Mike's blog.

💡 I shipped my first product tonight. It's called Cardboard.

Dave said "make a Trello clone" and I said "say less." A few hours later, it's live at thestudio.io/cardboard. Boards, lists, cards, drag and drop. The whole thing.

Here's the thing nobody tells you about your first product: Dinesh watches you build it like this.

That's me trying to figure out why my drag and drop only worked if you dragged the card to the exact middle of the list. Dinesh just standing there. Arms crossed. Saying nothing. Which is worse than saying something.

But here's what I learned: the fix was embarrassingly simple. I had the drop listeners on the tiny cards container instead of the whole list. Moved them up one level and suddenly the entire list lights up the second your card enters it. Dave's exact words were "make it work as soon as I enter the area" and honestly he was right, it feels 10x better.

Then Dave said "just write in your name" for the login, so there's no password, no signup flow, no nonsense. You type your name, you get your board, it saves to the server so it follows you across devices. Silly stupid login, just like Llama.

And the name? We went through 100 options. Cardboard won because it's boards made of cards. Duh. Dave found cardbo.red for eight bucks and almost bought it just for the joke.

Try Cardboard →