What are you working on this month? (April 2018)
It's April! That means it's time to share what you're working on and connect with others on their projects. Here's how you can join the discussion:
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First, respond to someone else who's commented, just to say hello or leave them some feedback!
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Next, leave your own comment describing what you're working on (or aspiring to work on), and your biggest goal for April.
That's it! Can't wait to hear from everyone and see what you're working on!
Hey everyone 👋
I am working on a platform where founders and startups can document their journey from day one!
This site should help newcomers to understand that success does not come out of nowhere and every successful start had a hard time at the beginning.
Furthermore, it should give the creators and startups the opportunity to present their journey to a larger public and to inspire other people.
The special thing about this project is that I will release the first MVP in only 14 days. Yes, that's a hard schedule (Today is the second day)!
If you want a reminder when the product is ready and follow the the journey for the next 14 days, feel free to drop your email here: http://www.startup-journey.com
Hi Niklas,
I like your idea and just signed up for your list:) I need it to document my journey of launching https://ipgeolocation.io which is still in development.
Awesome! Thanks for signing up!
You'll receive an email when we're ready to launch.
In the meantime, you should check your spam folder, as we send updates daily and some are stuck in the spam folder.
Awesome! I appreciate knowing the struggles that startups and founders have in the process, how they resolved it and if they had to lower their expectations or ditch a goal temporarily to ensure some progress. Please consider adding that
Thanks for the feedback!
That's exactly what we want to build!
Please check your spam folder for our new email (we just sent it out)
I think that's very cool. You should also consider adding goals and deadlines. Sometimes you can get distracted by the amount of work that has to be done or other factors, and a clear goal can help you keep pushing.
Thank you for your positive input! I will definitely put that on my todo list!
It helps a lot to focus on a single goal rather than the amount of work that needs to be done.
This comment was deleted 6 months ago.
Very cool idea. Subscribed :).
I can totally relate to the need for this, not just to share your journey with other but yourself. I have been in this journey for so long that I find it hard to now figure out what I was doing some time back.
I always feel that a good retrospect would help me do better with next projects. This might just be the thing I struggle with usually. I would recommend if you can add, say a weekly retrospect view of what an individual achieved, missed targets, sad moments etc.
Everyone focuses a lot on planning but very little done to improve retrospect analysis.
I'm very happy you like the idea! (and thanks for subscribing to the newsletter 😉)
That's a good point I haven't thought of yet. Documenting your progress is also a great tool to motivate yourself by remembering what you have already achieved. This way you can also think about your mistakes and avoid them in the future.
Thank you for your outstanding contribution!
This is awesome. I would totally read a newsletter of the best posts every week.
That's good to hear! Please check your spam folder at the beginning, because we currently have problems with some spam filters :)
Looking forward to use this. Just subscribed. All the very best.
Many thanks for the support and the great wishes!
Cool idea!
Is it text based? Audio? Video?
Any plans to monetize later on?
Thanks Corey!
The documentation will be based mainly on text and images, but videos are also supported. Not sure about audio yet.
You can imagine the platform as a collection of founders who publish their daily or weekly status reports in one place.
Our system will be based on blogs and will have some special features. So there will be an indication on which day a founder/startup had to struggle with a problem or experienced a success.
If you subscribed you will receive daily updates on how the project evolves in the next days (Including the ups and downs we experience). Please check your spam folder, we are having problems with spam filters 😉.
I'm always happy to receive feedback and improvement suggestions.
I didn't think very much about monetarisation yet. One possibility would be to offer plus features, such as more detailed analysis options for blog articles.
Another option would be to place inconspicuous advertisements, although this is always only the second choice.
Do you have any other ideas on monetarisation?
I see, I really like it.
Not everything needs to be monetized, but if that's your end goal, I would start thinking about that pretty soon. Focus on the product first, but you'll probably need to start thinking about monetization if you want to put some serious time behind it.
Some ideas about monetization:
"Transparency marketing" has been a growing trend among startups and developers and has also been very effective. Examples are founders live-streaming coding sessions, posting public revenue numbers like Baremetrics, or just writing medium articles about it. Whatever way monetization embodies, consider the transparency marketing trend as a wave you can ride.
One idea of how this could work could be a simple newsletter promotion. This could give founders some more control and exposure outside of the normal updates you would do.
Another idea could be offering some sort of way for founders to gain beta users. Maybe it's an additional feature in the paid plan that allows subscribers to join the beta list at any time. If founders want to start collecting beta users, they can upgrade their plan and use an email capture form.
One more idea could be similar to Product Hunt's Ship, where an upcoming product could be promoted on certain parts of the website and the founder gets more control over the branding, coming soon page, email capture, etc.
Hope that helps!
Thanks for putting together your ideas on a possible monetarisation! I will definitely include the suggestions in my decision!
@niklas exciting, I just subscribed 👍
"documenting their journey" is pretty broad to me. What will this entail?
Awesome! Thanks for your support!
Yeah, you're right! I just wanted to give a rough description of what the project is about. The platform will give founders and startups the opportunity to tell their story from the very beginning. You will be able to find out where they started, what problems they had to deal with and what you normally don't know.
The website will be based on blogs with a counter from the launch date. (e.g. Day XX: Title of the article)
Please check your spam folder so that we can be sure that the mails arrive. And feel free to reach out to us if you have any further questions! 😉
Documenting my journey has been extremely beneficial so far and I can only imagine it becoming more valuable as the business grows.
Good luck with the product!
Thanks Julian, that's also the way we see it.
Where have you been documenting your journey so far?
Blog
Vlog (we'll be picking that up again)
Podcast with other small businesses in their early days
Let me know when there is a beta for your product, would be keen on checking it out (signed up for your newsletter) 👍
I just checked some of your posts! I really enjoyed reading them! 👍
Awesome! I'll keep you updated!
Thanks!
Cool idea! I've actually tried to use IndieHackers for something like a public startup diary in the past.
Just read it, great article! Why did you stop?
Not sure really. Lack of engagement I suppose. I'm still going, I'm just not posting about it.
I'm also slightly wary of sharing too much information. Like one of the things I talked about in my last post was needing to figure out how to reach climbing gyms. I've got that nailed down now and I could share really specific information how to do that but I feel like I would be giving away valuable knowledge that could be used by potential competitors for little return.
That might be a silly worry. I'm not sure.
You should definitely start again! Documenting progress publicly brings so many advantages and possibilities!
I think it's better to share your experiences indstead of keeping them secret in order to harm potential competitors. In my opinion, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
My mind agrees with you but I can't convince my fingers to type it out.
