Brollly - Startup #1: From Character Debugging to First Product Launch

2024-11-25

As some of you may remember, I wrote last time about my need to address my weakest spot in my startups journey - the fact that I have never earned $1 online on any of my side projects. Here is my first update, or what I call a soft launch 🙂 There are still a few loose ends that I need to take care of before officially launching, but I can share where I am with my first startup.

But firstly, let's address the elephant in the room - the time dilation. It definitely took me more than 1 month, and there are very good reasons for that, mostly of personal nature which I'll keep private for now. What matters is what this extra time taught me more about shipping products.

In my opinion the original 12 startups in 12 months challenge was meant to be a framework, not a prison. While the timeline stretched longer than planned, the core goal remained unchanged: breaking through that psychological barrier of launching something that people would actually pay for.

And you know what? That's exactly what I've been working on, a tool that solves a real problem I've faced countless times as a contracting developer.

Startup #1

May I introduce you to Brollly - Where fonts meet colours, beautifully - a tool that I created to help developers (maybe designers too 🤞) to generate basic design system for their new online project. Simple Space bar click generates three new colours and a set of fonts: one for headings and one for body. You can then see a live preview of the values calculated by the system: colour palette, typography and basic components, and all in the context of your own wording.

Why Brollly?

When I was looking through my ideas journal for the first startup to tackle, I had a few criteria in mind:

It had to be something I deeply understood the problem space of
The scope needed to be manageable enough to actually ship
There needed to be a clear path to monetisation

Brollly checked all these boxes. As a contractor, I've faced this problem countless times - not every client has budget for a designer, specially when you deal with early, pre-seed startups, yet they still expect a professional look. I knew exactly what the minimum viable solution needed to look like. There is a first blog post coming up for Brollly where I go into more details of what it is and how it works. Here I just want to highlight that the main reason to build Brollly was a personal experience as a contractor: often client would come to build a prototype, and 9 out of 10 would have no designer on the project, not to mention budget to hire one. It was then expected that we, as developers, would somehow magically create a professional-looking interface while focusing on the core functionality.

Why It Took Longer Than Expected

I had a clear (at least that's what I believed at the time!) vision as to how Brollly should behave, but when I actually started using it, I realised that Brollly is not a fancy tool to just play with the design, but a potential automation tool that can speed up deploying your new online business from the idea to going live - in an hour instead of days. That's why I ended up rewriting a big chunk of the app to make it more aligned with this vision. After tackling basic and free functionality I will focus on paid features that will generally allow high value exporting and deploying functionalities.

Now let's turn to my lessons.

Lessons

Lesson One: Focus on Launching vs Building + Ticket Pruning

This journey with Brollly represented something crucial - it forced me to focus on launching rather than just building. Instead of adding more features, I had to think about things I usually avoided: pricing strategy, marketing, selling, and most importantly, actually putting it out there for people to use.

The biggest lesson so far has been about "ticket pruning". While I'm great at coming up with ideas for new features and breaking down the work into manageable tickets, I needed to develop a new habit: regularly reviewing and ruthlessly prioritising these tickets. At least once a week I go through my backlog and either prune tickets down or move them to a "v2 ideas" epic. I have a weekly event in my calendar by now.

Less is more, and definitely less is much quicker than more!

Lesson Two: Automation and Reusability

Lesson two is that I view this experience as a training ground for implementing more automation going forward. There are parts of the process that repeat over and over again when launching a new product. I already heavily use custom templates for frontend and backend work, but I am now working on command line custom tool that will help me bootstrap the whole project, including deployment.

Lesson Three: Perfectionism vs Iterative Development

Learning to launch before "ready". Brollly certainly isn't perfect. Maybe it will never be, but the key point I realised is that that's ok. It's more important to iterate than launch "perfect". Fighting perfectionism is ongoing, but I feel like I am moving in the right direction. Happy to hear your feedback!

What's Next

I am preparing for launch on ProductHunt, reddit, HackerNews and everywhere I find online. This is actually the most challenging part for me - the part I identified in my Character Debugging post as my weakest spot. It's one thing to build a product, but another to put yourself out there and say "Hey, I made this thing, and I think it's worth your money!"

Speaking of money - yes, this is where I face my sub-4-minute mile moment. From building in public to charging in public. While Brollly will always have a free tier for developers building side projects (I know that pain!), the premium features will be my first attempt at actually earning that first dollar online.

The main pieces of work I will focus on in the future are:

Generator output quality
Exporting to React and Figma
Deploying
LLM as UI

And startup #2? Well, let's ship this one first! 😉

If you're curious about Brollly's journey or want to help shape its future:

Try it out at brollly.com
Have a look at the draft launching blog post: Introducing Brollly
Follow the progress on social media: Bluesky, X, Instagram, LinkedIn
Share your feedback on our Slack channel

Thank you for reading.

Happy building! ❤️