Building a Solo Startup in my 20s (realistic coding vlog)

yeah again

first off I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who subscribed and watched my videos recently the growth has been crazy I'm so grateful to be able to share my journey with all of you it means so much to see your support in the comments and from reading your comments I see a lot of you are feeling stuck on your own startup Journeys I know exactly how challenging it can be especially when you're trying to do it alone and that's why I'm excited to show of you a new private community that I'm working on called startup Club this will be a space where we can connect learn and help each other win whether you need advice on coding marketing and everything in between running a solo startup I'll share more details soon so stay tuned if this is something you'd like to join please let me know in the comments All right so one morning I woke

up with a message from a Discord user saying they found my secret key whilst inspecting the code of my browser extension what is a secret key and why is this such a big deal well the secret key is like a master password to my entire application if someone had bad intentions they could have taken full control of my project and caused absolute chaos and how did this happened turns out this was all caused by a utility function that wasn't even used in my app but that function had referenced the secret key and when I packaged my app for production the secret key was visible in plain text for anyone that knows where to look this was such a rookie mistake but a costly one so feel free to roast me in the comments for this one but as soon as I found out I had to act fast I removed the useless function and all references to the secret key from my project make sure this would never happen again now you're probably wondering did anyone take advantage of this thankfully no harm was done I was super lucky that the user who discovered the issue reported it to me privately instead of taking advantage of it no data was breached no malicious activity occurred and I patched things up before they got out of hand but let me tell you this was a massive wakeup call when you're a one person operation staying VI and regularly auditing your work is so important it's the punches you don't see that do the most damage to fix the exploit I had to generate an entirely new set of credentials including a new secret key I wasn't taking any chances of this happening again but of course it wasn't just that simple generating new credentials meant my extension would experience inevitable downtime because I will have to resubmit an updated build to the Chrome web store with the new credentials so that all my users could get the fix given there were no other options that's exactly what I did literally minutes after I refreshed the credentials for my project my inbox started blowing up with emails from users reporting issues with the extension whilst I knew exactly what was causing their problems my hands were tied the issue was in the hands of the team at Google and nothing could be done until they published my latest build in the meantime all I could do was make announcements in my Discord server and respond to emails to keep them informed fortunately the latest version was published the very next day and the fix got rolled out to all of the users while the overall damage was minimal managing breaking changes like this in real time is always stressful you always feel a sense of urgency to resolve users issues as quickly as possible but in this case all I could do is wait looking back on this whole situation I realized something I think I'm on the right path to building a painkiller product it might sound backwards but user complaints can be a good sign it shows that you're creating something so valuable that when it stops working people can't help but let you know about it and sometimes in not so pleasant ways and in moments like these it really pays to keep a cool head and a stoic attitude especially when you're working solo and there's no one to share the workload with when my extension was down I watched the complaints flood into my inbox it was overwhelming and frustrating but I couldn't do anything till Google publishes my fix in these situations it's easy to dwell on things outside of your control but that is never productive most of the time the worst case scenarios you imagine in your head or nowhere as bad as reality my startup didn't vanish or die from this event if anything it was all a valuable lesson that I can apply to my future startups during tough times don't waste energy feeling sorry for yourself especially if you're a on man show accountability starts and ends with yourself just get to work take care of the task at hand reflect and move on if you want more videos on running a solo startup please like And subscribe and I'll see you in the next one bye-bye