Project 2
Launched: Day 2
April 10, 2025
30in30days: challenge yourself to deliver 30 _ in 30 days
A platform for documenting and tracking monthly challenges, built to document my own 30 apps in 30 days journey.
productivity
challenges
time-tracking
Cloudflare
Toggl
Project Timeline
7.3h
Work Sessions
Day 13
April 21, 2025
Making a post about 30in30days.com major update
17m
optimising 30in30days.com for mobile
1h 0m
Adding day reflection to 30in30days.com, separate days from projects, minor UI/UX improvements
1h 4m
Day 6
April 14, 2025
Updating 30in30days.com challenge entries
38m
Day 3
April 11, 2025
Updating content and templates for 30in30days.com
48m
Making a SM post about 30in30days.com
5m
Day 2
April 10, 2025
Looking into featurebase / fixing 30in30days.com website generator
1h 11m
Making 30in30days.com alpha static website, while posting on x/threads/bsky
2h 12m
Launch Day
Day 2Backstory
This project is exactly what I'm doing right now - challenging myself to build 30 apps in 30 days. I chose to build apps because I'm fascinated by online businesses and would love to have a bunch of them.
I've been following the 'building in public' and indie hacker communities for a while. Peter Levels (levels.io) was a huge inspiration when he did his 12 apps in 12 months challenge back in 2014. I thought, well, is it possible to build 30 apps in 30 days? Like, build an app a day?
With the current levels of AI tools, infrastructure, cost structures, and my experience, I thought I might be able to pull it off. So for the second day of the challenge, I wanted to build a project that would let me document the process in detail, with information, features, screenshots, and especially time tracking.
I think time tracking is really cool to see what it takes to actually build a project like this. I'd love to see what it takes for other people to build stuff too - like if they're painting for 30 days, how long did it take to get the results they got? Given their experience, productivity, and talent, what did it take them to complete something? I'm curious about that intrinsically, and I thought others might be too.
Not many people are developing apps, and it's becoming easier with AI tools. What takes me a day might take someone without experience a week or a month, but I think it will be faster than people imagine. The default is that people think it's not possible, and I want to showcase that it is.
The Challenge
Build a platform that documents my 30 apps in 30 days challenge with detailed information, screenshots, and time tracking. I wanted to showcase what it takes to build projects like these and demonstrate that building real apps / digital businesses can be faster than people imagine.
Personally, the main challenge for me is to actually sit down and document everything, but this is an essential part of building any online business.
Features
- Landing page with information about 30in30days concept
- Challenge page with information and rules about the challenge
- Individual day pages for each project
- Time tracking integration with Toggl Track
- Visual timeline showing how time was spent each day
- Breakdown of time spent on different activities
- Ability to see total and average time spent across the entire challenge
- Support for categorizing time entries with tags for analysis
Technical Implementation
The site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages with a custom static site generator built in Python. It pulls data from Toggl and saves information in JSON files that get rendered with Jinja2 into a static website. All the assets are copied into a specific folder that Cloudflare Pages picks up when changes are detected.
The time tracking is pulled from Toggl Track, which has a nice API. I didn't want to reinvent the wheel here since I was already using it before. I created a specific project '30in30days' for the whole challenge, and I'm pulling all time entries attached to that project. The entries are organized by day, which allows me to create visualizations showing how much time I spent on what activities.
Monetization
While the current implementation is free and open, there are several potential monetization paths. It could be a private accountability community, or perhaps (crazy idea alert) people could wager money on each other completing (or not) their challenges.
I could also offer premium features for teams or businesses who want to track collective challenges, or partnerships with productivity tools that align with the challenge concept. Social media statistics and detailed analytics could be premium features as well.
What I Learned
I learned that Claude 3.7 is surprisingly good at frontend development. Something has changed recently, and it can now develop high-end frontend experiences better than most templates you can find online (in combination with Cursor).
I also discovered that static site generation + Cloudflare Pages is an incredibly powerful combination. If you're already using Cloudflare for DNS, you can connect a folder from a GitHub repo and have it live on your domain within 15 minutes while maintaining complete control over the infrastructure. The fact that Cloudflare Pages is free is remarkable.
Time tracking has proven to be a valuable discipline. Committing to share all my time entries publicly is motivating me to be more diligent about tracking, and I'm looking forward to running some stats and seeing the results after a month.
I was impressed with how quickly I could go from a domain name to a live website - within 15 minutes, I had a site where I controlled 100% of the code, with a CI/CD pipeline ready for static website deployment, and full flexibility without being locked into any platform. That's just crazy fast.
Final Thoughts
I'm very happy I decided to build this project. There are some polish items I want to improve, like making the timeline visualization more intuitive and creating shareable infographics. I'll be making small improvements throughout the month.
By the end of the month, I'd be super happy if I could have people sign up and start challenges like this themselves, share them online, and maybe let others follow their challenge for accountability. I'd like to add direct links to social media so you can make beautiful posts about your progress.
There could be network effects with a centralized social media account (@30in30days on Instagram, X, Threads, YouTube) where we could post things from the website for extra exposure. Moderation would become a thing then, but I'll tackle those challenges one at a time as I'm still shipping an app every day.
I'm excited to see how far I can take this - how many apps can I actually maintain and make significant progress on simultaneously while still shipping a new one each day? I'm excited to see this potentially grow into a community or movement.