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Building a new social network

A detailed account of a Fastlane process...

Genka

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After reading both of the books I have always thought how I could help the most people possible and I have pondered about this for years. Few months ago I had this idea about this platform where people could lend other people whatever they needed, but I couldnt figure out how to make it happen and like with all the other projects the passion disappeared and I didnt get further than telling my friends about it.

About 1 and half months ago it finally dawned to me what I want to do and the thread is about that new thing I am working on. I dont wanna reveal what it is exactly because it is something that hasnt been done yet, but I can still talk about the progress I have made.



22.March.2018 - Made first mock-ups of the new social network and discussed with some closest people, they thought it was a brilliant idea.

24-31. March - Started building the website in pure PHP. Finished registration part, but after discussing with a friend, decided to move the project to python Django framework.

01-25 april - Didnt have any time to work on the project because I was working 12 hour days at tire shop changing tires.

25 april - Started learning Django. Totally new to me but, I kinda have it figured out.




Currently waiting for amazon to lift my instances limit because I only got one and its not enough, the develoment server on my computer is too slow to work with(10 second page loads)

Roadmap

Finish minimum viable product
Create corporation in US
Find investors, possibly equity crowdfunding
Finish building the product
Launch the product


Note: I am far from professional developer and I mostly copy-paste code from stack overflow. I knew nothing about serving web pages in python before I started building my site. Currently I have working website navigation, auth system and user editatable about me page. Using python django and bootstrap, but going to learn react and have ui written in that.

Image of the about me page: Screenshot

Next thing im going to work is user gallery.
 
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MJ DeMarco

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Impressive that you are teaching yourself code.

Congrats to you.

I would caution however on going with the social network route as your first business venture. As a new coder / developer, this is not where I would want to start. It's kinda like trying out for The New York Yankees before you've pitched at the high-school level.

Before you can earn millions, you must first learn how to make hundreds.
 

Genka

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Impressive that you are teaching yourself code.

Congrats to you.

I would caution however on going with the social network route as your first business venture. As a new coder / developer, this is not where I would want to start. It's kinda like trying out for The New York Yankees before you've pitched at the high-school level.

Before you can earn millions, you must first learn how to make hundreds.


I am really glad to get reply from you. I have been contemplating about private messaging you and talking about the idea with you for a while now, but I wanna have something to show before releasing more information about it.

The reason why I am building this and nothing else is that nothing else inspires me. This I cannot get out of my head.

Also it is not my first business venture. I have ran an e-store and been flipping used electronics for extra few hundred euros per month for years now. I just feel my life will be over too soon if I dont start with big stuff right now.

The coding I have to do to have the minimum viable product, after I get funding I wanna hire professionals to deal with that part. Even if my project should fail I have learned enough to land actual developer job and that would open another way to get green card to US.
 

Genka

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Update:

For some reason amazon doesnt grant me more instances right now, but I made it work with the ones that I have and the development can continue.
Took few hours to move everything from my local pc to amazon server and finally learned how to use git in the process. Ive always known its a very important tool in the development, but never really bothered to use it until I actually needed it.

Yesterday did some work on the blog system while waiting for amazon and now since I got everything on the server I will work on the gallery system like planned.

Will keep you updated.

Update:

Basic gallery system created with albums, drag and drop, multiupload:

Screenshot

Still needs to be done: Deleting images, thumbnails, editing albums
 
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Last edited:

Genka

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Gallery system is 90% done. Thumbnails are generated and cached with django-imagekit and gallery view is done using PhotoSwipe. Works well on desktop and mobile. Content is in amazon s3 bucket and when the page goes live I can start using cloudfront for cdn easily from that.

You can test the photoswipe system from their site: PhotoSwipe: Responsive JavaScript Image Gallery

I did not have any experience with javascript, jquery or ajax before starting with the website and I am learning a lot. Building something is the hands down the only way to learn programming, atleast for me.

Will spend one more day on the gallery and then will start building feedback system.

Currently estimating to have MVP by the end of the month.
 

Genka

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Almost a month has passed and its time for another update.

I decided to move from django to django rest framework backend and react frontend so I had to rewrite pretty much everything and learn a lot of javascript. It did push back the MVP, but this move to react will speed up development for ios and android apps.

Currently the profile system is 80-90% done.
Profile contains:

About page where user can have their bio, location, social media links etc - 90% done
Gallery page where users can have albums and photos in albums - 95% done
Feedback page where other users can leave feedback about the user - 95% done
Posts page where you can see all users posts - 50% done
Blog page where you can create and edit your blogs - 90% done

The plan has been to put 100% of my effort to this site until the end of this month and then see how far I have got and then from that reach a conclusion how to proceed.

On 1st of june I am planning to go to Turku startup incubator and see what kind of feedback can I get from there.

I have also figured out a way how to get this going without investor money. Bootstrapping has certainly its pros, but I am more focused on growth. Will see how that will go.
 

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