I quit the 52 products in 52 weeks challenge

It hurts to quit after only 2 products (and a few 80% done). But 3 weeks of this pace made one thing clear: it's not sustainable.

1. Health. My health was taking a huge hit. You know that feeling where you pull an all nighter to finish an assignment or study for an exam? I was basically feeling that for 3 weeks straight. Destroying my health for a year straight just isn’t worth it.

2. No time for marketing at all. I built 2 of the products and realised I literally had no time to market them. While balancing my full time job, building the products, and managing content across all social medias, all I could do was give them 1-3 posts each and that’s it. No cold outreach, no actual marketing, etc. This made me realise I was just building 1 product per week for no users.

3. Quantity over quality. Everyday I was just constantly thinking, “what am I building this/next week”, and “this week’s product is nearly due, I need to come up with a small product idea so I can complete the challenge”. This obviously led to me actively looking for products that took less time to build, rather than more complex products that solve better problems.

The challenge was good for building momentum because I’ve nearly built 1 product per week so far, with a few nearly ready for deployment, but the challenge isn’t worth doing for a year.

I was literally thinking everyday, “oh crap it’s nearly Friday, the next product is due”, and then “I’m screwed it’s Friday and the product isn’t done and I still need to do a YouTube video”. Living with this constant stress and low sleep for 365 days doesn’t sound healthy.

Overall this year I’ll still be shipping close to 1 product per 1-2 weeks just because I love building so much.

What changes

This newsletter will start to contain a lot more AI tips and tricks that should help you guys build a lot faster and optimize your AI workflows without wasting hours and hours testing everything that gets released.

Here’s one: after a complex/risky change, I open 2 Codex chats and run /review in both in case one of them misses a bug.

I've also been getting some DMs asking about my AI setup, prompts, tips, and workflows. I’m working on something for that and will be announcing it soon 👀, message me if you’re interested.

I’ll also be posting a lot more videos to my YouTube channel regarding AI/coding so make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss them: https://www.youtube.com/@kr0deryt

Anthony