Introduce Yourself! (August 2017)

Hello, Indie Hackers! I am Pranav. I am a full stack developer & a designer. I work full time on supportbee.com - it's a help desk software.

I have recently started working on a side project https://getcadet.com/

It's a simple feature request management software for SaaS businesses. My goal for August is to generate some early interest for Cadet, and validate the idea. I'd also like to start building the MVP by the end of the month, given that I'm able to generate enough interest :)

My advice for entrepreneurs who are yet to start, or have already started working is to read Start Small, Stay Small by Rob Walling. It's a great book. In fact, it was the top book recommendation from one one of my earlier posts on Indie Hackers

Thanks!

Hey guys, I'm a long-time lurker of IH so it's great to finally get a bit more active in the discussions...

• I had my own consulting gig until recently, which was 100% bootstrapped, geared at helping SaaS businesses to increase their sales by finding out about their best customers.

• We were 4 in the team working remotely but I burnt out. The financial and pressure was too much.

• During this time I started a podcast... It all started for a rather selfish reason: I wanted to chat with no-nonsense marketers and learn how they were “doing” marketing the right way. Between November 2016 and February 2017 I chatted with 16 marketers and made sure to record every conversations. At the time, I didn’t even have a name for the show...

• It turned out to be a life-changing experience as one of the guest I interviewed, CEO of Hotjar David Darmanin, suggested I should join them as their Content Marketing Strategist, and so I did...

• The podcast, Everyone Hates Marketers, is now 4-month old, with 21 episodes in the bag...

Fellow hackers, you should listen to those 3 episodes (and tell me what you think):

• The exact process Seth Godin uses to launch a new business with $1,000 in the bank and 90 days to spare: https://everyonehatesmarketers.com/seth-godin-marketing-secrets/

• Marketing for developers, how to build software people want: https://everyonehatesmarketers.com/marketing-for-developers/

• Screw best practices, with David Darmanin, CEO of Hotjar: https://everyonehatesmarketers.com/david-darmanin-avoid-marketing-best-practices/

Hey IndieHackers! You must be bored about me by now hehe I'm Joan and I'm working on everydayCheck - a simple and beautiful habit tracker.

Sorry for the holy bible I just wrote below guys...

July was a bit of a weird month for EDC. After having validated the product in the previous months, I decided to go from a pay first approach to a "30-day free trial" with the idea that, since my app is about using it every day, it would hook users up and prove its value during the period. Now that the 30 days have passed I can say IT WORKED! After a 30 day drought (because of the trial), the subscriptions have started rolling back :)

But let me go back to July 1st. My idea back then was, start with the 30 day trial and spend the whole month working on marketing. I knew absolutely nothing about OM. Had never messed with SEO, SEM, Content Marketing, nor any other types of OM. All I had done up to then was, well, share the link here and there. Now that I had something people paid for, I needed to use my brain. So I started reading about page speed, seo, backlinks, keyword research and all this stuff that most of you hackers around here would like not to hear about. Yep, we have to go along with it or noone will ever learn about the great things we build. Even though I have learnt a hell of a lot I feel very stagnant in this matter. SEO is something veeeeery slow, and for people like us, used to deliver, it's a little bit frustrating. I'm happy thought that I am starting to demistify it.

Even though my approach was to look for the long term, instead of the short term ephemeral traffic, something funny happened in late June/early July. I had sent my app to Show HN a few times in the last months and mostly getting ignored. And ProductHunt had brought me 8 super upvotes when I first featured EDC there back in May. In early July, I saw an opportunity and took my chances. #1 on HackerNews there was an app called "HackerHunt" a mix of HN and PH whose main goal was to give more visibility to Show HN. I couldn't help it, and showed my app once more on HN. Then the magic happened. everydayCheck ranked 3rd for the launch day of HH (HackerHunt) where HH itself was #1. Since HH was #1 on HN, a lot of people visited HH and saw EDC in the #3 position this bringing in a lot of traffic. Somewhat around 100 signups. It felt great. But the big deal was still to come. I went to sleep as happy as a kid with an ice-cream.

When I woke up, the first thing I did was to think "well I figure the app has already fallen from the first page" and I'm back to the cave. But to my surprise, not only the traffic hadn't gone down, but it was like 5 times bigger. I was like WTF is going on. Well, what happened is that since HH had been #1 on PH too, my app got some traction and got featured again on PH on the next day, bringing about 10k visits and more than 600 signups :OOO It was #6 product of the day, damn! Also, because several blogs from spain, japan (<3), russia, etc featured the app, I kept on getting traffic from them in the following days getting about 100 signups more... And since all of that happened about 30 days ago and I have a 30 day free trial... well, guess who is spamming f5 on Stripe :D (nah a lot to be done yet, but you get what I mean!)

So, I basically rode HackerHunts' wave.

This is obviously great, but I'm not happy with July because I didn't accomplish my goals. Food for today is hunger for tomorrow...

