Background: The Long Tail Effects of Cowardice
Hi friends. It's James again. Today is my birthday and I feel I don't have a lot to show for it. Five years ago, in 2020 I posted on Dev.to about creating 100 React projects in 100 days (link here) to learn front end development and get a full time job in the industry.
That mini-marathon of React projects got me some retweets from indie dev sites and the Dev.to community, and a little notoriety in the self-taught Javascript learner space. The projects repo (link) has 94 stars on it and 44 forks, which is cool, I also eventually did get a full time software engineering job at a startup, in part because someone in my network had seen the posts. It led to some really fruitful things and a whole career in the industry, plus eventually a web development business that 100% financially supported me while I lived abroad.
But honestly I've been thinking of building digital products since I was 19- 15 years ago- and I've never done it. In large part because I didn't have the skills, but mostly because I didn't have the guts. Rather than drop out of college and learn app development like I wanted to after my first visit to the Bay Area in 2011, I stayed in college because I didn't have the guts.
Rather than drop everything, be poor for a while, and learn to code after college like I wanted to in 2014 I went into software sales because I didn't have the guts. Rather than go full-time on a startup idea in 2015 like I wanted to, when I started learning Swift, I stayed working full-time because I didn't have the guts. And over the last four and a half years since I made those React projects to learn to code in 2020 I never made any of the products I wanted to build because I wanted to get a software engineering job and feel validated instead, because I didn't have the guts.
Well I'm a lot more competent with code now. I know React + NextJS and styling tools like Tailwind pretty reflexively. Deployment is a breeze and so is CI/CD. I also know Flutter for mobile dev pretty well at this point. So there's no reason to avoid it any longer. Plus I have a job and can financially support myself which, frankly, is a big deal when you're trying to confidently contribute to your side projects.
Today I'm starting 12 products in 12 months, something I honestly thought about doing all the way back in 2020 and has been bouncing around my head since then. Most of what I plan to make has also been with me that long, or are things I've thought of over the years since. It's time to put these things out into the wild.
So, What Is A Product?
What is a product? Let's define our terms. A product is something that exists in the world which people can purchase. So unlike the React projects, if the project isn't complete and if it can't accept payment then I've failed. That's why I'm giving myself a whole month per project rather than just a day 😉
And a product has to be a complete service. Whatever it claims to provide, it does its damned best to provide it to keep its users happy and keep them coming back. In this realm we go from incomplete best-effort projects to minimum viable products. So that's the definition. They definitely don't have to be perfect, but if they aren't feature-complete, then it doesn't count.
The first product - Texas Trades
Link - www.gotexastrades.com
OK, what am I building between this very moment and August?
The first product I have already been working on is a mobile-first service which is a Linkedin alternative for the fast growing blue collar industry, focused on the booming Texas job market. I've thought a lot about this over the last few years. I even considered buying the domain whythetrades.com way back in 2019 when I first started thinking about this:
I've often wondered why high paying, stable blue collar jobs are considered so much less prestigious in the US than jobs that pay a lot less and are frankly easier that require a college degree. In countries like Germany and Canada, the trades and white collar work are treated with similar reverence. You're working afterall- and providing a valuable service. That's prestigious and awesome in itself.
Plus, the job market is changing. With AI coming to displace the white collar world, college degrees not paying anywhere near what they used to, and the very real phenomena of US companies farming out their creative tasks to highly capable overseas workers willing to work for less, I think smart Americans will start to understand that prestige of a job and its market value aren't really aligned in 2025, and to take the trades seriously.
A very real question exists- why would someone take out $200k in student loans just to get a $50k per year job four years later if they can join an apprenticeship when they're 18, accrue zero debt, and be making well over six figures before they're 23 years old?
So that's what I'm working on. A professional network for blue collar folks who maybe have never owned a computer, possibly never even made a resume, never had a Linkedin or don't want to read inspirational articles about digital marketing when they're bending a pipe or lifting a steel girder. But the main thing that I think these people deserve- a job board that doesn't require you to write your own resume with Microsoft Word and doesn't force you to create an individual account per application, and fill out a 10 page Workday or Oracle form with 90% of the same answers every time. This process should be eradicated and the companies who use those HR tools should be ashamed. Here are some screenshots from the UI I've got done so far:
The Inspiration
I won't lie to you, and those in the indie maker space probably already know I'm copying the 12 products idea from famous indie hacker Pieter Levels. It's just coincidental that I also heard about and was inspired to make my 2020 list of React projects from Jennifer Dewalt's 120 websites in 120 days and I've been following his career since 2022.
I have a separate problem from Pieter though, which is a bone to pick with my own mind. I've had hundreds of ideas over the course of my professional life and have hardly made any of them. This is ridiculous and has led to me being a dreamer rather than a doer, which no one wants to be. And I'm too old now to be walking around with a bunch of ideas that are exciting that I've made no progress on. That's how you get old- not taking action. As Thoreau once wrote, "The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed". So I'm taking action to get out of that hole.
The Process
Simple. Each Sunday night I write a blog post documenting my progress on whatever product I'm working on. My KPI's are documented each week with a binary checkbox:
✅ Shipped?
✅ Marketed?
✅ Accepts Payments?
✅ Collected Feedback?
✅ 2nd Version Shipped?
I'll also be using the handy tool WIP.co - a maker tool for developers to track their progress. Here's my link over there:
https://wip.co/@well_akshually
Wish me luck!