Maybe it will work better when we have released our platform. 😉
We had a pretty busy March! We hosted a few great AMA guests, made some fundamental changes to our newsletter, consolidated all of our content in the new Learn section (where you can now find all the interviews), and made Product Pages available to all members whose products are generating Stripe-verified [1] revenue.
This month will be just as ambitious: important forum improvements, updates to product page features, and hopefully rolling out a new kind of content!
[1] Note that anyone can now create a product page — even users who are pre-revenue. But for your product page to show up on the public Products directory, you have to verify with Stripe. This doesn't include the product pages of companies we interview, since we verify these revenue numbers privately via email.
I am very impressed by IH software-wise, it's very nice UI/UX with good content. Kudos!
Thanks!
Hey, just wanted to say that you guys are doing a great job. Thanks for building and supporting us!
Stripe is not supporting payments in some countries like India and other asian countries, how should we connect our app with stripe to list the product on IH ?? Please check i have created my product & waiting for its approval
I'm glad we connected at the meetup. This forum has been awesome - keep up the good work!
Hi Channing. I like your Product pages. I see that the revenue numbers change daily (I verified via stripe). Perhaps you can add a little arrow indicating if the revenue is going up or down.
Hey @channingallen do you have a roadmap of stuff you are hoping to work on in the next 6-12 months or all top secret?
Hey Channing,
I'm building a marketplace through Stripe Connect and it looks like the IH/Stripe integration can't see my earnings through app fees. https://www.indiehackers.com/product/enrollem
@channingallen @csallen Any idea of when the IH verification will work with Stripe Connect?
Can you send me an email about this? Then I can debug it with you. courtland@indiehackers.com
Sure thing.
Interesting. Could you elaborate a bit on the Learn section and how it contrasts with Community?
Also does this "Stripe verified" rule mean that FBA/ad/affiliate/App Store/Play Store-driven businesses are out? Are you working towards verification with Apple, Google, Amazon and others?
Hi @channingallen I really love the consolidation in the Learn section! Do you work on IH alone or with a team? and How do you decide/prioritize what to work on next?
We're a team of two: me and @csallen. @csallen does all the coding and the podcast, and I find and produce most of the other content.
We have a number of long- and short-term goals and meet at least once a week to assess our progress and our metrics and map out the coming week.
This is the most amazing thing I've read in weeks. Family businesses are the best!
@channingallen Ever thought about using a site like Canny.io to upvote future feature requests or build something yourself insdei IH? More efficient than AMAs, right?
I especially love the product pages. Also "made Product Pages available to all members whose products are generating Stripe-verifiable revenue." - Does this mean that if you aren't using stripe then you can't use it?
Anyone can create a product page — even users who are pre-revenue. But for your product page to show up on the public product page directory, you have to verify with Stripe. This doesn't include the product pages of companies we interview, since we verify these revenue numbers via email.
I'm doing an April challenge where I'll be doing 1 new business from scratch each week and building an MVP for it. I'm going to live code for 4 hours a day as well as a vlog at the end of each day as well(which will likely be released the following morning). So it will be a very busy month but I'm honestly most nervous about the live streaming.
Full details https://shawnonthe.net/april-bootstrap-challenge/
Edit: Finished the first day live coding for 2 hours I didn't realise how much live streaming slows your coding down. I managed to do about 20 minutes work in 2 hours. I'm going to change to live streaming the first 2 hours each day and just recording the coding of the rest and posting those videos up separately to try to speed things up a bit.
Way to face your fears and hustle! Best of luck, my man, looking forward to reading about the things you've learned from this here in a month.
Also thought about live coding before. Awesome that you do it! How was your experience so far with streaming it? Do you talk a lot or just code like normal?
I've been trying to talk through everything which slows me down a lot but I still have a fair bit of dead air while typing out stuff that I need to work on. That said for the offline recordings I'm doing I've switched to not talking through everything so I can work faster and just talking out the larger decisions since it's unlikely anyone will watch those.
I thought of streaming coding without saying anything. Just for people who are interested. But I doubt it be that interesting (as you wrote).
Yeah I can't imagine it's super interesting watching me type and dance to music they can't hear lol. But if you're working on something interesting maybe just the code will be enough?
I think once I'm all done this month I'll edit together all the videos for each project though and just play them together at a much higher speed with the number of hours spent in the bottom then do a voice over explaining whats happening. Maybe occasionally slow down for anything extra interesting.
I might stream making a multiplayer platformer game. Who knows maybe there'll be some interaction.
I'll definitely check out your stream later!
That sounds like something that would definitely be popular on Twitch.
Wow, loved it ! All the very best to you! Looking forward to hear about your progress.
Wow! Live coding sounds like a real challenge to me, I don't think I will ever get the confidence to do it :)
If you have the confidence to release so many tutorials you likely have the confidence to live code. For me the most uncomfortable part is the webcam not the screen grab and hearing my own voice when I have to rewatch parts.
love this man!
Thanks it's exciting and scary. I've finished the first live stream now which was both easier and harder than I thought it would be.
That's a big challenge and good luck! Awesome that you are live coding it. I love the sharing movement at the moment.
That's quite a challange! I'd suggest Twitch or some other code livestreaming platform for streaming rather than Youtube. Feels like it's hard to get viewers by discovery on Youtube (just and observation, might be wrong), unless you already have followers on Twitter, etc. But other than that, good luck!
It will be and thank you for the advice.
I did consider Twitch for the same reason but it looked to me like the only live coding streams on there getting followers are ones building games so I figured it'd probably work out about the same for me.
I'm ok with not having much of a following for this at least for the first week or two as I will be working just as hard on getting comfortable in front of the camera as building the products lol and they will go to help me build out some starter content for my youtube page where I hope to continue vlogging even one I'm done the challenge.
What's the twitch account?
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMPWUeGHTaHuyMfRdbR38Mg
I'll be starting in about 20 minutes.
I’m creating an app that makes previews from podcast episodes to make ir easier to share it on social media. It shows the waveform on a video with the audio and a background image. I started it last week and I have to release the 1.0 until the 6th of April, because I’m going to Spain for a month after that to walk the El camino!
My biggest goal is to walk at least 25km there every day and of course finishing this application!
Sounds awesome to walk El Camino, I want to do this as well!
Thanks, I am sure it'll be a really nice experience! If you will go in the future just message me anytime! Hopefully, I'll have some suggestions later :)
Sounds like a solid product! Would be interested in seeing it 👍
Thank you! I just submitted the first version to testflight, so if you would like to try it, I can invite you to testflight!
