Coding Dreams into Reality: A Path to Passive Income — week 3
Welcome to my running series where I try to make the magic happen by creating passive income out of thin air.
My first product will launch on May 12.th: a tool to generate content for Twitter, blogs, flyers, etc. from your text inputs.
Be the first to check out the beta version today: https://social-media-content-gen.firebaseapp.com/.
Some background:
After years in the corporate maze, I chose to diverge from the traditional corporate trajectory. It wasn’t about ascending the corporate ladder anymore; it was about gaining autonomy and flexibility. Leveraging my newly won free time I set out to explore the realm of passive income, seeking avenues to augment my revenue streams.
The goal is not to leave the corporate world, but to be able to choose freely where to spent my time and energy.
Autonomy and freedom — this is what makes it for me.
So, how was week three of my journey?
Coding Coding Coding …
The past week has been rather technical.
Here are some of my biggest Ups and Downs I went through.
Valley of Despair
As I delved into the complexities of Svelte and Firebase, the path ahead seemed daunting.
Wrestling with unfamiliar concepts and navigating through unforeseen challenges, doubts inevitably crept in. While Svelte is easy to learn and needs little code to accomplish big things, somewhere around Tuesday I fell deep into the Valley of Despair (see Dunning-Kruger Effect): tackling concepts of stores, page routing, server-side code, authentication state changes, components, and many other topics at once proved to be overwhelming.
Having achieved a masters degree in physics in the past had filled me with eagerness, "Surely I can fit some frontend coding into my head within one week. I have learned far worse in maths and physics.". While maths especially did have a lot more brutal concepts to learn, the short timeframe to learn Svelte and Firebase left me utterly frustrated with very little progress on some days.
My vision kept me going.
As stupid as it sounds, the first step in the 12-week year plan was to write down my vision about where I want to be after I accomplish my goals. Reading those sentences actually gave me the perseverance to continue. Being usually rather rational, I would have never expected such simple tactics to actually work.
And just like that I continued coding and left the valley of despair all the more wiser.
Minimal Viable Product (MVP)
I was able to combine all the building blocks into one application that generates three tweets from one content input.
I use Svelte for the frontend, Firebase for the hosting and a combination out of the Firestore (Firebases NoSQL database) and Firebase Functions (serverless run code) to build the first tweet content generator for this product. I had to use make use of some ingenuity to realise my idea, but it kinda works as follows:
The user enters inside the website the content for which he/she/divers wants social media posts to be generated. This creates a new document within the Firestore database which in turn triggers a Firebase function. This function runs in Python and asks the ChatGPT API to generate some tweets. Afterward, these tweets are written back to the original document and the website shows the tweets from this document.
With this, the bare minimum core functionality is implemented. I packaged everything into a beta website for potential users to test. To launch on May 12.th this application needs authentication, payment, additional content generation (like text for flyers, newsletters, blog posts) and a big visual update.
Talking about visuals.
Visuals
Coming from a science and technical background, designing things to look pretty is really not my core competency.
To be honest, my adult drawings would hardly pass a 5th graders art test in school. I hope for some boilerplate code or templates ready to make my website look amazing — but with my limited time this might become a real challenge.
If you can provide some know-how in that regard, feel free to comment in this article.
Preparing for the launch
Now, on the brink of launch day, anticipation fills the air.
Weeks of dedication and hard work culminate in a product that represents more than just code. The big entrepreneur and investor Reid Hoffman once said:
If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.
I am excited as well as afraid, to be honest, and the to do list is long — very long actually. Still, my product already performs its minimal value contribution and this keeps me optimistic that I will have my product in a launch-able state by May 12th.
Will you show up to find out how the product will turn out?
