May 5th, 63 Apps Launched

May 5^th, 63 Apps Launched

The Search Engine sandbox continues to be the bane of my very existence. Building nonstop to no audience is depressing and this waiting game is an exercise in patience I never wanted.

I am very firmly in the grind of making new apps. While I enjoy the varied nature of the builds the volume is both exhausting and redundant. Every app is different but every component is basically remade in dozens of different ways across dozens of apps. Visually anyway, I cant really make many structural changes or it will seriously impact code maintainability. Every app has to be structured and operate similarly. What an absolute nightmare it would be to go back a year later and try to figure out my thinking of how I built this and why on every single app update. Knowing that, these are structured almost identically and is one of the major reasons why I am building them all on Cloudflare workers.

I am writing this next part knowing full well I am about to contradict myself. Although I absolutely try to focus on just makng repeatable business oriented web applications I did make a new Quickbooks 2003 type clone. I was, and still am, toying with the idea of open sourcing the code to Linux. There just is not a viable local-first software package. I was thinking of working all the bugs out using the Linux distribution and angling the monetization on the Windows and Mac versions. Both of those require licensing and certifications and would be a huge pain so I would rather have the bugs worked out prior to that first. As much as I enjoy software coding end-to-end projects like this they are a huge time draw. I have pretty well committed to this SimpleSaas project and as much as it offends my ADHD nature I need to just focus on it as much as I can and quit chasing shiny objects. It’s a neat project though and I do need it to keep track of my own finances and business books. So, although I know I need to concentrate on building out these simple web applications and launch every day I needed the mental break.

Now that I am over 60 Apps launched and live there have been a few changes. I have moved from AWS Simple Email Service to the internal Cloudflare Email sending. No good reason other than it just removed a build step and integration. I do like running the email notification as simply a part of the software function. Analytics is now largely handled by Google Analytics, Ahrefs, and my internal Logging features. I did not realize what a huge pain analytics was going to be starting out. I assumed that would be a hundreds launched problem but this issue has been around since the beginning.

Finding new app ideas I haven't built already is not a huge issue but finding ones that have high search and low bottom-end competition is a bit problematic. I typically look for boring business tools that have relatively high amount of daily users but no simple low cost software. Ones that rely mainly on Excel or bloated overpriced software. That is kind of my present sweet spot. If I find others I don’t mind jumping in but this seems to be working for now. I have built a few much more computationally heavy applications which required a separate server but these will be more limited. I enjoy them but they take several times longer to build. I would assume if any of these apps truly expand beyond the comfortable limits of the Sveltekit/Worker platform they are currently coded into I will roll them into this Go backend / Svelte frontend package I have been trying out.

The build quality of my average apps compared to what I was building just a few weeks ago is simply astounding. The sheer volume of apps that I am building os bringing the quality of the apps up in a way I wasn't expecting at all. The layouts and styling have improved but the data methods are worlds better and much more simple.