Last week of February building bookmarkbear.com in public

After ending the last week with some doubts about whether I would continue the bookmarkbear.com project, I decided to still go for it. With some help from Jacob, through Twitter, I spent time on the Chrome extension. I also worked on the app itself. Following my plan to complete 12 projects in 12 months, this would have been the last week to launch, but I’ve given myself 2 more weeks. In this blog post I will take you through week 8 of my challenge to complete 12 projects in 12 months and the reasons why this project is extended.

I usually write a blog post for every week, 7 days, that I am working on this challenge, but I decided to also include the last couple of days of February into this blog post. The last 4 days of February I was away with some friends so I didn’t have any time to work on my project.

Day 51

I started the day early as my daughter woke up early. After her bottle she went back to sleep again, I stayed awake and sat down at my desk to do some work. With the help of Jacob I was able to get a good start on my Chrome extension. It now shows a popup when you click the extension icon. The popup loads an iFrame that contains the form to save a bookmark, but also redirects you to the login page if you are not logged in yet. It is all still pretty basic, but it does what it needs to do at the moment. 

I didn’t spend any time on the project the rest of the day, went into “relax-mode” and enjoyed the day with the family. I went to bed early, so I could get up early Monday morning and start working again.

Day 52

While working on bookmarkbear.com on Monday morning I realized time will be too short for me to complete the MVP before the end of the month. As I would be away for the last 4 days of the month I only had 4 days to complete the MVP and to be honest, it is nowhere near complete. Although the MVP should only contain the most basic functionality it should also provide some kind of value to users. At this stage, there was no way that bookmarkbear.com would be able to provide any value besides storing bookmarks which can be done though any browser itself as well.

A good reason to think really hard what to do with this project. Extending the time to complete the project will turn into less projects finished at the end of the year, but so does not finishing the MVP. So although I’ve learned a lot from building bookmarkbear.com, it feels like a failure. I probably shouldn’t be looking at it like this, but it made me feel quite miserable. The whole reason I started this challenge was because I started several projects before but never finished any.  With all the doubts I’m having right now, I’m still not sure if this is such a project or if I am able to finish the MVP after all.

One of the biggest struggles I have is with the new technology I’m using. Normally I would go with .NET Core, MySql and Bootstrap, but for this project I wanted to dive more into client side languages and chose to use Next.js, React, Supabase and Tailwind. The general rule when building an MVP is to use the tools and languages that you know and it seems that this has become a reality during this project as well. Learning React and Next.js has been quite difficult and I don’t feel really comfortable with it yet, although I am getting better at it. I decided to drop Tailwind and fall back on Bootstrap, just to make sure I don’t change too much at the same time.

Day 53

Today was a busy day in terms of things that I’ve been working on for bookmarkbear.com. Instead of building my own login and registration form I went with Supabase UI as it seems to be working perfectly with the Supabase authentication. I have to test it further to see if this is the actual stuff I’m going to use, but for now it does what it needs to be doing.

I also worked on getting the data out of the Supabase database. The syntax that is used is something I need to get used to, so it took me some time to figure it out. I’m not quite there yet, but I have figured out what I need to do in order to get it working. 

Last but not least I spent some time on the designs of the pages. Since I made the decision to go with Bootstrap I needed to refactor some stuff, strip out Tailwind and implement Bootstrap. 

Day 54

I didn’t have a lot of time today and the time I did have was mostly spent on learning Next.js and Supabase. Still some quirks I couldn’t figure out. I got really annoyed with the fact I couldn’t get things to work like I wanted it to work so I decided to give it a rest. 

I notice that if I get frustrated with work, it helps me to leave it alone for a while. Go for a walk, clear your head and try again. Sometimes I have a sort of tunnel vision and am not able to think clearly. I’m sure you have had the same feelings, let me know how you handle this.

Thinking about March and the start of a new project I explored the Twitter API a bit as I have an idea to create a SaaS for people that want to grow their Twitter audience. When stuck in work it can also help to work on something else. In my case, instead of doing some work I did some research. 

Despite not having the best day of the year I ended the day great, booking a vacation for my family. We now need to wait until September but are already looking forward to enjoying some time in the sun, at the beach and pool.

Day 55

The last day before I went away on a weekend trip with some friends. I decided this morning that I would give myself 2 more weeks to complete the MVP for bookmarkbear.com. It gives me a bit more breathing space and the possibility to work on components that I can use in other projects in the future as well. Instead of rushing things or abandoning the project, this will give me enough time to at least finish the MVP hopefully. I didn’t do a lot of coding but started on my blog post as my plan is to write the blog post during my time away, but as time is limited every little bit I can write at the moment makes it easier finishing the blog post during the weekend.

Day 56 - Day 59

Well, I can be pretty short about these 4 days. Although I had planned on writing the blog post, I didn’t get to it. Long evenings playing games, having a few drinks and having fun resulted in sleeping until it was time for breakfast, leaving me no time to work on my blog post. There is a time to work and a time to relax, so I really took the opportunity to relax with friends. The only “work” I did was think about the project, what to do with bookmarkbear.com and think of new ideas to work on / problems to solve.

March

As I combined the last two days of February into this blog post it is also a good time to look forward to March. With the additional 2 weeks I’ve got for bookmarkbear.com the main priority has to be putting all individual pieces together. I’ve created several components but you can’t really navigate through the website. The Chrome extension isn’t complete yet although it is coming along nicely. I still need to build the logic to handle the current page URL but once that is done, the Chrome extension will almost be ready to be submitted for review. The review will take a bit of time, so I don’t expect it to be ready before the launch of the MVP.

The second half of March I want to work on a new project. A SaaS project that involves the Twitter API and can be used to increase your Twitter audience, engage easier with other users and maybe more. I’ve already learned so much this last month, that I can’t wait to put these lessons into practice.

Online presence

The last 4 days of February I hardly used Twitter and I noticed a big drop in impressions. The thing I learned from this is that it really pays off to be consistent. Tweeting every day, multiple times a day really results in more engagement with your audience. Since my previous blog post I gained roughly 25 new followers, which isn’t as much as the previous week, but still very good. I’m at 250 followers right now, a milestone for me personally.

My personal website isn’t visited a lot, but I can understand that. I haven’t done any SEO on it yet and I even haven’t added my URL to Google through the Google Search Console yet. So organically there won’t be any traffic. The only traffic on my website comes through Twitter, so I see a (little) spike in traffic after I post a tweet telling that I’ve published a new blog post.

I also tried engaging more on Twitter, by connecting with others, sending DMs more often and responding to tweets by others. I will continue doing this as I think this will also increase my online presence and I will be able to provide value for more like-minded people out there.

If you have enjoyed reading my blog, feel free to reach out on Twitter.