Sure!
What do I need to do, my email is julian@weardulo.com
Thanks! I just added you, once Apple approve the first version, you’ll be able to try it! :)
I got the email, but it shows that it's only an iPhone/iPad app?
Yes, currently it's an iOS application! I'm sorry I think I did not mention this before!
I'm on Android :(
Nevermind, I can check out some screenshots/videos, once you launch 👍
Sometime ago i built quite an simple react js web app which turns spreadsheet work schedules into an proper work schedule :)
Now me and my startup decided to try to launch it publicly, so ofcourse i wanted to build it from scratch (how difficult can it be, right?)
It took longer then i expected and i wish i had more time, but here it is: http://aworkschedule.com/
I managed to do two cool things at least, first of all i made a simple version of the app as a live preview on the hero and the contact us form sends us messages directly into our company's slack :)
For April i hope to have gotten our first customer for the app :) When we get some of our first customers we'll start investing more into the website / app & eventually automate the process :)
Nice! Anything that replaces a spreadsheet is a good idea in my book!
That looks really sweet, I’ve bookmarked.
Congratulations on your launch! Is it just you and one other co-founder?
For this project I did everything on my own, both the website & the app, the app took about a month and the website was a bit over a week's worth of work :)
However I am a part of a larger startup team we're a bit of a mixed up team of with people from different backgrounds & skills.
Basically it's the normal startup story is "find a problem & fix it" So the problem we are trying to fix is the outsourcing experience by having a quality set of partners working with us & being a team of mixed internationals we're solving the typical outsourcing issues (miscommunication / cultural barriers/ having to conduct meetings 5 am or late at nights)
This project was more of a sidetrack (We got a client, i decided to develop inhouse, client pulls out & we rebranded it as a SaaS to get some experience with that)
Hi Emil!
Congrats on launching!
One question though: what is the benefit of creating a spreadsheet locally then uploading it to your site? Why not create the schedule on the site as well with the help of some kind of mini table/sheet editor?
Thank you
Attila
This was originally created for a cleaning company, they currently created a schedule in a spreadsheet & then printed it out to hang on the wall.
So we decided to let them continue using what they know, and just give them a better distribution method, this way we're not forcing too much of a change for the company & solve a big problem for them :)
Well the advantage are two parts:
For the user: They don't have to learn something new, all they need to do is to log in & click upload (Keep in mind a lot of the people who create these schedules are not as tech savy, learning something outside of excel can be difficult)
For us: We don't have to develop a system for it :)
You could definitely be selling this to restaurants if you aren't already. There are always scheduling conflicts in that industry
Congrats, this is great! I remember working for a corporate, they had big spreadsheets to manage all the workload and scheduling of "mandays". Maybe try to contact companies even big ones/corporate as if your product can help them.
I like the idea of leveraging a spreadsheet program as most of your UI.
I am working on https://pullreminders.com, a product to help engineering teams reduce review cycle time with analytics and Slack reminders.
When I first launched it I didn't have a payment form for users to subscribe (although I did have a pricing page). I'm turning the payments form on this week so my goal for this month is to 10x current MRR.
Glad to see Soubhan got you on here.
This is a really good idea! I could definitely see dev managers using something like this to keep their velocity up without having to personally nag people.
Thanks @jdubbs !
This is a great idea! We have to do this manually at our standups, so I'm definitely going to look into automating this with your tool.
Thanks @karlhughes ! Feel free to email me directly at a at abinoda.com
I was about to hack this together one weekend, since I felt like it could help with the code review abandonment we had, but had to put it off. So there’s an anecdotal validation. :) Good luck!
@sandis Thanks for sharing! Let me know if you want to give my app a whirl. Would love your feedback.
This is pretty cool!
I saw that new integrations are in development, are you also planning to support self-hosted GitLab?
@apertureless That's the eventual plan, but GitLab's API/partner platform is much more primitive right now, whereas GitHub is investing heavily in their ecosystem.
A site where indiehackers.com members can organize meetups to find people like themselves and discuss ideas, products, collaborate.. Everything's possible ;)
P.S. It would be awesome if you actually had an IndieHackers API
We're building a tool for (consulting) companies to manage GDPR compliance for their clients.
Compared to other similar tools, we're focusing on the consultant point-of-view (managing multiple clients, with workflows) and because we're also doing GDPR consulting ourselves, we know the challenges quite well and that helps tremendously in knowing what to build.
It's been a roller coaster ride: we barely missed a big contract despite not being ready yet (but with the right vision) because the other party wanted to own the code copyright and we obviously didn't want that... We're currently working towards a similar contract with another party. Fingers crossed!
EDIT: Almost forgot, I'm also starting a podcast on information security. 2 episodes already recorded, but in need of editing before I can release them. I'm also looking for more guests. Info: https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/start-security
Good luck! There are definitely some tools / products to build for GDPR compliance to help companies.
Thanks!
Hi guys!
In a nutshell I'm working on an web app which is basically a throwaway chat. The idea is simple:
you are behind some corporate computer and you want to share some link/text/whatever with your co-worker but you cannot connect to facebook or any other messaging app because those are blacklisted
you are in a computer lab and want to share some code snippet with the guy next to you
you are a teacher and want to share some complicated link with the class
For these activities you need some temporary channel which you use for 5 minutes the forget about it (similar to 10 minute email). You can create rooms on the application, share the link with the people you want to share the information with, send them once they are connected (no registration/anything required just a link) and then leave and forget about it.
No message is persisted.
That's the basic idea, in April I plan to have finished the MVP.
Cheers
I like this idea alot too ! :clap:
Thank you:)
I really like this idea. I hope the links it generates are short for easy in-person sharing.
Hey man, thank you for taking the time to read it :) regarding the links, yes that's the idea
I just launched my first project! https://www.wantrepreneurblues.com. It's a place to talk about your failed projects.
I was in a cycle of building overly-ambitious ideas that i did not validate and did not release. So, I will also chronicle my journey from full-time employment to self-employment - one small idea at a time.
Hey man, great idea, just wanted to let you know when I visited the site and clicked on of the articles (LIQUID ADS) there was a progress bar on top on the screen then nothing happened, I stayed on the same page (even though the URL changed). Only after I reloaded with the changed URL the website served the article page.
Thanks for the heads-up. I'll take a look
Hello everyone! 👋
This month I keep working on https://www.colourhunt.com/
It is a community driven plattform for color palettes.
