Hi everyone,
Welcome to the first edition of this newsletter.
I've wanted to start writing something like this for a while. My idea isn't to teach people how to become successful or pretend I've figured everything out. I'm still very much in the middle of the journey.
Instead, I want to use this space to document what I'm building, the decisions I'm making, the mistakes along the way and, hopefully, connect with other people who are trying to build products of their own.
This week seemed like the perfect moment to start because I finally shipped an app, Slice.
How the project started
A few weeks ago, an old friend got in touch.
We actually met more than twenty years ago through breakdancing. Back then we used to spend hours training together, but as often happens, life took us in different directions. We stayed in touch from time to time, but not nearly as much as we used to.
Today he's a successful tattoo artist in Barcelona and has built a sizeable audience online (Oscar Hove).
He called me with an idea for an app.
The problem was surprisingly simple.
When tattoo artists prepare a large tattoo, they first need to create a stencil that will later be transferred onto the client's skin. If the design is larger than a sheet of paper, preparing that stencil becomes a tedious process involving multiple tools, resizing designs, printing tests and generally spending time on something that isn't actually tattooing.
As he explained the workflow, I found myself thinking, "This sounds like exactly the kind of problem software should solve."
What attracted me wasn't that the market was huge or that it could become a massive business. I simply liked the fact that I could solve a real problem for a very specific group of people in a short time.
Building Slice
One thing I've realised over the years is easy to overcomplicate projects.
I come up with an idea, I spend some time researching and learning some new technology, then I keep adding features and eventually lose momentum before anything is launched.
This project felt different from the beginning.
The same evening we spoke, I sat down and built a rough prototype. It only took a few hours, but it answered the most important question: Could this actually work?
I had never published an iPhone app before, so there were plenty of things I didn't know. Instead of treating that as a reason to stop, I decided to learn only what I needed for the next step. AI was incredibly helpful throughout the process, especially when navigating areas I wasn't familiar with.
Looking back, I think choosing a small project was one of the best decisions I made. Progress was visible almost every day, which made it much easier to stay motivated while working on it alongside my full-time job.
Launching
Interestingly, building the app wasn't the most frustrating part.
Getting everything ready for launch was.
There were developer agreements to sign, tax forms to complete, App Store reviews to wait for and, of course, an App Store rejection that delayed everything a little longer.
At one point we discovered that the app was available almost everywhere except Europe, which happened to be the region where we wanted to launch first! It wasn't a technical issue, just another reminder that shipping software involves a lot more than writing code.
Once everything was finally ready, my friend shared the app on Instagram and we waited.
I probably refreshed App Store Connect more times that day than I care to admit. Sales don't appear immediately, so for a while nothing seemed to happen.
Then the first purchases appeared!
What made that moment special wasn't the revenue. It was knowing that complete strangers had found enough value in something we'd built to pay for it.
Over the last couple of weeks we've sold 16 copies. From a business perspective, that's obviously a tiny number, but I don't think that's the right way to judge this project.
For me, the biggest success was simply getting something out into the world.
What I learned
The biggest lesson from this project wasn't technical.
It was psychological.
Once I had momentum and a clear image of the finished product, each problem felt manageable because I only had to solve the next one. Looking back, the project now seems much smaller than it did before I started.
That makes me wonder how many other ideas I've abandoned simply because they looked bigger from a distance than they really were.
What's next?
I'm hoping this is the first of many projects rather than a one-off.
I'm already working on a few new ideas, some of them considerably more ambitious than Slice, and I'll be sharing the process here as honestly as I can. That includes what works, what doesn't, the numbers behind the projects and the decisions I'm making along the way.
If you're building something yourself, I'd genuinely love to hear about it. One of the reasons I'm writing this newsletter is to meet more people who enjoy creating things.
Thanks for reading, and I'll see you next week.
Daniel