How I built 180 websites in 180 days and became a YC fellowship founder

I’m a technical founder of a startup in Y Combinator Fellowship W16. Sometimes it feels a little surreal because only three years ago I didn’t know how to code at all. This is the story of how I got here and what I’ve learned along the way.

(Disclosure: Tech in Asia is also a Y Combinator startup. See our ethics page for details.)

The backstory

I taught myself to code by building 180 websites in 180 days. Building a website a day consumed my entire life for 6 months. People are often shocked to hear that I quit my job to tackle the project, but I knew that there was no way I was going to be able to learn to code if I also had to work a job.

I used to be a fine artist… sort of. I love building things, which is why I ended up studying fine art. Art gave me an outlet to build and create. I went off to art graduate school with a head full of youthful optimism and a bunch of student loans. I spent two years making artwork – finding my voice as they say – and when I graduated, I was broke. I needed to make money so I started bartending because I thought it would give me enough free time to also make art.

Me, doing a performance piece for my MFA thesis show

I was wrong. Having to split my focus made it very difficult for me to produce the artwork I wanted to. I never really “quit” making art, but since I wasn’t fully invested in it, I started to do other things to fill the creative void. The turning point was when I helped some of my friends with the UI/UX for an iPhone app. After that, I was hooked, and I helped out on a couple of other tech projects in my free time.

Screenshots from the first app I worked on, ruHot

Working on the design side of things was fun but I wanted to do more. I wanted to actually build the things I was working on, but how? I knew that if I didn’t fully commit myself it wouldn’t work out for me, so I decided I was going to quit my job and learn how to code. I didn’t have enough money to quit immediately, so for the next few months I just focused on making money. When I finally had enough money saved up, I quit my job to pursue my dream of becoming a coder.

Learn by doing

I didn’t have a plan at first, but I knew that if I was going to succeed at learning to code, I would need to crank out as much code as possible. First I thought about just diving into a big Rails project, but as a beginner that seemed really daunting. So then I thought about making a bunch of small websites to get my feet wet. But how many should I do? Five? Ten? Fifty?

I asked myself, “If I make one small website a day, every day, how many could I possibly make?” 180 popped into my head and while it seemed totally crazy, it also seemed like an awesome challenge so I set out some rules for myself. I would make one website a day, every day, for 180 days, write a short blog post everyday for each site, and publish all my code on GitHub.

I chose to make a website every day because it meant that I would have to finish something every day and start again the next day. Finishing something every day would made me feel like I was winning, and having a deadline meant that I couldn’t get hung up on the little things. It didn’t matter if I understood everything that was going on, just as long as I shipped.

YumHacker – Build something real

Wit.ai – Growth hacking

Zube – Building a company

Final thoughts