The last few months I have been trying to write in this to develop an idea. After much back and forth, I think I have landed on something.

All the previous status updates have not been the best, and have not been working.

Work got really hectic the last few months, and I wasn’t making any progress here, so it was easy to stall.

For the last couple months (April - June) I have been in this really bad habit of waking up at 8am to work, working until 4pm, then gym/shower/etc until 6ish, then I’d be back on my work computer kinda working kinda not until like 10pm, then eat, then bed around 1am.

This has been great for my job. I got a huge raise, I’m building great shit, and love my day job and what I’m working on. Even though this job pays very well and with top notch benefits/perks, it will never make me rich.

And deeper than that, I never signed up to be an employee. I’ve gotten distracted from my main journey of building businesses because learning to code has been so challenging but also very rewarding. But I’m finally skilled enough to fully handle the technical aspects of building and scaling software/web services. I’m ready to build my own products, launch them, and $cale them to the moon.

I’ve had this idea for building a product. For now, all I’ll say is it’s a dating app. I know I can build it, but it is frankly quite a large product.

As a solo dev, you need to see what you should be building as fast as possible to finance yourself and propel everything else forward. This means you need to build a functional MVP and charge money ASAP. This is possible for things in emerging markets, singular tools, and niche products.

However, things in the dating market, have a much higher bar. Your MVP needs to be a functional modern dating app that can handle (hopefully) 1k daily active users (or else the platform sucks because no one is on it).

Running the numbers on this, I really like the prospect of this dating app for a couple reasons

  • I found a great niche, and validated demand
  • Basic napkin math points to this being very profitable
  • This would be a really interesting technical project to build
  • I know how I would build it

However, there are a couple things that are making this a little bit too risky for me

  • Entrenched competitors. There are holes to be exploited here, but will take time and resources
  • Suffer the classic chicken-and-egg problem of building a marketplace
  • User safety is a concern, and legal would need to be involved ($10k+)
  • It’s just technical enough to build where it’s just straight up going to take a while to build (design -> dev -> QA -> launch -> repeat)
  • It comes down to a marketing problem, which takes time, money, and resources.

I need to build 1-2 things before I can build this dating app idea. I want these ideas to be capable of $10k/month in revenue, but they are designed to be learning projects. Meaning even if my first couple projects never make money, that’s ok because I would have multiple really nice, functional, usable, working, SaaS/software products to point to.

The area I am going here, is diving head-first into AI. Will explain exact steps later

Here is my basic outline

M - F

  • Work 8 - 3
  • Gym/shake/shower/walk 330 - 6
  • Build Products 6 - 10
  • Dinner 10 - 11
  • Winddown 11 - 12am
  • Sleep 12am - 8am

Saturday

  • Build Products 8 - 4
  • Gym/shake/shower/walk 4 - 6

Sunday

  • Undecided at the moment

The main variable here being Sunday’s, and dates. Focus and grinding is important, but recharging (mainly sleep) is important too as is having some fun with the women I enjoy spending time with.

I have just started my initial learning plan, and I will be adding a more detailed breakdown as I go. I will be doing this to further my own understanding of the subject matter.

As I’m learning this AI stuff myself, I’ll be building small things I might share but they’ll mostly be throw-away things until I find an idea I think I could monetize.

Stay tuned.