I built a whole dashboard because I was drowning in tabs

Last month I had 14 tabs open at once — Threads analytics, TikTok studio, Instagram insights, a Google doc with content ideas, a Notion page I hadn't opened in three weeks, and a notes app on my phone that I kept meaning to "organize later." That was my content system, right. That was the whole thing.

Here's the thing right, when you're posting across four platforms and you're doing it at 11pm after soccer pickup and bedtime and you somehow also have a full-time engineering job, the last thing you have energy for is playing hide and seek with your own data. I'd have a post perform really well on Threads and I genuinely would not remember what I wrote. Like I posted it, it did well, and I had no record of why. That's not a content strategy, that's just throwing stuff at the wall and hoping you remember what landed.

So I built Chispeando HQ. That's what I'm calling it — my personal mission control for content. It scrapes my posts from Threads, TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn using Apify, pulls them into a SQLite database, and gives me an analytics view, a content bank, and a calendar all in one place. I built it with Next.js and Recharts for the charts, and I ran the whole thing local-first so there's no monthly bill sitting there waiting for me.

The hook analysis piece is the part I actually use the most. It categorizes my hooks by type — pain hook, curiosity hook, vulnerability hook and all that — and shows me which ones get the most engagement over time. I can see patterns now. Like I can actually say "okay vulnerability hooks on Thursdays are doing something" instead of just guessing. That was not something I had before.

And here's the real lesson from building this, because it's not just "I made a cool tool." It's that the best product to build first is usually the one that solves your own chaos. Not because it's the easiest — it wasn't, scraping and parsing four different platforms is genuinely annoying — but because you are the most motivated user you will ever have. You know exactly what's missing. You feel the pain every single day. You don't need to do user research, you are the user. Every solo builder I know who actually shipped something they're proud of started by scratching their own itch, como nosotros dicen. You are your own first customer and there's real power in that if you don't sleep on it.

I know the startup world is always like "find the market first, validate the idea, don't build until you've done 50 customer interviews" and look, that advice isn't wrong for a certain kind of company. But for someone building nights and weekends with three kids and a demanding job, the fastest path to a real finished thing is usually: you're annoyed by something, you know exactly what you need, you build it. The clarity that comes from solving your own problem is worth more than any validation framework. And then you figure out if other people have the same problem, which I'm guessing they do because I cannot be the only person running content with a notes app and a prayer.

better-sqlite3 is the library that made this whole thing possible without losing my mind. It's SQLite in Node.js, and here's why I love it — it's synchronous, it's fast, and there's zero setup. No spinning up a database server, no connection strings, no monthly cost. The database is just a file sitting in your project. For a local-first tool like Chispeando HQ that's only me using it, this is exactly right. I'm talking queries that run in microseconds because everything is on disk locally, and the API is clean enough that I was writing real queries within like 20 minutes of installing it.

If you're building any kind of personal tool, a dashboard, a tracker, an analytics thing for yourself, don't reach for Postgres or Supabase first. Start with SQLite. You can always migrate later if you actually need a real server. Start with the thing that gets you to working fastest, right.

If you're building something and you want to see what I'm shipping week to week, come find me on Threads — I'm @yeseniavperez and I post the actual progress, not the highlight reel.

Yesenia M. Perez Lead Backend Engineer. Mom of 3. Building at 11pm.

yessieperez.com | IG @yeseniavperez | TikTok @iamyessieperez | LinkedIn /yessiemalone