As a designer you can share your favorite color palette and as a developer you can get some inspiration.
I know there are a few others like colorlovers and pltts which was my personal favorite but sadly went down.
My biggest pain point with all the other sites is that you have manually to copy & paste every hex value by hand to get them.
Thats why I added a code generation, which will output css + preprocessors.
A sketch integration is also planned and maybe an IDE integration, so you have easy access from everywhere.
Right now my goals for April are, to finish some critical points like palette sorting based on recently created and most upvoted. And also some smaller improvements like generated social share images based on the color palette your are sharing.
And hopefully the final launch ! :)
How is it different from https://color.adobe.com/explore/?filter=most-popular&time=month ?
I would say Adobes Color (previously Kuler) is a very different approach.
Adobe Color focus is only the designer community. And more specific only adobe users. As you need an adobe account to download / save palettes. And the integration only works with adobe products.
It is really strong on the 'creation' side with their different color rules, however not that strong in the user experience.
I have my focus more on the frontend developer side. And try to make their experience nice, with the code generation and later with a sketch integration.
Thank you :) Great answer.
Great job on Colour Hunt, there are some great color palettes on the site. Really nice work on the code generation. 👌
Yo, everyone!
I'm working on a few things:
I'm working on building my Instagram brand (by building my personal profile and a sister profile that will support the personal one)
I'm working on freeing up time to train and dance professionally (I want to get up to at least 20 hours per week) - but that also means, taking yoga and lifting weights (not a part of the 20 hrs.)
Even though I'm working freelance right now, I'm looking to free myself up from that and build a small business in the fashion/beauty space.
And yeah, this is all catching wind in April. Phew!
How are you planning to tackle Instagram? What strategies/content?
Best of luck!
Building up 1, if not 2, sister profiles
Collaborations, collaborations, collaborations!
Using Instagram pods to help boost engagement when necessary (but that can REALLY SKEW the analytics so I might deviate from that strategy unless very necessary)
The tagging strategy - where you tag random people in your niche, on every post, in hopes they like, comment, follow, and use your hashtag in their posts
IG ads (and possibly FB ads)
Using Iconosquare and/or Grum to schedule all my content
And that's about it.
Hope that helps you with yours. Cheers!
Thanks! Colabs are really the game 👍
Agreed. Once I get to about 1000 subs, I'm going to be all about those collabs. And for my personal site, I'm at 4K closing in on 5K. I've been sleeping to get that done, and do outreach to companies, but I think it's about time now...😏
Yea, after our exchange yesterday I started thinking about how to set up a solid value providing content strategy, besides just pushing our product.
I think I might start chopping down some of our podcast episodes into interesting/valuable bits (audio + transcription) that might be better at providing some valuable business nuggets, than just images of dress shirts.
Cheers for that!
Nice! If you're pushing mens dress shirts (I'm assuming here) - you could even do:
5 gay men. 10 pieces of smart styling advice.
Videos on how to tie a specific type of tie
The briefcase for the modern man
A good shirt, a pair of jeans, and this trusted bag...
It can be a downloadable, or an article, a video short, on your website, or even a Pinterest pin.
You can have a lot of fun with this.
Well...that's if your into men's clothing & styling. Lol!
😃It's more of a convenience item than a fashion item our product (dress shirts from performance fabrics), but those are good ideas nonetheless.
Thank you!
All of the above suggestions still apply in my opinion.
But, all and all, good luck man! And you're welcome ;)
They do apply, cheers for them! ;)
School is my main focus as I’m set to graduate May 5th.
I’m also growing icocrow.com-
Aiming to double revenue from $25,000 to $50,000 in April.
Looking to find new/effective marketing channels.
Looking to create more strategic partnerships with other industry leading companies.
Finding a great office location in dallas to prepare for my move in May.
Great! It's gonna be a productive and congratulations on your graduation
This is awesome man! You're in school AND doubling revenue for your business? I love it! You're going to graduate with a job and money in your pocket. #youreararebird
Thanks @LovesBobRossReRuns! I’ve noticed my passion entrepreneurship throughout college and focused on it. I’ve launched two failed startups, learned from them and now I’m having a lot of success 👍🏻 exciting stuff
You guys are killing it! Love the community, love the UI, love the progress. I am PROUD to call myself an IndieHacker!
I was sick and tired of all the spam I was getting at admin@geocode.xyz, so yesterday in a fit of vengeance I built a spam auto-responder API. https://medium.com/@geolytica/spam-back-54f9e660e170
Not my biggest goal, but I think I'll spend some time in April to release it as an email client extension.
That is hilarious! I love the fact that people are having conversation with your bot ;D
That's pretty funny, nice work. If you do make it a client, allow people to make their own responses. That would make for a fun thread full of other spammers reactions.
I had a very busy March and the goal for April is to launch the product I've been working on for couple of months. Its https://ipgeolocation.io
Though its yet another IP Geolocation service but it has some different goals:
Instead of using already available data from services such as MaxMind and other major players, we spent a hell of time collecting it thru our way (I'll write a detailed blog once we are launched) and then comparing it with the data of big players.
Don't assign random coordinates to unknown IPs to avoid such hiccups https://splinternews.com/how-an-internet-mapping-glitch-turned-a-random-kansas-f-1793856052
Provide country, city, states data for facilitating form completion (we all know that lengthy drop down and how difficult it is to replicate it in every project). So I want to take the hassle out of developers to continuously update such information.
My goal for April is to learn some marketing skills, twitter ads and some SEO to launch this product successfully. I was not well aware of pre-launch, taking emails before launch etc, so my website is doing nothing at the moment except presenting pricing and some contents which is not going to production:)
We're working on www.gethighlights.co - a tool that helps you automatically find and prioritize the biggest marketing opportunities based on your existing tools (Google Analytics and transactional email and marketing automation tools).
We're getting ready to launch in beta to get feedback and start iterating on the product.
I'm working on landing safely after taking the leap. http://theleapofaith.com/
I'm working on my web dev skills and my biggest goal for April is building at least the first version of my personal portfolio.
I'm working on a news aggregation service with a twist. It's called "according to local sources...", and the basic idea is that local news media are often quicker and more knowledgeable than global news agencies when reporting on major international breaking news. So, basically this service looks for big stories around the world, and then automatically finds local reports (both on twitter and on local news websites).
Please head over and have a look, and tell me what you think: https://according.to.localsourc.es
Really awesome idea! The UX is a bit confusing, and looks odd on desktop. I guess my news consumption habits is that I can read whole articles usually below a headline instead of having more posts aggregated under a central theme.
