Original Summary

Little background, I'm a dad of two, working as a web developer for four days a week. My other two passions are music (under my stage name Dear John) and coding. For the last 15 years I used a self-built Wordpress website to organize all my songs and build setlists for gigs. I always had a dream though, building a chord sheet app for other musicians. With 20 years of frontend/UI/UX experience I knew my way around, but something this size next to a job and a family just wasn't realistic before. Then vibe coding happened. I turned 40 this year and decided it was time to be confident enough to just GO for things. And so I started out and soft-launched the MVP of Fretlist , a (web)app for chord sheets and setlists. That same night, right before I went to bed, I decided to post on Threads with the caption "I built a thing for musicians". I woke up the next morning with 35 people in my inbox that wanted Early Bird access. I was kinda freaking out haha. That lit a fire, I was onto something. Now, nine months later, I'm still on it. EVERY day, every stolen hour when my kids were sleeping, on train commutes to my day job (that's where I'm writing this from now), weekends, whenever I found time, I worked on the project. What kept me going were the conversations with REAL people using it. Musicians, like myself, who ran into the same problems I had. I counted, over a hundred different people from all over the world in my email. Each having feature requests, compliments, small talks, all of it. Sooo motivating. Where I'm at now: 600+ signups, 33k+ songs stored, 3500+ Github commits, hundreds of bugs fixed. And €0 revenue so far, it's been free during Early Access the whole time. All these people shaped the product, up to a point that I'm finally, again, confident enough to officially launch it on 1 November, with paid plans for the first time. There will also be a free plan, but this is the scary part. Every founder knows the feeling, the doubts, the scare, that maybe, it's all been for nothing. But in my opinion, that's never true. So this post is mostly to encourage all of those parents out there that have a dream, chase it. And for those who've done this side-projects-with-kids thing: how did you manage to keep going?   submitted by   /u/Dependent-Prior6108 [link]   [comments]

  • 情报分类：工作与职业机会
  • 分类依据：内容涉及招聘、求职或职业发展
  • 信息来源：Reddit · SideProject
  • 发布时间：2026/10/9 20:39:24