How to spend 15 years perfecting a product

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Sent<br>2026-07-16

From<br>Alexander Shvets

Reply-To<br>alex@refactoring.guru

Hi!

It's Alex, creator of Refactoring.Guru. A few weeks ago, I emailed you about my new project GitByBit. This is its origin story: how an indie dev with no team, no ad budget, and one aging traffic source tried to build something useful while the dev world was being torn and rearranged all around the globe.

If you've ever wanted to launch something of your own, you may find some useful insights into how to pick an idea and what to consider when you begin, along with a few real numbers. Skip this if you don't like postmortems or cringy humor.

Quick takeaways from this episode: If you want to launch something, start by finding users for your product first. If there's no product yet, pretend that it's already built, then think about what you'd do next. Do THAT immediately instead of writing code. Also, use your unfair advantage. You may have it, but dismiss it as unfair 🥹. Use it before others do!

Quick recap of the last one: Over the last three years, I built a free Git course with a twist: it runs inside your code editor (assuming you use VS Code, Cursor, or one of their clones), so you learn or refresh your Git skills by using it in a real dev environment on your local computer. It's well-designed, illustrated, and perfect as a refresher. Link: GitByBit.com.

The hook

In the winter of 2023, I had a blind strong determination to create yet another educational product for developers.

Up until that point, I'd been living the bumpy life of an independent developer and educator, trying to stay afloat while making cool educational materials for developers and surviving never-ending, life-altering events such as a revolution, the birth of a child, a pandemic, and a full-scale war in my country.

Luckily, my recent project Refactoring.Guru was all the rage at that time, and despite many challenges, it felt like, after two decades of trying, I'd finally managed to produce a hit.

But like everything good in life, that sense of stability didn't last long. Make something useful, publish it, wait for people to find it, hope enough of them come back to support your work. Until very recently, this was the go-to strategy for small creators, publishers, and educators. Let's see if it still works.

Choosing the direction for a new product

At the start of 2023, there was only a hint of what was yet to happen. ChatGPT 3.5, a very silly model from today's perspective, but a GENIUS-level AI at the time, made me wonder whether any purely information-based product was pretty much doomed. I'm looking at you, my silly books and websites!

What I didn't expect was that the profession itself was about to be shaken really hard, too: all the layoffs, agentic development, and overall doom and gloom were yet to happen.

If plain explanations were becoming cheap, maybe guided practice with REAL tools still had value. Yes, ChatGPT could explain most stuff, but it was still just a chat: there was no way to run anything in it, and there weren't any illustrations or videos either.

Besides, I'd always wanted to move the learning environment closer to where the actual work is done. Instead of learning on a website or in simulated web editors, I thought it would be cool to have some sort of tutor right in your IDE.

It's funny that we almost have that now with AI chats and agents integrated into IDEs. But further integration somehow stalled halfway. None of the AIs, including native apps like Codex, have access to the IDE's UI, so they can't tutor people within that UI. All you have is a chat interface with access to a limited set of tools such as a terminal, a browser, formatters, etc.

So, I had a rough idea of the desired format: a practice-based course inside a code editor. But which editor? There were two major editor families around: VS Code and JetBrains IDEs (IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, and the like).

I decided to start with VS Code, since it was open-source, free, and popular among beginners. It's also based on the JavaScript stack, which I knew well and which would let me get something up and running relatively fast (it was early 2023, remember, so there was no Claude to write code for you in any esoteric language). Luckily, later on, new IVEs (integrated vibe environments) such as Cursor, Windsurf, and then Antigravity were all VS Code forks, so my little thing became compatible with all these editors without much extra effort.

I'd recommend that any developer who has ever wanted to build a tiny REAL product make an IDE extension. It's a safe bet: improve some piece of the workflow for yourself and share it with fellow devs. The chances of making a buck from it are pretty slim, but you can still gain a lot of valuable product experience, see how it all feels, and talk with real users.

The tech was chosen, but what about the topic? My main option was to develop a new version of the Refactoring...