I’ve completed a freelance project I was working on for a few months, and have started saying no to new opportunities. It’s time to work on one of my own ideas again. This is part of my plan to start failing more. I’ve decided to build a business sending gift cards to Pakistan - and eventually other countries in that corner of the world. Why? A few years ago I had sent a gift card to a colleague in the UK. I found a number of very good options. They all had websites that inspired confidence, and used robust payment methods (Stripe in my example) that I could trust with my credit card. I recently had to send a gift card to a colleague in Pakistan. I was confident that I would find a bunch of great options; instead I only found one that I could think of trusting with my money. I ended up using their services and the card was delivered, but there were a number of problems I saw: No trust building around card payments. There was no clear mention of which provider they used. I did a bank transfer instead of using a CC. This meant my payment was manually verified and the card was only sent after a few hours. There was no confirmation email about my order. I was worried enough to call their helpline to confirm that my order had gone through. Once they had sent the card (which I also had to confirm via phone), I only got a confirmation email the next day. To get an invoice to expense this, I had to send them an email. I’m still waiting on an invoice. There were multiple colleagues who chipped in on this gift card. I had to collect the money from them and then pay for the card myself. In my previous experience of sending a gift card to the UK, I was able to include my colleagues in the process. They were able to add their contributions directly to the gift card I selected and a card of the total amount was sent to the recipient. Finally, there was no option for the receiver to choose which gift card they wanted. Instead I had to choose for them. There is a “Universal Gift Card” they claim works at all merchants and is the one I got, but redeeming that would be slightly more complicated. Interestingly, my colleague didn’t open the email they received with the gift card because they thought it was a spam/scam/malicious email. Only after I asked if they had received the card did they end up opening it. I know a better user experience exists. I want to bring the same to Pakistan and solve my own problem at the same time. Is there a market for this? I believe so, because: It’s a problem I’ve just faced. I’ve seen my wife having to deal with low-trust companies sending gifts to Pakistan. Gift cards are different, but eventually I could also add the option to send physical gifts to the recipient. I’ve seen my employer deal with this. Recently a baby gift basket arrived 2 months after the baby was born. 🤯 This is a recurring problem. People & companies need to send gift cards on birthdays, weddings, etc. With more companies starting to hire remotely in Pakistan, this could be a valuable service for businesses to subscribe to. Validation? I haven’t found an easy way to validate this idea. There is no community of “people sending gift cards to Pakistan” that I can tap into. That isn’t a cohort I can find in one place. I could make a list of B2B customers; companies that hire remotely in Pakistan. However, I want to start with individual customers - because I’m starting from a place of solving my own problem. It should be possible to pivot to B2B if I don’t find any interest from individual customers. Validation then involves me starting with a blog - suggesting gift cards to send to Pakistan. I’ll use SEO to bring in traffic. If I see enough visitors, I could start building a business. This also means that if/when the actual product launches, I’ll have a distribution channel already working. What if I’m wrong? There’s a very strong possibility that I’m wrong about this idea. That I’ll spend a bunch of time for it to get nowhere, or that I have picked a problem that isn’t very valuable to solve. This is my unique brand of fear of failure. I used to think I didn’t fear failing, because I had already failed many times. Instead, my fear of failure manifests as a fear of picking the wrong thing and wasting time on it. The way I am dealing with this is to realize that if I don’t pick anything - which I have frequently done in the past - I have an exactly 0% chance of succeeding. Just trying something makes that probability > 0%. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. Another thing that’s helping me is to time box this idea. I will spend 6 weeks on building the blog and populating it with as much useful content as possible. After that I can spend an hour or two every week to add a few more pieces of content. I can start researching and working on a different idea after the 6 week period and wait for the SEO to have an impact before making a decision to continue or abandon this.

