Story time:
In 2023, after working for a company called Nextdoor for over 4.5 years, I was ready to switch jobs. Like everyone else, I started with Leetcode but quickly realized, as great as Leetcode is for general software engineering, it isn't exactly applicable for frontend engineering interviews, as they focus more on domain-specific questions.

So, I decided to scour the internet and quickly realized how tedious and difficult the process was for preparing for frontend interviews. I spent weeks just scouting the internet to find the correct resources to study for interviews. While there were good resources available for frontend, I struggled to find anything that really simplified the study process and showcased questions that are actually asked at companies. Eventually, I created a large spreadsheet that listed the most frequently asked questions tagged by companies. The spreadsheet had over 5 tabs and hundreds of questions collected. Here’s what that looked like:
https://i.imgur.com/hOlZ8n3.png

During this process, I was also really inspired to start making YouTube videos as I have been a user since 2007. I have always been camera shy and not one to put myself in the limelight, but I thought it was time to face my fears and start creating content. I then thought to myself, how can I create a flywheel, where it meets my four goals:

Find a new job by studying for interviews.
Make YouTube videos.
Help people in the process.
Balance personal life, as I previously had a startup that was acqui-hired by Nextdoor, but I really placed my startup in front of everything else in life, which caused a significant impact on my mental and physical health.
That's when I decided to create YouTube content on what I was studying for frontend interviews and use Teachable.com to create a small course website to publish what I have learned and share it with other people. The goal here was to intentionally not invest in engineers initially, to understand if this concept even had product-market fit. This is what v1 looked like:

https://i.imgur.com/7AkFdzH.png

Slowly but surely, I started to make videos, which received almost no views but after six months of trying, my videos started to take off and really helped a lot of people. I also started receiving a small number of paid users to my course website, where I also received a lot of positive feedback and testimonials. In under a year, I had over a thousand paying customers on my course website.

While this was great news, I was completely burnt out from studying for interviews, creating YouTube videos, creating course content, interviewing myself, working my full-time job, which was super demanding, and trying to somehow maintain a personal life. It impacted my mental and physical health greatly, to say the least, eventually I fell into a layer of depression and severe sleep deprivation but thankfully, with support from my family and therapy, I was able to recover by taking a month or two off.

The good news behind all of this is that I did eventually land my dream job at Roblox, where I currently work today. I also received offers from several FAANG+ companies, so this framework works. I spent the last six months working on the next version of frontendlead.com, which was soft-launched on April 1st, 2024, and have received nothing but positive feedback so far from customers.

The platform had several layers of challenges:

1. Dump my spreadsheet somehow into an organized website.
2. Bring the data in from the server so it's not just hard-coded on the frontend.
3. Make it fast and optimized for SEO.
4. Build an in-website code editor (with integrated unit tests) per problem.
5. Port over the authentication flow of Teachable.com in my own NextJS-based application.
6. Set up a discussion board so my users can freely and anonymously communicate and share their interview experiences.
7. Display the code editor somehow on the homepage so users can see it in action right away.
8. Create all the text content for each premium page.
9. Create free content for users so they can browse without ever having to pay.
10. Make it look pretty, use Tailwind, and add a lot of custom animations (had to tame it down for page speed).

All in all, it's been quite a roller coaster, but the platform is just getting started. Thank you for reading this, and the platform is still in its infancy stage, so any feedback is more than welcome.