What are you working on this month? (August 2018)
It's August 1st! And with every new month comes a new chance to talk about what you're working on and meet other founders. 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 August.
That's it! Can't wait to hear from everyone and see what you're working on!
Meetups and some much-needed feature improvements (have you checked out the new social features on our product timelines or tried out the new bells and whistles in our search functionality yet?) were a big focus for us in July.
Similar community improvements are coming in August, along with a ramp-up in the number of founder stories we share. Stay tuned!
I really love what is already there, but I am currently mostly using the discussions features by simply scrolling down directly after opening the front page and scanning the titles.
Is there a feed somewhere, where new features and improvements are announced? You might want to think ways to reach casual visitors and incentivize stronger engagement somehow. Abstract, I know, but maybe you can think of a fun way of doing that ...
Would really love to see "Mastermind Group" functionality added at some point. I think that has some potential.
Nope, but good idea.
Yep, we've been thinking about this a while but don't want to lower the quality for our regular members.
At the moment the closest thing we've got are the Meetups. But we've got changes coming to the site that will make it a lot easier to get in touch and communicate with people of the niches of your choice. Not the same as a Mastermind group, but…
Love those hover effects on the new "more" tab :)
The new search functionality is great, I was able to convince a indie hacker to join our ranks in the next few days. I was watching the scene for far too long.
I liked the new features, but we really need a RSS feed.
the More tabs are 🌟
The new header looks great. Glad you decided to display Community, Interviews, and Podcast without having to click somewhere else first. This makes the interviews feel more relevant again.
Feature suggestion: add "unanswered" sorting option to the forum. There are many topics to browse, and it's sad if great questions are left unanswered (especially if someone is posting for the first time.)
Have you ever wondered what marketing tactics you should be working on now? Which tactics are for you if you don’t want to spend a lot of money? Or perhaps you just want an easier way to track your marketing to-do list?
The site I'm working on this month is called https://tactictaco.com. It helps you find marketing tactics based on a variety of criteria (budget, time to implement, impact, etc.) and lets you add them to your "currently working on", "future to-dos", and "completed" lists. It's really just a scratch my own itch type of side project.
This week I'm just continuing to chug away at writing and doing the proverbial "eating my own dogfood" by implementing the tactics I'm writing about one by one. Just trying to make steady progress 🌮🌮🌮
Cool, working on the same thing for product features! Would be great to hear more about your experience with acquiring and retaining users, for me especially retention has always been the biggest challenge for informational sites. I'm having the same issue on another project: fundingpath.co
This is literally the first time I've made the link public, so I have yet to try to get any real users who have started tracking their tactics yet! :-P I'll let ya know how it goes! Cool site! How are your users using the data you're providing?
Love the idea! I gave it a whirl.
For me... I think to myself "who is this and why should I put any stock into what they say?"
It would be super awesome if each tactic was something that some "leading expert" in the industry recommends and you're just aggregating those recommendations and layering your awesome search on top of it.
It would prompt me, and maybe this is JUST me, to take action by adding legitimacy to it.
Great idea!
For example, Neil Patel does a lot of these step by step tutorials for tactics that I love. Just thinking out loud, I'm wondering if pulling small bits and obviously crediting original authors is feasible or a no-go. I'd have to chew on how this could be implemented while ensuring everyone is still happy.
Love it! Just curious why you have an option for visitors to select “low impact”? Just trying to understand/help.
Hey Eric! There are some tactics out there that you still may want to do even if their individual impact is low. For example, updating your email signature or making a single posting to social media aren’t exactly going to get you a flood of customers from doing them, but are still good things to do.
This is a great idea!
I just finished Traction by Gabriel Weinberg, Tactic Taco basically seems to be that book as a filterable todo list, which is actually really useful.
Bookmarked for future use.
Epic landing page pun also :D
haha thanks! I think I'm going to have to build up a library of taco and mexican food related puns and themes.
wait...OMG...I just found a site with a whole page dedicated to them. http://punpedia.org/tag/guacamole/. I love the Internet.
Wow, how did I not know about Punpedia. This is important work!!
I love this! Such a great thing to put it all in a website - always talking about the criteria you mention but never thought to structure the recommendations. Following!
That's so simple, but so useful, especially for non-marketing savvy.
Keep up the good work! :)
I'm continuing to work on startupsfromthebottom.com, a newsletter of startup ideas and analysis for entrepreneurs.
It's grown to almost 721 subscribers in 40 emails. The key has been consistency in posting/sending emails.
Recently we tried to create forum (discourse) to get more of a community but it hasn't taken off as fast as the email list. There are more daily replies to the email than forum posts.
Biggest goal? Get to 1k users and either grow or trash the forum. Also, I'm spending some time to craft a survey to find out what everyone wants and we'll focus on that.
Biggest takeaway from this? I'm shocked (happily) at the high caliber of people that have subscribed and replied to the emails. Most have accomplished careers and have held high technical positions at well known companies, CTOs, lead devs, sr management, etc. I've started to form some virtual friends that I email regularly and am working to collaborate on freelance work.
Any thoughts/comments are appreciated! This community has been a great contributor for our initial growth, thanks :)
just signed up, sounds interesting!
Thanks! What do you think so far?
Hi. I'm a subscriber and happy to hear from you today.
👋 Glad you like it! What makes you keep reading?
Pretty cool concept, Brian - I just signed up, looking forward to reading. It's pretty great to get to 700+ after just 40 emails, & I'm confident you'll get to 1k soon.
I've worked on email campaigns before and surveys are tough -- I've honestly had better luck reaching out individually to people and asking for the information I'm looking for. The question "why do you read this?" always gets good responses too. It's awesome that you're starting to collab on freelance work, but I'd be curious what your readers would say if you asked them why they like your email. Have you thought about doing some sort of ambassador group/campaign a la the hustle?
Hey Christian, thanks for the insight. I've asked a few people already but I should definitely reach out to more.
I have not thought about an ambassador program. The hustle's looks awesome and pretty successful. I think I'll need better positioning/culture before starting that. It seems like a great angle with a "join us", an exclusive community mentality.
Agreed, hard to implement because it requires such an all-in investment. I've not done it successfully - just been playing around with it for my own newsletter. It's tempting because of the success it's had, but definitely don't want it to come across as forced!
subscribed!
Hey! Love the site and the idea. Simple, elegant, and seems really fun.
I left some feedback on your landing page below. Hope it helps!
https://app.toyboxsystems.com/share/ninkpYOHaB91
Whoa, I'm seriously blown away. Thanks for taking the time to do this. I am redoing the design, I'll send you a message for some early feedback before it goes live if you're up for it?
#5 - For sure, I threw that together in 15mins. I like your comments/suggestions on how to improve.
#2 - I didn't even notice that but now I can't un-see that, lol. Thanks!
Thanks for the rest of the comments.
My pleasure - excited on where you take it!
We're actually building the tool I left the comments on and are testing a platform where you can submit your site and receive professional feedback (Copywriting, UX, Visual Design etc.)
I'd love to hear your thoughts around this or any related services you've needed!
The site looks and feels good. I like the idea of commenting on that snapshot of the site.
I run 32" monitors and I instantly tried to drag the side bar over but it only allowed me to make the main pane smaller. I would love to see that side part wider or adjustable.
Also a tick on the scrollbar where the comment sits on the page would be sweet. Like when you hit command+f for search and it highlights the matches in the scroll bar.
If I can make that sidebar bigger, I would like to have add a comment inline. Clicking "add comment" would show a text area and the chat would be on the same page. The less pages, the better.
We had a similar product at one point for contract/document annotation. Clients loved being able to see the comment thread/history and creation all in one space.
Our most useful feature was a slack alert for every comment. As a dev agency, this meant a client was looking at the contract. Once the comments stopped, I called them immediately. It drastically sped up the process to close the deal and I felt it helped close faster for two reasons: 1. we wrote that software and 2. we talked with the contract fresh on their mind.
