MVP Journey - André Baltazar

Building an MVP every week

📝 Daily Log – Realization – Day 3

I've decided to put a stop to this notification system project. It's very early in development, but I've come to realize that it can be used for a lot of spam if not done properly. As I don't have control of what is posted on the endpoints, providing my own bot for Telegram can be a recipe for disaster. Allowing people to send messages against the terms of service is not good. I could allow people to provide their own bot, which would be better, but still, everything is coming out of the same server, and it could be bad, once again.

The project has potential as something people configure and allows them to send their messages to their users, a library or self-hosted solution, but providing a service that does this can be more of a hassle. This is something I'm not willing to continue and see where it goes. I know the idea of this site is to build a new MVP every week, at least for now, but putting effort into something that you no longer believe is just insane. So I will no longer develop this project right now, unless I find a better way of dealing with the identified issues. Who knows, maybe I will build the self-hosted solution in the future. But right now I would rather develop a different kind of project.

The objective is to show the journey, and not to show the successes only. It's not easy to start with a failure, but it is expected for a lot more of them to come.

So the task for today is to create a page on this very same website where I will list the projects from this journey, and their status. I will also 'soft launch' this website. It will be available on the internet, with no one knowing about it. It will be a long journey, this is just the beginning. A failure on Day 3 opens the possibilities for a success to come earlier.

Finally, there is also something that I want to explore. As I mentioned in the first post on this website, I was going to participate on a game jam. I actually did it, but I realize I didn't share anything as promised.

The Subscribe Button with the different notification options
Save Gogo, the game I developed for Ludum Dare 50

The image above represents the game that I developed for Ludum Dare. The theme was "Delay the inevitable" and I decided to make a crowd-sourced game. Everyone needs to keep feeding the dog to keep him alive. It's available at https://savegogo.icy.pt, it will probably be dead by the time most people read this, if anyone reads this. At the time of writing he has about 7 hours to live, and will probably be dead tonight.

I want to expand this idea further, it has some potential to become viral and evolve into something different. This is like a group digital tamagotchi. It will take time to get something polished out of it though.

I'm conflicted on what exactly to do. If I should continue on to develop the notifications as a self-hosted solution, or if I should move on to a new project. The Save Gogo v2, is probably a good candidate, but I don't want ot rush it. I thought a few times about scrapping this whole posts as start anew, saying I've changed my mind to create the self-hosted solution.

It is cool to be able to have this stream of thoughts, without judgement. Some day, if this website becomes more popular, people will see this, and probably judge it, but as I said I'm here to share the whole journey. It will be a good one. You will know what I've decided to do at the end of the day.