How would you use a timeline for your products?
Many of us here are working on products, even if we're still in the early pre-launch phases. It'd be awesome if we could see what everyone's working on in more detail, follow each other's updates, and leave feedback and encouragement. At the very least, we wouldn't have to keep asking, "What's your product?" when people make posts that are vague on details.
To that end, I'm considering opening up the Indie Hackers timeline format so all of you can create your own timelines for your products. My question is:
What kinds of updates would you add to your timeline?
Here are a few ideas I've been thinking of for timeline updates:
The timelines also double as transparency dashboards (for those who are cool with sharing numbers). I'd love to make them searchable and filterable at some point, like the current database of interviews but better. Then it'd be easy to find and connect with the right people, e.g. "founders of online courses making >$500/mo."
And of course it'd be useful if, whenever you make a new post on the forum, there's a link to your product's timeline included so people can get more info.
Great stuff. Would you consider making this somehow embeddable to our product pages? It isn't exactly the same idea but merging this with a changelog of sorts, where you can let users know about new features or changes would help create a story around the product. The customers would learn about new features and also see how the product they use grows in terms of revenue, # users, etc. They could feel part of the story.
Hello Joan! I launched a changelog as a service with a similar purpose as what you are suggesting. It includes an In-product widget among other features. Below is a link to the service if you want to give a try:
https://noticeable.io
Definitely considering it, really like the idea
That would be awesome. Good personally to log and track what you are doing/build/experimenting with.
Could also be interesting to see the day intervals between launch and today, and between updates, etc.
I noticed the IH timeline tracks Twitter followers. I'd be happy to supply all of the data for social media follower graphs if you wanted to add that to timelines. That way the number is always current and you have historical data.
Yeah, could be really cool to connect APIs like Twitter (followers), GitHub (how much have you shipped), Stripe (revenue) to automatically keep your profile up-to-date.
What is the timeline build with? Custom code?
Hmm, I'm not sure exactly what you mean. But yes, my old timeline was custom code, and the new timelines hosted on Indie Hackers will be custom code as well. What's the alternative?
There are a few timeline frameworks. example - https://timeline.knightlab.com/ - I don't think they are great, so custom will be sweet. :)
For me, I want to have multiple timelines:
Several years ago, I built a simple (and ugly~) timeline creation tool TimelineE.com https://timelinee.com/ (the website is in autopilot mode ...)
There are some use cases: https://timelinee.com/recommended/
I posted this project to hacker news and it got 34 upvotes, which is kind of validation of this sort of idea. People want this kind of timeline tool.
Hello! I launched a changelog as a service with a similar purpose as what you are suggesting. It supports multiple projects and timelines among other features. Below is a link to the service if you want to give a try:
https://noticeable.io
Will there be multiple timelines (for each project) per User ?
Besides stats I'd also include learnings and Experiments like "tried Adwords, burned $500" , "automated Welcome Mail, increased customer conversations", "cold called 20 customers, sold 3 licenses"
Definitely.
I think this is a badass idea, thanks Patric!
Hi Patric. I launched a changelog as a service with a similar purpose as what you are suggesting. It supports multiple projects and timelines among other features. Below is a link to the service if you want to give a try:
https://noticeable.io
It would be great if you sent us an email every month reminding us to fill out our "month in review" posts, just like you were doing with early Indie Hackers.
Even better if we could fill out a template with some questions for our monthly reports. That way, all reports would be standard.
These reports could be part of the timeline. The rest could be automatically gathered data from different sources such as Twitter or Stripe.
I was inspired by your early month in review posts and have been doing that over at my blog: https://www.koipun.com/blog/category/follow-the-koipun-story but would love it to be able to post them to Indie Hackers to get actual feedback. At the moment, I am writing the posts mostly for myself, since nobody reads them.
Definitely want to do email reminders, and I really like the idea of template questions to standardize reports or at least make them easier to write. Very cool to see your monthly review posts, btw. Hopefully we can help get you some more readers :-D
That's a great idea! I love it!
In my timeline I would add some metrics about my product (number of customers, milestones, revenue, subscribers, etc.). I would write what I have done each month in a summary. Making each timeline an RSS feed could let us get some inspiration from other founders right into our inbox / rss reader.
I imagine I could follow other founders that make a similar product so we could share ideas on how to grow seamlessly.
Wow! Sound really cool.
I think I'll update my steps for pre launch as:
Validations (e.g landing pages, survey)
Prototype (UI and so on..)
Building
Marketing
Launch
This is a great idea!
I like your suggestions for timeline updates. I would probably update product advancements, user and traffic numbers and marketing successes.
Love love love this.
It's a great way to journal and write notes on your story, but it can also serve as a "lab notebook". I can imagine having two timelines for my one product: one for storytelling, and one as a log of events like "I transitioned from MailChimp to ConvertKit," "Twitter-famous person retweeted my thing," or "Upgraded Amplitude analytics".
It'd also be cool if we could hide certain types/categories.
Courtland, I would probably add new features I release to the timeline. Sort of like what Kevin Hale mentioned he did for WuFu? So when people visited it would show what was new since they last visited
For an initial entry, I think a well structured template describing the project would be useful. If everyone had a similar template it would be easier to consume the info after reading a couple of them.
Sounds great!
A couple weeks ago, I created Open Milestone (https://www.openmilestone.com) to better track my development time. It can be useful for others.
It is a simple tool to set an open challenge for pretty much everything: launching a new product, reading a book or simply learning a new tool within a certain time frame.
Yes, please! In addition to retrospective posts, I would publish plans and ideas to validate.
Hi Sasha. I launched a changelog as a service with a similar purpose as what you are suggesting. Below is a link to the service if you want to give a try:
https://noticeable.io
I would absolutely use something like that!
Hello! I have launched a changelog as a service with a similar purpose. Below is a link to the service if you want to give a try:
https://noticeable.io
Great idea! It'd be awesome to see how far along everyone is, but even more so you can probably make cool inferences or at least speculations based on the timeline.
e.g.
For my timeline, I'd add the metrics/milestones you mentioned plus the more controllable metrics that David Hauser discusses:
It'd be cool to be able to toggle between achievements and tasks/effort or whatever you would call the controllable section. I would also like to be able to embed the timeline on my site - with a backlink to IH of course 😊
Interesting idea to make it embeddable, hadn't thought about that. Any examples of similar features on other platforms that are also embeddable? At the very least I could make each timeline an RSS feed.
It's not exactly the same, but Google Analytics supports embedding via JS
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/reporting/embed/v1/
Hi Ryan. I have launched a changelog as a service with a similar purpose as what you are suggesting. It includes an In-product widget among other features. Below is a link to the service if you want to give a try:
https://noticeable.io