Creating the idea...

As a developer and all-around creative person, I have ideas that come to mind constantly. Coming up with ideas is almost like a passive activity to me, it comes to me like nature.

The idea for this product (CashHook) arose when I needed to make a financial hack for MLH’s ‘The Hackconomist’ event, and with this event being a weekend-long hackathon, well, I was left with 48 hours to bring a simple idea to life!

How I built the idea...

Considering the tool needed to be both beginner/non-tech person friendly and quick to build I had to choose my toolset wisely. For this reason, I selected autocode.com to build the mass of the project, not only does it help to speed up development, but it also allows anyone with any amount of knowledge to install the code and host it in a matter of seconds making it by far the best option for this product.

Building the idea and turning it into a product only took a few hours after mapping out a thorough plan in my head, I simply made 3 webhook connectors for the top donation platforms making it super simple for both myself and the creators to understand, test and use.

Within less than 6 hours the product was produced, tested, upgraded and in a suitable condition for launch. Just goes to show what you can do with an idea and a little determination.

Getting the brand ready...

Honestly being under the pressure of hackathon time restraints is actually useful in this situation, whereas I would often put this off for multiple weeks having just 48 hours to finish this and have it release-ready was surprisingly useful… I worked around bugs and quickly beat errors in order to get things done as quickly as possible while making sure they look good!

I got the site built up with the basic necessary info and set to work getting this product ready for the world. Using bootstrap for the basic features sped up development a lot and so there wasn’t too much playing with CSS, which in this instance was pretty useful.

After about an hour I had a good-looking site and was ready to take a break and get a bite to eat after a busy afternoon coding until I could code no longer!

The final steps...

With the product and its web presence all ready to go the final steps were to register the domain and get things moving, as this was a hackathon it was sponsored by a registrar who I was able to grab cashhook.tech from for completely free which made the product launch really easy for me!

Once the domain was registered it was as simple as pointing it to the host and getting ready to announce the launch on Twitter, CashHook is now live - which caught the attention of quite a lot of people including Ko-fi themselves!

The outcome for me...

Building and launching CashHook in under 48 hours taught me an abundance of things. I learned that not every product you launch has to be overly complex and take months to even finish planning. I learned that if you are passionate about an idea, no matter how big or small, you are capable of making it happen, and that is how I launched CashHook in under 48 hours.