How I Shipped My First App In 6 Days

One of my goals for 2025 was to start shipping the side projects I was building.

To this day I've never released anything I've built for myself (excluding one project last year that I realized didn't work properly).

Fear is the #1 thing that has held me back, and I knew that I would never get closer until I released something.

I'm getting back into uploading consistently on YouTube again, but shifting my niche to development.

As a part of that I've been trying to learn how to make better videos. I took a thumbnail course a couple of weeks ago so the idea of improving thumbnails has been top of mind.

On Monday, February 10th, I had found an idea I had written down about an AI tool to give feedback on thumbnails, and thought it was the perfect opportunity to build something fast.

This week's video was 'how I build my apps' and I wanted to have an actual app on the internet I could use as a case study for that.

I spent no more than 30 minutes thinking about what the MVP would be, and came up with this list:

1. Homepage Image Upload

Upload a thumbnail (from a file or YouTube URL), add video title and description from an intuitive homepage interface.

2. AI Analysis

Send the thumbnail to an AI model that evaluates it based on proven thumbnail design principles.

3. Shareable Results

Have a dedicated page to view the results and optionally make it public.

4. History Dashboard

Access all your previous thumbnail roasts in one organized dashboard.

I was able to build the initial flow of uploading an image and getting a response within the first day.

I built both frontend and backend with Next.js which sped up the process of building UIs and connecting them to actual data.

The hard part became associating each roast with a user (or a logged out 'anonymous' user), and setting up proper rate limiting.

The majority of these 6 days were spent adding authentication, setting up payments with Stripe, and figuring out which plan a user had.

I wasn't initially going to bother having much account management or any way to collect payments, but it forced me to take the project seriously and has already been a significant learning experience.

Charging for your app completely changes your mindset around building it.

The goal isn't to make (any) profit, but to break the limiting belief that you need permission from anyone to ship something.

It's not a toy project but a real product that real people can pay for.

That alone has reduced the pressure I feel about building another app (or improving this one).

The deadline of today's video (and the fact I talked about it) forced me to ship it in such a short amount of time, and taught me a ton.

You can try it for free at roastmythumbnail.com

How I Coded My First App In 6 Days (SOLO / with AI)

I went over more of the process in the video and talked about all the tech I used to build it.

Have a great week.

Cole

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