Building an idea while learning: The Tradeoffs

Doing something for the sake or learning always it’s easy, you can take your sweat time and make sure to do as many things as necessary to understand the topic itself or the idea.

In the context of building an idea with a end goal (for example launching an app and have real users) you often think to stink in your comfort area and it makes sense, your baseline of quality is way higher, your iterations are also faster.

So what about if we decide to Build something to seek users as the objective while also learning technical stuff?

The conclusion: not a good combo I would say

The idea

This is quite straightforward, a hosting is not something that came up now, it’s an idea that has been around for quite a while and lot of people have their own or there is some of them quite well established so why this?

As for myself I like infrastructure and I thought to myself of the challenges that I’ve not faced enough is dealing with a lot of users myself so I thought running a hosting with few resources would be quite a challenge, the base idea was quite simple and I was not thinking to build anything custom but then a friend decided to join and make things bigger that they were in my head in the beginning.

So we decided to build a custom platform to handle the servers and the infra itself by ourselves (since he’s more dev than me and wanted to learn also infrastructure)

Current status

The tech stack

Here the first tradeoff began, since I’m more comfortable with infrastructure (specially on prem) we decided to cut cost and go mostly on prem on a VPS called MassiveGrid and handle things ourself, the frontend of the app we decided to do it in next since both of us have neither of skill there so Vibe coding was the way and agents have more context/knowledge in popular things.

For the backend we decided to go with Java + Spring boot, since the entity of the system itself seems to be related to OOP I’ll say (now I regret) why not Java? this also was not a bad idea in the beginning because my friend is comfortable with that stack.

I had way to confidence in myself that java would be easy but nope, I thought I could read code easily each implementation was not that easy so it took my time even with the help of LLM’s (also we had some implementations that neither of us could archive easily because of the java ecosystem itself)

Our objective

The base idea was to build a free tier (using our own pockets) to learn what it feels to have an actual product with real users (even if we were at a lost in terms of money) and if it went good start selling actual services for interested people.

Or at least to build the service and gift servers to communities and see how hard was to maintain them with little to none resources.

But most of it was to learn so in that point we keep our word and try to learn until the end.

What actually happen

We are taking more time than we expected (way more) it’s not something bad if the idea was only learning but if we were counting this with the idea of actually making money we already saw that the idea it’s expensive and hard while it not guaranties success.

At the middle of the development we thought what if we move to golang/node so we iterate faster? poor cursor it tried his best but failed miserably so java lives another day.

It was worth it?

Can’t tell until we finish! there are only a few features left until we finish the integrations and there start search for users, here’s still a few things cool to see (seek users and see how to retain them lol)

As far from know I’ll say that the experience itself is totally worth it trying to build something from the ground up, maybe at a technical level you think have you learn it a lot? nah but yes in others aspects which I value a lot in this field.

Conclusion

Building something from zero is fun but it takes time depending on the idea you are planning, make sure to have your priorities defined so you don’t leave projects without a finishing!!

As far for Mainhost the build continues, see you at release day!! (Hope it would be soon mueheh)