3 Mistakes I Made Building My First Web App

At the time I started building my app, I wanted to move fast and just figure things out along the way. Some of that worked. Some of it wasted my time and used up credits and wasted my time. Here are three mistakes that I made.

I wanted my app to write reviews on its own, so I tried a bunch of different tools to make that happen. I tried the Anthropic API, then Gemini, then Perplexity it didn't work well. Tried copilot, same problem. This happened four or five times before I gave up and checked what my own app builder already had built in. Turns out it had exactly what I needed the whole time.

For the front page, I wanted a nice-looking background image. I pulled images from another website, but they kept failing to load. It looked broken half the time. So I switched to just using colors and simple effects built right into the code instead of outside images. It's worked perfectly ever since.

In the beginning, I wanted every part of the app finished right away, all the features, all at once. But I was on a free plan with limited credits, and trying to build everything together meant I kept running low without actually finishing anything. So I slowed down and started building just one thing per day. It felt slower, but I actually finish things now instead of having a bunch of half-done features.

None of these mistakes were huge, but they all taught me the same thing: try the simple option first, and don't rush faster than you can actually keep up with.

If you're building your first website or app, I'd love to know what's one mistake you learned from early on?