My preparation for the 24h startup challenge 📋👨💻
Hello ! 👋
Just after building a startup in 10 hours, the 24h startup challenge was announced. More than 400 makers will stream themselves building a startup from scratch 🤯, as crazy as it sounds —I could not miss it.
The 10 hours challenge was very personal and there was no pressure, but this time is very different, so I needed to get well prepared 👊
Finding an idea
I keep a note sheet on my mac where I write every idea I have. I picked three candidates and submitted them to a community of makers to help me choose the best one :
And I got some responses :
Ok so #1 seems like the best one. It’s more specific than the others and easily monetizable. It’s in the trend of the serverless era where makers don’t want to maintain a backend anymore for simple things such as calling an API.
The three main challenges with this idea are :
- It’s not easy to build it right 🤯
- It’s hard to explain to people what problem the service really solves 🤨
- There’s no big Waouh! effect 😐
It’s not easy to build it right 🤯
The best method to build something complicated is to cut it into small, easily achievable, tasks.
So I decided to write everything about the product, to visualize the whole thing — I actually built the war room I wrote about in my last post.
The goal is to keep the bare minimum features to demonstrate some value while maintaining the complexity low. For instance :
- It will only support basic auth bearer token, it’s the simplest to implement and that’s how work maybe 50% of the APIs out there
- It will set the update frequency to one hour. For a first version it’s okay if the user can’t choose exactly the update frequency
Another important thing to think about beforehand : what services will I use ?
Being very time-limited I will make my landing page using launchaco.com. The service itself will rely on serverless, powered by aws. I will use firebase for the configuration and authentication, as it is supported out of the box. Quite simple this time 👌
In order to make the service I need to :
- Build a CRUD so that users can add APIs and Tasks (task is the name I give to the API endpoints)
- Handle authentication
- Build a /update lambda
- Build a /read lambda
And that should be it (Of course each of these tasks need to be detailed, but I won’t do it in this post). Ok now I know what to build, and how to do it.
During the challenge, I will only have to write the code, most of the thinking is already done 👌.
It’s hard to explain what the problem solves 🤨
This is according to me the hardest challenge, mostly because it’s a communication problem and I’m a geeky engineer 🤓.
Something I learnt is always to tell a story first :
Ok so in two sentences I can explain what the app is about 👍. Now I need a tagline.
A method to find one is to start with a long sentence and to iterate on it by removing no essential words. I did it and ended up with :
Use rate-limited APIs from the browser without limitation
It’s quite short, does not go into details and tells the main use-case with simple words. It should do the trick 👍
On the landing page I will have to showcase the three main features of the service. It’s better to think about this beforehand rather than under the stream pressure. Those features could be :
- Data is refreshed every hour
- Your API keys are stored safely
- The performance are not impacted
Okay, that’s the best I could think of. Not very catchy but it does the trick, I will refine them later if I still have time.
Another very time-consuming problem is making the product’s design. After playing with launchaco a bit, it looks like this design is quite relevant for ApiGuard :
The goal is not to make the website right now, this will have to be done during the stream. It’s about thinking about the final product, having the right target in mind to be mega-efficient building it.
About the logo, a very very cheap way to make one is to pick a not-so-used- emoji, for example : 🛡
I will probably go for it and maybe adapt it a little if I have enough time left.
About the missing Waouh! effect, I will have to deal with it 😂
No seriously, maybe showing a concrete example on the landing that can be played with would be enough.
Getting the setup ready
There are good articles out there to prepare a streaming setup. What would be nice though is to setup more ways to interact with the viewers like :
- An open trello board to be transparent about the progress would be nice
- A document to gather ideas
There are probably are other ways to engage, maybe some viewers will suggest them during the stream, let’s see !
Conclusion
For this kind of fast paced challenge, I believe preparation makes 80% of the final result 💪
Thanks for reading and if you like my work, follow me or drop me a message on 👉 Twitter to keep in touch ☕️.
If you want to get notified when the stream will start, 👉 hit this page 🚀
