I'm building a community, I'd like Indie Hackers to use it first.
Hello,
I just finished building (beta) Readory as a recently (2 yrs) self taught coder. The goal of the app is to help make finding great written content easier, as well as give more exposure to the content creators behind them.
There are so many great blogs not hosted on medium or news platforms that are hard to find. Even more-so you have great written content such as Quora answers, Ask Producthunt, INDIEHACKER posts, e-books, tutorials, and much more that are underexposed. This is why I've created Readory.
As you can see there is no content shared on the website yet. I could have asked family and friends however I want the community to grow organically and the best place to start I believe is amongst other founders.
Design is on point . 🔥🔥
Cheers!!
@johnnyb0y Solid, solid work!
Great idea and design as well!
Even though I'm no the biggest fan of creating accounts all over the place, I might make one to give it a whirl and put my $0.02.
All the best with the project!
What's the plan for the next couple of months?
Cheers mate!
That would be awesome it's what the website needs at the moment great feedback!
The plan really depends on the feedback I get in the next week or so. But some ideas
Development
I want to implement setting the topics that you enjoy upon registration so you get your own feed based on those topics (not sure about that yet)
Some other improvements aswell
Growth
Hosting interviews with creators who have become successful (thanks IH - Products)
Probably launch on PH in a week or two
https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/readory
After I improve on that feedback I will share on Reddit and HN
If you have any suggestions let me know!!
Will do @johnnyb0y !
Have bookmarked it and will share/create some content on the platform 👍
Hey, I'd just like to say a huge thanks for making this! As a person who has my own small blog and is trying to bootstrap my marketing, it can often be annoying when you see fellow bloggers on Medium who are getting way more views just because they decided to use that platform. I personally like to be in full control of my blog, design, code and content.
I'm really excited about what this will become, it seems like a really awesome idea and I hope it will grow over time. Also, I just have to say that I love the Product Hunt vibe ;)
I've posted a few of my blog posts on there under the name Code The Web - some are mine and some are other people's. Sorry if I'm dominating the article list, I assume that will change as more people post. But seriously, tell me if I'm posting too much ;)
One feature I think you should add is the ability to change or choose your username when you sign up. I signed up with twitter and now my page is at
/users/code-theeven though my Twitter username is CodeTheWebBlog.I look forward to chatting in future about other issues and difficulty content creators and small bloggers face on the internet!
Booligoosh, have you considered having your blog both on your site and Medium? I did this for a couple of articles. You can ask Medium to put a canonical tag on the page.
Man, thanks I really appreciate that!
Not at all keep posting, the goal for the next two weeks is slowly launch beta list etcetera before going on hackernews/reddit/ph so I'm just trying to get as much content as possible organically obviously
I agree with you on the username changing, I will try and add that feature asap. Thanks for the feedback
I'd love to chat with you more about it add me johnny@readory.com or reach out via twitter!
This looks amazing! Good job on launching it :).
I'd be curious about your approach to building it:
how long it took to build (estimated hours) and
if you outsourced anything.
What was it built with, just curious, I know it ultimately doesn't matter.
I love the fact that you have multiple signup options, have you considered allowing email based too (like on IHs)?
Thanks!
A really really rough estimate would be 200ish hrs, I'm not a great coder, I used Ruby on Rails to build the app. Yes I outsourced some parts to a a great developer friend in Serbia, specifically brain-hurting bugs!
I decided against e-mail signup because I want more authenticity similar to producthunt.
I see :).
Everyone here seems to love your design, how did that come about?
I like your domain, it's short, and not too hard to remember.
Thanks for answering.
I just looked at many different websites across the web and tried to keep it as minimal/cool as possible. I'm really glad to hear the positive feedback about it!
Cheers, I tried my best to keep it as short as possible .com's are so hard nowadays...
Nice :)
Sweet dude!! I like the design of it!!
Cheers!
Whenever I see marketplace designs with stretched product photos, it impacts my ability to trust. Not sure why, but it does something to my impression of the team's intentions.
There are a few options to crop and center an image within a container. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11552380/how-to-automatically-crop-and-center-an-image
The easiest one would be adding the property
object-fit:cover;to the.avatar.avatar-lgclass in your theme.csss file.I agree!! I literally just pushed an update now with the change.
