Diary of building software startup from scratch
Oh, hello. I didn't see you there. Did you ever wonder what it takes to build and launch a software product from scratch? Not a high-level summary. Not a short essay that describes a year of development. Detailed, day to day activities. A captain's log. Mistakes and pivots. Technology choices. Marketing activities. Design considerations. You might know me as the creator of SumatraPDF. I'm starting a new software product from scratch and I decided to make it an experiment of building in public. I hope to inspire others to build more software by de-mystifying the process of creation. I'm on…
In plain words
A developer documents the daily process of building a new software product from conception onward. The diary covers specific decisions, technical choices, design work, marketing efforts, and mistakes encountered rather than high-level summaries. Aimed at aspiring software creators interested in understanding the real details of product development, this public building experiment demystifies what it actually takes to launch software from scratch.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Oh, hello. I didn't see you there. Did you ever wonder what it takes to build and launch a software product from scratch? Not a high-level summary. Not a short essay that describes a year of development. Detailed, day to day activities. A captain's log. Mistakes and pivots. Technology choices. Marketing activities. Design considerations. You might know me as the creator of SumatraPDF. I'm starting a new software product from scratch and I decided to make it an experiment of building in public. I hope to inspire others to build more software by de-mystifying the process of creation. I'm on day 14. It's early but that is the point: you can follow along. Here's the daily dev diary: https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/30da6655040f47e693f8e66eacd308c1/diary-of-a-solo-dev-building-a-web-app.html The product is Filerion, a web-based file browser / file manager with support for s3, Dropbox etc. I'll be posting updates to https://twitter.com/kjk but don't just follow along. Start building your own stuff as well. The world needs more great software.
More growth this month
the category →
AstraPixels▲267A pixel-art solar system at its real current positions.
Growth · 29d ago · astrapixels.com
Launched alongside, June 2022
the whole month →- AF
I've seen some interests in (simulation) video games here on HN so I thought I'd share a short version of our story. More than 6 years ago, me and my friend from university were playing around with an idea of making a game we always wanted to play. We worked on it on weekends but the progress was quite slow, especially due to so many dead ends and wasted effort. Eventually however, we solidified our direction and decided to take the risk to resign from our well paid SWE jobs and work on it full time. It took more than a year but yesterday we have finally released it on Steam:…
Life & fun · 2022
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