Solving the problem for designers
A friend of mine, Patrik, who is a product designer, had the following problem. His daily routine was to create mobile and web design. And for each project, he has to spend some time choosing the correct pattern of colors. Which means some manual color choosing and putting it in the design to see how it fits together to find the perfect match.
He approached me with this problem and I told him, my not to automate it? We can create some templates and with a single click, the color would change and propagate back to the template.
Let the React do the magic
In 2017, I was still at the beginning of my React career path and this was the perfect idea for a side-project. As for the dev stack for the frontend I used React, lodash-fp, styled-components, and react-router. The backend and authentication were handled by firebase auth and real-time databases.
It was super fun to build something together. The initial idea was to finish the app within 1 week, but in the end, we spent 4 months building it and get ready.
I remember back then React was still not that popular as today and the battle of frameworks, React versus Angular. Looking back I'm glad that I jumped on the React train.
Sharing the idea with others
We are a huge fan of producthunt and it was a go-to place where we wanted to submit our little app. We spend about a week preparing the submission. We studied what time is the best time to submit the project, how to write the description, and so on.
When we felt that we were ready, we submitted it and by the end of the day, we couldn't believe how we did.
🥉 We finished as 3rd most upvoted app of the day.
❤️ We had over 817 upvotes
👨💻 We had over 8.000 page views that day
It was our first success and fuckup at the same time. You ask why fuckup?
Fuckup #1
- forgot to add google analytics → didn't expect that it would have that much of upvotes
Fuckup #2
- The free version has only 100 real-time connections → this the connected 101., 102. etc, the user is not able to log in and save palettes
I quickly switched to the upper firebase tire and integrated google analytics. But overall it the whole process of creating, building, and launching was fun. We had tens of mentionings on Twitter a few people wrote blogs about pandacolors in different languages and even some people contacted us for an interview