So, what's next? Keep improving the app but especially focusing on improving anything that brings quality traffic to the site. Every 250 visits pay for my lunch right now!

@channingallen asks us to share resources, I'll just share awesome-indie again, in hopes some of you guys discover it and make some quality pull requests :-)

happy hacking!

Hi All, I am Jinal(AR/AI Tech Lead@Google, https://www.linkedin.com/in/jinal-dalal) but on the side, I am working on Machine Learning from Scratch for Product Managers. At Google and in bay area, I have noticed instances where non-programmers want to learn quickly about Machine Learning but have a limited idea on where to start.

Signup if you are interested in learning about ML, no coding required. For first 20 users, I plan to provide free access for a limited time($99 afterwards).

Add to the waiting list, last 3 spots left: http://mlfountain.com

Here is the overview of the curriculum. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S45iOmOc4B4UYMTccdjPityNNxRJm59mKOLYAZDzPEo/edit#

I'm Kyle, I have been visiting IH for about 3 months now and enjoy every second of it. I am continually blown away by all of the feedback and open conversation on this forum.

I am currently writing an ebook that walks through practical examples of leveraging Amazon Web Services to solve problems. My target market is those who are hungry to learn AWS, but find the sea of information about it to overwhelming.

Since last month I began doing more technical blog posts about AWS in order to hone in on my writing style for the book. I have reached out to a couple publications to feature my posts so that I can build a consistent following. Lastly, I took the advice from IH and hired myself a technical editor to review my writing on a consistent basis (awesome idea!).

My biggest goal for the month of August is to get a rough draft or at least a large portion of a rough draft under my belt. Up there with that goal is to get a landing page launched for pre-orders.

A tip I have learned from IH and will pass down is that if you are looking to truly market yourself and/or your product, write everyday. It is easy to get sucked down the drain of reading post after post about how to get something off the ground. These are great things to read, but you need to be applying it back to your goals.

Hello,

I didn't have the chance to talk about the little projects I'm doing, so here I go.

Let's start with PagesColorées (http://pagescolorees.info):

I was in a trip in North Africa a few months ago. I needed to contact by phone the airline company but the Internet was very slow and the data plan on my mobile phone was limited. When I checked their website, they swallowed every byte remaining in my data plan because of their non-optimized, non-data-friendly* website. So I wanted to build a directory (Yellow Pages) of "usefull" phonenumbers/email/ect. in a data-first way. PagesColorées was born a few weeks ago. There is not a lot of contact right now, but I will try to add them in a few days. I will probably move this project to a GitHub repo if people want to add more contacts.

*We do have responsive websites (mobile first), but we also need to think about those countries where they are limited either by speed or by data and need to build our projects/products data first.

frmfrm (https://frmfrm.cc):

I am not new in the game with this project, but I just wanted to build a form backend as a service for me. And this project was in my list of projects since years (as the majority of my other projects to come).

SnapScreen (https://snapscreen.me):

This is a website screenshot taker. Not working for now because I am rebuilding it.

YouTube Comment (https://snapscreen.me/youtube):

Many youtubers embed comments in their videos to answer people's questions and they "manually" screenshot and crop these comments. So I wanted to automate this part of their work.

Watchable Quotes (https://gamwe6.github.io/watchable-quotes):

A collection of quotes that you can watch/listen to. Same here not a lot of videos right now, but I am hoping to add more in the near future.

52 minus the above 5 projects = Goddam 47 projects remaining.

More to come this week, so stay tuned. https://twitter.com/gamwe6

Bye.

Hi IH

I'm Rory. 16 years in tech, consultancy, agile etc.

This year I decided to "man up" and do something for myself. So I founded my own little side gig, side hustle (or possibly startup).

It's called CTX ( https://getctx.io ) and it's a search product.

It's SaaS - just integrate it with your Trello, Slack, Google Drive etc (securely - OAuth etc) and then you can search over everything from one simple page.

It's like a less corporate, more immediate version of Enterprise Search, designed for startups, agencies, software companies and other small outfits.

I've been working on it since January and it's in limited private beta with some friendly companies I know. Looking to widen that out over the next few weeks and do a full launch of the paid version in Q3 '17.

Wish me luck :-)

Mainly lurk around here but my latest project was directly inspired by this article by Courtland where he talks about how he came up with Indie Hackers:

https://www.indiehackers.com/blog/how-to-come-up-with-a-business-idea

And this video by Pieter Levels:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3nb_Qj3mRA

My latest project is a web app that rounds up your spare change into Ethereum:

https://coinflashapp.com

Early access code is beta if you guys want to try it out.

Hey I'm Brian. I've missed the recent Introduce Yourself posts, but I'm still working on my project: https://theymadethat.com Theymadethat shows you the people behind stuff (whether they created it, improved it, or just maintained it) which can be anything: a product (software, cars, clothes, ...), breakthrough technology, a concept, laws, and so on. In short it's an IMDB for everything and not just movies, giving people credit for their work.

