when i had just turned 16, i registered my first company. i wanted to sell band merch online. i had no clue what i was doing, but i really wanted to just do something. it didn’t work out, but it was a fun ride.
after that, in 2018, i started a company with a friend where we made websites for small businesses. at that point, i was mostly focused on design and had just started learning how to code. it didn’t last long, but i learned a lot from it.
it’s always been clear that i’ve had big ambitions. and even though none of my early projects led to huge success, they gave me a lot of experience and pushed me to level up my skills while building out my portfolio.
eventually, i started my own business. this was during the period where i was really motivated to create a startup, even if i had no idea how much work it would actually be. instead of going all-in on one idea, i decided to try a few different ones first. that led to me building three different apps in a pretty short amount of time.
doccy — code-less documentation generation
doccy was a documentation generator. the idea was inspired by tools like vuepress, where you configure some settings, create a menu, and then write markdown to generate docs.
but i thought: why not make this accessible to non-devs too? documentation isn’t just for frameworks and api’s.
login system
while working at gravity, i often used strapi, which is a headless cms. i really like it, so i used it for doccy’s backend. i implemented a basic login and password reset flow—just enough to make the app usable quickly. i didn’t add registration yet.
documentation creation
once you log in, you land on a dashboard that shows your “projects” (which are just different documentations). creating a new one looks like this:
page creation
each documentation could have multiple pages, which you could create and edit in the editor.
there were supposed to be styling and menu options too, but i never got around to building that. the end goal was to let users:
- export docs to a zip and host them manually
- connect to netlify and deploy directly
i finished the first one. the second one was more effort, so it stayed on the to-do list.
conclusion
i think this was a solid idea, but i made the right call dropping it. the audience would’ve been too niche.
songrev — album & single reviewing platform
i love music, and i also love watching people roast my favorite albums. reviewers like anthony fantano are always entertaining. i also know someone who writes reviews for sputnik music, which is a super old-school but very active site.
i figured i could build a more modern and user-friendly review platform. on top of that, i integrated the spotify search api, so users could search for any artist listed on spotify.
search system
you could search songs, albums, and artists. if an artist wasn’t in my db yet, the app would fetch and store the data from spotify so i could attach reviews to it later. pretty cool system, i think.
popular tracks & related artists
i also pulled extra info from spotify, like an artist’s most popular tracks and their related artists. the review and rating system wasn’t functional yet.
conclusion
i dropped this one pretty early on. i realized there are already platforms like rateyourmusic that do this better. and something like this would need a ton of marketing to get off the ground. also couldn’t figure out a good monetization model. still had fun playing with the spotify api though—there’s so much data to work with.
landing pagr — drag & drop landing page builder
this was one of my older ideas. back when i had that small company with a friend in 2018, i stumbled across a landing page app and thought: this is pretty cool. nowadays there are tons of these tools, but back then i could barely find any.
the idea was that you could drag and drop components to build a landing page. then you’d pay the company to generate the real site.
our version
my spin on it was to make the landing page exportable right away, so it’d just work out of the box. keep in mind, this was when i barely knew how to code, so i didn’t think through most of the technical challenges. my friend handled the dev side.
i made a design, but eventually we stopped working on it. it was just too hard of a first project, and i think my friend didn’t feel like doing the heavy lifting solo.
what came of it?
why mention this? because later, when i started my own company, i built the first version of the site builder i still use as of writing this. the early version was built with nuxt (ssr) and strapi as the cms. i had automated deployment set up via github actions, and deployed everything in docker. honestly, it was kinda sick—but also super expensive.
my cms setup was too complex for strapi. i had loads of nested components and needed dynamic fields, which wasn’t really an option, so i ended up with a bloated mess of fields everywhere. still, i think this version deserves its own blog post one day.
conclusion
this project was way too ambitious back then. i had plans for tabs to switch between landing pages, user accounts, a payment system for unlocking premium components… it was a lot. with a team of three, this could’ve been done in a few sprints. but at the time, it was just me designing and my friend developing.
still, it eventually evolved into the site builder i use as of writing this, so that’s pretty awesome.
final verdict
i’ve had a lot of ideas over the years. none of them made me rich, and most were probably too ambitious. but what did i lose? honestly—nothing. what i learned from working on these projects easily outweighs the time i spent on them.
i worked on these in the evenings after school, and i always saw them as potential portfolio work. but deep down, i’ve always held onto the dream that one of these ideas might someday turn into something bigger.