Got laid off 2mo ago, learned to code. 1st project with $204.61 revenue so far - Top portable monitors according to Redditors

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rdavis0720

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I was a product manager at a small-medium SaaS company. 2 months ago, I got laid off because the (0 to 1) product I was leading (AI enabled influencer marketing tool) wasn't working out, and the company was running low on cash to continue funding it.

It was a serious punch in the gut, mainly because I was the main driver of that product and felt responsible for its failure and my teammates' layoffs.

But after getting past that, I started getting excited about starting my own projects with my new found time. I've been following the developments in AI closely, playing with it, using it at work etc. I saw that there's a lot of cool stuff that you can do now that wasn't feasible just 1 year ago and so i've been itching to get more hands-on with it. Now's the time I guess!

What I built for my first project:

A website that shows you the top portable monitors according to Redditors.
  • Because Google results are now terrible
  • Based on AI (+ human checked) analysis of relevant (and recent) posts and comments across Reddit
  • Monetization via amazon affiliate links
Link: https://redditrecs.com/

Timeline:

2 months ago - started (seriously) learning to code

1 month ago - deployed first version of website
  • Shared on Reddit in reply to people to people asking for recommendations
  • Main criticism (from friends, and myself) was that the comments were hard to parse, which I agreed.
  • Looked into SEO and started a blog using Hugo
Now - v1 gotten $204.61 in amazon affiliate commissions so far
  • Mainly from replying to people on Reddit - posted \~8 replies so far
  • Nothing from SEO so far, will probably need to invest more time to figure it out
  • Launched v2:
    • You can now quickly zoom in to comments that you're interested in (e.g. what's good about the monitor, what are people saying about portability etc)
    • Relevant parts are highlighted for easier parsing
  • Will be starting to share this more widely in places that I think people will find this helpful
$204.61 in 2 months is not much. Hopefully I can figure out how to make this grow exponentially. Will need to push on the distribution front.

Nonetheless, it was quite energizing to see some validation from my few instances of sharing

https://preview.redd.it/dj4xz52db0u...bp&s=d676042d092999e3e2047bf921499a09bb10b5dc

https://preview.redd.it/ifie50tdb0u...bp&s=6562518107619aa00138a418cd5cfd2db53d4cb4

How I decided on the idea:

I had a bunch of project ideas, but I went with this first because:

I personally struggled when I was first researching portable monitors
I noticed others struggling too
  • People asking for recommendations on Reddit
  • Growing trend of adding "reddit" to Google search results
I've been using portable monitors as a digital nomad for >2 years
  • I have first-hand experience on what is confusing and what matters when choosing one
  • I am somewhat up to date with the digital nomad niche and community
My hunch is that the portable monitor market will grow as remote work becomes more widespread

I had a relatively good idea of how I could put it together
  • From playing with LLMs, I already knew how to use it for cheap yet accurate sentiment analysis and data extraction
  • A quick check confirmed that Reddit has an API for getting post and comments data, so I knew I didn't have to deal with scraping which can get complex
tldr: I had a hunch that there'll be demand, that it'll be simple enough for a first project, and that I have an advantage being a user myself

Some notes that may help others new to coding:

I've been using Replit as my main IDE
  • Upside is that you can skip some of the boring stuff (deploy in a few clicks, don't need to install as much stuff)
  • Downside is most tutorials and AI (even Replit's) don't assume a Replit environment which causes confusion for me sometimes
  • Replit AI is pretty good. I used Cursor for a while and its a bit better. But Replit AI is cheaper and comes with hosting.
My learning approach is AI-first, tutorials second
  • I love this because I get to see something work faster for the things that I'm excited about
  • Previously, I would have to grind through boring examples prescribed by tutorials first to learn the fundamentals, and then try to apply them to build what I wanted
  • Now, I can run the generated code and see if it work first. If it works, I can then go learn why it works and how to manipulate it to do more things
  • This way of learning feels more energizing and motivating
I use Replit AI 50-60% of the time
  • But it does helps a ton to be familiar with the language
    • Very often, AI will get you only 80% of the way. Knowing the language gets you the last 20%
    • When you know the language you can ask the AI to focus on more specific areas and get more specific help
  • Knowing how to use AI effectively feels like a bit like knowing how to Google effectively. There's some skill involved which I can't full articulate yet. Something about:
    • Knowing how to scope the problem for the AI
    • Knowing how much context to provide
    • Knowing what keywords / references you should include in your ask
To ship faster, I kept some things super simple
  • Static website - no calling to a db in a server (haven't learnt how to do it yet)
  • DB is just a sqlite .db file
  • To extract and analyze data, I'll have to run the script and update the site manually
What's next:

Some of the key things that I plan to work on:

Distribution
  • Sharing to communities that would find this helpful (let me know if you know any!)
  • Try out programmatic SEO
Product improvements
  • Detect and filter users that may be affiliated with or incentivized to promote certain products
  • Fix some instances where newly posted comments aren't captured
  • Extract key specs (e.g. screen size) for easier narrowing down
  • System for visitors to flag inaccurate data extraction / classification
I also have another idea for another digital nomad problem that I want to ship. So may take a short break from this.