My current top priorities are:

• making an effort to show theymadethat to more people for feedback

• writing grant applications

• fixing obvious bugs

• fixing UX issues

• taking care of bureaucratic stuff

Hey there!

My name is Sasha, I'm a software engineer with a decade of production experience. I'm a serial open source contributor (https://date-fns.org/ is my the most successful library so far) but yet, I didn't have a chance to ship my own products. Recently I left my day job to pursue this dream.

Currently, I'm working on a new version of date-fns, a VR arcade venue (currently I'm stuck in paper-visa-work) and Chirr App (https://getchirrapp.com/), an app that makes it easy to plan and post Twitter threads.

My plan for August is to:

• Finally, release date-fns v2 (I'm working on the release for 8 months already).

• Apply for a long-term visa to Czech Republic where I'm building the arcade (and then wait for 90 days for the response 😑).

• Validate the idea of Chirr App and get my product hunted for the first time.

I'm Alex. I've been around here intermittently. o/

Currently working on Penmob, which launched less than a week ago. My goal for August is to have a steady stream of new writing getting posted for editing. Sub-goals are refining the messaging to appeal to the right kind of writers (which I've been getting some awesome tips for), improving the software infrastructure, and releasing the first big update in functionality to accommodate more curated editing sessions.

Piece of advice that's 100% directed at myself: manage your tasks and time schedule in one place (e.g. a Google calendar) rather than 5+ places (e.g. todo lists in evernote, a text document on my computer, another place that I have to scroll to on that same text document, emails sent to myself, sticky notes stuck in my wallet so that they're too annoying not to read, et cetera). My goodness.

Hi, I am Tyson.

I am working on

https://bestfoodnearme.com

a site that allows you to find and share amazing food dishes you have tried at restaurants.

My biggest goal for August is to get one or two thousand dishes I am currating, loaded into the site.

I am still trying to find a proper audience for the site. Deciding what to eat when eating out is still a challenge in some parts of the world.

Hey Indie Hackers,

I'm Régis. I've been following this website for a long time, and I now dare to post something here.

Early June this year, I posted a link on Hacker News at 9am about my small project. Without real hope. 2 hours later, it was number #1 for two days in a row. The link was about my side project, Monica.

Monica is an open source Personal Relationship Management (PRM) system. It's like a CRM, but it's there to organize the relationships with people you care about. The code is on GitHub and the repository has something like 3400 stars and hundreds of pull requests already.

Since June the project has gained around 9000 users on the hosted version. The docker image has been pulled 4000+ times and 44 times on Heroku. I have 17 supporters on Patreon and 1 paid user in the app. But there is absolutely no incentive to have a paid account now, because there are no premium features. It's mainly to see if people would pay for it.

My biggest goal for August is to put features behind a paywall and see how it goes. Current users won't be affected by this, only the new ones. I have a full time job and doing this on the side is really hard - the only way for me to be able to work full time on the project one day is to make some money with it as soon as I can.

Apart from that, here are some advices for apprentice hackers like me:

• I've been obsessing over the design way too much in the past for other side projects. Monica is the first "ugly" project I've done, and the first one that gets real traction. Don't spend too much time on your design, people don't care.

• Don't overengineere your code. It's so easy to do, and you'll suffer so much later.

See you all :-D

Hi everyone,

My name is Jesper, I'm from San Francisco and currently taking a break between jobs (previously Zendesk) - focusing on myself and coding for fun on the side a little bit, before deciding on where to go next. I've been spending the majority of my time playing with Elixir and Phoenix - and because I wanted to get better at that, I launched https://www.formbackend.com a couple of months ago. I have no experience with marketing or driving traffic - so because of that it isn't going that well (+ the market is pretty saturated, and there are a lot of similar services out there). I posted Formbackend on a "Show HN" post, but never promoted it on Product Hunt as I was embarrassed having launched yet another form-backend-service :/

Right now I'm working on the last few features before opening up the beta for a blogging platform aimed at developers named Tabs & Spaces (https://www.tabsandspaces.io). Tabs & Spaces is currently powering my own blog https://blog.jespr.com

I really dig this community and it's fun to see peoples idea turn successful :) I hope I can get better at marketing and how to drive traffic to my sites - so maybe I can be successful with my own projects some day :)

Cheers!

Hi all,

Long time reader, first time poster :)

I'm working on https://www.pulseproduct.com - a website auditor.

Yes, there are dozens of website auditors already available, but I am hoping to make mine standout in a few ways.

1. It will be affordable to small businesses, and individuals. My competitors all charge upwards of USD$50p/m and sometimes their base plans are USD$99pm. This is way too much for bloggers or small businesses who turnover just a few thousand dollars each month.

