Starting 12 Projects in 12 Months
While listening to the Lex Friedman Podcast recently with Pieter Levels. They started talking about completing 12 projects in 12 months and it got me thinking... Could I pull something like that off?
The podcast was released on the 20th of August, I listened to it around the start of September and since then I've just been contemplating this idea, noting down small but interesting (to me) ideas as I went about my day. I'm up to about 10 ideas I know I could complete, each in 1 month (or 30 days). I do love to work on side projects and I've had a few projects in recent years that I'm quite proud of. So I figured why not give it a shot?
The Projects
So I don't want to release the ideas I have straight off the bat, that would ruin the surprise but I will mention the first one I have planned starting in November. No point in waiting until the new year right?
The first project will revolve around gaming sessions with friends and leaderboards! My friends and I use a spreadsheet to track certains stats in games we play just for some fun competitiveness, so the plan is to build a website around that, that tracks sessions and leaderboards.
Rules/Obligations I'm holding myself to
So I want there to be some rules to this:
Each website/application needs to have a paid aspect. I don't care if it doesn't make money or if it isn't successful, I want to set the challenge that I can build monetizable features.
I am doing very little market research on these ideas, maybe a cursory look to get design ideas but I don't want to let an already well-executed idea sway me from doing it myself, after all, it's easier to stick to things you know you will enjoy building.
I will stick to the same tech stack for the most part unless the idea calls for something else, so far I have a stack that should cover all of my needs including:
- Next JS (TypeScript)
- State Management with Redux Toolkit
- Postgres Database with Neon (Will be migrating to Prisma Postgres)
- ORM with Drizzle (Will be migrating to Prisma ORM)
- File Storage with Cloudflare R2
- Payments/Subscriptions with Stripe
- Transactional Emails with Resend & React Email
- Styling with Tailwind + Shadcn
- Analytics with Fathom
The above are all part of my personal Next JS starter kit. I've been fleshing this out to give me a good foundation for all these projects.
I am going to document each project, at least twice a week, with short blog posts sort of like doing a daily standup, that describes what progress I've made. I must also post these on social media channels such as Reddit, Twitter, etc so I can potentially gain feedback on what I'm building. All the repos must be public.