Obstacle #1: Competition

As I’ve been writing about lately, I’ve made it my goal to finish a project, any project, that I start. So I started tinysale, an easy way to sell digital goods online and track analytics.

The idea came from using Gumroad.com to sell my e-book on how to learn to code. At the time, I was pretty unhappy with how little analytics Gumroad provided and wanted my own solution.

Well, right after I launched the tinysale landing page, Gumroad came out with more advanced analytics. You can now see where each view for my Gumroad landing page is coming from – just like I wanted.

This would usually deter me. After all, why build it when someone else has already done a great job at it. Gumroad also has about $8 MILLION in funding, so they could easily add all the other features I really want.

But, in the spirit of finishing my project, I will continue to build tinysale. Every non-coding project I’ve started and finished has always turned into something bigger, so I know firsthand the value of completing something. If I gave up at any point on the Stanford CS106A course when I first started learning to code, I might not even be here today.

Competition, BEWARE. Tinysale lives on!