Published on 2024-12-28 21:41 by Kevin Coyle

The Year of Build

Ship Fast, Ship Often ⛵️ I know that 2024 was a different year for me, development wise. I feel like I scrambled in at least 6 different directions, but it all seems to have made sense. I also feel like I made a lot of progress on all fronts.

I started the year in San Francisco, pitching to a group of investors about a SaaS app I had been working on. We thought at the time that our main product was a tool for helping employees train and learn as they onboard as new hires. That platform, Chelle, is stil moving and has been a source of a lot of learning about sales and what it means to get people to pay for your product.

Chelle is still moving, but after some serious deliberation, my co-founders and I agreed that I would move from a CEO position to more of a Sales position - I’m going to work on doing buisness development and finding customers, and let others work on operations. That was followed by a thought: what if I upped my credentials by putting things into market?

I decided 2025 is going to be the year of shipping products.

• My first idea is Pale Huna, a tool to shield people’s content from AI. I am about to launch this in the app store.
• My next idea is Menstrcycle, a tool to help men track their wive’s menstrual cycles. This would also be an educational experience - the app will explain how the phase of a cycle release different hormones and how that affects the body. I am getting mixed reviews on this one. Can’t tell if it’s that thing like Frank Zappa said - there is something going on here.
• In 2024, I worked a little bit on Legends Pools, a tool to help people create pools for sports games, like The Masters. I want to launch this with a March Madness pool in 2025 to my co-workers.
• I built a Shopify site and Instagram for a Pickleball ecommerce company that was my brother’s idea, called “Big Dill Energy.”
• In 2024, I built Ready Golf with probably the best human I know, and an even better friend. Ready Golf is a certification program for golfers to help them understand etiquette and rules of the game.
• In 2025, I want to launch Sileninja. This is a mobile app for people who think that their phone is listening to them and want to prevent that. I plan on launching this in the app store in the later half of Q1 2025.
• As a portfolio project, I built a “link in bio” site. I used a previous domain that I owned - nPassim. This is a mini-website generator for people who want to create a little bio site, but don’t have any coding skills, nor do they want to pay for hosting. I think I’m going to market this as a tool for people who are in the dating market. Once I figure out the marketing angle, I’ll launch with a new URL and branding. This is live.
• In September, there was a hackathon in Hawaii for Honolulu Tech Week. I built a semantic search engine for memes. I didn’t take it any further, but I think it would be cool if it existed as an iPhone Message extension, like the gif app.
• Finally, I’m going to market with interviewgineer.com, a B2B site for companies who want to interview data scientists, data analysts, and data engineers. I created quizzes and technical challenges for interviewees, and made it really easy for the company to deploy the quiz.
• I’m closing out the year with a start as a fractional CTO (or maybe Chief Data Officer? I’m not totally sure about title here). This will be my first foray into that world, and I’ve already started cold emailing other companies to see if they’d like to work with me.

Like I mentioned in the beginning, 2024 was definitely a year of shipping. Some things that I worked on but aren’t companies include:

• Writing curriculum for a few Caltech CTME courses
• Building a generative AI powered data dashboard
• Building a RAG based chatbot for a major lodging and hospitality company (a hotel chain)
• An agricultural application
• Product Managing a generative AI tool to extract data from financial docs and organize it into JSON format for a startup

Some things that I want to build but I’m deprioritizing in favor of the ideas above. If I finish the ideas above, I’ll move into this list:

• Python courses for beginners, deployable on jupyterhub
• A Shopify dashboard with ML models
• A raw petfood company
• A tool to “catch” Santa Claus on video 🎅🏼
• An event site like welikela.com
• A daily text news service that sends 5 short sentences about the news of the day.
• A price tracking application for Solana meme coins.
• Proudly
• Loose Shakas, a lifestyle brand that does 1 for 1.

I have discovered that I love to create products. Of all the cycles in development, figuring out what a product is and who the main users are is a lot of fun for me. Next year I also plan to focus on how to market brand new products. Getting from 0 to 1 users will be a new learning curve for me.

I’m excited for 2025.

Written by Kevin Coyle