been thinking about this lately. as someone who tests multiple development setups and dashboards every week, setting up environment variables and basic routing always feels more tedious than it should be.
found myself spending an hour just configuring boilerplate files yesterday before even testing the actual core features.
do you use custom scripts to speed this up, or just manually set everything from scratch each time?
I was shocked to find out that so many people in my office are skipping breakfast! I cannot concentrate if I am hangry before lunch. Do you eat breakfast? If so, what do you eat?
I'm super curious how everyone starts to vibe code? In the beginning I would simply jump into @bolt.new or @Cursor and just do a prompt and continue refining with the AI. I quickly realized this created a lot of issues as I didn't think about the structure, tech stack, and how I wanted the features to interact with each other and how the way I was building things would impact the user experience. I now do the following:
Write down a simple problem statement: "what am I trying to solve?"
Write down a simple solution statement: "what does the thing I'm building do (to solve the problem)"
Share the above with @ChatGPT by OpenAI and word vomit my thoughts, ideas, how I want the user to interact with my app, etc and ASK ChatGPT to turn everything I said and want into an easy to understand directive and instructions for an Engineer.
I then take the Engineer instructions and give it to a new chat in ChatGPT and ask it to turn those instructions into a prompt for an AI engineer and to break up the project into sections so that each time we focus on a section the app is shippable and keeps things easy to work on.
I take the output and paste it into my notes. I then give it to Cursor.
Once in Cursor, I create a new project folder and got at it!
Curious what everyone else does and if you've experience any things to avoid or must do
I have made profitable SaaS earlier, profitable newsletter and community too. This is my first time doing around an Ebook - https://zerotofounder.co/ The book is primarily for people to help build profitable side projects. I picked Notion by choice as this will more of a living document than a stale Ebook. There are some big content updates planned. Happy to answer anything. It's not traditional book though. It's a book with exact notes without any fluff. It covers below topics:
- SaaS is not the only option to generate revenue/recurring revenue
- How to launch on PH, Betalist and experiment faster
- Where to find users
- How to find some good ideas
- List of places to post about your product
- Marketing & Growth
- Dev founder vs Non-Tech founders
- and a lot of other topics too (roughly close to 200 varied questions)
Hello! I'm Julien Smith, co-founder and CEO at Practice, a platform that allows coaches to run the entire scope of their business in one place, from scheduling to invoicing. We re backed by Andrew Chen at a16z, Tony Robbins, Austin Rief, Brian Norgard, Greg Isenberg, Josh Buckley, Lenny Rachitsky, Emily Kramer, Nikita Bier, Shrug Capital, Sahil Bloom and a lot of other great angels. Previously, I co-founded Breather, which raised over $150m, and was its CEO for over 5 years to Series C. Breather was a network of private work spaces built for productivity and was used by millions; I ve been working my whole career to empower individuals, and the mission at Practice is no different. I m also a NYT best-selling author, having written Trust Agents, The Impact Equation, and The Flinch. The Flinch is probably my most famous book - it was one of the top downloaded and highlighted books on Kindle since the day it was published. It s about the moment of fear that holds people back from reaching their potential and has influenced a lot of startup leaders. I also coach a few first-time CEOs as a way of giving back to the startup space. Let s talk about startups, Practice, coaching, managing fear, and CEO-life! AMA
Wanted to start a thread to hear about how some other startup founders have approached finding the right early adopters and have kept them interested/engaged as the product grows, fails, and goes through changes. How did you find the early adopters? What was your strategy for keeping them engaged? How often did you reach out to them for feedback?
