I think what can be really annoying at times as a developer is being flush with ideas. Once you know how to build or have built a SaaS platform, it’s really easy to think you can just bang something out in a few hours.

For the most part, this is true and untrue. I’ve sat down on a Saturday thinking I could throw together an MVP, fast forward a few hours and I’m sitting there with barely a hello world page.

Why is this? It’s easy to get lost in the details of simply setting things up. A lot of little things can happen that get in the way. This isn’t even an isolated to building frontend apps, but backend as well!

Sure, it is easy to wire up a http server and get a route working, but if you actually want something that works, it will take much longer.

Standing up a frontend app can be even worse. I wanted to create a new react app and not use nextjs. Oh boy, where do I start? Maybe I’ll try out the hot new tanstack start project. It’s in beta but what the heck, this is a greenfield project!

That works pretty well, they’ve even got examples that use tailwind v4 that only came out a few days ago! I also want to use shadcn as I am pretty comfortable with it. Oh, but none of those components have been updated yet.

Now, before you know it, it’s been 2 hours and I’m swimming just trying to get the platform set up in a way that I will be successful.

Wait, what was I doing again? Why did I sit down to do this in the first place? The idea I had now seems so far away because I got lost in the just the setup of the MVP. The MVP of the MVP!

You could say this was wrong to do from the start, and it’s a lot of those little decisions that can wreck you when trying out something new. It’s a constant battle between:

1. Building with what you know to just validate the MVP
2. Hey this is a side project, I’m going to use it to also try out some new tech
3. ** This is where a lot of people (myself included) get got

2 is the tar pit. It’s common for folks to explain this away because there is no time pressure. So your brain convinces you this is a good idea and to use it as a learning experience. Well well, that is multi fold isn’t it?

Once you’re a few hours in and you’ve realized that you’ve spent that time just learning your new tech and not even focused on the original project idea, it can be quite demotivating!

But! You’ve also learned a few things, right?

1. You’ve learned some new tech (cool!)
2. Your pursuit for the new tech has taken you away from even starting on your new project.

Before you know it the sun has set, the weekend is over, and all that’s happened is you’ve deferred your new idea until next weekend (if it even makes it that far).