I have failed, and that is exactly what I had hoped for a few months ago in this blog post. This is a good failure. It has taught me things, lessons I can use in the future to avoid failing this way again. But first a bit of context. What did I fail at? In February of 2024 I decide to try my hands on my first “Indie Hacker” hustle, something that would make me money on the internet without having to trade my time for it. A product instead of consultancy services that I usually provide. I had seen a number of people on Twitter (X) rave about how well their bootstrap templates were doing; and I had just gotten out of a consultancy project where I needed to connect a Next.js frontend to a Django backend. I thought it was the perfect project to start my indie hacking journey. I put up a launch post and started working, updating a build log as I went along. I gave myself until 28th March 2024 to finish it. That of course did not happen. Let’s talk about why I failed and what I learned. Episode 1: The one where I don’t understand the meaning of MVP My initial plan was to build a Django+Next.js boilerplate template the provided all of these: the base template that provided a Django backend & Next.js frontend working authentication b/w the backend & frontend Dockerfile that would create the backend & frontend containers for deployment Terraform scripts to setup an infrastructure on AWS Celery + Redis for background task processing TailwindCSS for the frontend (comes mostly for free with Next.js) social auth This looks like something achievable in a week or two of work - but only if you’re working full time on this. I failed to consider that I have a day job and a life. I was barely able to tick of the first two of these deliverables by the time my 6 week deadline came up. As a good friend told me later, I should have focused on the minimum amount of value I could deliver. Just having the first two things on my list be done would have been enough. I couldn’t charge the $20 I had planned for, but I could have charged $1-$5 for just that. And if no one was interested in spending the cost of a coffee on the MVP of the template, that would have been a good signal that this wasn’t going anywhere in it’s current shape. Instead, by focusing on building something much bigger, I robbed myself of the ability to validate the idea quickly. I spent all my available time coding the template instead of trying to talk to potential customers about it. Lesson 1: Scope down aggressively. Episode 2: Where I jumped on the hype-wagon I settled on building a boilerplate template because that’s what I had seen a lot of people on Twitter/X doing lately; I’m chalking this down to recency bias. I had no personal interest in a boilerplate template. It’s also not a product that I would personally use. I have so far made one project that uses this tech stack. Most of my other projects are Django, and Ruby on Rails. The most successful boilerplate templates I come across are from people who made a bunch of projects in 1 tech stack then realized they needed to do the same thing over-and-over again; which they then packaged into a template they could use. Selling to others was a bonus at first I guess. I was very enthusiastic about the project at the start, but as time went on I had to force myself to work on it. My lack of interest in this type of project was a big factor. Another factor was there being no way to see the fruits of my labor. I am currently working on an analytics dashboard for another client (a RoR project) and every time I build a feature, I love to play around with it in my free time. I test how it works, make sure the UX is a good one, and just play around and admire the app I’ve made. Without me using my template to build new projects, I lacked that feedback loop. Without the loop, I quickly lost interest. Lesson 2: Build something I can use myself. This isn’t a job I’m getting paid for, so the only motivation I have initially until it starts generating money is to build something interesting for myself. Episode 3: Where I had nothing for potential customers to play around with This is related to the 1st lesson. Because I didn’t have a path to quickly get something out there, there was no way for me to get my “product” into the hands of people who could test and provide feedback. I think the problem with a boilerplate template style of product is that you can’t give people a half-backed thing and ask them to test it. Unlike other SaaS apps, there’s no mid-way version of a template. Customers have to “buy-in” to use your template with any project they are starting. With SaaS, users can sign up and test, and then leave if they don’t like it. There’s no easy way of testing with a template. Lesson 3: Build something that can be tested by potential customers easily. For now, I’m going to stick with SaaS style web apps. Conclusion Moving forward: I’ll be working on web app products that users can sign up for and test very quickly. My next few experiments/products will be things that I can use myself as well. I’ll post what I’m going to work on next when I decide and have some time away from my job & freelance projects that are currently in progress.

If you’re just looking for implementation instructions, skip my ramblings and go straight to the code here. I’m currently working on my first project after deciding that I needed to fail more and practice finishing projects instead of abandoning them midway once they got “boring”. Anyways… This one is till in it’s interesting phase, so here’s a blog post with some things I learned yesterday while working on it. The project is a boilerplate template that should make it easy for devs. to start a new project with a Django backend and a Next.js frontend, something I had to struggle with recently. The problem The first thing I’m looking to solve is authentication. That was my biggest challenge when working on the contracting project that inspired this template. While there are a number of good posts around how to setup authentication b/w Django & Next.js, nothing “definitive” came up and I had to cobble together a weird mess of Django+DRF (Django Rest Framework) and Next.js+NextAuth, sharing a token from Django that was masquarading as a JWT token for Next.js. It wasn’t pretty and I knew I could do better. The options I considered 2 options for authenticating the Next.js frontend with the Django backend: Token based auth. On logging in, a user receives a token that is stored in local storage by the frontend and send with every request to the backend. Session/Cookie based auth. This is how authentication works in Django by default and is very easy to get started with - it basically comes for free out of the box when you start a new Django project. While token based auth. is what almost everyone suggests to use when using a Next.js frontend with any backend technology, I wanted to give session based auth. a try. I was curious what it would take to make it work - if it was even possible. tl;dr: It was possible to use cookie/session auth. b/w Django & Next.js - though with a few constraints which make it less appealing than the token based solution What follows are my notes on how to set it up, the problems I faced, and why