What mental barriers did you have to overcome as a first time builder?

Question

Hello everyone,

Being in product management for the last couple of years, I have always wanted to build something on my own.

I have been spending almost a year thinking about new problems to solve. I have come up with a few ideas but I have never built upon any of them. I feel like I am in a loop where I am in constant discovery mode.

I want to break that loop and get started with building the most promising idea. As someone with no coding experience, I feel the thought of having to dive deep into programming has become a huge barrier in my mind.

What was your experience like as a first-time builder?  I would love to hear suggestions from the community about getting started.

P.S. I have been more active on Product hunt in the last 2 months and the community has definitely inspired me to start working on my ideas. So kudos to the amazing community.  I have been a lurker so far and with this discussion, I hope I can start contributing more to the community.

Uma Venugopal · Accepted Answer

@dhoorjati it's certainly a good option if you don't want to deal with the hassle of dockerizing your code and deployment and such. For validating ideas/mvp/beta testing no-code/low-code are tempting so long as you don't want more control over things.

Uma Venugopal · Answer

I come from a non-tech background as well. I trusted an engineer when he said the website would be up and running in a week. Then he ghosted me. So I decided to learn coding all by myself using Youtube and Udemy. I have absolutely loved every bit of it. If you keep an open mind brimming with curiosity, you'll love the world of programming.

Suggestions would be to immediately apply everything(or as much) of your learnings to building a real-world application/feature. Best way to learn is practical vs just theory.

Dhoorjati Varma · Answer

@uma_venugopal Thanks for the suggestion. I will start looking at courses and videos to get me started. I am also exploring some low code/ no code tools to get started. What's your opinion about such platforms?

Dhoorjati Varma · Answer

@uma_venugopal I think after validating the ideas, we would eventually want more control to build the best experience possible. So, eventually learning to code makes more sense. So better now than later.