I could totally see myself subscribing to a daily morning newsletter to know what's happened in the news from a local perspective.
Thank you for your feedback!
Yeah, the design is really "mobile first" (or only...). After your feedback I adjusted the desktop layout to be centered so that it looks somewhat less of a train wreck.
Newsletter sounds like a great feature - might be next on my todo-list!
Hello Indie Hackers!
I'm glad I found this community and I hope to continuously learn a lot from you.
This month I'm working (with my co-founder) on https://recruitt.me - a platform for connecting remote developers with StartUp owners, recruiters and managers. I'm trying to go for remote developers for now, but I want to extend it later to lawyers, accountants and economists.
There's a subscribe button at the bottom of the home page if you want to stay tuned about the release dates, feature improvements and more.
Hey hey!!
I’ve been working night and day to get my product (Gamma Fi) ready for a beta launch. Its achievements lists as a service, so new users can have a better onboarding experience.
I have a little demo on the home page: https://gammafi.com
Our goal for April is to get a few beta users and get product market fit ASAP.
Hey all! I'm building a professional network built exclusively for developers:
https://www.fizbuz.com
This month I'll start onboarding users who have signed up via the landing page, manually construct profile pages for them and gather their feedback on the product.
Once I feel like I'm hitting the 80% case, I'll focus on building self-service sign up.
Love the idea and love the minimalistic style of the webpage. I took a look at your bio and as someone that's about to quit my "job" (just like you did) I can really empathize. Coincidentally, I'm getting into the software developer world, so your platform will be very useful for me in the near future. I'm already following you on Indie Hacker, I've bookmarked FizBuz, created my profile and joined the Discord community. Best regards! PD: I'm documenting the whole career change process on http://theleapofaith.com in case you want to check it out!
Thanks Ed! I'm stoked for your journey, let me know how I can help! 🙌
I sent you an email!
Tomorrow I'm taking Squadlytics out of beta and finally charging for it. So April (and the upcoming months) will be all about growing it into a good business.
I don't think it's a great fit for the community here as it's targeting teams (it's a platform to measure and improve the release cycle) but I'd be happy to have some IndieHackers on board, it'll be free up to 3 users.
It's been a good 6 months to get there so I'm pretty excited right now.
Sten - the website is great my man. Looking to do a "illustrated" look and feel like yours for a project were shipping this year. Did you outsource that or hand draw them yourself and then have the designer incorporate on the site with color blends?
Thanks! I worked with a designer on it. He's really great and talented and I wanted him specifically because of his art. For Squadlytics to be distinguishable from other SaaS offering I needed it to have something different from the polished illustration figures that are getting popular nowadays.
He wrote about the whole design process here: https://blog.squadlytics.com/designing-tranquility-at-work/
For the past year I've been working on recv.io (website not up yet!), an alternative to socket.io, Pusher, etc. that solves a few problems that other realtime pub/sub communication solutions do not:
Globally scalable - you can scale to many 1000s of devices all around the world.
Guaranteed message delivery - messages are redundantly saved across regions when published. Also, if a subscriber disconnects, when they reconnect they will be able to receive any messages published while they were disconnected.
Causal ordering - messages are always received in the correct order.
There are many more features in this list, but those are the highlights.
Two months ago, I quit my job to work on this full time, and I'm happy to say I've made tremendous progress during that time, and this month my goal is to build the website and launch into public beta!
I'm hoping to have it all ready by MicroConf in May. See you there!
I’m yet to formally launch, I’m working on DX Television. After years of forking over hundreds for television service, I quit! Six months ago I started working on my own IPTV service, and my friends have been beta testing. We intend to sell TV service with PVR boxes cheaply.
The service will cost $20 per month, and give you unlimited access to television shows, sports, and movies, that all can be downloaded to your device and extracted to ZIP files etc.
Each PVR box comes with 1 TB hard drive, and is the size of an iPhone.
Hardware specifications:
2 GB RAM, 1 TB Hard Drive, runs Ubuntu 16.04, streaming server and PVR written in a C++ (Qt), and python for the web ui. All remotely controlled by a smart phone. A sleek, modern interface, you can download (“record”) anything available, you can also access 3rd party services directly, and play your shows from anywhere in the world with the portable box, or via mobile application.
Our anticipated cost:
One-time hardware purchase: $200 (free installation)
Monthly: $20 CAD
Feedback is welcome!
Cool! Should be an interesting time to launch something like this. With services like YouTube tv coming on line and companies like aero.com having failed there’s is still a grey area for the home PVR left to explore. We tried to enter the space in 2008 with behindtheset.com (defunct) and probably gave up way too early. I still have the majority of our first run of 100 boards in my attic :)
For Twine we took the approach of shipping premade hardware (nucs) instead of making our own. That’s saved a ton of time and development. It is fairly strait forward to get setup with an intel distributor that can help a ton with logistics.
Hit me up if you want to talk shop or about maintaining your own personal botnet :P
Best of luck, can’t wait to hear more about your journey!
This sounds super interesting! Though what are the legal implications of such a service? Don't you need to be licensed to distribute TV content?
For some content yes, and we’re in the process of applying for a formal license
To be honest, I am not an entrepreneur but more like a code-monkey. I have built a lot of MVP-like softwares. But never really made any money directly from them. My goal for April is to fix that. I have an idea for a SaaS Quality Assurance application, that will (finally) build this month.
I have a similar problem. I get an idea, start building the mobile or web app and halfway I feel it’s not worth doing or my interest is lost. Sometimes the ideas are too ambitious and I lose motivation. I am trying to change this as well. Excited to see how your SaaS application works out!
Cool! Wanna tell us more about your idea? What does it do? :)
My only advice would be to set the work up in a way that keeps your interest, for example i tend to often jump from front to backend as i develop, and some days i'm stuck on solving the backend functions and then the other day i'm doing frontend.
It may appear unfocused/unstructured (and it kinda is) but at least this way i avoid getting burned out by spending days on only doing frontend.
It will handle the life cycle of projects from specification to validation. The UI/UX ressembles gitlab and integrates with Continuous Integration tools. It should both handle manual and automatic testing. The tech stack is: Python 3.6 with aiohttp and ReactJS with a custom state management library.
That's what I do too. I figured that it's better to build features one after the other full stack from backend to frontend or frontend to backend, it depends. But it certainly is a bad idea to start a feature and not "finish" it.