for the template I’m going to go with token based auth. instead. Learning how CORS & Set-Cookie works It took me a few hours to get my head around how cross-origin requests and cookies work together, but the actual implementation was surprisingly straight forward. This “mini-quest” gave me a chance to learn a lot about how CORS and cookies work, and I’m happy with the time I spent on this. These are the resources which helped me the most (all are from MDN): Cross-Origin Resource Sharing Same-origin policy Using HTTP cookies Set-Cookie And finally, there was a surprise waiting for me! Browsers are almost universally making changes to restrict 3rd party or cross-domain cookies because of their privacy implications. Here’s a nice article from MDN about it: Saying goodbye to third-party cookies in 2024. This is the reason why; while this approach works, I won’t be using it in the template. More on that later. Implementation Implementing the session based auth. b/w Django & Next.js is pretty simple. Django configuration Install the django-cors-headers Python package. Add "corsheaders", to your INSTALLED_APPS. Add the "corsheaders.middleware.CorsMiddleware", middleware, right above the existing CommonMiddleware. Set CORS_ALLOWED_ORIGINS = ["http://localhost:3000"], replacing the URL with your frontend URL. Set CORS_ALLOW_CREDENTIALS = True Configure settings.py to allow cross-domain access for the session cookie. Set SESSION_COOKIE_SAMESITE = "None" Set SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE = True Next.js configuration No configuration is needed on the frontend. However, you do need to use the credentials: "include", option when using the fetch() API to access your backend. Here’s a minimal example. "use client"; import { BACKEND_URL } from "@/constants"; async function signIn() { const loginData = new FormData(); loginData.append("username", "admin"); loginData.append("password", "admin"); return await fetch(`${BACKEND_URL}/accounts/login/`, { method: "POST", body: loginData, credentials: "include", }); } async function whoAmI() { console.log( await fetch(`${BACKEND_URL}/accounts/me/`, { method: "GET", credentials: "include", }), ); } export default function Home() { return ( <main className="flex min-h-dvh w-full flex-col justify-around"> <h1 className="text-center">Home</h1> <button className="" onClick={signIn}> Sign In </button> <button onClick={whoAmI}>Who Am I</button> </main> ); } That’s it. That simple piece of code & configuration took me hours to find. Hopefully you can use this example to skip all that time spent trying to figure things out. Side quest log: Initially, I was not using the credentials: "include" option in the signIn() function above; thinking that I didn’t need to send any cookies with the login call, only the second API call to the /accounts/me endpoint. That mistake cost me about 2 hours of debugging time. If I had RTFM correctly the first time, I would have seen this: include: Tells browsers to include credentials in both same- and cross-origin requests, and always use any credentials sent back in responses. The credentials: "include" not only controls if cookies are sent, but also if they are saved when returned by the server. Why I won’t use this solution in the template Browsers are phasing out 3rd party cookies (Saying goodbye to third-party cookies in 2024) and adding features to work around that restriction where needed. The simplest way that doesn’t require much change is to use Cookies Having Independent Partitioned State (CHIPS). To enable CHIPS, you simply put a Partitioned flag on your Set-Cookie header, like so: Set-Cookie: session_id=1234; SameSite=None; Secure; Path=/; Partitioned; Unfortunately, there’s no straight forward way to do this in Django for now. There’s an open issue to resolve this, but looking at the comments, it won’t likely be solved anytime soon. Considering this, I opted to use the token based auth. method for my template. I’ll write a blog on that once I get it working over the next few days.

I was recently listening through the How to succeed at failing series on the Freakonomics podcast and started to think about how often I had failed in the past few years. The first answer was - not too much. I couldn’t think of too many instances of where I had “failed”. This was not a good thing. It was very much a sad thing that I couldn’t quickly think of many things I had failed at. Why is not failing bad? I realized I didn’t fail a lot because - I didn’t try a lot. I didn’t fail because I didn’t have good goals. Sure, I have a folder full of projects I thought of, researched, some that I even started working on; that I gave up on pretty soon after starting. But those don’t count as failures right? I was just playing around, not really aiming for anything. It was just a fun side project. That’s why I didn’t fail a lot, and that’s also why it’s not a good thing. I need to fail more Which means that I need to set goals and work towards them. Without goals to aim for, I keep spending my time in the same unproductive loop. Think of a shiny new project. Play around a bit, maybe learn a few things. Give up when things get hard or boring. Repeat While I do learn some things, I don’t really learn new things. Picking up another web backend framework when I’m very good at 1 already (Django if you’re looking to get something built 🙂) is very small incremental progress. I should be learning about running a business, marketing, sales, how to talk to people, cold calling, etc. Instead I’m playing around with NextJS/Remix because it’s easier to do and there’s very little chance of me failing at it. What I’m planning to do Any new project that I start, I will have an achievable goal for it. Something that can be called “done”. Achievable is different for everyone. Creating a small SaaS and have 5 people pay for it might be childs play for some, it’s my Everest for now. The plan is to aim for things just outside of my reach – to work towards those and grow in the process. Have a deadline. For now I’m starting with 6 week cycles of project work. In order meet deadlines, I need to have a clear picture of the goal. Goes back to the first thing on this list. Having a clear definition of “done” is important. But being able to cut scope to achieve some version of the goal is also important. - I’ve just finished reading Shape Up by Jason Fried and I like the Basecamp approach of deciding on an appetite (time commitment) to a project and cutting scope to meet that appetite. - That’s my plan moving forward. Each project I work on will be “shapped” into an achievable outcome and will have an allocated appetite - when I want to launch it or decide to abandon it. Continuing it for the next 6 week cycle will be another option but should be done sparingly. This approach of timeboxing projects and having an achievable goal is also discussed by Zack Freedman in this video Here’s what’s preventing you from finishing projects. See it when you get the chance. This wasn’t supposed to be a new years resolution I started thinking about this over 2 months ago and have been planning to write a post on it. Today seemed like a good day for it. So I guess this is my new year’s resolution. Fail more, fail better.