I just jumped on your main site and saw integrations to slack coming soon. Make that a priority :)
On your pricing page I would change the names to: freelancer, team, agency. It's more accurate for people who are actually buying it and it helps the relate more to the product. "I'm a freelancer, this is for me"
Thanks so much for the feedback Brian!
Totally agree with you there - need to make the sidebar more flexible in it's width for the user :)
Love that idea! That's super cool - need to figure out how to do that on the scrollbar
We're about to push some updates to the commenting that lets you leave a note directly on the page itself. Would love to hear your thoughts on it when we push it!
Totally agree with the Slack - it's high in our backlog so we'll hopefully get that in soon. Good to hear that adding that feature worked out really well for your agency
Great call with the pricing page. We'll update that as well!
Thanks so much again - seriously appreciate your thoughts.
No problem, glad to help! Shoot me a message or reply here when you make updates, I'm glad to check it out and give my 0.02.
-Brian
p.s. Good call on the numbering in the response, I gotta learn to do that in comments :)
Hey Brian, I just signed up for this. I like that I'm immediately shown an idea after signing up and followed the link to join the discussion. Somehow I expected to be redirected to the discussion of the idea that I was just reading. Do you think it would help drive traffic to the forum if people can start or jump to the topic after signing up?
Thanks, I thought it was key to give you an idea immediately.
I'm currently debating a forum vs landing page with disqus, what are your thoughts? There is a forum but that specific one on the landing page is not in there. I'll add it, thanks!
A forum is better
Could you share some thoughts on what tactics for growing your subscriber base did and didn’t work? I’m at issue #8 with my weekly curation ‚The Session‘: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/the-session
I would give a bit more detail on your experience with any of them or your insights on one. It'll be hard to dive deep on all of them but some more insights would be huge.
Maybe you could drop it down to three and pick ones that all work together or competing frameworks?
I like the pictures/logos. I'm seeing a bump in views after every email that includes pictures.
Do you like using Revue? I'm on drip.com with the site built in webflow. I like having full control over the whole experience.
Looking good, keep it up!
Working to validate my dev-friendly dead simple A/B testing tool:
https://easyabtest.com/?ab=ih
Next thing is to drive some traffic to landing page and test out a few different value propositions to see what sticks.
I'm getting to the point with the project I'm working on, https://ceev.io, where I've built out most of the core features, so now I need to spend more time on other aspects - like marketing and A/B testing.
I've never done it before on any other projects, so this will be a first, and your project looks nice. I'll definitely give it a try once I start getting all that set up.
Hey Mitch. Landing page is great and looks like you're building an awesome product. Keep it up :)
I left some feedback for you here - hope it's helpful!
https://app.toyboxsystems.com/share/fW0aGW4KUmOE
Hi Mitch, the call to action button "Design Your Resume" on https://ceev.io/designer is not working
Thank you Mitch! Your landing page looks great already :)
Just add your email to the mailing list and I'll make sure to get you started up. You're probably not the only one wanting to do their first a/b test, and I'd be happy to assist you getting the first round done to see how a first-timer would think about it.
Yeah, that's awesome. I think there is a lot of room in the market for a developer-friendly A/B tool. The current tooling is quite bloated and dangerous ("Sure, load a third-party script and let some random person from Marketing manipulate the DOM after my page loads").
I started working on a solution for this a while back but abandoned it after I stopped doing A/B tests on some other sites. My angle was a nice JS test library that sent data into my reporting interface. So all tests were deployed code and all dom manipulation was handcrafted.
I agree, this is quite brutal. Viewing sites using VWO with slower internet, you can see the original text load, different font family, etc and then boom, the sales copy pops in correctly.
BUT, having been on both sides, marketing and dev... I see a pretty big flaw. If I understand the product correctly, I have to wait for a developer to make dom changes, check in and deploy just to see some sales copy changes. This is predicated on the developer having free time, the marketer getting the copy right on the first try and the developer not fat-fingering anything.
The joy of VWO is a marketer can change the sales copy so it flows with the site design, tweak font size and make any adjustments per breakpoint. It takes some time but looks perfect in the end.
Now, it's more common to have the marketing portion of a site on wordpress, webflow or squarespace, this would allow a marketer to make some of these changes but it's still slower than a wysiwyg editor from VWO.
Maybe if you can add templating to the existing site and filter through your service, server side, that would be an interesting option. Like internationalization?
I 100% agree there is a gap in the market and am hopeful you can find a niche in it :) I think there is room for a few players in this mid priced area. Shameless plug... I sent out an idea about this topic a few weeks back: https://forum.startupsfromthebottom.com/t/28-simple-split-test/47
Good luck!
This is a very good point. I agree that the suite of current tools are popular primarily because they allow someone to make changes without working with a developer and going through the deploy cycles. And because it is "a/b testing" it is considered "safe". I've seen some pretty crazy setups that end up using Optimizely like a CMS.
I think there is probably room for a tool for some organizations that are a bit more engineering focused/agile that would work with an existing CMS or allow for developer-configured changes. It would help prevent deploys breaking in production because of some DOM manipulation that only happens in that environment. And would, ideally, avoid the case of sites being completely broken if a content blocker blocks those services.
I'm not quite sure what the answer is. Probably some middle-ground. I always described it as "Stripe for A/B testing". Developer-focused documentation and fair pricing.
Interesting, I definitely like the developer first approach. I'm not 100% sold on the current implementation but I think you're definitely on to something.
I do see that you're doing the the hiding on the client with display: none. Since it is dev focused, maybe build language specific plugin that would remove it on the server, removing the extra dom elements. If you build a ruby gem, I'll beta test it.
I see you're eating your own dog food... https://easyabtest.com/?ab=d https://easyabtest.com/?ab=ih and default. ih is for indie hackers? ;)
I love this comment! Spot on with my own frustrations that lead to building this tool in the first place.
Another thing I've seen is that the A/B test tool itself makes the site so slow that even the control version (without any new test) performs worse than usual. </rant>
Do you think this is a problem? With easyabtest.com I personally think that it should be fairly straightforward to extract a/b test results with analytics/ads tools.
It really depends on how accurate you want to be. If you have massive traffic or one of the variations has a huge impact on conversion then you'll be able to eyeball it with standard tooling. But, if you have lower traffic or lower conversion imact and want to do some sort of Bayesian calculation then you'll have difficulty doing this with standard tools.
Spot on! With MVP thinking I'm building statistics up bit by bit. I'll start with simple eyeballing: "Is a any better than b", then provide simple statistics like "How much a is better than b", and the final goal is to answer the hard questions like "how probable is it that a is better than b".
One of my goals is to try to make the tool as simple to use as possible, and one of the big questions is that how you will understand the results without a degree in statistics.
All the big split testing products on the market have dropped any entry level plans (VWO, Unbounce, I think Optimizely doesn't even show prices any more), leaving only Google Optimizer, which is a bit complex and heavy-weight for that market. I love the concept and will consider it next time I have need.
Thank you for the great point of view! This is very true. I was thinking about having a small fee to the first-level package too, but considering your comment I'm bending towards the freemium model: It would emphasise that this product is great for small-mid range companies.
Just register to the mailing list!
I'm working on updating my landing page for syrreo.com as well, the goal is to get it done by Aug 31! I might use your services for a/b test.
Good Luck
A big thank you! I'll make sure to get you set up before that :)
Ayy! That is precisely what I am working on as well! Although, it looks like you are a little further ahead than I am (currently unreleased). Good luck to ya! 😃
Boom! Great minds think alike :D
Did you have the same angle or something else in mind? My next technical thing would be probably to support cookie-based tests too.
The market for small businesses and indie hackers is well under-served in my opinion. A/B testing really doesn't have to be over-engineered and over-priced. This is something that I think you capture and I am also striving for. Simple, minimalistic, but also performant.
The angle that I came up with is snapshot (scrape) based. This approach allows them to be fairly hands off for them except for adding a simple script tag.
