Building in Public: First Month Learnings — umxir.com

I shipped something. Not perfect, not polished to a mirror finish — but real, live, and working. Here’s what the first month taught me.

The hardest part isn’t the code

I expected the hardest part to be technical. It wasn’t. The hardest part was publishing — clicking the button that makes it real and puts it in front of people who aren’t me.

Every developer I know has a graveyard of projects that were “almost ready.” Almost ready is a trap. Ready enough is the only bar that matters.

What I actually shipped

A web tool. Small, focused, built to solve one problem. Not a SaaS empire — just something that does a thing and does it well. I used Astro, deployed to Cloudflare Pages in about 20 minutes. The whole stack stayed fast and free.

The lesson: the infrastructure for building is embarrassingly good right now. The barrier is intent, not tooling.

Mistakes I made in week one

Over-engineered the architecture. I designed for scale before I had a single user. Refactored twice before anyone saw it. The right order: ship something simple, learn what’s actually used, then refactor.

Didn’t tell anyone. Built for two weeks before mentioning it anywhere. That’s not building in public — that’s just building. The “in public” part is what creates feedback, momentum, and accountability.

Optimized for the wrong metrics. I watched Lighthouse scores obsessively when I should have been watching whether anyone found the tool useful.

What actually worked

Writing while building. I kept rough notes about what I was stuck on and why I made certain choices. Those notes became this post. They’ll become more posts. Writing while you build turns the process into content, and content turns into credibility over time.

Sharing the wins and the stumbles equally. People connect with the stumbles more. Nobody learns from “I built a perfect thing in a straight line.”

How to use the tools on this site

Every tool I ship here is something I built because I wanted it to exist. The Word Counter was the first one — a clean, distraction-free way to count words without opening Google Docs or paying for a subscription.

If you want to build something similar, the process is simpler than you think. Start with the smallest thing. Ship it. See if anyone cares.

What comes next

More tools. More posts. More building in public.

The goal isn’t perfection — it’s momentum. One month in, I have momentum. That’s the win.