2. Mine will be automated. Currently I can sign up for my site auditor, and have it automatically review my website each night at midnight. It will tell me what new content or changes I made during the previous day needs tweaking or fixing to follow best practice. It knows what timezone you are in, and checks your site while you sleep.

3. Pulse Auditor is intuitive. There are not pages and pages of information crammed all over the show. It simply tells you what needs fixing, why it needs fixing, and how to fix it. It doesn't do one page at a time, each crawl covers your entire website.

There are other features I am working on too which appeal a bit more to bigger businesses. Eg) crawling multiple websites, assigning tasks to others in your team, CSV exports etc.

My goal for August to to complete the front end of the website. I've nearly completed the tool itself, now I just need to prepare for launch.

Regards,

Matt

Howdy, I'm Mike.

The 54 tabs I have open have to do with my startup https://lanes.io but dipped in here for some "constructive" procrastination and saw this thread.

So, goals for August:

• I've relaunched lanes.io with some neat features—article highlighting & video annotations—that add a lot of value to one of my largest user segments (students & bloggers) and that lend themselves to sharing (I think (and hope!)).

Do my users agree? Tune in to September's "Introduce yourself" thread!

Advice-wise:

• For the love of Ja, build a feedback loop to keep you motivated. For me it's Intercom and Google Analytics. We're heading into the weekend (long weekend here) and seeing people using Lanes live is the juice that will see me through while swiping away offers to hang with mates.

The best kind of motivation is seeing new customers, though! So for those who use Stripe, check out my extension: https://dosh.fr/ - it notifies you in Chrome whenever you get a payment. Seeing that popup a few times a day feels good.

Best of luck, everyone!

Hi IH, my name's Justin. I'm currently working on my side-project Flashfed.com - a flash sale aggregator powered by machine learning, and looking for a little feedback.

My goal for August is to publish my webview android app, as well as make at least a single conversion through my site.

Built with Azure ML, Huginn and Wordpress, which is using the pluginhunt theme made by Mike at epic themes.

I'm using Huginn to scrape/format data and send post requests to an Azure ML web service, which is outputs as RSS. Wordpress consumes the RSS feed, which is displayed with the pluginhunt theme. Hosted on Azure via BizSpark.

Let me know what you guys think!

Hi,

At one time, my dream was to be richer than Bill Gates. Now I just want a lifestyle business.

This is new account because I have changed a lot in last few months. My previous posts don't apply to me anymore and I had promised far too much.

The biggest reason for change is that I am going to be father. I really don't care for money anymore. Well as long as, I can support my family and save for retirement.

Before I thought I had plenty of time after work, now I think I don't have any free time. We are due next year but I have finally started paying attention when people talk about their kids. And from what it sounds like, once you are parent, you have no time for anything but kids.

So I am really focused on lifestyle business.

Instead of building whole app by myself, I am outsourcing as much as possible. This means I am more vested in the app because I am spending money, not just time on it. The programmer I hired is far better than me. And I don't slack anymore as he needs my code or he will be delayed.

Also with extra free time, I am learning about marketing because this is first time I think I will release a product.

Anyways, I hope to continue to learn from all of you and I hope I can contribute a bit back.

:)

I'm sorry for how long this is. I started typing and didn't realize how long it was until I stopped.

Hi everyone. I'm Rob. 26, I've been working as a devops engineer for the past two years and I was a standard SWE for a year before that. I'm very interested in starting a small lifestyle business. At this point I'm really just looking to connect with people. I guess ideally I'm looking for some kind of mentor I can learn from. Anyway, I figure I'll use this post to share a bit about myself.

When I graduated college, I was motivated and excited to enter the workforce as a software engineer. I felt like I was going to invent the next big thing or change the world. Here I am three years later. I feel burnt out, jaded, and stuck in a rut. Things have been getting so bad, I even started looking to alternate careers like designing board games or playing poker to sustain a living. I'm not sure what happened over the past three years and I'm still trying to figure it out.

Every year I can feel myself becoming a little more burnt out with my career and I don't know why. When I was in college, I loved working on projects and studying. I graduated with a high GPA (hope this doesn't look like bragging, just giving some background) and thought this meant I was ready for the workforce. I couldn't have been more wrong.

I loved college because I had assignments and studying to do, but I could do them on my own time. The faster I got them done, the more free time I had. For this reason, as soon as I got an assignment, I went to the library and hit the books. I'd work hard for hours straight until I was done. Then I'd have the rest of the day to relax and pursue other passions. I was also very results-oriented in college. My motivation to study hard was because I wanted the accomplished feeling of getting an A on the test and knowing the hard work paid off.

