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xq3000

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Youtube has a bunch of simple and free UX and UI courses.

You might also want to search more specifically for information architecture, designing website navigation, picking a color scheme, basics of web fonts, designing forms, and UX user research.

I guess I could offer a few thoughts here, as I’ve been thinking about this for a while.

You say it’s for personal projects but if you care about marketing then I’m going to guess the projects are serious/ambitious enough.

In that case, as you build them, you’d probably first need to do some “marketing strategy” early on, then naming and branding, then some growth marketing/product design, then see how you would incorporate different types of analytics into the projects, then finally there would be a launch and running some campaigns and using the analytics methodically.

I’d say anything less than that would not really be any kind of methodical marketing. But people do get lucky with word of mouth sometimes.

So, basically, you could probably use a good amount of modern marketing skills.

The internet is, of course, full of options but it’s hard to filter through them.

Based on my watching this space for about 10 years, most of the one-person shops and small teams that do SEO and Wordpress websites will know very little about those things you’d need.

Maybe 1% of medium and large firms out there will work with that stuff in SaaS space but then they would likely be way too expensive for personal projects.

Which leaves you with two options IMHO, 1) to learn that stuff yourself (the path I took), or 2) to find a marketing/product/growth cofounder/advisor/consultant that has experiences in that niche, such as SaaS, for example.

Good luck

By index encoding I just mean putting “encoded” values into the indexed column of your table. Something like this: “city:department:sku”.

This technique is a bit advanced, borrowed from hierarchical databases, and optimizes for specific queries known upfront, so it’s cool but not very flexible. There is a lot more to making it work. You can watch [1], if interested.

But I’d also +1 other suggestions here on fine tuning your db engine and just scaling up the server.

[1] https://youtu.be/jzeKPKpucS0

Disclaimer: I’m with AWS.

I just meant something with a lower level of programming than business apps.

Usually, the frameworks themselves, “servers,” “engines,” and “drivers” would not be easy to generate with the MDA approach. I imagine, apps and games with highly customized UI/UX would not be a good fit either.

MDA is for “boring” business apps where you would want all your screens look the same unified way. That’s where MDA shines, cuts down coding and QA effort, and allows producing massive products with many hundreds of tables and screens.

I personally would make a different suggestion here: 1) set up a new corp as soon as possible to be able to track business expenses right away, issue stock, etc 2) use an S-CORP instead of an LLC. All those additional “processes” people usually mention are really just “good business,” not that difficult to keep up with, and ultimately will only add security especially if you will have cofounders / investors. 3) use ONE corp for all your MVPs, track per-product costs nicely for each of them (Xero does it well), and only maybe spin them off into separate companies if/when they succeed

So, to clarify, it looks like you are already using Google Sheets, which is great.

But the spreadsheet you link to is designed more “visually” and not like a real database. You also don’t seem to be accounting for 1-to-Many and Many-to-Many relationships in the data.

Also, from the way you phrase your question, it sounds like you say “a database” but mean “a database and an app to manage it.”

Am I close?

If that’s the case, I’d suggest to begin with watching a few YouTube videos on “database design” to understand things like “primary keys” and 1-to-Many and Many-to-Many relationships. And then focus on designing just the tables of your database. Possibly, just using Google Sheets and with a little help from an experienced freelance developer.

Once you get the tables right, you can think about the app. A few options there would be Google Sheets, Airtables, Bubble.is, or even using something like MySQL and a custom-built app.

A somewhat different path could be “architecture.”

I went from a software developer to a system architect, and then moved to director and VP but always in “architecture,” which definition could differ from company to company, in parallel to development management.