Building a Startup in One Day
By: Kathy Li
Tags: Startup, Web App Development, Vote, Github, Entrepreneurship

Far from being someone who enjoys competing with others, I somehow like to challenge myself a lot.

Merely a day after I got myself out of this “2-Hour Movie Challenge” that I arbitrary created for Leap Day 2020, here I am again, digging another hole for yours truly.

But I can explain.

Every time I want to learn (or re-learn) a tech development skill, I like to proceed by building a full-fledged app around it. In fact, this also partly accounts for why I have such a sizable app repertoire for just a one-person dev team.

Earlier today I was hoping to brush up on my PHP.

Ergo, once again, a new product ensued.

Thus began my “1-Day Startup Challenge.”

Somewhat coincidentally, my tinkering around with my Twitter profile during the movie challenge inspired me to build something that involves check ✅ or cross ❎ marks.

One thing leads to another, I built a voting app.

And my initial tech “stack” is super straightforward.

Gmail

As this experiment would likely require some of the G Suite tools, it made sense to sign up for a new Google account.

Social Media

With this new email address, I was able to sign up for new Twitter and Instagram accounts.

Handle: “whowouldyouvote”

I also created a new Facebook Page.

Facebook Page

Domain Name

In this Internet-heavy age, every startup should ideally have its own domain name. This voting app is no exception.

Knowing that the “whowouldyouvote” handle was still available, I went ahead and acquired whowouldyouvote.com.

Yet another domain acquisition of mine.

Web App

(Or do I really need one?)

Here is where my approach diverted a little.

The original plan was to build a web application where users can vote on trending topics.

This would offer an added benefit for me to practice PHP, which would be used to send vote counts from the front-end back to whatever server I might use.

But as I was signing up for a new Twitter account, it occurred to me that my minimum viable product (MVP) could be further simplified.

In order to launch even quicker for the sake of testing the waters, I wouldn’t even need to build an app from scratch.

I could just leverage Twitter’s built-in poll feature.

This means I was literally just minutes away from being ready to launch!

Started from an empty profile

Created a poll Tweet

Which could be embedded into my new site

Logo and Icon

To move things along, I sidestepped the common time-waster where some founders would spend a lot of resources on perfecting their first logo.

I basically just repurposed an emoji to be my main logo for now.

GitHub Page

Now that I no longer needed a dynamic website, I decided to just quickly get a static one-page site up and running, which could then be hosted for free on GitHub Pages.

Thank goodness the new domain that I just bought wasn’t going to be redundant.

Here’s what I did—I’m including a lot of screenshots here for clarity, but in reality all of the below steps combined only took me several minutes:

1. Signed up for a GitHub account, using my new email.

2. Created a new repository.

For my hosting route, it’s important to end the repository name with: [github.io]

3. Pushed my one-page static site on GitHub.

4. Used GitHub Pages to host the website.

As of the latest GitHub version, it’s necessary to select a theme for page hosting to work, even if we are not actually using the selected theme.

Site is up and running!

5. Hooked the new site up with my custom domain.

Updated my DNS records based on the above help guide.

Site is still running — now with my custom domain!

6. Added HTTPS

Literally just by clicking a checkbox.

Without HTTPS

See the difference? Now HTTPS-enabled.

That’s it! Challenge complete.

What’s Next?

This exercise did turn out to be my fastest product launch yet, so I would consider this challenge a small success.

When time allows, I may also see about putting some marketing effort into promoting the site, especially since it is already fully functional and all.

Technically speaking though, I only ended up writing very little code for the entire project, which is kind of defeating my original purpose of polishing up my PHP and other skills through hands-on app building.

That being said, I can definitely foresee myself revisiting the project and enhancing it bit by bit —perhaps even turning it into a dynamic app at some point. So I suppose future updates are on the horizon.

Until next time!