Hacker Bits, April 2016

Building a startup in 45
minutes per day while
deployed to Iraq
By MATT MAZUR
You may one day find yourself
in a position where
you’re eager to work on
a startup but limited by the
amount of time you can put into
it due to a day job, family or
other obligations. In this post I
would like to share with you all
the story behind Lean Domain
Search, a domain name generator
that I built in about 45 minutes
per day during a 5-month
deployment to the Middle East.
If you’re struggling to find time
to put into your startup, I hope
this convinces you that you can
accomplish a lot over time by
putting a small amount of work
into it each day.
Background
In the summer of 2011 I was a
26-year-old freshly pinned-on
captain in the Air Force serving
as a project manager at
Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts.
I was 4 years into my
5-year service Academy commitment
which meant that I had to
serve one more year to pay back
the Air Force for my education
and training.
At the time I also had two
moderately successful side projects
that I had built on nights
and weekends in the years prior:
Preceden, a web-based timeline
maker, and Lean Designs, a drag
and drop web design tool.
Everything was going
smoothly until my Unit Deployment
Manager called me into his
office one day and informed me
that I had been selected to go
on a six month deployment in
August.
This presented quite a predicament.
As a solo founder, I
didn’t have anyone I could turn
my two projects over to maintain
while I was away. I also had no
idea what the Internet situation
would be like wherever I was
headed, but more importantly I
didn’t want to be distracted by
these projects while I was out
there.
I was contacted by the officer
whose position I was going
to take over when I arrived.
He filled me in on some of the
details and I eventually learned
that there was limited internet
access where I was going to live,
but it was slow, had a firewall,
and I’d probably be moving bases
several weeks after I arrived
anyway. I asked him if he could
check to see if he had access to
sites like Heroku (where my sites
were hosted) and Github and he
confirmed he did, but that still
didn’t guarantee I’d have access
to make changes to my sites,
time to work them, or even
Internet access for the entire
deployment.
I decided to keep the sites
running, but to stop working
on them several weeks prior
to the deployment. That would
provide time for any bugs to
surface, which would allow me
hacker bits
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