I'll be watching you 🧐. haha, I kid. But for real, if you want to bounce ideas off of me sometime, feel free. I believe this market is big enough for the both of us. 🤠
Wonderful! I wish best of luck to you 😊 I agree that there's plenty of room in the market, no need to not being open about what we're doing.
Let's bounce ideas someday! That sounds great!
This month I'm going full-steam to finally launch Strip Club, the premium membership option for StripTogether: The Collaborative Webcomic Community.
So far StripTogether has been completely free, with a donation page, but that isn't the most sustainable so I've been working on and wrapping up requested features as a paid service.
What I'm building for Strip Club launch:
Layers for the drawing interface
Increased Strip length range, 2-9 panels instead of 3-6
Restricted Strips - comics which can only be drawn by other Strip Club Members
Strip Club Members-only Message Boards
What I'm working to add after Strip Club launch:
Scripts for Strips, allowing artists to collaboratively write scripts, which may then be used to start a Strip Club Strip.
Sharable Backdrops, a marketplace of drawings which Strip Club members can add to their libraries with which to start their own panels.
Direct Messaging
I'm still working out the exact pricing, but since everything around the brand has a slightly edgy sense of humour I'm looking at $6.66/mo billed monthly, or $4.20/mo billed yearly. What do you guys think?
Love the name!
I like the price too, assuming $6.66 is close to a reasonable price to begin with i.e. $6.66 is better than $7 but worse than $15 perhaps.
Have seen StripTogether a few times here now and love the idea.
What I would find awesome is a way for artists to post their own Web Comic series examples and a Guideline (think Corporate Identity rules document) and then invite others to collaborate. Maybe that is just a small extension to what you have in mind for the "Scripts for Strips"?
Are there plans for an API that would allow people to show the results of collaborations on their own website?
Thanks! Great ideas.
I hadn't thought about that first option exactly, but I have considered eventually allowing Strip Club members to form series (groups) that others could subscribe to.... a series collaboratively made by the same set of artists, it would be like a collaborative spin on Line Webtoon.
As for the API, that's a great thought! I've been trying to find a way I could bridge the gap to make Strips more sharable, currently it's not as simple as saving the image and rehosting, since each panel is a separate image. But now that you mention it, I guess it wouldn't be too much work to provide a share button that provides an embed code.
The website design is really good, the strips page loaded a little bit slow but maybe its just all of the IH community on your site at the moment :)
Good luck!
Thanks for pointing that out! I've sped that part up now :)
This is a really cool idea. You gotta put social sharing buttons at the bottom. I reckon people would share these. Also the brabding colour tone on the website (red) make it seem like a business website. It might benefit from bolder colours that resonate more with your target audience. Nice work though, I like it
Thanks for checking it out! I used to have social share buttons, but analytics showed that no one had every used them so I opted to simplify.
Nailing down a few more partnerships for (our social impact software house)[https://www.lutendo.net]. We've been building software & apps for early-stage startups, and now we're focused on going for longer-term clients so we can take our entrepreneurship training program to the next level for our developers in Sri Lanka.
Will also be running the V1 of our one-day in-person bootcamp in Paris, what we're calling "Startup Saturday". Just put together the curriculum and excited to put it out there!
Wow, that looks super ambitious and amazing.
Initially I was a little confused by the offer ... or offers? There is one "how it works" outline - but a list of 3 things lutendo can do that initially sounded like separate offers, not like a progression.
Another thing (maybe that is just me): "accelerating a roadmap" did not vibe all that well. In my mental model a roadmap is mostly static and might change slightly ... but it is not something that moves and needs acceleration. Burning through a backlog or roadmap, that would be something I could relate to a lot better.
Maybe you could put something about "creating an asset" in there.
That might speak to people who have read books like "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" and worry about Cash Flow ...
Side remark regarding Fitmersive: it says EXERCISE SAFELY, but how exctly is that problem solved? I was unable to find any details.
I'm working on my website monitor https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/skeeper I've got the front end platform to build and i'm also working on validating my next idea ;)
Finished the landing page for https://www.pricingbot.co
Basically it's a SaaS for e-commerce / marketplace seller to monitor competitor's prices.
Now I'm driving traffic to the page to get some emails for the upcoming beta.
Kevin - Love the design and single page setup. I don't run a store but if I did I'd be very interested in the product. The pricing section seems to be missing an ID so https://www.pricingbot.co/#pricing doesn't go anywhere.
I'm notoriously bad at shipping content but here it is: I promise I'll publish a blog post this month.
We got some good momentum from our PH launch last month so it's time to add fuel 🔥🔥🔥
Following up here. I DID IT: https://canny.io/blog/hire-fire/
First time encountering Canny - this is awesome. Will be using on our team.
Looking forward to the blog post! :)
Thanks Christian!
Awesome, I also love Intercom too! Do I also remember you from a YC office hours? Or are you a different canny?
Yeah, that was us! Good memory 👍
Website design is solid.
Thanks Irshad!
Working on improving our small business lead tracking/CRM https://www.simpleleadtracker.com
Looking to improve the overall look as well as add new features. Last month we added copy and paste forms that automatically add leads to the system, as well as the ability to create custom fields. This month the overall goal is to improve the UI as well as get out a series of training and tutorial videos.
Peter - Maybe try stressing what the user gets (close 42% more sales, less stress managing sales funnel) - not what the product does - in the sub-text "makes it easy to track and follow up with leads and connect with past clients".
Also, "making" money is a bigger motivator for me than "saving" money. A person can only save so much, but you could make unlimited!
Hey! Was just checking out your site and left some feedback for you here on your landing page :) Hope it's helpful! https://app.toyboxsystems.com/share/4WOmC8KmPbRF
Keep up the great work!!
I'm currently working on my Vue learning site (https://vuehero.com).
Right now I'm working on the next course and soon I'll start posting more content like short lessons too.
Courses look awesome - really cool that you're providing all of that for free! I left some feedback on your landing page. Hope it helps!
https://app.toyboxsystems.com/share/yxQvBmtK8FwY
Hi Brendan, that's so nice of you to use time to add such a useful feedback! There was definitely many important things you pointed out and I will probably implement almost all of them :-)
Will add a new comment here when it's done!
My pleasure!
We're actually building the tool I left the comments on and are testing a platform where you can submit your site and receive professional feedback (Copywriting, UX, Visual Design etc.)
I'd love to hear your thoughts around this or any related services you've needed!
:)
I've implemented most of the things you pointed out now! Thanks again.
The tool looked very good and the idea behind it is briliant! If there is anything I would like to point out is the points (6, 7 and 8). I just see your name to the right and not what you actually did, I have to click your name first.
Also, if I click on one of the numbers it would be cool if the comment could be highlighted or something in the sidebar so it would be easier to find it there.
As someone who's been learning Vue, and stuttering, this looks neat.
My feedback would be to offer some photography of yourself, or a screenshot from the course (photos of people usually work the best in my experience) on the landing page. It'll make it feel more differentiated from other learning sites, too, as that's your ownable IP.
Hi again, Charlie. Added a photo and a little text about me on the site now!
Thanks Charlie!
That's not a bad idea. Guess it will give people some more confident in the page it they can actually identify them self with the person behind it.
This is the start of month 7 working on https://ceev.io - which is the longest I've stayed focused on one side project.
Definitely happy with the progress I've been making, although I've been slowing down a bit recently. I just hate doing marketing stuff, but I know I have to if I want to continue to get new users 🤷♂️
That is a 🔥🔥🔥 landing page. Super impressive UI as well. Keep it up!
Working on a little experiment called https://saastransfer.com/ , seeing if it's a viable way for people to sell unused SaaS subscriptions (that are transferrable). I've rec'd great advice here - a big thanks IH'ers!
Hi Rich,
I'm working on a service to create curated websites just like the one you did. Would you be open for a quick survey? It would really help me to talk to potential users early on!
