem, a bit of a concern these days, so to make it official I got my SSL cert with Namecheap. This could be easier but, hey, it’s cheap. Started deploying to heroku, ran into some errors… got annoyed and had lunch. When I came back, I set up Continuous Integration with CodeShip — seriously easy setup. Each time I push to my GitHub repo, it runs my tests and pushes to my PaaS server of choice #codeshipped

Hour 4: Set up account with modulus.io — I’ve previously used heroku with much success but I was having trouble with the build (I later found out this was because someone got overly greedy in a .gitignore file and the buildpack for heroku couldn’t find a directory… water under the bridge, but it shows how fickle developers can be — run into a tiny error on one PaaS platform and they’ll switch) but decided to switch since other people working on Meteor give it rave reviews. Install modulus command line tool and deploy… damn, that was easy. Apply SSL certs in modulus control panel. Switch over Route 53 DNS entries and we’re good to go.