When I got my first job out of college, I still had the drive to work hard. When I was put on a project, I worked very hard and finished it quickly. I did this for every project I was on. I got a lot of praise from my boss but I started to feel like he didn't know what to do with me. I think he just didn't have enough work for me to keep me busy all the time. So at this point I had a lot of downtime at work. I would try to find stuff to do like organize my emails or fix up documentation. But it was getting more and more difficult to fill all eight hours in a day. I started to feel very bored at work. It really bothered me that even though I finished my projects, I still had to sit there and act busy at my desk. Acting busy at my desk was probably the part of my job that I dreaded most. In an eight hour day, I was most productive for only two or three hours. But I still had to sit there and do nothing for the other five hours. I've also never sat so much in my life. I was actually getting weird back problems because I probably didn't have correct posture. Spending time at my desk got easier as time went on but it was hard to adjust.

Because of all the downtime at work, when I was put on a project I didn't have incentive to finish it quickly. I knew if I finished quickly, it just meant I would have to do nothing at my desk until the next project came. So I would work slowly until I was given enough work to last for a while. I found I was working just slow enough so I would never be finished a project and waiting on the next one.

I switched jobs to a startup which helped. The startup made me excited about work again. However, a year ago it got acquired by a big company and I've found myself falling back into the rut I was in with my old job.

I read the Four Hour Work Week which introduced me to the idea of a lifestyle business. I like the idea of this because I think it's more like college which I enjoy. I can work on my own time and I never have to act busy at my desk to fill eight hours if I don't have to. In a lifestyle business, I actually have an incentive to work hard because I own the outcome of my work and reap the benefits of it. On the other hand, if I do well on a project for a company, I don't see any benefit from it and it just means I have nothing to work on since the project is finished. I don't really care about having money either. I'd be okay with making half of what I make now if it means I can work my own hours and have more free time.

I just joined this site today after reading https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/arkservers-io and feeling very inspired by it. I'm an operations / devops engineer so a web hosting business suits me well. I also love the idea of starting a one person lifestyle business and working for myself.

I'm thinking my next move is to dedicate myself full-time to starting a lifestyle business. I have enough savings to dedicate myself to this for a couple months before I would need to find work again. I've tried to work on business ideas after work and on the weekends, but I find myself burnt out very quickly. I think trying to start a business full-time is my best shot at actually making progress on it.

There's one problem: I'm a total noob at business. I've read the recommended books on startup theory (Lean Startup and Four Hour Work Week), but I know nothing about the hard skills like what paperwork I need to fill out, how to handle payments and taxes, legal issues, etc. My plan right now is to just start and learn as I go, but I'd love to learn about this side of running a business.

Has anyone been in my shoes at one point? I'm really just looking to learn from all the smart people on here. Feel free to add me on gmail rpsutton2@gmail.com . Sorry for how long this is, but thanks for your time!

Hello y'all 👋🏻 This is Ugur (Uuu) am a product designer who loves side projects, coffee ☕️ and ice cream 🍨 I turned my previous side project 6-figures profitable in less than 6 months 🎊

Nowadays, besides helping Layer build a conversation design system, I focus on a main and a side project:

1. Invoice.to - A simple and elegant invoicing tool for freelance designers to send beautiful invoices and get paid via Stripe

2. Pagespeed.Ninja - A plugin (currently Wordpress only) that boosts Google PageSpeed insights score for better speed and SEO

My biggest goal for August is to finalize Bank (ACH) and Bitcoin payments, add scheduled/recurring invoices, implement new UI designs and interview at least 10 users for invoice.to

Tip: Make people your first priority and focus on them, instead of news, trends, advice and all and be persistent.

Here's one of my favorite articles that never gets old: Do Something

Hey Indie Hackers! My name is Carmen and I'm still a wantepreneur. I'm fascinated by online businesses and spend my days reading entrepeneurial blogs and listening to podcasts. I know if I keep doing that I'll never have my online business, so I need to take action NOW!

I tend to have plenty of ideas but don't know how to code or have any friends who does, so I started learning HTML, CSS and Javascript with an Udemy Course (The Web Developer Bootcamp by Colt Steele- currently at 42%) and www.freecodecamp.com (curr. at 246). My goal for this month is to go through those resources as fast as possible.

My ultimate goal is to be able to build something myself or start an online business with someone else. I already tried things like dropshipping and niche sites, but I'd prefer to do something that really give value to users, like all of the projects shown here at IH.

Long time lurker, first time poster. I'm Dan, I've been indie hacking since 2009 and went full time in 2010.

My main source of income is bliss (https://www.blisshq.com) which is downloadable software or organize music collections.

bliss grew well for three years, then plateaued, then began to shrink. In 2016 I shook things up with the encouragement of my Mastermind group, introducing a subscription model for software updates and also redesigned both the marketing web site and the app itself. This had a big effect, and sales increased about 2/3 from there.

I also run a SaaS API for music metadata: http://onemusicapi.com which is slowly growing and provides some diversification.

Hi my name is Zack

I'm working on https://codefor.cash

My biggest goal for this monthly reporting period has been to find a predictable pipeline for scalably finding consulting clients.