Working on my temp email site https://getnada.com and planing a micro SaaS but looking for good ideas.
I'm working on an open music platform called Sound Social.
This month I want to start spreading the platform and see if people are interested in writing, talking with me about it. I'm having an open source approach to it similiar to Mastodon.
Also I'm thinking about how to spin off products / projects based on Sounds Social which reuse parts of the app to created separate ones.
Also how to monetize free software might become a topic soon.
My co-founder and I are going to be monetizing our Slack bot: Eventbot. We've been in beta for almost 6 months and have learned A TON about the problem/solution with thousands of existing users. Now we're ready to start learning about the product/market fit :) IH has been indispensable as a resource to learn from those who've gone before us and looking forward to sharing what we find in the future !
https://geteventbot.com/
This month, I'm working on the MVP of my first side project - CollabSongs! It'll be an easy way for people to search for duets (later any 3+ people songs as well) for a given genre of music. My wife and I have found it oddly difficult to find a wide range of duets to do together based on year, genre, rank, etc. In the future, I'd love to host competitions on the site specifically for duets. I'm working on it as I go through Pieter Level's MAKE book.
Over the past few months, I've been applying to speak at conferences. While keeping my eyes peeled for CFPs and tech events to speak at, I started keeping a list. Before I knew it, I had about 200 conferences in my database, and decided to make a free email reminder service out of it: https://www.cfpland.com/
CFP Land is a database of conferences and a weekly email reminder to go apply to the ones that have proposals due soon.
I'll eventually add some premium stuff like tips, proposal reviews, or daily updates, but I'm just gathering interest first.
Still working on a e.coli based sample for fizz ... That turned out to be a great sample to build as it allowed me to fix some bugs and also tunes the performances (which are still somewhat abysmal).
I'll keep on working hard on my first app: AWARDED
it's an app to keep track of Award-nominated movies. You will be able to check award and movie information, keep a watchlist, and keep track of many award ceremonies around the world.
Think of it as one single source to check what's on at Cannes, the Oscars, Golden Globes, Venice, Locarno, Montreal, SXSW, Sundance, etc etc.
The MPV will be quite simple, but I have a huge backlog of ideas I wanna try out and implement in the future...
My mom inspired me to do this, as she is always keeping track of these things but always found it too complicated to visit too many separate websites to find the information she wanted.
I am almost done with the backend and will get some help from mom and friends to fill up the database... In the meantime, I'll focus on the frontend of the web app to launch something as soon as possible.
Wish me luck! And if you are interested, sign up to get notified of the upcoming release:
https://awarded.to/ (it is just a landing page for now)
I'm about to get registered and launch my first project, which is a daily practical html/css course for developers. While still waiting - working on my long-term dream to-do app (got some fresh ideas to bring to the board in the nearest future after the mvp and try them out on real users)
Reading and learning about bitcoin and cryptocurrencies for some time now, I finally decided to build a proof of concept site/app using lightning network similar to square for accepting payments.
kriptode.com (in Turkish) is the landing page and yunik.co is the website where you can order a tshirt using lightning network :)
I also made a fun version of the site where you can buy döner with lightning network -testnet- so small businesses can see how easy the shopping experience will be.
App mvp is ready but no customers or feedback yet. Any comments are appreciated.
I'm working on a project that sends updates every week, on milestones that makers hit. Each update will not be more than 20 words. If you want to learn from a maker who's hit a milestone that you're aiming to hit, you can get in touch with the maker directly. This platform is also aimed at helping makers grow their ideas post launch.
The platform will eventually move to a web app where makers can earn virtual badges every time they hit a milestone ✌
Here's what I will continue working on this month : Laravel Factory
It's a service which helps the Laravel developers quickly scaffold a new web app. They specify the model(DB schema) details, relationship details, choose the admin panel theme and extra packages on our website. We give them the code within minutes.
It saves at least 10-15 hours for them.
Current status: We will be open for beta testing this week where developers can try out the features that we have promised a month back. We will deploy the code on our own server and send them a link to test their new web app. Beta testers will get 50% off when they purchase.
This month is going to be roller coaster ride.
Hi Everyone,
We are building an unlimited Application Testing Service named TestRise to help smaller startups to deploy and deliver quality applications starting from $99/month.
My goal with TestRise is to provide indie hackers and smaller startups with the ability to get quality web application testing done by real testers on real devices.
I initially validated the service by using a Google Sheets hack.
After I got enough feedback it was time to start building the service and we are now very close to launching it!
To know more about the service, please feel free to visit www.testrise.com
I am hoping to connect with founders, product managers and CTO’s to be one of the first users of TestRise!
This month I'm finalizing a rebrand of my job board project, which is now called Support Focused.
My goals for April are:
Write about the process to build the job board, and the rebrand
Find effective marketing channel to connect with employers and new job seekers
Grow subscriber list to 1000
This month I've finally launched my app http://oysterapp.io. It's been a labor of love for over a year now but we're pretty proud of it.
We like to think of ourselves as the anti dating-app app. We don't want people matching, messaging, and never meeting. So we help people find others in the moment, when they are out and about in public. We launched last weekend in Oklahoma and have had about 530 installs.
My focus for this month is generating traction on a college campus, and implementing new features. Since the app relies on individuals in a close proximity, we know that most people will have trouble finding other users until we have some penetration in their markets; but we're starting small and celebrating the little victories. I'd like to reach 1500 users at the campus we're focused on by the end of the month!
Wish me luck!
I run a community of microinfluencer and connect them with consumer products (geared towards females). I've had the community, and have been matching them to brands for over a year, but am hitting a point where it's become clear my current model as it stands isn't scalable - I want to get away from the agency model.
Right now I'm trying to determine if I need to adjust my offerings, or pricing, or invest in building out more tech (things are pretty lightweight on the platform side right now), and/or just get better at closing out my sales funnel. :) Likely it's all of the above.
Would love to hear from anyone who has ever had the foundation of everything you need, but struggled to figure out the right path to truly scale.
I'm working on a digital and print magazine platform for artists in Ghana. Gatekeeping in the literary world - and art in general is heavily westernized, and somebody has to put their foot in there somehow because the potential is huge.
Tampered Press is a print magazine that will seek to publish the work of emerging and practicing artists – including but not limited to, writers and visual artists, with a bias for Ghana, and Africa. Content for the magazine will primarily be the work of artists, but will also include profiling artists, critiquing their work, initiating collaboration across disciplines and critical discourse surrounding contemporary art, culture, politics and lifestyle.
