Lessons from creating engineering apps

Hey, I spent almost 5 months developing an IFC chatbot, convinced it would revolutionize how engineers interact with their model. When I launched it, I only got three logins—two users never uploaded any models and one just imported a drawing. It was a fucking fiasco… I spent every waking hour working on this and it was expensive. I was delulu and thought I would drive a lambo at any moment lol

I recently spent 15-20  hours over two weeks on a new app, this time working on a very specific subset of a subset of a subset of engineers who see real value in tackling a niche problem, Uniclass classification. I launched the app on Monday and have had someone using the app every 5 minutes since then. It’s a free app though. But I think I can add value and eventually get paid, who knows.

The key takeaway here is that setbacks aren’t failures—I learned a lot more about coding and app development building the first app.  It made me create apps for fun instead and it worked because I did what I liked and not what I thought others would enjoy. I found other engineering nerds like me by creating something for myself. The world is big, heaps of people with your interest out there.