Makebook — A case study. Chapter 2: Build: Plus IH notes

Makebook — A case study. Chapter 2: 🛠 Build – Ed Powderham – Medium

In November last year I wrote about purchasing @levelsio's makebook (https://makebook.io) and would launch a product alongside reading the book, following both the book's steps and a general intuition built up from being involved here at indiehackers - blogging the journey and trying to build an audience to launch to before building isn't detailed in the book itself!

I have since spent the last 6 weeks building a Slack bot to track leave for small teams. (www.holibobs.app - currently in closed beta, sign up is available) In creating this app I gained a real appreciation for creating a no maintenance/design product: The 'front end' runs on Slack so nothing to do there (notably very little design work), and my back end is run on AWS Lambda functions which again run themselves. I would highly recommend this set up for solo founders who are devs.

I have detailed more about the build/product decisions here on Medium: https://medium.com/@Powderham/makebook-a-case-study-chapter-2-build-d247ffc99871

I would also like to share some meta stats for the IH community. Where the medium articles purely detail the makebook's steps, there are some additional steps I thought the IH community would be interested in - namely stats and signups!

Details below at the following link: https://imgur.com/a/NcofBVH
Of the 300 views that the post got, the standout point was that 82% of my traffic came from posting on Indiehackers.

Finally, I used a great service upscribe that allows you to easily embed a beautiful signup form in to your medium posts(https://upscri.be). This got me 3 email sign ups, which is a modest start but I'm very happy to be able to start growing that list. However, given the 3 sign ups that I got, the cheapest tier of $9 a month was quite a high cost per sign up. So now that I have a landing page, I've retired it in favour of mailchimp on my own site.

I'd love to get your feedback on the medium article, this IH post and the landing page (www.holibobs.app).

The next step will be responding to beta feedback (do sign up if you're interested) and preparing for a public launch.