5 Lessons I Learned Building and Launching DreamShuffle.app

Posted on Mon 03 March 2025 in DreamShuffle

A few months ago, I came up with yet another project idea. We all have them, the ideas we fall in love with for a few weeks, only to abandon them when the initial excitement fades. Over the years, I've talked with friends about countless projects I wanted to launch, and I've listened to hundreds of pitches for their projects too. 99% of the time, nothing gets launched.

At the end of 2024, I had a great conversation with Marcos Sponton, a seasoned entrepreneur and product expert who I had the privilege of working for in the past and who's always been a big inspiration for me. One key takeaway from our chat really stuck with me: you'll never learn anything about your project if you don't actually build something and launch it. That simple advice was the push I needed to break the cycle of endlessly daydreaming about an app reaching a million downloads without writing a single line of code. This time, I was determined to build something, launch it, and see what happens.

A week ago, I went live with the first demo of DreamShuffle.app, a product that combines AI-generated sleep stories with the concept of cognitive shuffling to help you fall asleep faster. This was an idea I'd been toying with for a while, and even though I don't know whether it will ultimately succeed, I've already learned a ton from the experience. Here are five key lessons from building and launching DreamShuffle.

1. Aim to Release

The biggest enemy of shipping a product is overthinking. It's easy to get stuck in analysis paralysis, debating frameworks, cloud providers, feature sets, and everything in between. But if your goal is to learn (and it should be), nothing teaches faster than actually launching.

Get over analysis paralysis. You don't need the perfect solution right now, you don't need to decide your entire stack on day zero, and you definitely don't need to build something state-of-the-art.
Build something good enough. Perfect is the enemy of launched. Hardcode things where you need to. In my case, I chose not to render audio in real-time, instead, I went with a polished set of pre-rendered meditations that rotate on each visit. In the future, I'll build a pipeline to keep content dynamic and fresh for users, but not now.
Leverage LLMs. ChatGPT, Claude, and others are your friends. Use them for brainstorming, copywriting, and code generation. I'm terrible at CSS, so the base styles (which would have taken me days to figure out) were done in minutes with the help of ChatGPT.
Stick to tech you know. Unless your goal is to learn something new, this isn't the time to experiment with an exotic stack. If you're vibe coding, it's way better if you can quickly diagnose and fix anything that breaks.
KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). Your MVP should be embarrassingly simple. The goal is to get your first demo in front of potential users and see how they react.
Don't over-engineer. You're not Amazon. A basic VPS or managed service is more than enough. I'm using a small-ish VPS from OVH, but in the past, I've also used budget-friendly hosts I found on LowEndBox.
GDPR and compliance? Important, but don't let it block you from launching. Tackle it when your audience starts growing.
Monitor your audience. Tools like Google Analytics and LogRocket take 5 minutes to set up and will help you collect insights on what's happening after you launch.

2. Iterate Fast

Your first release won't be perfect, and that's fine. What matters is getting it out there, seeing how people react, and improving it quickly.

Version everything. Even your smallest experiments should be tracked. Create a free private repo on GitHub (or any version control platform you like) and stick all your code in there.
Release. Then release again. Frequent small updates are better than one giant perfect release.
Don't get too precious. Your users won't notice the rough edges nearly as much as you do.

At DreamShuffle.app, my approach was to get a working demo live in days, not months. I gave myself a two-week deadline from the moment I started experimenting with TTS tools to the first public version. Every tweak and improvement I make now comes directly from user feedback, not guesswork.

3. Stay on Budget

It's tempting to treat your project like a VC-funded startup, but unless you have actual funding (or deep pockets), keeping costs under control is crucial.

Track your spending. Know exactly where your money is going. I started a simple spreadsheet, every expense goes in there, whether it's the domain, VPS, or a test Instagram ad.
Set a budget. Realistically, your project probably won't make money any time soon, and that's okay. Decide upfront how much you're comfortable spending. I set a hard limit of £100 for myself.
Figure out what you actually need. For example, you don't need Google Workspace email if your domain registrar offers free email forwarding (most do). Otherwise, you'll burn through your budget on stuff that doesn't move the needle.
Don't build for 10,000 users. Build for 10. If you're lucky enough to need to scale later, that's a good problem to have.
Leverage free tools. There are tons of high-quality free services out there. For DreamShuffle, I use:
- Cloudflare for DNS and basic security (and free caching, which helps performance).
- Porkbun for domain registration, they also handle my email forwarding at no extra cost.
- UptimeRobot for basic uptime monitoring, which gives me peace of mind without spending a penny.

For DreamShuffle, I made a deliberate choice to avoid expensive infrastructure or unnecessary subscriptions. A small VPS, some basic monitoring, and a domain. That's all I needed to get started.

4. Getting Seen: SEO and Visibility

Shipping is only step one. If nobody knows your product exists, it's like you never launched. Visibility matters, and even basic SEO can go a long way, especially for personal projects.

Stick to a single domain. Since I hadn't decided on a name early on, I ended up buying four different domains. I figured the more domains pointing to my site, the better my chances of getting seen. Turns out, I was completely wrong. Search engines actually penalize duplicate content across multiple domains, which can hurt your rankings. Do yourself a favour and read up on canonical domains.
Secure your social handles. It takes less than an hour, and it's good for credibility, even if you don't plan to post much. Try to register your handles using an email address from your domain so you can easily repeat the process for future projects.
Set up email redirects. Even if you're not actively emailing customers, having a hello@yourdomain address instantly makes you look more professional.
Content marketing works. That's exactly why I'm writing this post, to drive organic traffic back to DreamShuffle.app.

Don't obsess over SEO on day one, but getting the basics right from the start makes a big difference, and it's way easier to do it upfront than to clean up a mess later.

5. Move On to the Next Thing

This might seem counterintuitive, but one of the healthiest habits you can build is knowing when to move on. Not every project needs to be a lifelong commitment, and that's okay.

Know when to walk away. If you're not seeing traction, it's fine to cut your losses. Decide upfront how much time you're willing to invest, and what signals will tell you it's time to move on.
Apply what you learned. Every project teaches you something, even the ones that flop.
Keep creating. The next idea might be the one that actually takes off.

DreamShuffle might succeed, or it might fizzle out. Either way, I'm already brainstorming my next project and thanks to what I've learned, I'll launch that one faster and smarter.

That's it. Five lessons from building and launching DreamShuffle.app. If you're working on your own side project, I hope some of these resonate. And if you're struggling to get something out the door, my advice is simple: stop thinking, start shipping.

Feel free to check out DreamShuffle at dreamshuffle.app, and if you've got your own stories about shipping indie projects, I'd love to hear them.