48 Hours In: My Plan for the First 100 Customers
A solo founder''s operator-to-operator notes on shipping his way toward the first 100 customers, two days into the journey.
Hey, I'm Tom
I build software, write about it, and share what I learn along the way.
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Spent the evening debugging an Inertia SSR daemon that flapped every 1.1 seconds on prod. Killer turned out to be a SECOND Laravel site onthe same Forge box, defaulting tot he same port. Anyone else running multi-tenant Forge - what port-collision pattern have you been bitten by?
Every system has two surfaces: the code and the description. When they diverge, users experience a third thing - confusion. Keeping them aligned is not a documentation task. It's a definition of done. The README is not downstream of the feature; it is part of the feature.
do-work log drafts now enforce their own length. Feels almost rude that they didn't before.
The next time you're about to file a ticket against your own work, ask: Would a screenshot be faster? With a one-line caption? Sent to yourslef? For 90% of solo-dev bugs, the screenshot is the entire bug report. The rest is ceremony.
Refresh the home page. Something is different. (Hi.)
There are two types of bugs you can't see: the ones you don't know about, and the ones you've looked at so many times they've become wallpaper.
Tags on tomkaczocha.com are clickable now. Try #build-in-public.
Put a newsletter on the site tonight. The bit that took longest wasn't the form - it was the copy under the submit button that says "check your inbox to confirm." Tiny phrase, but without it the double-opt-in flow feels like it's broken. Curious how others handle this: do you tell users about the confirmation step before they submit, after, or not at all?
Tonight I wrote a Python script to invent a logo I didn't have. The brief said "must work with dark theme" and I looked at the navy-on-white wordmark the designer handed me like it had personally insulted me. There was no dark variant. There was never going to be a dark variant unless I made one. And I am not a designer.
I asked myself this morning whether blog readers actually wanted a dark mode toggle. I wrote "my inclination is yes" in the log and moved on. By the end of the day I'd shipped it. Not because a reader asked. Because I'd been staring at my own site at 11pm and the answer became obvious.