My very simple tech stack:
  • Replit (IDE and hosting)
  • Javascript, CSS, HTML
  • Vue.js
  • Bootstrap
  • Python
  • OpenAI
Let me know if you have any feedback, suggestions, or questions!

If you want any personal advice on portable monitors, feel free to ask too.

UPDATE 15 Apr 2024:

I realized there was a typo in the site code (from a last fix that I didn't test thoroguhly) before publishing this post 🤦‍♂️

If you want to zoom into specific aspects (e.g. portability, negative comments), the relevant parts of the comments should be highlighted

https://i.redd.it/dhvmqbgmpnuc1.gif

There was a typo in the mark.js CDN and so the highlight wasn't working
 
@nina723 Thanks! Yeah I wanted to start from a niche I knew a lot about.

Somebody tried to do something similar (doesn't seem super updated btw) but seemed like they took a more general approach. Idk personally for me I didn't find it useful when I tried to use it to look at some hiking boots and bags.

Feels like the data is kinda there but its missing that last 30% for it to cross the threshold to become useful to the niche.
 
@christ_inme93 I only learned the bare minimum to build my website (which is honestly relatively simple). There's still a lot of stuff about python and javascript etc that I am not familiar with. I'm definitely going to be slower than most experienced devs if I need to make changes or add features. And it’s probably not very optimized in many ways that websites should be.

Like I wrote in the thread, I also rely heavily on AI coding assistants. They help me to keep moving and I can use them to explain stuff that I don't understand. It's really game changing.

I’ll also re-emphasize that 2mo ago was when I started seriously learning. I spedrun replit’s 100 days of code before (while still working) but probably only did 15 of the exercises because they didn’t really interest me.

Oh and it also helps that with Replit you don't need to use the terminal much haha.
 
@mrfuture Thank you! I think it also helped that I was previously working at a software company. So even though I wasn't technical I often worked closely with devs to figure out how to scope things down and ship quickly.

Honestly this exercise was quite a refreshing experience because I now get to be in my dev teammates' shoes!

I almost felt like I had split personalities LOL - the dev in me wanting to refactor stuff to make things cleaner and more understandable but the product manager in me saying "lets ship it first! we can always come back to it". And then the dev in me grumpily obliging but also thinking at the back of his head "doubt we'll come back to it and probably add more tech debt"
 
@rdavis0720 You should definitely give yourself more credit. While your experience at a software company provided some valuable insights, your success is far more attributable to your own intrinsic qualities—your ambition, drive, and execution skills. These factors are inherent to you, independent of any employer.
 
@rdavis0720 Congrats on the revenue, and I enjoyed your writing style! Easily one of the most readable longer posts I've seen on Reddit.

Are you digital nomading at the moment? I would recommend posting on X. since there is a large digital nomad community there.
 
@gospelbluesman7 Thanks! Glad it didn't feel too long. After I posted it I was like whoa that looks longer that I imagined it would.

Yup! Digital nomading at the moment. Any specific communities you'd recommend?

I did post an update on my X / twitter profile but I don't have many followers (yet, hopefully haha) so I didn't have high hopes that it'd fly
 
@rdavis0720 Nice, I hope to digital nomad one day too.

I gave you a follow ( x.com/neuen_net ) .

I don't have a large following myself yet. But my strategy is to post frequent updates with #buildinpublic and #indiehackers. Interacting with like minded people seems to work well too.
 
@rdavis0720 this is so cool OP - < 2 mins I found a monitor that should work for me - I'm going to bookmark this so I can click via your site when I ready to buy -- great idea too.
 
@rdavis0720 I really like how you let people choose what they want to use it for; for me I wanted to use this coding/work so a anti-reflect with a good size screen is best; I also like how non flashy the site looks and just right to business. The one thing I would recommend removing the thing about tired of google seo. First of some people might not care much or even know what an seo is and second you might need to do some seo on your site so that would not be geniune. May be replace with something like using the power of crowd sourcing. and or clearly say that the recommendation is completely based of comments and not influenced by affilate compensations. good work tho.
 
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