Private contact and relationship manager with client-side encryption

Hello fellow hackers!

Today is the day when I am going public with my side project Contact Cache.

What is it?

It is a contact manager mixed with note taking application. It helps you to remember things like gift ideas, important dates and anniversaries, favourite stories or what is currently going on with people around you. It is a web application, with the intention to make it work on mobile as PWA.

How is Contact Cache different from other contact managers and similar apps?

• ℹ️ Collect more than just contact information
• 📝 Write notes in Markdown attached to specific people
• 🔐 Everything inside the app is client-side encrypted
• 💯 Oriented towards privacy
• 🇪🇺 Data stored in EU

So if you are in the mood, try it out and let me know what you think!

...

Product Hunt

That being said, I submitted Contact Cache to Product Hunt today:
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/contact-cache

I don't have any extensive network where I could promote the app, so let's see what happens.

...

And since we are on IndieHackers, let me share some background information with you!

Getting people to sign up for a newsletter

• I was able to get only 22 signups during the 3 months my first landing page was up. Given the low traffic of ~280 unique pageviews and by removing the people I know from the equation, the conversion rate was 5.71 %. There were also people who signed up, but didn't confirm the subscription.

• I didn't pay for any ads and only posted about Contact Cache to IndieHackers, reddit and mentioned it in some comments. I didn't do any aggressive marketing, so the numbers reflect it.

Getting feedback:

• Everyone who signed up got the opportunity to join the private testing, and people did, but I received only one proper feedback answering the questions I had prepared.

• I recommend talking to your friends in the industry first to get early feedback. Your friends will take much more time to evaluate your work. Talk to someone who is not afraid to tell you their honest opinion.

Building product

• It took me some time to make and market my product. I was first working on it as a side project during my fulltime job and only focused more on it in the couple of last months after I left my job. My first commit is from 4.5.2017! I re-did many things in the app since the beginning.

• I am experienced developer, but still had to learn a LOT to put it together. It was my first SPA that I developed from start to finish and I learned Vue.js from scratch for that. That was actually one of the best tech decisions I made. Vue.js delivered everything I needed & its programming model is simple and addictive.

• I also learned Flask and how to deploy Python applications, how to set up VPS properly with nginx, SSL certificates and everything. I improved my knowledge about some more modern CSS and building web applications today (Webpack etc).

• The main things that I had to figure out were how to synchronize data with conflict resolution for offline support and how to do a bit of cryptography in the browser, since I didn't had the opportunity to do that before for any of the apps. Without this the application would lose its biggest selling points.

• The application is fairly small, around 8000 LOC for both backend and frontend. In programming, it is not about typing, but figuring out what to type :-)

Plans for the future

• I am launching a product that is not finished nor polished, but I want to continue developing it in the open. I think this will help me with motivation and feedback needed to create a great product.

Thanks for reading and have a nice day ❤️

Ask me anything if you have any questions :-)