Wholesome Django 🥰💻 #0017

Happy Sunday!

I have some great news to share this week. The story of SuperLemon which Preetam and I built together got featured on YourStory

We had started SuperLemon with a very simple idea - What if we could build a business that makes us $1000 a month each? 

Living in a country like India where cost of living is low, the implication of this is that we would have the freedom to choose our own work hours, work from anywhere and live a happy life. After all, isn't this what entrepreneurship is meant to achieve?

To reach this goal, we dug deep into the ecommerce ecosystem to find a problem that is not being solved really well today. The problem had to be small enough for us to be able to achieve it with our reduced ambition of making $2000 a month while at the same time it had to be underserved for us to be able to make an impact. 

We also had to keep in mind that it was just the two of us running this business and choosing a complex product would mean straying from our goal. 

All of these constraints lead us to build a product that piggybacked off of WhatsApp to provide a frictionless way for customers to communicate with their sellers. This increased revenue for the sellers and made the customers happy.

After running SuperLemon for 15 months, we realised that our ambition has grown and we wanted to take on bigger challenges which lead us to exit SuperLemon and start DelightChat.

It feels great to have our story published and shared across various social media platforms. It will serve as a reminder to us as to why we started this journey and how far we have come.

What I wrote this week

I enjoyed writing my blog post this week which talks about the age-old problem of concurrency and how it can be managed in Django applications using select_for_update when you run multiple instances of your server.

Here is the tweet version of it if you prefer the TL;DR

Interesting finds from the depths of the internet

How two guys built an open source search engine for 6 years before it started making enough revenue for them to be able to jump into it full time.

Fun fact: Typesense is one of the very essential components that powers DelightChat.

How an engineer at google criticised the company by publishing comics that went viral and then quit!

How quickly can you guess if a number is prime or not?

A great way to quickly learn SQL through a series of interactive lessons

See you next Sunday ✌️