How to Build a Product in One Day

I was inspired by people who create products in a short time. Moreover, I set goals for this year to make products from scratch in a few days, to practice new technologies, and to launch products. At the same time, I am not a developer and do not have that experience, so the choice was limited.

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

It was my first experience, and where professionals spend a couple of hours, I spend more time, though I am incredibly satisfied, and I am sure that my learnings can be helpful.

In this article, I will tell you more about what I did and how.

Idea

You should start by finding a problem. I also took into account the fact that I did not have enough programming skills, so I chose a bot constructor for Telegram as a tool.

Based on this, I generated suitable ideas. Moreover, since I did not have enough time for customer development, I chose a problem I was faced with and which I observed in the relevant online communities.

As the author of big productivity and a self-development Telegram channel in Russian, I understood that summing up the results of the day is a helpful habit. It affects your enjoyment of completed tasks, awareness, and reduce everyday stress. Furthermore, even regular recording of the results of the day, without analysis, significantly affects productivity.

Therefore, the idea was as follows: the bot daily at the same time asks seven questions of the user regarding the day, and a user can answer in a detailed or brief manner; it takes a couple of minutes. In this case, you do not need to remember the habit; the bot sends messages itself, helping to form a useful habit without additional effort.

Besides, the original idea had many options for its improvement. For example there is analysis of words and expressions, and quantitative assessment of the day, but in the process of working on the bot, I realized that my technical knowledge and standard tools in the bots would not be enough to create such an ambitious project.

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Tool selection

At this step, I lost a lot of time. Initially, I decided that the easiest option was to find suitable bot constructors for Telegram. I checked about five tools and did not find the functions I needed. Many of them were functional, but there was no option to start the same script daily. Tools had smart message chains, AI, but it was not possible to run the script on a schedule. Therefore, quick research showed that it is quite manageable to create it in Python and create the Serverless-version with AWS Lambda. Talking about my developing skills, I had basic Pascal knowledge from school, but at the same time I am close to computer science and quickly learn this, so I decided it was worth a try.

Looking ahead, I’ll say that this was not a very rational solution because the pool of tasks turned out to be much larger than I thought, even for such a simple matter as creating a bot.

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Development

I shifted from a complex idea to a smaller one and decided on what the bot should and should not do, so the new version had basic functionality. I tried to understand the Python and copied the functions I needed from the codes of bot examples on the Internet. Within five hours, I managed to create the bot that does what I need.

In the process, the main problems I had were with the syntax, and without knowing it, it was quite hard to work.

Nevertheless, I already had a ready bot that worked as needed, and all I had to do was transfer it to AWS Lambda.

I had big problems with this. For many hours I tried to transfer and run the script in the cloud, but I couldn’t connect the bot library. It worked successfully on the local computer, but did not connect to AWS. It seemed like the instructions were simple, but without experience working with professional tools, I eventually failed to do this. I studied the manuals, tried various options, installed Docker, and used several services to work with serverless tools. However, I didn’t even have an idea about the architecture of all this and how it should work and connect, and I couldn’t finish it successfully. Therefore, after evaluating the remaining time for me, I decided to focus on finding bot constructors who can do what I want. By that time, I had already spent about 13–14 hours developing the bot.

As a result, after testing a few more bot constructors, I found one where I was able to create the minimum functionality I needed in 30–60 minutes. If I had initially found such an option, I would have saved a significant amount of time.

Here you can see my first bot :)

Launch

Since I have a broad marketing background, the launch and presentation of the product interested me no less than the development itself. In an hour and a half, I recorded a short promotional video about how the product works, took some screenshots, created a simple landing page, made a product page on ProductHunt with a description of the product and its development process.

I understood that the bot is not something exceptional, especially for functionality, but I wanted to discover ProductHunt and publish a review there.

That’s how my day ended. For the whole day, I spent 17 hours creating a product, of which 13 hours were working time.

Lessons

Here are a few lessons I learned during the product development process:

1. Personal hackathons with limited time have great potential. In general, I like hard deadlines regarding the launch of new projects (which you do for the first time), even recording a podcast, or writing a book. People tend to procrastinate, especially if something is new and unknown to them. Such hard deadlines help one not to postpone, but to make MVP, and then decide whether or not to continue.
   Moreover, I think that the approach of very short deadlines, 1–2 days, works exceptionally well if you have the opportunity to allocate a day so that no one distracts you. Try to work on a product whose idea you keep in your head a very long time. You will be surprised how much you can do in one or two days.
2. Try to plan the development of your product so that you understand what stage you are at, what you will need, and where there may be problems. If you (as well as I) do not have enough experience in developing, then sometimes you can only guess. Nevertheless, by searching bot constructors in more detail, I could save 30–50% of the time.
3. Upgrade your developing skills. After building the product, I thought about improving my developing skills, to be able to do something at the junior level; this would help to test and develop products that are more accessible. I checked and even No Code tools don’t help much, and most of the projects are aimed at the front-end; hence I did not find complex No Code-projects. At the same time, I don’t want to learn programming because I will take everything into my own hands, and it’s better to develop entrepreneurial skills, find collaborators, inspire them with an idea and create a product together, and not take everything on myself. So this question is quite controversial. Still, it’s worthwhile to understand programming, at least to know how to correctly create technical specifications. In the process of development there are additional factors, that I would not even think of.

Photo by Fabian Grohs on Unsplash

Most importantly: do, create, learn something new. Surely, if there were a programmer in my place, he would have made such a bot in half an hour but would have spent much more time creating a landing page, a promo, and content. So learn something unknown, test product ideas faster, and gain experience. This approach will be useful in the future.