Delightful Launch
January 10th, 2024
I started this blog after quitting my job to pursue the very open-ended and ambiguous goal of “building my own thing”. You can read all about it in my first post but the general idea was I knew I wanted to build new products/ventures but wasn’t quite sure what those would be, so I decided to start building prototypes of ideas I found interesting, share them publicly, and see what happens.
Fast forward 3 months and I’m very pleased to share I’ve released my first mobile app - Delightful. Delightful is your pocket-guide to the ever-expanding world of non-alcoholic beverages - Think Vivino or Untappd but fully focused on the non-alcoholic category. You can learn more about it at get-delightful.com and download the app on the App Store. (If you’re an Android user rest assured we’ll be coming to Android very soon! You can drop your email on the waitlist to stay in the loop).
I’ll probaby do a separate post which does a deeper dive into Delightful and how I built it. For this post, however, I wanted to share the story of how I got from writing that first blog post to this launch.
When I wrote that first post, I accompanied it with a quick prototype I’d built for a travel planning app. The post got a lot of positive reactions from my network, which was incredibly encouraging and made this whole quitting thing a little less scary. Some people liked the prototype, some wanted to share ideas of their own products to build, and others were simply happy for me taking this step and wished me well. I even landed some freelance work through that post, without which it’d be much more difficult to sustain these startup efforts.
Encouraged by all the positive feedback, I began sharing the prototype with friends who knew a lot more about travel than I did. One of these friends was Deryn, A Product Manager at an AI tech company who also has a really great, rapidly growing travel instagram. We grabbed coffee, chatted about the app and how we’ve both been wanting to start our own thing, and agreed to start collaborating together.
Initially we planned to build on the travel idea but after seeing the sheer volume of AI-based travel apps being released at the time, we felt compelled to explore other ideas. That’s when we rummaged through our respective idea banks and landed on Delightful.
I decided to build the app with Python/Django on the backend and Typescript/React Native on the frontend. I hadn’t built a mobile app before but I'd done a lot of fullstack engineering work using Django & React, so I was able to get up and running fairly quickly. I made my first commit on Oct 14th and continued to work on the app nights/weekends while working on freelance projects by day. We really wanted to have the app live before the end of Dry January, and this goal drove much of the urgency around the build.
Almost exactly 2 months after that first commit, we launched our beta on Apple TestFlight, and now 3 weeks from there, we’re live on the App Store. Still a long ways to go from here but it’s a good feeling to get to this milestone, especially considering I had no clue where all this would lead when I started this little adventure!
There are a few key things I’ve learned from this experience which I hope might help others in a similar boat:
1. Just Do It! If you’ve been wanting to dive into some kind of creative/entrepreneurial pursuit but keep puting it off - start now. This is a cliche and I’m certainly not the first one to say it but the last 3 months have really taught me the value of just starting things, being public about them, and letting that process naturally lead you to your next steps. It works!
2. Find a buddy. Don’t try to do it all alone - Find people who complement your skillset and work with them to build stuff you find exciting. When you’re building something like this there are just so many facets involved (legal, marketing, product design, social media, etc.) and it can be paralyzing to try and do them all on your own. But aside from the division of labor benefits, working with someone else on such a venture is just a lot more fun and less lonely. There’s also far more accountability throughout the process, and the push & pull between you and your co-conspirator(s) ultimately leads to a much better product than any one of you could have built alone.
3. Leverage AI. If you’re an engineer and you’re not leveraging AI in your work, you’re probably spending a lot more time writing code than you need to be. I highly doubt I could have built this product as fast as I did without it. There’s two main ways AI (specifically GPT-4) helped me in getting to this point:
a. When you’re building an app from scratch, really what you’re doing is building a bunch of different mini-systems to form a cohesive whole. Each of these mini-systems has their own nuances and design challenges (e.g. Authentication, API design, Database design, 3rd party integrations, etc.). Each time I’d need to add one of these systems to the app (which in these early stages is basically all the time), even if I conceptually knew exactly how to do it, it would help immensely to use ChatGPT to walk through the implementation at a high level upfront. It’s essentially rubberducking, except the duck in this case has the entirety of the internet in its head and can synthesize that knowledge back to you intelligently and succinctly.
b. A lot of code we end up writing in an app tends to be boilerplate. For example, the time shown next to each review on Delightful is in relative time (“A few seconds ago”, “1 month ago”, etc.) and this is done using a fairly standard function which takes a timestamp as input and returns the relative time string as output. I could write such a function in say 15-20 minutes or I could have ChatGPT do it for me in a few seconds. Of course, it would be ill-advised to do this for the more complex parts of your app and you need to know what you’re doing if you’re going to start using auto-generated code from ChatGPT, but once you get the hang of this and use it in your toolkit, it’s truly such a timesaver for all your boilerplate code and standard utility functions.
If you made it all the way down here, thanks for reading! As always, if you have questions or comments about anything I write, you can reach me at prashanthselvam@gmail.com. I’m also available for freelance and consulting projects so if that’s of any interest please don’t hesitate to reach out!