I am working a bunch of different angles and trying many different tactics including:

• printing out copies of this case study and leaving them around the flatiron in manhattan https://codefor.cash/case-study-workreduce

• hiring someone to write blog articles that can serve as content for social media.. my only question is can he participate in the communities where the content would thrive and post them

Strategically I have an initiative to scalably build software services with smaller upfront payments and payments over time based on actual usage. We have a lot of developers who want to make a subsistence income and then get paid a lot of their code is used a lot. So it should meet the needs of the developers, while for the client, enabling development that wouldn't otherwise be financially feasible. Totally experimental... have added about $60 in MRR this month from the initiative, though

I also made a list of my most lucrative clients and to me it's clear that my best resources are CEOs, Founders, CTOs, or Presidents. i.e. someone who has held one of these titles more than once is a good heuristic for a potential client. Startups are especially hot but really I'd take anybody. I would like to buy a list of data so I can throw out the bad leads with neverbox and start mailing/calling/phoning.. persistently

Best investment I made was paying someone $600 to convert the landing page of https://codefor.cash/delegate to mobile friendly and use html5 instead of a GIF; it reduced page load time by half. #seekingstripeleveldesign

Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm currently working on https://keepinstock.com/ which is a SaaS for small businesses to help them keep track of their inventory and their customers.

I had to pivot from a mobile app to a web app (literally have never made a web app or worked with JS until last weekend lol) due to how payments for such things work, and I'm glad I did. A web app seems like a much better idea.

My goal for August is to find a paying customer (or even a free one lol). I'm not sure how to attack the problem -- I thought I was going to go for Reddit, but I rather not look like a spammer.

I've been hanging around this website reading and learning for probably 7 months and I finally have executed on something.

P.S. if you check out my website, please critique it. I am not so good with web design and any ideas are appreciated.

Hello!

I'm Nicki. In my day job, I consult with large companies on product design for digital tools and user research.

Currently I'm teaching myself Javascript by building a driving game based on my favorite Volvo (https://edamamegreen.github.io/roadgame/).

I've joined IndieHackers because I'm building an offline desktop personal finance app that I'd like to turn into a business. An early version is working (using it myself) and I'm getting ready to show it to some folks. That's my big goal for August - show it to 5 people.

As for advice, I recommend writing as a tool for problem solving and design. Write about what you want to accomplish and how you're going to do it. I know my first ideas are rarely my best so before building them, I write first to test them out. It's saved me lots of time and resources.

Excited to learn from the community!

Hey Indie Hackers,

I'm Silvio from Italy, former front-end dev now switching to UX/CRO.

Last month I launched Remoteur, a free bi-weekly newsletter of remote jobs in Europe featured on Product Hunt.

My 1st goal is to grow the subscriber base (762 right now, with 3-4 new emails per day), ultimate goal is to make it profitable. Suggestions are more than welcome :)

It's great to be here!

Hello, I'm Leandro. I recently signed up to Indie Hackers and really love this community, after reading through some of the threads and interviews.

My brother and I are currently working on UNUBO.com, a simple dashboard that helps you manage your cloud apps including cost, users and reports.

There's a video on our site so feel free to check it out!

We're currently in pre-launch phase about 2 months away from launch. We had previously been in beta and are now re-developing everything from back-end to front.

I am spending most of my time speaking to businesses, to form connections and really understand who will be using our product and how we can help. That is pretty much my goal for August - speak to as many businesses as possible and spread the word. Hopefully we can gather some valuable, early feedback.

I'm currently coming up with how to price our product and these articles helped me tons with that:

1. Why we never sold Basecamp by the seat - https://m.signalvnoise.com/why-we-never-sold-basecamp-by-the-seat-4482f3e6a195

2. Ghost interview here at IH - https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/ghost

Cheers

Hi I'm Doğan. I'm currently work for a company 8/7 and 6 days in a week. Developing opensource software was my biggest goal but I dont have time anymore. I'm using python, ruby, php and go for development. Also looking for some side projects to quit my daily job.

Hi Hackers! I'm Daveyon. I go by the names Sylar or SylarRuby on most to all websites. As most of you will know, the name Sylar comes from the NBC's movie series, Heroes.

I have a Masters in Electronics but my choice of career path is in web development. I work for a small web development UK agency building websites in php and javascript.

I want to start with my own company/business building web apps for small businesses. My first iPhone app (not released) https://ottitia-web.firebaseapp.com/ used to calculate uk taxes and expenses for the self-employed. The plan was to submit their taxes to HMRC with just one click but....I got lazy!! Before the iPhone app, I made my first overly complex web app with Rails and React: http://ottitia.herokuapp.com/ (slow loading) Notice the same names? LOL! More about me here: http://www.mayneweb.com/about Best place to reach me is on twitter! Peace! BTW, I L.O.V.E the podcasts.