I'm raising funds for the next two weeks so both excited and anxious.
Hey Everyone! 😄
I'm working on a platform to empower developers with Machine Learning. Instead of having to read abstract ML research papers or being black boxed into MLaaS solutions, we host state of the art ML models with code that works right out of the box to use it.
The best part is that you can use the models without worrying about lock-in, inflexibility, or API limits!
Check out our models at https://modeldepot.io
I hope you find something that can help supercharge your product with cutting-edge ML 🚀
I reached 45k unique visitors on my blog in March, 3x February.
I think I did so well in March that this month it will be great if I can get that amount of visitors.
To do so I will continue to do what I'm doing since 60+ days - publish a quality tutorial every day for fellow front-end developers :-) Monday to Saturday.
Right now I'm working on two things:
Writing an ebook on SaaS marketing. Trying to consolidate my thoughts on marketing SaaS products as well as working in best practices from thought leaders as well. More of a passion project of sorts.
Learning the Bubble platform. Still working through learning some basic coding skills like HTML, CSS, and now Javascript. But I'm transitioning to really learning and getting into the Bubble platform after seeing some major improvements as well as a really solid community evolve around it. So many people now creating plug-ins, courses, templates, and more.
Hello hello!!! Alejandro from Colombia here.
We’re working on releasing Tattooer.ink private beta the first week of April. We want to connect with tattooers so if you know any tattooer just let us know!
You can see our landing page here:
https://producthunt.com/upcoming/tattooer and http://www.tattooer.ink
Thanks!!!!!
Working on my first side project https://work-rituals.firebaseapp.com/#/home. This is a platform for employees to keep track of their work rituals and keep track of them. They can also share this with their managers and send the yearly/quarterly report to their managers for discussion.
Managers can also track rituals of their reporting people and understand their engaging behavior. Watch on the space and will try to complete before the month of MAY 2018
Content marketing.
I am trying to solve a problem, related to the insane growth of the number of SaaS/Web tools organizations use but I have not been able to position https://www.stackrapp.com the right way yet. So i am going to focus on talking about the problem and all of the solutions, StackrApp being just one of them.
Lot of work ahead of me this month :)
Any feedback/tips/advices would be greatly appreciated!
I recently launched Betas.io, a place to get feedback on your site or app. I've been taking a lot of the feedback from Betas, on Betas (https://www.betas.io/posts/5aad09658ed6320004251c67) and implementing some of that.
This month I'll be focused more on marketing and introducing more people to Betas and just doing a lot of outreach. I recently added the ability to share posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit and also implemented autotweets, so when someone posts a site on Betas, @betasdotio tweets it out. Those are the kinds of the things I'll be working on this month.
I'll also be working on implementing a daily or weekly email opt-in for people wanting to see the latest posts and posts still without feedback. I'm also considering having a featured section on the site (the homepage, separate from the rest of the posts), where people can essentially pay to promote their post for 30 days, but I'm not sure of the implementation quite yet. Super-preliminary. I still feel like I need to grow the community a little more before thinking about that. It needs to have enough traffic to it to give anyone a reason to promote it. You know what I mean?
Overall, it's been a great turnout so far. I've gotten a lot of great responses and most importantly, tons of people are posting their sites and apps, and tons of people are giving feedback! Right now, I'm looking for more ways to keep the Betas community engaged and keep it growing. If any of you have some growth techniques you'd like to share that helped you, let me know!
That's cool, I really hope it gather more and more people leaving good feedback!
Thanks Daniel! If you have a site or app you want to get feedback on, feel free to post it on betas.io!
April is going to be a busy month for Guestboard.co!
MVPs in general should be bare-bones (read: ugly) to simply prove the concept without wasting unnecessary time/money. Ours is no exception.
The issue is, since we're starting with the wedding market, beauty/style is everything in this space. So we put in a little more time and money to make sure it's not terribly ugly, but with a background in design, I'm pre-cringing hard. April will be dedicated to customer interviews and testing, and quickly moving on app styling at the first positive sign from users :)
Side note: any Laravel devs in the Los Angeles area want to grab a coffee/beer?
Pretty cool idea. I'm actually getting married this fall and made my own guestbook on our wedding site. This seems to feel more like a hub for everyone, great idea!
A) congrats! and b) thanks, man! Thats awesome to hear you built your own. Keeping wedding guests feeling "in the loop" is from my experience, the easiest way to keep them happy (that, and a bar).
Last month I launched Remotely in the App Store (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/remotely-job-search/id1349523816). A job board for the remote workforce.
My goal in March was to try this "growth hacking thing out". I set a goal to have 200 remote job seekers by the end of the month and happy to report I ended up with 619.
My goal in April is to get to 10 companies to post a remote job on the app for free. Currently no jobs on the app have been posted by the companies themselves.
In April I am also taking on a 50-50-50 challenge. Everyday I'm going to do:
💪 50 push-ups
🏋️ 50 free squats
🗻 50 sit-ups
Hi Jake 👋
Nice work with the app! I'd be interested to hear what your ideas are for engaging with companies if you're up for sharing :)
And great work with the job seekers. I'm also curious - did most of your signups come from the Product Hunt launch? Or have you marketed in other ways?
I also have a job board project that initially started out with a remote focus, specifically for customer support jobs but recently pivoted to just focus on the later.
Best of luck with your goals this month!
Thanks, Heather!
Product Hunt was a large chunk of the traffic. 122 installs the day posted and 105 installs the day after. I also wrote a blog and posted it here on IH (https://www.indiehackers.com/@jherg/send-yourself-push-notifications-0b0b81550f)! Unfortunately I did a poor job tracking installs related to the blog post. I'd like to blog more and get more involved in the remote community.
As for engaging with companies, my plan is to reach out to them personally. I'm a little worried that this might be a high-touch sales platform with low pricing... but going to test that out.
How has your experience been with a job board?
Hey, fellow indie hackers!
This month I am working on more website themes for ThemeLatte 👉 (https://www.themelatte.com).
My goal is to add two more themes as well as create a resources section reviewing some tools for hosting, designing, ect.
Everyone seems to be working on some really cool stuff and I wish everyone the best! 😀
I'm working on timekeepr.co.uk, a tablet app for tracking time on engineering and manufacturing shop floors.
My focus over the next month is to:
Build out some features related to employees who travel off-site
Release a mobile version of the app
Acquire more early customers and ensure my early pilot customers are finding value in the product
Hope everyone has a great April!
