Ideas And Creation - JUST PUSH IT TO PROD !!
We are all looking for that billion dollar idea. An idea that consumes our passion for coding. An idea that keeps us up at night. Hooked to our monitors, high on caffein. Something that gives purpose to our hustle. Something that liberates us from 9 to 5s. We are all looking for new facebook, new Uber, new google.
When I was in college, I read a book by Peter Theil - the co-founder of Paypal called Zero To One where he said
"The Act of Creation Is Singular"
He suggests that true creation involves generating something entirely new
- Uniqueness of Innovation: When something is created from nothing, it is a unique occurrence, a moment that cannot be replicated or copied from elsewhere.
- Challenging the Status Quo: True creation involves thinking differently and challenging established norms, leading to novel solutions rather than mere iterations.
- Resulting in Freshness: The output of a "0 to 1" act is something that is "fresh and strange," indicating its originality.
This inspired my thoughts for a long time. It shaped my thinking. Always searching for a NEW idea. Something Never been done before. I was always brainstorming my mind - "What can I build?". Any idea that I had - was either already done before or TOO difficult to implement for me. I participated in numerous hackathons, tech conferences, learned under mentors, internships - honing my skills so that I am READY when that idea hits my brain. The eureka moment.
And its not that I did not get ideas. I ~~worked on ~~, started numerous projects. My Github is a testament of numerous repositories left incomplete. The Graveyard. I could not get through them because midway through I knew they are not unique. I did not believe in them. I built a lot of projects but deployed only 1 or 2 which were barely functional.
Fast forward I graduated college - got full time job, occupied myself with 9-5. I spent years polishing my skills, writing enterprise code, became a JAVA backend engineer but my itch for creating something of my own still bothered me time to time. Somewhere around 2021-22 ChatGPT blew up. AI started writing code. And the concept of VIBE Coding originated.
Developers started pivoting towards prompting. tools like cursor, v0 started popping up. There people on twitter who vibe coded entire applications from scratch. It was absolutely amazing and scary at the same time. One model after another, code started getting better. There is a whole culture of devs out there building barely working applications, just pushing code to prod and improving it later.
One of the most notable figure of this moment was LevelsIO. The philosophy was simple - vibe a MVP, add a payments link and PUSH TO PROD. Gather feedback, see if people buy - IMPROVE. And seemed like it was working. Twitter was filled with hundreds of devs creating MVPs, after the boom of AI code generation tool.
I listened to this LevelsIO's podcast with Lex Fridman. I watched hundreds to videos on Starter Story videos This was in direct collision to my earlier beliefs of - Finding that idea. A lot of these projects were simply cheaper copies of software that already existed.
- Better Marketed
- Doing something very very small
- Niche
- Working on Improving something already existing
My glass shattered. So is it really NOT about building something new ? I mean how could it be ? 99% of ideas are either already implemented or just down right impossible for one person to do. I had to try this new paradigm. Build Micro saas. Build something that might already exist. Something that fixes my problem. Make it working as soon as possible. Push it to prod and lets see.
I am still not sure if I am chasing the clout at this point. But I am really enjoying it. Finally I am pushing projects. AI coding tools - while not perfect have been a huge blessing. Currently my though process is simple.
- Find a small problem
- See if other people experience it
- Create a small app QUICKLY that solves it
- push it to prod
- share it with friends
- Gather feedback and then decide the next course of action
Now I have still not lost hope on finding that ONE idea which is unique. But I just can't sit idly. I am polishing my skills everyday. I give my best in my full time job. But after that, I open my code editor and just try to solve small problems.