I have a problem a lot of indie devs have: too many side projects, and no idea
what to actually do next on any of them. Every project had a mental backlog
a mile long, which meant every project felt overwhelming — so I'd avoid all of them.
So I built BuildNext: a small Flask app with one rule baked into the data model
itself — every project gets exactly one next action. Not a todo list. One thing.
What it does
- Add projects and move them through five stages: Idea → Planning → Building → Testing → Published (or Paused)
- Each project has exactly one "next action" — with an optional due date that flags when it's due today or overdue
- "Mark as done" logs the completed action to that project's history, so I can see momentum over time
- Optional blocker note + GitHub link per project
Stack
Flask + Flask-SQLAlchemy + SQLite, server-rendered Jinja templates, no JS
framework. Deliberately boring — this is a tool, not a demo of a framework.
What's next
Right now it's a personal tool I run locally. No accounts, no cloud — just a
GitHub repo I can point people to. If enough people want to actually use it
rather than just read the code, a real deploy is the obvious next step.