Hi All,

My name's Jonathon. I've been snooping around IH for a few weeks now, being inspired by everybody's stories. It's a really cool place for people like us...

• I'm an engineer and product designer.

• I've worked in a number of early-stage startups in the past few years, sweated for equity and experienced first-hand the ups and downs of founding a company.

• I got a taste for travel and I want the option to do it more often.

• I want to start a side business and eventually turn it into my primary source of income and enjoy the freedoms of working for oneself.

My project that I am working on is taking a more human-level approach to user analytics. Drawing hypothesis about why the user is engaging in the product in such a way, rather than how they are engaging; the why comes first, it drives the action. Knowing how many times a button was clicked is relatively useless in the grand scheme of things.

I've been tinkering with the finer details of how I am going to build this and figuring out how to build the MVP in as little time as possible. I aim to get a landing page up in the next few days for some validation. I'll post the landing page here to get your feedback - (please - GIVE ME FEEDBACK).

I have a few goals for this month:

• Validate my insight and test my solution by: talking to some people, creating a landing page, and potentially signing up a customer. I definitely have some people in my network that would be willing to trial.

• ☑️ Introduce myself on IndieHackers - I never get involved online because I am introverted AF but I really want to change that.

• ☑️ Stop reading, stop procrastinating, stop thinking and start doing!!.

I recently finished reading Deep Work by Cal Newport, great read, lots of good practical advice about immersing yourself in your work and creating a productive environment.

I also just read Quiet, by Susan Cain. It was a really nice follow-on from Deep Work as it talks about the Introvert and how Introverts can thrive in the workplace.

I'm wondering if any of you can relate: It's been a great struggle to get started, get motivated and settle on an idea. I've read and listened to everything on IH, read numerous books, troll HN, etc... I've heard all of the advice and been inspired by all of it, but putting it into practice is a completely different ball game. I have been self-diagnosed with a severe case of Analysis Paralysis.

If you wish to check out my work, this is my day job: https://www.confeti.com.au

Thanks for having me IH, I will see you around. :)

Hi all! My name's Nick, and I'm a creative technologist and prototyper. I enjoy working with sensors, circuits, machine learning tools, and apps.

I'm working on finishing up a new mobile app, and hope to have it done by the end of the month.

Hi to all 👋🏻 I'm Mark(us) and very new here, like 10 minutes new. I'm self-taught front and back-end developer who can also do some design, UI and UX stuff.

I live in Finland and currently work full-time in local interwebs company, building stuff for clients. I'm also side hustler; I like to call myself private side hustler, private because I build stuff and even write blog articles, but never publish them. sidehustlestack.com is an exception, that's my little project that I have built from ground up. To there I gather all the useful apps and resources that I find and test. Also, it acts testing ground for SEO, marketing, and other various dev projects.

I'm now trying to educate myself to be better on keyword research and advanced SEO. So, therefore, I would like to recommend https://kwfinder.com — great tool for keyword research.

Next thing for me is to get familiar with ChatBots, and for that, I would recommend chatfuel.com

Hi all! I am a developer in NYC, a graduate student at Cornell Tech, and aspiring entrepreneur to develop great products and services in the AR/VR industry. Would love to meet up with anyone in NYC to chat.

Currently I am a full-stack developer, but I am diving heavily into iOS and ARKit to start content marketing Augmented Reality experiences. Still thinking what would be a good way to develop my presence in the VR/AR community.

Follow me on twitter at @andrewmendez19 !

Hey there IndieHackers!

I'm Ross and run a small modern honey company on the side - bestfriendshoney.com. I'm working on a few other honey/bee side projects that are more tech oriented but I'm excited to be a part of the community here.

My day job is over at simplecontacts.com running their Patient Experience Team.

Looking forward to meeting and chatting with everyone.

Hi! I've been a 'skimming' lurker for about a year now. I'm a mechanical engineer turned software developer. I've been failing at things for about 10 years now. Here is a super brief list of some of the things I've been apart of: https://kyleparisi.com.

My favorite project may have been a wood fired grill. It was super challenging and grueling. Rife with set backs and too short a deadline. My partner and I finished it just in time with the last 2ish days being 18 hours of work and 24+ hours of straight work to deliver the product (would never do again haha).

Now I work at an education start up that has massively ambitious goals. Our current product 'feature' is an in house chat system. This will be launched in the next few weeks. I am feeling a bit burned out from it, but it was very educational and interesting.

On the side I try to make micro projects as that is all I have time for. My current pet project is a utility to convert xml files to either csv or tsv formats (which are more standard for data processing). They can be found via xmltocsv.com, xmltotsv.com (still a work in progess).

My goal this month is to launch that chat feature and chill. I am rereading a book called 'Perennial Seller'. It's very good. I would recommend this book to anyone who needs some motivation in thinking bigger.