Emil
Sure, send me a message and I'll complete the survey. Bonus points if it's using Typeform (slight Typeform fan here)
Great, thanks a lot. Sent you an email!
Hey Rich that's a brilliant idea! Could you describe a bit more the business model, i.e. do you involve the SaaS in the process at all or is it a transaction between the old subscriber + SaaS Transfer + the new subscriber only? I am asking it because would love to recommend your tool to my customers that are about to churn :)
Hey Duda! I was originally going to be the "trusted third party" for people wanting to sell unused SaaS subscriptions but I've scaled it back so people can list on their own and then handle the transfer themselves. It's a tricky space as I'd love it to be self-service so people don't need the same level of trust but then the transfer process does have risks (whether I'm doing the work or someone else is) like changing passwords, switching out the billing CC to a prepaid CC to avoid the chance of ongoing billing etc
Feel free to PM me if you've got ideas 😀
I've sent my first invoice for yourgoals.io and I'm setting up my first customer. Waiting for them to return the SaaS agreement and invoice now!
Just a technical note: your page takes way too much time to load 🙂 like 30s for me.
The reason is that the home page size is 6MB.
The parallax-2.jpg image is 4.8MB big. Just running it through ImageOptim made if 50% smaller, but I'm sure you don't need a 4000+px image. It can be made much smaller. Another image is 1MB, try to trim that one as well.
You might not notice it as the browser cached it after the first use. Try clearing the cache and you'll notice, the spinner takes forever to go away.
Optimizing the speed and size of a site is key for the user experience, and Google also likes speedy sites a lot more (and this means it pushes slow sites down)
Cheers - yes I am aware I need to get on it. My main channel for customers ATM is personal referral. But I realise that having a nicely tuned landing page will help with this. Part of the issue is that I use Linux at home and have PS at work - so I need to work out how to optimise images without PS (which I know is easy just on the list).
Nice work!
The description confused me a well, but that could be due to me not being in the industry.
P.S. this bad boy is almost 5 MB and took 20s to load in Europe - https://yourgoals.io/images/parallax-2.jpg :)
Cheers, I need to tune the landing page. It is aim at my customer cohort, but I need to really go to town on it. Aware of the size issues cheers will rectify this weekend.
Such a cool product - keep up the good work!
Thanks very much, I appreciate your kind words. Good luck with your own projects
Nice work. I took a look at your site and I thought the description was a bit confusing. Can you provide some more detail about your product?
It helps adults with intellectual disability develop adult life skills, service providers to automate reporting and family members and carers with transparency.
I am planning to come up with a Master Plan and do content idea brainstorming for DoByLearning.com
One long running aspect will probably be blogging about progress on StackCASE:
https://ideasareworthless.io/ideas/tech-stack-database-with-case-code-generator
I am planning to decide if I want to work on PlayTexts at the same time or put that on ice for now.
Biggest goal for August: survive the transition from Day Job to Job Search. Germany is really brutal when it comes to being eligible for social security benefits. A bonus goal is prototyping and discovery for the plan I have regarding StackCASE.
Lots going on, wishing you focus and success in all!
One thought for DoByLearning: I was a bit confused by the landing page. Instead of listing the features under the "about" section, you should add more about what problems you'll solve for people, the unique approach you take, or the overall value they'll gain from the community. As a viewer on the site, I'm intrigued by the "map for the maker world" but don't see why I would want to follow your blog, etc. There are a lot of learning communities out there. How is yours different?
Thank you for the pointers. You are definitely right.
Technically, I suppose, I have no landing page yet. There is just the website.
As you write, I will have to add the exact benefits somewhere. I am not sure how I should go about that, though.
I want to introduce paid courses at some point. Maybe I should do that sooner rather than later to avoid the "WTF ... I thought everything here will be free" moments. For those courses, the idea is something like: "Monetize Your Learning Experience, Surpass Conventional Wisdom and Build a Solid Business Foundation". I toyed with that on http://www.codeandsucceed.com a long time ago ... and will probably kill that site, soon.
On the other hand, it might be better to Blog evergreen content for a while and use Twitter and Backlinks to grow a Mailing List before I launch a first product.
I should probably consider the Blog content my product for now, create a landing page for it and then find a tagline that explains the benefits of following it.
I started working on a side project which manifested itself after growing my own instagram account: https://catchit.io
Today was a pretty tough day, I tried to setup an ssl certificate with with the same configuration as always, but Let's encrypt wouldn't connect to the server. Turns out the IPv6 routing has some kind of bug that the request doesn't reach the server, so I wasted a whole day 😞 Anyway, I gotta get back hacking on the landing page.
My goal is to launch in 1-2 weeks on PH.
Ohh I know that feeling man, anyways the fact that your working on your side huddle means a lot by itself.
Hey Martin, this looks really cool and I signed up! I think some people did something on Twitter for awhile that did drive some conversions....any recommended tactics here to use it as a way to grow your IG?
One last thing, which country are you from? So I can buy the telephone number in advance.
What I do is being super thoughtful and relevant to the people whom I'm watching. They generally respond. If the comment itself gets upvoted too, every follower of that person will see your account. Typically people then click on your account name and want to see what you are up too.
And the best outcome is, when you showed up numerous times and the other person starts to follow and like your stuff. Then your content will suddenly appear on the explore page of the instagram accounts followers.
That's what I'm doing and it works great so far. I just wanted to migrate the logic away from my main service, hence catchit.io got born.
I'm glad you like the idea, but don't sign up just yet :D. The page is still a static page with no backend. The core logic still lies on my second service where I have to migrate it away. So your signup didn't go through. It'll work on Sunday if you come back. I'll make sure to post it on IH too ;)
I'm in the US - feel free to email me too. Ben@playsweep.com
Done.
Would cloudflare help with the certificate?
Is there a reason you're NOT using SSL from cloudflare?
I'm following Pieter Level's advice to have as little external dependencies as possible in a production system. SSL certificates is one of them. I started indiehacking at the time when Amazon Cloud had a major outage because of a DNS mis-configuration and major sites where offline last year, since then I try to follow Pieter's advice. I have nothing against Cloudflare though.
Well, I would heavily suggest using CloudFlare and setting up SSL using it as it takes about 10 seconds to do.
The benefits heavily outweigh the limitations in this case.
Yeah, usually let's encrypt has no problems either. Often it takes only a single command line call to set it up, but not today :D
I am just finished an MVP for my first app, just started learning to code two years ago and this is my first production project. IH isn't really the target audience (its "google finance of biotech startups") but any feedback is welcome! I've never done design or marketing before so feedback goes a long way
https://bio-vc-tracker.herokuapp.com/
(heroku hobby plan so first page load may be slow, also doesn't look great on mobile)
Good start. Interesting data set. Who is your target audience? What is your competitive advantage over sites like crunchbase?
Thanks! I'm targeting startups, investment bankers, investors and pharma BD and executives. Not sure which group will find the most value at this point but hope to find out soon :). I used to work in banking and VC and would have used a tool like this.
What I heard from people in the industry is that existing sites like crunchbase and others don't work that well for biotech. In biotech startups, most traditional operating and financial metrics don't apply (biz model is to exit before generating any revenue and products are basically science projects). So those other sites give you lots of companies, investors and deals, but they don't capture the biotech specific data that actually matters, and you get a lot of noise you dont care about. So I'm going deeper on the data that matters without cluttering the dataset with stuff people don't need.
There's also a lot of offline work I do that I can bring to the site to add a lot of proprietary scientific insight, which is not available with other services.
Awesome data there. I also have a UI/UX pointer. For a quick fix until you really manage to dig into the UI. Add a class like this to your css:
.clr {
clear:both;
}
Then to stop the overlapping of words within their containers you can add that class to the element and it will make sure it's separated. The quick hack is something like:
<br class="clr" />
/explore page looks broken on my screen as the text doesn't fit their containers. Remove the absolute height attributes from elements to the containers stretch to fit.
