Michael Jelly is a founder and software developer focusing on productivity apps. His journey as a builder began after a brief stint in corporate consultancy. Mike seized the opportunity during the pandemic to delve into coding, starting with JavaScript and Free Code Camp.
“While learning to code, it was super frustrating to set up environments. I'd actually set up a Python environment on two different computers and every time found it super painful and later found out, oh, I had the wrong version.”
As a founder, Michael has a knack for identifying bottlenecks in his and others’ productivity and independently developing tools to improve them. MagicFlow emerged from this fascination with personal productivity. Michael initially developed an app to analyze Facebook data, which, while not a commercial success, sparked his interest in data-driven insights. This led to the creation of MagicFlow, a time-tracking app designed to enhance productivity by minimizing context switching and maximizing deep work.
“I think if you can accelerate the productivity of the world's most productive people, then you get better science, you get faster-growing startups, you get faster turnover of good ideas to become better.”
To build MagicFlow, Michael needed a tool to meet his high productivity standards right out of the box. Replit was the answer, enabling Michael to set up a Python environment and web hosting quickly and easily.
On Replit, Michael relies on our templates to spin up projects fast and create a strong foundation for him to build up from. When he needs assistance, he’ll use AI to help generate code and quickly test and run it in a Repl. From there, he can host his work to share with the world.
Michael could share and user-test MagicFlow with his network almost instantly, then iterate and improve on it just as quickly. In only a few days, he even built and launched additional social features, such as a leaderboard to encourage friendly competition among users and expand his user base - even reaching monks in Nepal.
“It feels like you have the idea, you can go on Replit, you can code up the thing, and then bam, it's live with no extra complexity that you need to learn. So if you know how to code at all, you can put that code on Replit and it's a super fast way of getting your ideas out of your head and into the world.”
As MagicFlow has grown in popularity, Michael has been able to single-handedly take it from a prize winner at hackathons to a sustainable business with a monthly profit - what he calls going from “ramen profitable to sushi profitable.”
“Replit simplifies the development workflow for me so much, that I don't need to hire someone else to do DevOps or to write a microservice and maintain it. I was able to just put it out myself really quickly and Replit will make sure that the server doesn't crash, so I don’t have to think about that. It means that as a one-man team, I can do a lot more stuff without the natural entropy of all code and all systems.”
Boost your own productivity with MagicFlow and follow along with Michael’s journey.
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