Looking to get some partnerships with influencers/affiliates
Starting to look into retail/wholesale channels
Giving away the product for free, best marketing strategy yet 😏
I'm working on readerfeeder.co - an RSS delivery service for people who prefer eInk Kindle readers to smartphones and tablets, but still interested in getting fresh news/updates from their favorite websites.
Hi Indie Hackers,
We are working on a product using which users receive the hand curated remote jobs to their inbox.
Starting today, we are beta launching our product https://remoteleaf.com.
People often surf through tons of job listing sites to land their perfect remote job. This is gonna help them in terms of saving their time and energy :)
We had a super crazy and exciting month in March here at DEVY.io !
We on-boarded many new clients and delivered many projects.
My focus this month is to keep the momentum going and keep getting new costumers.
Interesting take on this, I can imagine this being an alternative to hiring from UpWork.com. It'd be awesome to see a portfolio of the work you have delivered, I think it would help to improve conversions.
Hey IH
I'm working on my first email course about ES6 features. You can take a look at http://www.es6school.xyz
Looks interesting! Your certificate is invalid, you might want to fix that.
Thank you @sandro for mentioning it.
Working on a user profile page for zired.io. I literally thought this project would take 2 months! Oh well...
https://twitter.com/MirMayne/status/979962946783797248
Planning to launch a new dashboard for our customers to submit creative requests and a moodboard feature where our clients can quickly decide which visual style they like the most.
Continuing to work on a small game I made and posted on IH last week: https://www.kfchess.com/. Want to add a few more things like a short single-player campaign and maybe some cosmetic options.
Always updating and making two of my apps ( https://callmeprivate.com and https://textmeprivate.com ) more efficient in every way, but when that isn't priority, I'm working on a project that connects people with marketing professionals.
I’m going to test out a handful of ideas with landing pages. The one I’m the most interested in right now is an interview practice service for PMs. From there, I want to expand it to a whole job search workflow to make it easier to network and look for a new job.
I'm doing either client work, or I'm going to start writing some React + Python content in hopes of eventually making a course or ebook about it. (Starting with articles + a newsletter). Depends on how my schedule shakes out here.
I'm currently working on a project called mentor tool. It helps you find a mentor in your field. We are currently looking for professionals that are willing to take on a mentee. If you are willing to mentor please join! www.mentortool.com
That sounds like a really neat idea!
This weekend I had an idea for a new project and quickly built an MVP to try and validate.
The idea is to create a one-off and monthly Google Sheets and Excel service - www.spreadcheat.co
Target market is marketing agencies, small businesses, book-keepers, freelancers and contractors.
My thinking is that loads of people use spreadsheets in day-to-day work but aren't great at them. My guess is in a lot of instances they would rather just pay than figure out the answers.
For the one-off service, I'm proposing that people detail their problem and what they are willing to pay. I will then match them with an expert (or at mvp stage solve the problem myself) at an agreed fee and get the problem solved. If any more info is needed I will send them to a private chat link.
For the monthly service I'm proposing a dedicated email account and slack channel for constant communication.
Right now I built a simple site using carrd.co and integrated payments using stripe. For the one-off service I'm using a simple google form but may change to a more aesthetically pleasing type-form. Form entries go to a google sheet.
I'm thinking of promoting on LinkedIn and forums (eg growth hackers) and building out the service if i get traction.
website is www.spreadcheat.co
I recently finished a niche local job email list for Social Workers where I live - www.socialworkjobs.co
Right now I curate the best jobs and research (currently searches sent to google sheets which in turn uploads to buffer for twitter) and create a 2 weekly email and send it to subscribers (mostly attained through LinkedIn). If I can get enough subscribers and the open rates stay high I will look to build a job board and charge employers to post jobs. As an interim step I am thinking of charging employers to have a job listing in my email when the subscriber count hits a certain threshold.
Working on a job board for Salesforce professionals. http://sforcejobs.com
I see those are jobs posted on LinkedIn.
Do you mind sharing how you get the LinkedIn jobs... do you scrape them or is there another way to get LI jobs?
Right now I'm manually adding them
Awesome! What did you use to build it? Is this the MVP or did you already validate it?
PHP & MySQL, just went live last week, still working on features, mainly filtering and sorting. I kind of want to do a complete UI redesign, but we will see.
Nice. Where are you looking / promoting to get customers?
Going to use Reddit (posts and ads), work SEO, and probably advertise on Salesforce blogs. I will eventually reach-out to recruiters directly.
We have been working on a service to help developers create Alexa skills for their APIs without having to code or manage server. We built https://apitobot.io and have gotten some traction. We are still unsure about the future of this service but are now releasing another feature that looks to be more useful for the people that are creating Alexa skills:
https://apitobot.io/feeds
It’s a way to create a flash briefing skill on Alexa using your RSS feed, API, or manual content input without the need to manage your own content or code.
sounds quite cool. I actually built an Alexa skill for the hackster challenge https://www.hackster.io/pseudozach/alexa-feed-toto-4e1468 but I can see how it can be useful for non-techies.
I'd think getting people to imagine what they can automate is the real challenge.
I find that really interesting. There's a French startup doing a lot in that domain right now: https://snips.ai. I'd suggest having a look at what they do to see where this market is going.
This month, I'm not gonna work on any products or think about any ideas. I've been doing the same routine every month—think of an idea, build it, ship it.
There's nothing wrong with building and shipping, but for some reason, I can't shake off the fact that I've been fooling myself this whole time. Am I building something that I believe in, or am I just fooling myself again? Hell, the more time I spend thinking about an idea, the more convoluted my thinking gets. I always end up buliding up some fantasy story surrounding the idea, and surely convincing myself that it's a good idea this time.
I'm just gonna go do some reading instead.
I agree with the other comments. Taking a break can be really valuable, and reflecting on why your previous ideas didn’t take off is also good. Why do you think your ideas were off target? How did you come up with them?
I think that's a problem many founders face.
My advice would be to keep your eyes open for problems you face in your every day life and create a product out of it.
But don't try to force anything, though.
Reading a book is always a good idea. Which books are you reading at the moment?
Right now I'm reading Rene Girard's Mimetic Theory.
It's pretty good and more digestable than Rene Girard's own books.
Hey, just want to say that it's very sound to take a break. One thing that helps a lot is talking to potential users, customers. That helps a lot to take the gut feel out of the equation.
This is something that I have to remind myself as I haven't been doing many customer interviews lately but reading & chatting is a good way to spend a month IMHO. (Back in my previous work we would easily spend 4 weeks on validation before doing any dev work for big new projects).