Also, the colors on the front page are quite muted (but maybe biotech isn't the flashiest industry so they might be appropriate?) Great work on your first project!
Thanks for the feedback! I'm very new to UI obv so stuff like that is really helpful. Will try to brighten things up as well :)
I'm working on finally bringing my website auditor Chrome extension out of free beta and launching paid plans:
https://www.checkbot.io/
It's been way more hassle setting up payments than I expected so I'll be overjoyed to get this step out of the way so I can focus on adding features again. 😄
Test your site is the name of the checkbot?
That sentence is a little hard to parse ... which is not great given its significance ... and it might not be the strongest way to start things off. I would move it ... or get rid of it if you feel it there is enough redundancy.
Something like "Have a sophisticated bot test you websites automatically and more thoroughly than the average professional"
might work better.
Apart from that everything looks awesome at first glace. Bookmarked it ...
Congrats ... good luck with monetization ^_^
Awesome, thanks. 😄I'm not happy with the heading either.
Is this any better?
"Checkbot will boost the SEO, speed and security of your website -
Test your whole site with ease for broken links, duplicate titles, invalid HTML/CSS/JS, insecure pages and more"
I like your suggestion and it's more punchy but it's too long for the space I have. Some considerations: I want SEO, speed and security in there for SEO reasons, if the main heading is much longer than the above it doesn't work great on mobile and people seems to miss that Checkbot tests 1,000s of pages in one go instead of a single page which is a big differentiator.
Nice. The direction is great.
At first "Checkbot will boost" sounded a little like "Hulk smash", though ^_^
How about "Get SEO, Speed and Security right with minimal effort"
The "of your website" is kinda implied, and I often read that each word must defend its place in that kind of real estate.
Then
Our Checkbot will expose broken links, duplicate titles, invalid HTML/CSS/JS, insecure pages and more
Haha, I was playing with "supercharge" (feels overused) and "optimize" (dry) as well. "Website" can be implied but I like it there or something similar for SEO reasons. I'm actually getting decent organic search traffic already but maybe it can go. I'll have a play with it.
Thanks for the feedback! Let me know if you've got any other comments as I want to make sure people understand at a glance what Checkbot is. I'm hoping the screenshot + the heading gets the message across.
Sounds like an interesting challenge. It seems a little as if you make compromises to get the SEO aspect right. In theory there should not be much of a conflict between ranking and reaching your audience. What is going on there? My take:
I can see how that is probably not what you want to hear at this level of polish, but I think:
you might want two landing pages instead of one: one that is SEO optimized the way you keep mentioning - for people who think in traditional terms and still need some long copy that explains why a chatbot is for them, even though they are looking for a website validator ...
and then turn the current landing page into a "Chatbot Product" landing page that does not need any of the traditional terms for SEO reasons.
Not sure how much such a change would mess with what you have gained already ...
Thanks again for the thoughts. I'm happy to compromise with only one landing page, I was just trying to expand upon why the heading is a little clunky and the way it is at the moment. I need to give it some thought. Most of my traffic isn't going to be organic search traffic to start with so it's probably best not to optimise too much for that and go more in the direction you're suggesting.
By the way, you mentioned "chatbot" which is making me think you're not sure what Checkbot is so I have some improvements to make on the copy for sure! In a long sentence...Checkbot is a browser extension that can crawl your website from your own machine to give tips on how to improve the SEO, security and speed of your pages, where you can check as many sites as you want as often as you want unlike many cloud services.
Is there something I can change to make it clear it's not a chatbot to you?
No, I did too many things at one and wrote that sloppily ... was probably thinking in too many directions, too.
I understood that it is a Chrome Extension initially ... but somehow the Bot started to throw me off at some point. Not sure if that is cause for alarm. Simply observing if others have issues with the term bot should be enough.
Yes, I have to up that, as a ESL guy I had to read in 3 times. The landing page looks ok though.
I'm working on the launch of my product Element Form.
https://www.elementform.com
I've done the landing page roughly and working on improving it. Currently integrating analytics and similar tools.
Probably that is partly because the page is still WIP, but the page is very emotionless and does not attempt to address a specific target audience.
You start with the features, but you should always start with the benefits. And no, the features are NEVER the benefits. The benefits have to be non-technical.
I would try to add some Cold Reading elements. Pretend to read people's minds to make sure you nail the attention grabbing stage.
Thinking that people should already be at the elevated, enlightened level and just care about details can be a costly mistake.
The feature block indicates that it can be a great offering ... it does show substance and an understanding of the requirements ... but that is not worth a lot if people leave before they get there.
Thank you Andreas!
Yes, the website is a WIP. Apart from the features, the rest is really scribbled together. It looks better than lorem ipsum :)
Yes, I agree with the benefits in the opener, I will consider when I'm writing the proper content.
Can you give some examples of Cold Reading elements?
Yep, it DOES look better than lorem ipsum
:)
In your case it might be enough to mention some of the solutions that people might have looked at and the problems that they may have had with them.
Probably I have not really been in the situation where your solution becomes relevant, but here is a take based on what I am somewhat familiar with:
"You do not trust Google with your Surveys?"
"You want a more conventient way to collect data than hosting WordPress and using a Plugin for data collection?"
Things like that. Of course ideally you have a model target customer in mind and can identify better assumptions about what they might have exerienced and struggled with ...
OK, these give me some very important feedback.
I'm taking my notes on how to structure the content when I'm about to do it.
This will be very valuable when I'm doing the features AND benefits part of the landing page :)
Thank you very much!
Looks nice! Is this intended for people without programming knowledge? I saw that "no programming knowledge required" below the fold, so wasn't sure if that was the primary audience or just a secondary audience
Thank you!
Yes, it will be primarily for people without programming knowledge. :)
I tried to come up with a crude version of the marketing copy. I did this in a few hours.
I like your product. Perhaps you could make the logo bigger and have a favicon.
Thank you Azhan, I'll consider making the logo bigger. A favicon shouldn't hurt either!
I like the simplicity of it and how it would cater to getting of the ground with those forms easily without too much bells and whistles. One thing I do find lacking is a tad bit more color on the site. Feels a bit dry going over it, even though it looks really smooth and polished overal.
Hello Arqu,
Sorry that I missed your message in the turmoil of the thread. I've added a bit of colorful image that should give this missing touch of color you weren't able to locate.
Thank you very much for the feedback
I like how the landing page is shaping up!
What kind of gap did you see in the market that led to creating Element Form? I'm curious because there are a lot of players in the space and some are really big names (TypeForm, JotForm, Google Forms).
Thank you very much, Prateek!
I think TypeForm and Google Forms are very good however they evolve in very distinct directions. JotForm is pretty buggy and unreliable.
I'm aiming for the classical form builder market, no unnecessary bells, and whistles. It just works is the motto.
Love the idea of creating something simple that does the job really well. All the best!
Your input is valuable and I've taken my notes.
Thank you very much Prateek!
Looks great so far. I love the clean look. Do you plan on charging for it?
Thank you!
Not before the product is good enough. It's in development yet. Although I think I'll have a very useful free version.
http://webdef.com
Research Companies.
Find the technologies used on a any company website, how much money they spend each month, and a list of their emails.
This month I'm working on a reverse index of technologies and getting more people to give what I currently have, my super alpha software, a try!
Neat idea! I love crawling-related ideas in the business info space. I do think it's quite a hard one to implement. It seems like your crawler looks primarily at the website itself to determine technologies used, while most users will be interested in platforms used internally. For example, I looked up one of my old companies and found stuff like Google Tag Manager, when I think what people would be interested in knowing is stuff like Salesforce, JIRA, Thrift, AWS, etc. So you may have your work cut out for you. You might want to narrow your focus to technology or email lists since both of those are big use cases on their own.
Thanks Greg!
Could you share which domain you searched for? If not no worries, just wanted to dig :)
So I am indeed finding the stuff you mentioned.
