On a boring Thursday afternoon, I sprang up from my couch when a bright idea struck my mind. I jolted to get my journal and pen, and I started to write. In a minute, I was sitting by my workspace, or rather, I carried my laptop on my lap (cos I don’t have a workspace) and engaged ChatGPT to validate the thoughts in my head. This came off the back of having concluded learning to use the MERN stack, so the first step I took was to ensure it could be built using this stack, and yes, it could be. I got to work, planned out the architecture and features of the app, and the satisfaction that came with being the founder of a thriving startup fueled my drive to make sure it saw the light of day.
The backend plane took off almost immediately. I wrote the schemas and dealt with authentication logic, which was hassle-free. I took on building endpoints to create a game, fetch existing games, join existing games, and update profiles without breaking a sweat—but that’d be a lie because what’s a coding session without silly bugs that cost hours of debugging? In no time, my backend was completed.
In retrospect, if I were to start over, I’m not sure if I would still stick with using MongoDB as the backend or rather use a backend-as-a-service. This is because I struggled to incorporate Google Sign-In and Apple Sign-In logic in my MERN app, and you’ll agree with me that this proves to give a better user experience, giving users the luxury of signing up with their Google or Apple accounts.
The camel that would go on to break the camel’s back was my choice of frontend framework. I had no doubts going with React Native since I was obviously building an app, but little did I know this would greatly impact how my startup performed.
Another major challenge I cannot overstate is how I struggled with design. Remember, it’s a solo project, and I neither had the budget to employ a designer nor the luxury of having one on my team. So, where did I go from here? I took my journal again and started wireframing. After a lot of crumpled paper thrown into my bin in a fashion that Steph Curry would be proud of, I came up with a decent UI. Whether the UX is great remains unclear.
So, I started building my frontend, built the onboarding and authentication pages in a minute, and hooked my backend, which worked perfectly. I proceeded with the homepage and other tabs. I still was working around what illustrations and colors I would use, and trust me, this was a huge headache. To not bore you, the app came together after a while, fully functional, at least enough to pass as an MVP.
I was so excited—this was going to fly, I was going to get a lot of users in no time. It solved a real problem, and it couldn’t fail. These were words that I couldn’t get out of my head. Oh, I was going to take off with this app—these were indeed the stuff that dreams are made of.
I didn’t pay attention to the marketing side of things because I was strong-willed that if it addressed a problem and had good UX, it couldn’t fail. Little did I know—and I partly can’t blame myself because I was working on a stringent budget, if there was one.
My MVP was ready, and this is where the challenge came in: how do I share my MVP with potential users when the app isn’t hosted on the App Store or Play Store? I weighed my options. I definitely didn’t have the funding to host on either of these platforms. I was puzzled, and I proceeded to do what I think was the gravest mistake I could make—I made a screen recording of the app on my mobile just to show users the functionality.
I posted it on X-https://x.com/oyegoke19/status/1895226381887512891?s=46 ,and I expected way more traction, but I couldn’t complain about the 8,000 views I got. The way I thought this would work was that I was supposed to use this traction to get users to test my MVP. However, I didn’t have a platform to share my app. The only way I thought of to address this issue was to switch from a native app to a web app, which would require converting my React Native app to a React web app. This took me more time than expected, and by the time it was ready, I’d lost so much traction—the 8,000 people who viewed my initial post were no longer there to test my app.
I was dejected. I didn’t know what to do, and to this day, I don’t have active users for this product that I put blood, sweat, and tears into building. Lessons learned, and I take the experience as a learning curve. With the right approach, this is a challenge I’d love to take on again.
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