Solo Dev Saturday 🧱 - March 2025 Progress Report

Prioritizing learning over speed.

Hey there Solo Dev!

This month I decided to finally take Solo Dev seriously. I’m not looking for a perfect idea. I just want to build something.

While my job’s been paying the bills, I’ve been longing for something more. I’ve learned a lot these past few years, but it feels like one thing has atrophied: my ability to ship.

I decided to jump into developing a web app aligned with Solo Dev Saturday 🧱. The focus is to help developers transition into a solo business.

I tentatively call it “SoloDev Liftoff”.

Photo by Lance Asper on Unsplash.

I've gone from staring at a blank screen to having a functional prototype that's already making me question some of my own assumptions about the Solo Dev journey. This month's ride has both exhilarating and humbling.

Technical Progress 🏗️

This month’s priority was the backend of the app.

The backend is where I’m most comfortable. It’s what I spend most of my time dealing with at my job. And I believe you should start where you’re most comfortable to get the ball rolling, and carry that momentum into the things you’re less confident in (frontend, ugh).

Initially, I was all about “ship fast, ship early, ship often”.

That common piece of advice you often hear from builders.

So I decided to quickly envision a small MVP of the system, create some domain models, throw together a database and add some business logic. I wasn’t all that concerned with best practices.

Then, a couple of days in, I decided that this wasn’t it.

Would this choice lead to me having to make large changes later? (Yes). Would this choice be less impactful since I have a small audience from which to gather feedback? (Yes). Is this project mostly a learning experience? (Yes). Can I use this project as a tool to get better at my job? (Yes).

And so, I decided that the pros were in favor of taking my time with the backend. You see, I had chosen a tech stack I was familiar with, parts of which I use at work. It’d be a great opportunity to set up a new project from scratch in a scalable way.

So I decided to remodel the backend to a Clean Architecture approach, to maximize learning related to my current job.

Clean Architecture emphasizes separation of concerns. Currently it’s represented in my app through the separation of Application, Domain and Infrastructure as separate projects with specific responsibilities and dependencies. The idea is to enforce dependencies pointing inward towards to domain.

My goal? Create the full backend before starting on any frontend work.

Of course, having a goal and reaching it is a different matter entirely.

Looking back, I realize this was a foolish goal. There’s no way to hold all the potential use-cases in your head to guarantee you’ll never need to update the backend. But on the other hand, defining most of my backend has made the initial frontend work easy.

I’ve been making heavy use of my business partner, Claude AI.

I set up a project for this app in Claude. This lets me upload documents as a knowledge base that Claude references. I uploaded my complete backend and we set off starting on the frontend.

I knew I wanted React and Tailwind, told Claude, and we quickly built login, registration, and several small pages with forms that all interact with the API and database.

Honestly, I was shocked at just how fast I arrived at a workable UI with validation, user authentication and user-friendly error messages.

What remains is the most complex part of the app so far: visualization and scenario planning. I expect we’ll talk more about that next month.

Business Progress 🌱

Since this is the first month, I don't have any revenue or user metrics to share yet. But I've set one clear goal:

• Ship an MVP by, at the latest, end of May

I realized as I was writing this that I haven’t been tracking my time spent developing. This would be a useful metric, so I’m gonna do that starting next month, and include it in the next report. I aim to spend 10 hours per week on development.

My only expenses have been $12 for the domain and $20/month for the Claude subscription. I’m considering swapping the Claude description for Cursor, as that is the IDE I’ve been using. My payment juts went through a couple of days ago, so this swap will likely have to wait until end of next month.

Lessons Learned 📚

I have three big takeaways from this month:

• You can’t visualize everything, you have to work to uncover the ideas

• Different projects have different goals (this one is mainly learning)

• We can do so much more than we think as Solo Devs

Next Month's Goals 🚀

For April, I'm focusing on:

1. Completing the visualization component to show the "runway" and income projections graphically

2. Building the scenario comparison feature to let users try different transition strategies

3. Setting up a basic landing page to start collecting email addresses

The biggest challenge will be the visualization component. I'm not a designer by nature, but I know this is critical to making the tool intuitive.

I'm most excited about the scenario comparison feature. The idea is to show how different approaches affect your financial security during the transition, including saving them and comparing different scenarios.

I think it will be an eye-opener.

Community Corner 🤝

This is where I need your help! I have questions:

• What's your biggest financial concern about going solo?

• How much runway (in months) would make you feel comfortable taking the leap?

• Would you prefer a simple calculator or a more detailed financial planning tool?

What's Next

The Solo Dev Saturday 🧱 journey is just beginning, and I'll be sharing monthly updates just like this one as we progress. The highs, the lows, the code, and the numbers – you'll see it all.

See you next Saturday. Until then, keep building your future one calculated risk at a time. 🧱