Here's a "fuller" example: http://webdef.com/search/211
If you scroll waaaaaaaay down to the bottom of the list you'll find a section called "Undefined Technologies" which are literally the ones I have not researched yet, but my software did find them.
In terms of narrowing focus...
...there is already some great software that finds email for you, and some software that finds technologies, but not many finding both, doing it well, and scaling beyond that (to the extent I'd like to go).
So, it's my differentiator ;)
Thanks for the comments! Always happy to hear more!
Yeah, if you can do both well, that sounds great. I'm curious why you're starting with both. Is it because you're crawling sites and basically get two for one?
I searched for gracenote.com.
Happy to chat more if you want more feedback.
Gosh, I wish I'd get that for free :) But no chance...
Starting with both because my vision to fill a hole in the market wouldn't work with just one. To sell your service/product to a company, you need to know what they use, how much they spend, and who to contact.
Thanks for letting me know your search, saw that one.
So when I visit the gracenote site I'm not seeing the technologies you mentioned, for example, Salesforce. Double checking and I see my software picking up everything.
My software has found Salesforce on other sites so far, more specifically it's found this SF product but there may be more lurking in undefined technologies:
https://www.salesforce.com/products/marketing-cloud/data-management/
Thanks for the feedback!
I just realized this is mainly my reading comprehension problem. I assumed for some reason that you were talking about trying to track what software companies use in general, but you clearly state that it's software used on the website. I just missed it or didn't absorb it.
Interesting feedback, and maybe something I'm not making clear enough!
In all honesty I really have NOT focused on my own site layout, design, or marketing copy much. I've put almost all of my effort into the software and infrastructure to quickly make new features public.
Rapid iteration :)
So, that could be wholly on my end.
Thanks for letting me know, great feedback!
Without writing a single line of code, I was able to grow my interview training business to over $2000 MRR. This month, my goal is to automate this training by building a video training. The cost will be $99. Check out https://www.jinaldalal.com/product-intuition-training/
We are working on replybutton.com. It's an email follow-up automation tool with quick reply buttons.
Trying to increase reply rates to sales emails with quick reply buttons below emails. Will launch in the beginning of October.
Muzaffer - Really interesting concept if I understand correctly.
So I'd send a cold email to a prospect and there would be a few buttons within my email or triggered by my email with canned responses the contact can reply with?
Like: "Cool, call me tomorrow"; "Let's talk pricing"; & "No thanks"
Yes Daniel, it's totally correct :)
There will be 3 buttons below your email and recipients can give a reply with 1 click. After clicking the buttons, recipient see a 'thank you' page and we record the reply. You can customize the button texts according to reply you want to get.
If you are interested, please leave your email on replybutton.com :)
Also if you have any suggestions, I will be happy to hear.
I am working on service for small business owners to ensure their site is always up and running and alert on downtimes.
How will your service be specialized for small business owners?
I will launch the v3 of Manypixels featuring new pages and payment per service in beta (we'll still be offering subscriptions though!)
Working on a finance spreadsheet site. The cell mapping alone(taken for granted) is already a challenge but a fun one.
This is primarily for me, one main problem with these sort of apps I think is that you have to manually input your data and it's not updated in real time eg. your actual balances can get out of sync. I wonder how services like Mint get that integration, must be some crazy certification. Other neat things are cells with individual properties like API connections that would be neat but not sure if it will be practical/safe.
A thought crossed my mind about taking screenshots of logged in finance apps and these screenshots are parsed by CV to extract values and then sent to the API to be inserted into the app but I don't know.
Anyway for myself I use Google Spreadsheets but as a developer it would be great to build. It's not just a blank spreadsheet, it has a specific functionality regarding paying down debt, but it's also generally a fill it in/monitor interest growth and what not/calendar bill reminders. Before I was a developer I designed this and now that I can build it I'm pretty psyched.
If all goes well in life I'll be working on this. Overall I just want to put out something that's end to end usable/ready to go but I understand not to make it "perfect" but I don't think I've ever finished/launched something that was ready to be used/accept payments. I'm full stack, so there's a bit of work to do, the graphical part alone will be a challenge eg. draggable/resizable/groupable cells it's interesting.
edit: ehh the more I think about it, why rebuild excel. The whole sanitization thing, nested parentheses parsing... I don't know. The drag/snap/coordinate update thing too. We'll see.
This did not happen, working full time, freelancing as well, did a 5-day vacation trip, not sure what else, also generally take up to 15hrs/wk riding a bike.
overall though motivation/purpose/etc... I've been screwing around with Robinhood/"scraping" stuff, idk
In short, testing different monetisation strategies and optimising AARRR funnel for https://www.fullstack.cafe. And content, content, content.
Just launched Codezzi (codezzi.com)
We help Shopify Store owners to grow their revenue. Our main strengths are:
Tech help - Bug fixes, Store optimization etc.,
Increase your conversion rate on your store
FB Ads strategy
Tasks for this month:
Finalize the pricing plan
Test the market
Acquire first 10 customers
Would be happy to connect & help any shopify store owners here.
Thanks
Over at https://propertyments.com I'm working out how to deposit collected rent into a landlord's bank account in one to two business days using stripe.
Cool idea, this is an interesting space with a lot of potential. My friend has 5 doors, 3 houses that he rents out. He used square at one point to take payments but had trouble with the fees.
How do you handle the 2.9% + .30? Maybe look into ach?
At scale you can negotiate deals with stripe and/or braintree. If you incentivize tenants to use debit you could probably get interchange + 20-30 basis points.
I heard venmo ate the fees until they got bought out and almost went out of business. I heard their story on "The Tony Robbins Podcast" podcast, interesting story.
Good luck!
Thanks Brian! I am currently using ACH through stripe to collect rent, otherwise the fees would be huge each month it's processed. Stripe charges .8% capped at $5 per transaction, so if monthly rent is $1500/mo, your friend would only be charged that $5 extra (which can be paid by the tenant on Propertyments if your friend chose to pass it on).
The issue is the time it takes for ACH payments to be delivered to your friends bank account. ACH is very slow compared to credit card payments, so I'm looking into ways to bridge that timeframe using the tenant's security deposit. So far testing has been positive and I've been able to payout ACH payments in just a day or two.
Ah, cool. I didn't know stripe did ACH, awesome. Debit is regulated at 0.05% + $0.22 which would be even cheaper. You would have to negotiate a deal with stripe to get your rate close to that but it may be an option.
Can you restrict stripe to only use debit? May be another option to save. I'm not sure how long debit transfers take either.
Building https://www.indiehackers.com/product/keenbrain
Working on a product management course to help:
Non-PMs break into the field of product management
Everyone else interested in going from zero to a successful product launch.
Ya'll can sign up here to get on my mailing list if you want a section of my Product Launch and Product Management course for free
www.keenbrain.com
My goals for this month are:
Improving the landing page and front-end for a structural design tool I'm working on: RCAD. Right now it has a bunch of links to nowhere.
Finish a little wordcloud / keyword analyzer app I made for fun, so you can analyze what companies are looking for in their job postings.
Improve the hugo shortcode I created to embed Observable notebooks on my personal website.
Redesign the front end of a study/practice question app I made for a law and ethics exam that P.Eng's need to take.
...all while working full time as a consultant 😵.
Was checking out RCAD - seems like a really cool product for a very specific target market. Love that :)
I left some feedback for you here - hope it's helpful!
https://app.toyboxsystems.com/share/0oQifvbTS1nZ
Wow that's a brilliant project you're working on. Thanks for the feedback, its very much appreciated.
Thanks Jeremy! Please let me know if you have any feedback on viewing the comments etc. within Toybox - would love to hear your thoughts :)
Going to launch my next product. Blog first. Build in public. Looking forward to it, and all of the feedback.
In the final stages of finishing up my cryptocurrency transaction alert service MVP, with my current focus on tightening up some backend integrations (blockchains and payments). This is the first product I'm launching and it's been a humbling experience, though reading about fellow Indiehackers' journeys these last few months gave me continued inspiration so thank you everyone!
