From Zero to Shipped: How We Built Snippet Hive in 1.5 Months During Buildspace.

There's something about a hard deadline that cuts through every excuse you've ever made for yourself.

Before Buildspace, my co-founder and I were the kind of developers who had a graveyard of half-finished side projects: all brilliantly conceived, none of them shipped. We had opinions about tech stacks. We had strong views on architecture. What we didn't have was anything actually live in the world.

Buildspace changed that. Six weeks. One project. Ship or go home.

This is the story of how we built Snippet Hive from nothing (a blank Figma canvas and a half-baked idea) to a real, live product with a Chrome extension, a VS Code extension, and a community library. In roughly 45 days. While both of us had full-time lives outside of it.

Week Zero: The Idea Napkin.

We came into Buildspace already kicking around the problem. Both of us were deep in AI-assisted coding at the time, using ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, and we kept noticing the same thing: complex, reusable snippets were getting regenerated over and over. Authentication flows, hero sections, boilerplate components. Twenty minutes of back-and-forth with an AI, every single time, for code that was essentially the same.

What if there was a public library for this stuff?

The idea felt obvious once we said it out loud. A community-driven repository where developers could share, rate, and instantly reuse the AI-generated code they'd already spent time refining. Not just copy-paste from a website, actually integrated into your IDE and your AI chat workflows.

We wrote it on a napkin (metaphorically, it was a Notion doc), and walked into Week 1 with that as our north star.

The Stack Decision: Move Fast or Move Right.

One of the first real arguments we had was about the stack.

My co-founder wanted to go with what we knew best. I wanted to try something new. We spent approximately one evening debating this before we both agreed: this was not the time for learning experiments. Buildspace rewards shipping, not tinkering. We picked tools we could move fast with and never looked back.

That decision, boring, familiar tech over shiny new tech, probably saved us two weeks.

We also made a rule early on: if a feature wasn't directly tied to the core value proposition, it went on a "later" list. And "later" was basically never, during a six-week sprint. This was harder than it sounds. We are both, by nature, people who want to build the full, perfect version of a thing. Constraints forced us to be ruthless.

What We Actually Built (And in What Order).

Here's the honest breakdown of how the product came together:

• The Website came first. Before any extension, before any integration, we needed a place for the library to live. A place to browse snippets, build a profile, submit and rate code. This was the core of the product, everything else was designed to feed it or pull from it. Getting this live gave us something real to point at.
• The VS Code Extension came second. This was the piece we were most excited about, and it showed. The idea of being able to find a snippet in the library and drop it directly into your codebase without leaving your editor: that felt like genuine magic. We built a basic version in a weekend and kept iterating on it throughout the programme.
• The Chrome Extension came third. This one was for the AI chat workflow: the ability to find a snippet in the library and inject it directly into a ChatGPT or Claude conversation, so you could use it as a starting point rather than starting from scratch. It was a smaller lift than the VS Code extension but felt surprisingly delightful to use.
• The rating system came last. Quality control was always part of the vision (a community library is only as good as its worst snippets) so we built a basic upvote/downvote mechanism that surfaced the best contributions. Simple, functional, good enough for launch.

The Nights It Almost Fell Apart.

I want to be honest about this, because the "we built a thing in six weeks!" narrative can make it sound cleaner than it was.

There were nights where nothing worked. Where a VS Code API change broke something we'd spent days building. Where we'd ship a fix and introduce two new bugs. Where one of us was exhausted and the other one had to carry the session.

There was one weekend, around week four, where we seriously considered cutting the Chrome extension entirely and just shipping the website and the VS Code integration. We were behind. The extension had a persistent bug we couldn't crack. We were both running low on sleep and patience.

We fixed the bug at around midnight on a Sunday. It was a one-line change.

I think that weekend was when the project became real to us. Not the idea, not the vision, but the actual, grinding, unglamorous work of making a thing function correctly in the real world. There's no shortcut for it. You just have to stay in the room.

Buildspace as a Framework.

If you haven't come across Buildspace, the simplest description is: a programme designed to get people to actually ship creative projects, with accountability, community, and a structure that makes it very hard to stay in the planning phase forever.

For us, the most valuable part wasn't the resources or the curriculum. It was the deadline and the community. Knowing that other people were watching (other builders going through the same grind, cheering each other on in the Discord) made it very difficult to make excuses.

There's a version of Snippet Hive that we could have spent six months "perfecting" before showing it to anyone. Buildspace made that option essentially unavailable. We had to show it, broken edges and all, because the programme ended and the world was waiting.

That forced vulnerability (shipping something before you feel ready) is, I think, the most important thing any builder can learn. You are never ready. Ship anyway.

Launch Day.

We submitted with about twenty minutes to spare.

The product was live. The extensions were published. The website was up. It worked: not perfectly, not completely, but genuinely, functionally worked.

We posted to Product Hunt, shared it in every Slack and Discord we were in, messaged developers we knew, and posted on Reddit. People responded warmly. The "everyone loves it" phenomenon that later became our downside was, in that moment, genuinely exciting.

We had gone from zero to shipped. Whatever came next, that was real.

What the Build Taught Us (Separate from What the Launch Taught Us).

The building phase and the post-launch phase taught us very different things. The post-launch story (the struggle for users, the product validation lessons, the eventual decision to wind down) that's a different essay, which I've already written.

But the build itself left me with a few things I carry forward:

Would I Do It Again?.

Without hesitation.

Not necessarily this product: the validation story didn't end the way we'd hoped, and I've written honestly about that elsewhere. But the experience of going from zero to shipped, of holding something real that didn't exist six weeks before, of seeing users sign up and explore a thing we made, that changes how you think about what's possible.

Before Buildspace, shipping felt enormous and distant. Now it just feels like what happens at the end of a focused sprint.

If you're sitting on an idea, thinking you need more time or more preparation or more confidence, you probably don't. You need a deadline, a co-builder you trust, and six weeks of not letting yourself off the hook.

The rest, honestly, figures itself out.

Building something and want to talk about it? I share the wins and losses of the whole journey, connect with me or drop a comment. Every builder's story is worth telling.