Thanks a lot for the tip!!
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Nice. let me check it out
Awesome site. A new bookmark for me
Awesome!
Looks interesting, nice idea to have a place for all my reading needs.
I'll go check it out, let you know what I think!
Thanks! Feel free leave me any suggestions or feedback you have
This looks very professional! Good work my dear Johnny! All the Best!
So I guess the Sign Up button only shows a message with no form? Then I clicked on the Upvote button and got presented with social media sign in options. Why do I have to click the Upvote button twice to save it? Maybe because I'm using the Edge browser? I've noticed a few websites don't work as expected with this one. I went to view my profile and the Upvote I just did isn't showing on that list.
Then I added links to my other profiles on your Edit Profile page but they don't show up on my page. I refreshed and they still didn't pop up, but my tagline is just fine though.
Great concept. Great design. One issue I found is that I can't close the Product Hunt subscription prompt after opening it. You might want to add a 'close' button for it.
This is my second time encounter this kind of idea,
My friend build this: http://yibuio.herokuapp.com/
(target Chinese market)
but he doesn't maintain it anymore, it's difficult to make money.
he want sell the domain(I think is yibu.io or something),
that's why he put this project on Heroku
but anyway, good luck with your project.
hope to see your indie hacker interview in 6 month to 2 year haha
:D
Hi Cheng,
That's really interesting -- I'll try and learn a few things from that! Thanks for sharing
good luck haha~
I hope your site can grow and become something like Hacker News,
people visit it every 1-2 day :D
Hopefully!
Hey this is a great idea! When I hear authors explain why they post on Medium, the answer invariably includes "because I get readers there".
While self-hosting / self-publishing is the right way to go for many reasons, it leaves authors with a very steep hill to climb to get visibility. Taking the ProductHunt model (more or less) to this problem is just what is needed.
Thank-you for making this and I want in :)
Thanks alot Olivier that is the exact problem I am planning to solve. Really appreciate the comment, feel free to reach me at johnny@readory.com
I wanted to sign up with twitter but permission scope is unacceptable for me:
See who you follow, and follow new people.
Update your profile.
Post Tweets for you.
Any particular reasons for that ?
Shocking, my apologies and thanks for pointing that out. Omniauth mistake on my part when asking for extra permissions to get e-mail (twitter doesn't allow that without requesting) I must have not unchecked the other boxes.
This looks like a really good idea actually. You seem to have stumbled upon a pain that's felt by a large number of people. I'm going to be very interested to see how you grow this over the coming months.
I know it's perhaps a dirty word but it's also imperative - what are your plans for monetisation?
I'll submit an article to it now if that's ok?
More than okay!
Monetisation wise, the goal would be to just cover the costs of the app as it expands without bothering people.
The only two things I have thought about for sure
I don't want to do a paywall ever.
It would be reasonable to add sponsored ads (similar to producthunt) on the link comments pages as long as they meet the category expectation...
What do you think?
Whatever you feel comfortable with. I wouldn't ever suggest doing something that's not providing huge value to your audience. But at the same time I would be looking to more than cover costs.
You've built a nice tool here, you deserve to be rewarded.
I'd say your best bet is building a massive audience and then monetising it with something else further down the line. You've basically built a way to foster a huge community without asking people to sign up for a free ebook or any other [fill in the blank] marketing tactics.
I think your right about building a massive audience before monetising it.
I'll give it more thought further down the line for sure! Thanks for the great advice
Great job Johnny, the design is sleek!
Cheers!
Great job, Johnny. I'm loving your design.
This looks like Hacker News or Reddit if it was made in 2018. <3
Cheers!
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Very glad to see it published, good job!
Nicely done Johnny!
One suggestion to increase stickiness/conversion would be to make the banner that explains what Readory does bigger. I landed on the page and felt a little overwhelmed (despite the beautiful design).
Thanks a lot, really appreciate it
Good point, and I think you are definitely right about that i'll look into how I can make it clearer
I'll be interviewing written content creators like David Walsh and many others for a weekly newsletter to grow organic traffic whilst hosting some great content (may have picked that up from IH) let me know if anyone has any other ideas!