The site can be accessed at https://www.cryptotxalert.com/ but registration is disabled for now. While I've solicited feedback before and iterated a few times already, I know that the value proposition can be articulated more clearly especially for those new to crypto. Any type of feedback would be much appreciated!
I have a full workload consulting this month, but in my down time I'll be putting some final touches on a Jeopardy! training app that I have been building for a couple weeks. It's a showcase piece for my dev work, no goal of making money with it.
It will allow people interested in the game to play through historic episodes, tracking their scores and stats as they play through over 6000 games. While Jeopardy! rarely repeat clues exactly, there is a lot of repetition with themes, structure, and content, so I envision this as being a helpful tool for hopeful contestants not only for tracking their competitive knowledge, but also as a study aid for learning new material or refreshing their memories of existing knowledge.
Last week I launched synthshare.com 2.0 with design and speed improvements. There hadn’t been any major updates in almost 2 years. This month I’ll be fixing bugs, marketing, and monetizing. There are also some new features that I will explore to improve the user experience.
Hey everyone. Was hoping to launch Intake360 to legal professionals but ran into a snag with the platform that I'm using. Hope to get it resolved soon and get my first paying customers.
www.intake360.com
Trying to get some nice ideas for web app that has something to do about podcasts.
Trying to grow my business. Probably also get some funding. A game asset store (https://www.mijjimo.com).
This month I have the goal to do casual research for problem discovery @ a local Recording Studio/Rehearsal space.
Also today I speak @ a local Fuckup Nights meetup 😬
I'm making a much better attempt at the cold outreach that I said I would make a good start on last month for iDIOPAGE.
In the process I'll try and get some more feedback and improve my onboarding process too.
How do you feel cold outreach is working for you? I want to try it and am still a little terrified of it for some reason.
For a little feedback on your site - all the underlining was a little confusing. I went to click on the words use case and visitor segment fully expecting a dropdown menu to pop up.
It sounds super useful - perhaps checking out rightmessage.com for copy inspiration could help you hone your sales copy on your homepage :-)
I've sent so few at this point it's hard to say. Open rate is good, reply rate is poor, but the sample size is tiny. I'm going to switch tacts and try to get people on the phone as a first step, so I'll report back on that next month.
I think the fear is normal. I was a little hesitant to send cold emails and I'm pretty apprehensive about getting on a call, but if it seems like it might be a good strategy for you then you just have to go for it.
Thanks for the landing page feedback, I'll get rid of those underlines.
I did actually get word "personalization" from RightMessage. Their's is good but also focused heavily around their sub products, which I don't have. I'm hoping I'll get more insights to improve it once I get some people on the phone from cold outreach.
I am still working on my file storage and collaboration platform FileAgo which is about 90% complete now.
Also started a blog last week where I plan to explain more about the software and related stuffs in the coming days/weeks.
Final sprint for the public launch of https://www.datagekko.com. Basically cleaning up some remaining stuff and hunting down first customers :)
Cool! Nice looking landing page.
I noticed in the pricing section there is some alignment issues... I understand its probably not your biggest concern right now but it caught my attention.
https://i.imgur.com/uT78fgk.jpg
Yeah noticed, CSS can be fiddly sometimes. It's an eye sore to me too, but got bigger stuff to wrap up. It's on my todo list for the next few days. Thanks for pointing it out, seems like a lot of people are bothered with it :D
Nice one!
I checked your website, but did not fully "get" what I could do with your system after I send data there.
Say I fired up a raspberry pi with a thermometer, threw it to my attic and connected it to send temperature hourly to DataGekko. What features could I use with your service to make use of my data?
Hey, thanks for the input, this is gold for me right now. Seems like I need to iterate on my message some more.
Anyways, as to what you get from it:
No mess with setting up your own time series measuring
A highly available setup
Tons of throughput if you need it. I don't restrict you on message frequency or device numbers.
You can query and slice and dice your data any way you like (per client/metric/data tag) across large time spans or zoom in into millisecond level data
Some deduplication magic and other under the hood goodies
Some basic tracing of your devices in terms of connectivity and uptime
Some upcoming features are GEO support, MQTT 5.0, HTTP endpoints, alerts and webhooks.
Some features on the roadmap but a bit further away are Log ingestion and relevant analytics, automatic anomaly detection, custom plugin mechanisms, integrations with 3rd party services, an exposed API to consume it at your own will, restreaming data to some third party data sinks. There's also a lot more on my wish list but I'm trying to go at it 1 by 1.
Hope this helps you understand it a bit better :)
Hey! Thanks for replying, cleared up a bit :)
If you don't mind me asking, one thing is still unclear to me:
Does your tool help me visualise my data? I know you're saying that I can "slice and dice" the data, but I can do that with either an SQL query or with data visualization. Do I need to pull my sliced and diced data and do a visualization somewhere else?
Glad it helped. Just keep the questions coming :)
So the obvious but relatively cheap part is that you get the visualizations and graphs as part of the deal so its bit more integrated and easier to explore. The difference to SQL is that SQL might do a good job up to a certain scale but then it quickly starts falling short. Another thing is that you still need to host that SQL DB somewhere so there's that.
So when you sum it up right now:
You send data
We collect and store it
You can query and visualize it
You have some basic overview of what's going on with your devices
What you benefit:
Super easy to set up/use
Has all the basic stuff integrated out of the box
No worries about performance and the technical side of it
Super helpful small team of people that will probably answer and try to help anything you might need (regardless of the support levels mentioned on the page)
Our competitive edge over services in a similar market:
Pretty cheap given the volume
No restrictions on the number of clients/metrics
Millisecond data resolution (very niche but I guess that's how you differentiate a bit)
Now THAT is clear way of communicating. Thank you :)
(would loved to have that on your website too 😁)
I have just the right side project to test your platform out! Will probably plug it in some day when I have the time.
Awesome! Let me know when you're up for it and if you like it we can work out a special plan for you as a thank you for your feedback here :)
Also, updating the page in the next 24 hours :)
Sorry for delayed comment.
Me and my team is working on bringing a tool ,named as LambdaTest.com on the cloud for fulfilling all software testing needs. With LambdaTest you can perform cross browser testing of your website or web apps across 2000+ browser-OS combinations.
We are live with manual testing feature and currently focused on bringing automation testing feature with which user can automate their script to perform testing.
As you guys working on some web apps or websites, you can give a shot to LambdaTest and please share your expert feedback.
I am looking for apartment residents to help validate renthint.com.
The site works nationwide so if you are in the US and like/love your apartment, please sign up.
We help apartment hunters find an apartment they'll love by speaking with a resident who lives in the complex. Residents make $10/call for their time (~10 min). Free to use for apartment hunters. Rent Hint makes money from properties.
It's pretty crazy that most people move into an apartment (where hundreds of people live) without speaking to anyone who currently lives there.
I also always appreciate site feedback!
Thanks, HackNation!
Working on https://mochiboard.com/ and my main focus is on getting beta users and improving the mobile experience. If you want to give it a whirl I'm open to feedback/suggestions to make this more awesome.
Launching in the app stores is going to be new for me so we'll see how this goes... any tips appreciated!
Working with my partner on this: https://twitter.com/razvanilin/status/1023220404998078464
A platform which allows you to connect your database and generate beautiful charts from your very own data. Coming soon 🚀
I am planning to start an app for making simple friendly followups. I hope I will finish my client projects so I can start working on it. I still need to validate this idea though. It's gonna be my first paid product so I hope it works.
We are finalising the Demo and Private Beta version of Ambissues - An AI-powered platform for user feedback insights.
Finalising means security checks, DB optimizations, deploy strategies, and various whistles and bells (as few of them as possible, we are still engineers at heart and always want to implement more :-) )
Moreover we continue with person-to-person lead generation and user interviews, without spending a cent on ads.