Hey all, my name is John and I'm the founder of https://restaupreneur.com . If you've ever wondered what it would be like to apply indiehackers interviews to food, this is it. I was previously working at a fintech startup and decided that I wanted to work for myself. Nice to meet you all.

www.TagProspect.com enters its second month, still no paying customers and most trials are from people I know personally. Some great feedback which we've implemented quickly. Thanks to this community!

Hi guys, I'm Jeffrey Manu;

I'm originally from Ghana but I live in the Bay Area now. I literally moved here with no job, no contacts and no accommodation with my wife in tow(bless her heart). I'd never even been to California (I'll share my full story of failures and successes in an article soon.)

I'm also the creator of GrowingStartup.com app-a growth marketing planner that helps early stage founders get their first 1000 users. (Fun fact: I launched one of Africa's first IOS apps way back in 2009 and I didn't even own an Iphone.)

I'm the founder of ManuEquity.com; a growth advisory firm that sets up marketing and sales sequences for ambitious entrepreneurs who want to turn ads into profits and attract a steady flow of paying customers.

I wrote a book called The Dominant Force. If you want to rise to the top of your field while doing what you love and be able to charge whatever you want, you should check it out on Amazon.

Currently aside from my consulting business and the Growing Startup app, I'm working on an interactive app that helps founders with customer acquisition even if they don't have a growth team. If you want to know more just email me jeff@growingstartup.com

Nice meeting you guys.

Hello fellow Indie Hackers,

I have been listening to the podcast since the beginning, and reading every interview on the site.

My side project ( www.contempus.be ), a service that helps retailers compare their prices with those of their competitors, has been very quiet. Until a week ago there was no public website at all.

I have had once customer for the last 14 months that is happy with the service. That made me decide that what I built is probably valuable for others as well, and a few months ago I started working on a better design, better application and plan to get more customers.

My goals for August are :

☑ Get a public landing page

☐ Do a successfull sales call and do a live demo

I'm confident I'll reach those goals, although the thought of cold calling makes me very very nervous.

I'd appreciate feedback on the landing page (contempus.be) and thanks everyone for this community.

Hi I´m vitomd, a Software Engineer specialized in web development. I mostly work with Ruby on Rails, Javascript and Riot.js

Reading this site inspired me to create my side project based on books. It´s called http://arandomquote.com It´s a site to discover or learn about nonfiction books. You can find great books summarized in 5 quotes (or less) so you can get the main idea fast.

For example you can read this big list of business quotes from bestselling business books http://arandomquote.com/categories/business/

My goal for August is to add amazon affiliate, promote the site, improve organic search.

My question for you is should I add a mailing list? What would you like to get? weekly random quotes from books? recommended books?

Hi I'm Tony, working on a few projects. Thanks to everyone here sharing their stories its been a huge motivation for me to read about everyone's experiences. I haven't seen much success yet personally but I hope I can contribute something.

The first is a saas for running an internet radio station.

https://streampusher.com

I have a few customers in beta (at a discount) and I'm using it to run my own radio station datafruits.fm.

http://datafruits.fm

I am developing new features for Streampusher, but I really should be focusing on blogging and marketing more.

https://streampusher.com/blog

The landing page could use some work as well.

To be honest its a pretty complicated product and sometimes I wish I would have picked a simpler software product as my first. Many people have expressed interest but say they will only use it if it has this feature or that feature. That said its a blast to work on and I'm using it to solve my own problems with my own station.

I've submitted Streampusher to betalist for the second time and I've been accepted. I'm trying to make sure my app doesn't fall over in case there is a large influx of traffic!

At the same time I'm busy managing my own radio station datafruits, scheduling DJs and uploading podcasts. Sometimes I'm able to make a little bit of money from t-shirts and other merchandise.

http://datafruits.storenvy.com

Just running those two projects takes up most of my free time.

I've also written a small ebook about Liquidsoap, a software used for running online radio stations.

https://gumroad.com/l/liquidsoapbook

I wrote quite a few blog posts, collected emails, and prepared a launch sequence with a discount coupon. In the end I got about $200 in sales from the launch, and every other month or so 1-2 people might buy. I haven't totaled up the sales to date.

So that's nothing huge but it was a great feeling making money from my own work!

I plan to write another ebook about ember and rails, but I've only got the first draft of the landing page copy prepared for now.

I think I might see more success with this ebook as ember/rails has a bigger audience than liquidsoap.

http://freedrool.us/ember-your-rails

My biggest goal for this month is being prepared for the betalist launch, being sure I have enough server resources prepared and sprucing up the landing page a little bit.

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Hi everyone !!

I am Yachee Gupta, a senior year undergrad pursuing B.Tech in Biosciences and Bioengineering from Indian Institute of Technology (I.I.T.) Guwahati, India.

I am highly interested in machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, AI and their applications to make a world changing impact to create a better future and in creating a tangible product for the people of our generation.

I'm excited to be a part of this community and looking forward to work together.