A couple months ago, I was struggling to find Global Entry Appointments in my area. Being a developer I naturally opened up the Network Tab to see how the Scheduler on the website retrieved availabilities and to my surprise it was an open endpoint. I built a script around it to notify me of availabilities as they opened up. I was like yo why not just build this as a service and see if people find it useful
Upon doing research I was quick to learn what I was doing nothing new but had been done others as well -- but my main goal wasn't to make money. It was to scratch my itch and just build a product around it. Even if I could make a few bucks, I would have been proud of myself and that what I wanted to validate.
I spent hours dissecting the API, built my own API Docs around the endpoints, hosted it on Notion so I can refer to them and eventually launched Snapslot. Through this process, I got very familiar with: - Next.js App Router - MongoDB / Mongoose - Tailwind CSS and DaisyUI
I've gotten a few online customers from complete random strangers which is a rewarding feeling and now I think I've caught the indiehacking / project bug. Thinking of writing a full featured blog in the future on my experience to cover all technical and marketing efforts.
My Lessons Learned: - Just ship it. Who cares what happens. Through this I learned that the lessons you learn will just compound on your experience and you'll be able to ship faster. You'll also run into other problems and if the initial idea doesn't work out, you can go back to your those problems you solved and maybe productize that.
