I set this website up a few months ago, but I haven’t updated it in a while. Thought I would give an update on how I’m thinking about things.
I’ve been working pretty hard over the past few months building Gruvian, a toolkit to help website set up and run their own ad networks.
I’ve learned a lot, to say the least. I’m not sure if the code will ever be public, but this has definitely been the highest output of my life.
What did we build?
We built everything that you would need. Payments, analytics, deploying a low latency and distributed ad serving API, designing the auctions, the flow to help publishers design unique formats, etc. It truly was a lot. The coolest part is that it just works. Definitely wasn’t a side project.
Technology Learnings
- How to deploy containerized services, including how to use container orchestration tools (kubernetes, ECS)
- How to implement good UX design. Anyone can identify good or bad UX, but it’s a completely different set of thinking to implement it.
- Modern rendering patterns. Next.js is kind of awesome, I can’t wait to see where they take it. Server side rendering with React I would highly recommend
- Build systems and code organization. Not to be too much of a Vercel fan, but turborepo and turbopack work extremely well. I also am gaining opinionation on how code should be organized - for example, how to determine whether or not something is worth being a reusable component
Startup Learnings
- When people say to get something in your users’ hands as fast as you can, listen. Chances are that no matter where you are, you can go faster.
- When you’re just starting out, don’t overcomplicate the tech stack. SQL works just fine and scales, so just use it. You don’t need anything fancy. Chances are that you’ll end up rewriting a lot of the code you start writing with
- Momentum is super important. Get small wins, information, or something to say that you’re actually moving forward. Coding a feature that you think is important doesn’t matter.
- B2B sales is hard. It’s very direct and based on relationships. In B2C sales, you can do things like generate content, SEO optimize, get user feedback, etc. all to either grow the traffic to your product or improve it. That cycle doesn’t always exist, or is really slow, and naturally has lower volume. Especially hard to to this with few relationships in the industry.
- This is especially hard if you’re operating a marketplace and you aren’t making a ton of money off of each customer.
- Having a cofounder is super valuable. Bouncing ideas off of each other is really valuable. People say ideas are cheap, and they are, but bad ideas are expensive.
There’s honestly a lot more, and hopefully I’ll do some write ups on them soon.
So what’s next?
It’s still a dream of mine to own an operate my own SAAS company. But for now, financially, it might make the most sense to get a job and work on it on the side.
Money compounds, especially if you’re smart with it. The earlier I can generate income, the better.
I do like this lifestyle for now though, and it definitely has been good to experience it. This will help me better target the jobs I would want to get.
I have a friend who definitely is doing this the right way. He owns his own business as his main job, but has a corporate job as his “side” job. He gets all the stability that comes with a corporate job, but the freedom and feeling of running his own company.
Still haven’t decided if this is the path I want to go, but we’ll see.