The Simple Approach That Finally Helped Me Enjoy Developing My App Again.
The moment I stopped hiding my code and started feeling like a real builder.
Hey there Solo Dev 🧱
It's Sunday evening.
You've got a deadline tomorrow for your app launch, and you're frantically trying to figure out how to deploy the thing you've been building for months.
Your localhost:3000 has been your best friend, but now you need this thing to actually exist. You're scrambling through deployment docs, setting up CI/CD pipelines, and wondering why you didn't think about any of this earlier.
That was me last week with Solopreneur Liftoff.
And in that moment of deadline panic, I had a realization that completely changed how I approach building apps.
The Problem We Don't Talk About
Here's the thing about software development that nobody really discusses: We're missing the feedback loop that every other builder gets.
When someone builds a house, they see the foundation get poured. They watch the walls go up. Every day, there's tangible, visible progress that feels real and motivating.
But us? We see features on a screen. We see code that runs in our local environment. We see npm run dev spinning up the same localhost server for the hundredth time.
There's no sense of "building something real" because it doesn't feel real yet.
The Moment Everything Changed
When I finally got Solopreneur Liftoff deployed that frantic Sunday night, something incredible happened.
I opened the URL in my browser, and there it was. My app. Living on the internet. Real.
The feeling was electric. IT didn’t matter that it had bugs that rendered it useless and I had to fix. It was the closest I'd ever come to that house-building experience as a Solo Dev. My code had become a real thing that existed in the world.
And then it hit me: I could have felt this way from day one.
The Simple Approach That Changes Everything
Here's the breakthrough that's made coding fun again, even after the project started feeling like a burden:
Stop hiding. Deploy early. Deploy often. Even if it's just for you.
Not to production. Not to real users. Just somewhere that isn't your local machine.
Set up a preview environment on day one. Push to a staging URL. Create that public link you can visit. Make your app feel real from the very beginning.
Because here's what I discovered: When your app exists somewhere real, every feature you add feels like progress instead of just more code on your machine.
Why This Works (And Why We Resist It)
We resist deploying early because we think our app needs to be "ready." We think deployment is the final step. But deployment isn't the end goal.
It's the thing that makes the journey feel real.
When you can visit your app at an actual URL, even if half the features are broken, something magical happens:
Every commit feels like building something tangible, not just changing files
You start thinking like a user, not just a developer
Problems become real problems worth solving, not abstract code issues
Progress becomes visible and motivating
The Feeling You've Been Missing
That house-building feeling? That sense of creating something tangible? It's available to you right now.
The key is this: Make your app exist somewhere other than localhost as soon as possible.
Stop hiding your work from the world, even if "the world" is just a preview URL that only you visit.
Your app deserves to exist. Your code deserves to be real. And you deserve to feel that moment of seeing your creation live on the internet.
What are you afraid of?
See you next Saturday!