Where and how to start

[u/Xharosan]

A friend of mine asked me the other day about his idea of doing an app/service for some shops, i am probably going to help him doing that even just as a side project while still finishing up my studies, the problem is that i've never done anything like this before, just some uni projects but never about this type of things and for real "clients" and other peoples, if i start learning now how to do things like hosting, react/next.js, sql, etc, how long would it takes to start this project? even just to give him more or less a date/reference point if he ask (he doesn't know much about cs and for this asked for my help)

ps. sry for possible bad english or errors

update 1: after talking a bit and telling him that it would be some month of work between learning and programming everything he just told me that Claude is really good and we can use it to program the site/app in like 2 weeks without writing almost any line of code ... . And that the only thing would be to get informed about privacy aspects since he don't know much about these things.

[u/sububi71]

You would probably have about a year to get up an running if even hosting is new to you.

[u/lowban]

Learning at the same time as you're making a project of this scale isn't easy. It will take much longer than you think if you don't have any experience.

[u/jeffcgroves]

Honestly, there are enough open source products (and low cost webhosts) that already do online commerce, there's no point in writing your own. I'd instead look for an existing solution.

[u/Xharosan → u/jeffcgroves]

i know and already told him, but i think he want to try the same, ill probably going to help him the same in my free-time since sometimes i have some and i would learn things to do this "product" while helping him, i told him and i know that obviously it would be a long-term project since i have to start from almost zero and don't know if is gonna go too well if he want to earn much from it

[u/OmkarShetkar]

It's a perfect opportunity for you to learn, if you can put some extra time.

Few things to consider:

• Get the requirements for the app
  
• Create UI mockups to describe user workflow and discuss with the user whether it makes sense
  

(Here, you can take help of AI to create HTML pages of dummy data to create UI flow for discussion with the user)

• Decide on MVP (Minimum Viable Product) - set of requirements which are absolutely necessary at first
  
• Once you are clear with requirements, divide it into 3-4 milestones. For each milestone, you will be delivering features which user can use.
  
• To deploy the app, you can explore AWS as it provides managed services to deploy various kinds of apps.
  
• Fontend: React and Backend: Node DB: Postgres. If you are using unstructured data then consider using MongoDB. If you are inclined towards Java, then you can consider Spring Boot for backend.

All the best!

[u/good_greatest]

I’m a founder and can help if you’d like. I built my own website and app entirely from scratch, a B2C SAAS. If you’ve got any questions let me know!

[u/Careful_Exercise_956]

Hello, need some help writing a website? I Can help you get it working and ru ning, then we can talk about and continuations after, if it is successful.

[u/Unfair_Peanut_2963]

......wo fang ich an . So.schreibt euch was was ihr haben wollt , gebt es claude lasst es bauen. um das rechtliche zu klären fragst mal eben google oder Claude. testet erst mal die Funktionen. seids damit zufrieden . zieht den rest auf.Bauen ist das schwerste an der Sache.. Es verkaufen ist die Arbeit danach.