How I Built Market Your Build
Market Your Build is my first foray into building small projects in public. It is the first of many ideas I want to release into the world.
The Idea
My goal was to come up with a simple idea that could be implemented very quickly over a weekend. I didn’t want to deal with implementing authentication, but I still wanted users to add information and gain value easily in a low friction, production quality manner.
I realized one of the major gaps in my projects as well as the projects of my friends was that there was no easy way to freely market them.
The Tech Stack
I’ve been using bun.sh since it came out and generally I prefer it over other options such as standard NodeJS or Deno. The primary reason for this is that it’s just faster to install dependencies and hot reloading works very well. Additionally, Bun is based on Zig which is a highly performant backend language.
I then decided to use NextJS with TypeScript and ESLint all set up via the create-next-app boilerplate. I prefer this boilerplate because it sets up basic things like routing and has support for Server Functions as well as React Server Components out of the box. If I was a beginner, I’d definitely opt to use Create React App instead mainly since it’s more barebones.
Lastly, I needed some way to store data. I considered using Supabase or one of the freely provided options on Vercel, but I’m lazy. I wanted something fast.
Enter Google Sheets and Google Forms.
The reason to use Google Forms was obvious, I wanted something that already handled authentication, input validation and data entry and was free and highly available. Similarly I wanted to be able to extract data and display it to my site easily so I opted to use the Google Sheets API to facilitate the view layer.
I made sure the Google Sheets API was called on the server for security purposes and properly secured the required API key information in Vercel.
Closing Thoughts
This is just the beginning, I want to be able to quickly build and iterate on projects like these and provide value to users. My intention for Building in Public is to train my founder muscle and get into the habit of fearlessly putting things out into the world. If you would like to join me on this journey you can also find my on X.