makedream
17:44Ali Abdaal
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Honestly, building a profitable service while maintaining a full-time developer job is incredibly difficult. It’s not something you can solve simply by "living diligently." Energy is finite, and more than half of it is already spent at the office. If you want to release your own service to the world, you must intentionally neglect certain areas of your life or outsource them to others.
To have enough energy left for development after work, you shouldn't pour 100% of your energy into your day job. You must start by breaking the habit of accepting every request just to remain a "nice person" to your colleagues. By trying to be the kind developer, you might end up never deploying your own service.
The 30% of cognitive energy you save this way is what builds your service after you clock out.
Housework is the biggest enemy of a developer's flow. You need to save the time spent cleaning and doing laundry yourself to write even one more line of code.
Doing it yourself saves money, but that time is gone forever. Buy the time to implement two more core features of your MVP with money.
Information addiction creates fake productivity. The moment you delude yourself into thinking you're "studying" while watching YouTube or browsing communities, your launch date slips away. Don't trust your willpower; block distractions with a system.
Just physically distancing yourself from your smartphone can reduce the time it takes to enter a development context by more than 20 minutes.
The most common mistake junior developers make is failing to deploy because they are obsessed with code quality. Worrying about architecture and over-engineering a service that isn't even making money is a blatant luxury.
Prioritize features based on RICE scores (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort). Dark mode or flashy animations are not essential features. If the payment and core logic work, throw it into the market first.