I'm working on CareerSprite, a site to help people find product management jobs. I'm planning to soft launch a basic free version focused on helping people practice interview questions in about two weeks. Then I'll start getting feedback and seeing how near or far from product-market fit I am. I'm furiously burning down my pre-launch punchlist!
If you're curious about it, you have the opportunity to be the absolute first person to sign up for my mailing list! http://eepurl.com/drARZ5. I'll be sending out PM career info and short updates on my progress about once a week.
I'm working on launching https://hivis.io.
I need to find a few more beta users that will help me understand if this has any future as a project.
Also have to merge the changes to the homepage that have been sitting for a while on my machine.
And creating the use-case page with all the various verticals that I came up with.
Oof!
I'm currently working on https://divvycodereviews.com. It's an app where you can request for code reviews for GitHub pull requests within Slack.
The idea is that code review requests have an expiration. The app should help you get a review started by giving you information like 1) how many unstarted code reviews are assigned per member, 2) who are available before the expiration (by tracking users' availability and Do Not Disturb setting on Slack) and 3) who are currently working on your project (for scenarios when subteams are created within your organization)
It's currently waiting for approval on Slack's app directory but I have some feedback I can work on while waiting.
I'm working on a collection of playlists that are a little more exotic than the ones Spotify/Apple Music tend to put out:
https://soundtracktomy.life/
Aiming to do a weekly release and build an audience via newsletter & Patreon. Posted on ProductHunt this week to a moderate reception, so I'm optimistic!
Just launched Tempcheck.io for testing – http://tempcheck.io/
It's a market-research platform for online video. So instead of posting ads on Facebook / YouTube and not knowing if they're working, we pay 100 people a small amount to watch the video twice, leave feedback and thumbs up / thumbs down in real time.
PM me if you have a video you'd like to test.
This month I'm hoping to pick up my first users for my dedicated note-taking app for books.
https://hq.oxity.com
I'm a prolific reader, and I built it as a side project just for myself after struggling to take and store my book notes using all the "generic" apps like Evernote or OneNote.
Oxity gives notes structure and associates them directly to books. This means that a user can cross-reference notes across many books, auto-generate citations, import the book info etc etc.
I never intended to release it to the general public, but after showing it to friends and colleagues they begged me to be able to use it, and they persuaded me that it might have some legs. So, here goes...
Working on getting the Team Plan of Drag (https://dragapp.com) out of beta in August. We are a Shared Inbox inside Gmail, in Trello-like boards.
Still some features and final refinements to do, getting there :) Would love to hear feedback!
Started work on https://knowhub.app/. The encyclopaedic term would be "company information management".
Essentially, it's a centralized place for all company information to exist. Searchable, indexable, taggable.
Right now we're at 1 of the 4 core features done!
I'm trying to keep up with my one-blog-post-per-day streak on my blog flaviocopes.com. I have posts scheduled until Aug 11 at the moment, so I'm over 1/3 of the goal (I like to have a good buffer in case I want to take a couple days off or don't feel inspired)
The blog is focused on educational content for frontend developers. Also, going to work on a Node.js ebook / course (still to decide the format of this new project)
I'm going to resume my work on Remote Leaf.
Apply for Stripe Atlas
Start doing the startupschool.org course
Just shipped a Beta version of YouTube comment analytics - https://www.tubeinsights.com/
The app scans YouTube comments for a particular channel, extracts keywords and presents trends and statistics.
Now driving traffic, testing demand, talking to customers and other marketing drills :)
My Budgetfuchs budgeting app needs fleshing out the different user roles, integration of stripe and the forecasting functionality. Integrating finapi to talk with German/Austrian bank is 80% done.
It got a mascot now and I've started to write blog posts about certain aspects of the application. Should have started that much earlier.
https://budgetfuchs.de?c=indiehackers
Love the name meaningful in German, sounds fun in English :D
A bit of feedback from my part - I would work a bit on the landing page design itself a bit. I mean it's not bad, but it doesn't really have much appeal and looks partly dated and partly modern. On the upside, it loads really fast :)
There's a trend to pronounce the colour Fuchsia wrongly without the hard k sound. In German Fuchs also has this hard k.
Yeah, the landing page... A friend is working on that and a few screenshots will be added as well.
Awesome, good luck. Hope to see the updates around here :)
About a year ago I built myself a service that aggregated tech news from various sources and bundles it into an email once a day. I put it up as a public service (https://blip.email) so a few friends could also signup.
I've been quite happy with my "once a day" news cycle. It is like getting a newspaper in your driveway every morning. I'd like to share that with more people.
My eventual goal is to allow each user to customize their sources and build their own newsletter. Currently everyone gets the same email based on my interests. But, my first step is to cleanup the landing page because it was really just something I threw together so a friend could signup.
Nice! I signed up to see what its like.
I wish I had something like this which also aggregates the articles and comments, so it can all be front loaded and then read while offline (my commute has spotty reception)
I've been working on a business management web app for a while.
August Goal: Update the landing page! Current landing page is OLD!
https://syrreo.com/
With Syrreo providing quotes, keeping track of orders, projects, tasks, sending invoices, and collecting $ can be done with ease.
Nice one, would love to see some more screenshots on the site. You could use https://www.screely.com for it (I'm not affiliated, just like the free tool)
Thank you, going to lookinto it.
Nice! Hopefully, you have some good insights for how it could be improved and aren't only updating it because it's old. I recommend removing the scroll jacking!
Started working on the 2nd course for https://frontloops.io covering js topic. My goal right now is to release it in 2 weeks, which includes the whole new set of 30 challenges and solutions and revamping the landing to work for both of the courses.
Just dividing the number of lessons by the number of the days - it's already clear that some hard work needs to be done there, but I'm getting there. Can't wait to share it with you!
I bookmarked this. My girlfriend has begun learning front end development. I'll show it to her after she finishes her first udemy course.
Do you think this is her next step or would you recommend something before this?
Hey. It's perfect to start the course once you are in a period when you've learned some theory and need to start practicing. Actually almost everyone who I asked had this struggle to find some real world tasks to work one while they didn't have the frontend job yet to make it a daily routine.
I'm working on https://botdelive.com/?ref=ih
BotDelive is a cloud communication service. It provides push notification and two-factor authentication via the chatbots.
Oh wow, this is a really cool concept! Though it took me about 5 min of reading and re-reading to grok the idea.
It clicked for me after reading through the FAQ, that the reason why someone would use BotDelive is to avoid having to build/maintain a separate app just for the purposes of sending 2FA / push notifications. It would be great if you can highlight the "why" of using this service more so than the "how" to integrate, because (at least for me) the idea is quite novel and not immediately intuitive.
Thank you for this gold feedback! I will improve the landing page. Also, we're working on an explainer video. Thanks again!
I'm currently working on https://sitebot.ai, a website monitor that tests your site automatically using a real browser to check that everything works as it should. It's currently in beta.
My goals for August are to get more paying users, figure out some marketing and to develop support for more browsers.
Is this cross browser or is it just using like Headless Chrome? Not sure if you're not so much focused on visual but functionality eg. clicking things/submitting forms/etc vs. rendering properties a cross browsers eg. Safari.
It's currently run only on Chrome but it works on Firefox, and I'm tackling IE11 issues to get real cross-browser testing running soon. I'd love to have it running on Safari too but running it on a server is probably very complicated.
I'm not focusing on rendering as it will differ anyway but the browsers will take screenshots that can be checked manually. Detecting changes is easy, but it's hard to know if something is broken or not :)
Good luck.
I think the people that use actual machines is pretty interesting. Particularly for the mobile testing, I know it would be ridiculous and the security involved to have live internet people piping pages into your physical devices but it's interesting. Not an emulator sort of thing.
Actual real machine is what user wants. Sorry for delayed comment.
Actually my team is also working on bringing complete testing needs under one umbrella. And the great thing is we are using real machine not emulators for desktop browsers. You can give it a shot : Lambdatest.com . I'll wait for your expert feedback.
Ha I am far from expert. Pretty neat though you guys have big brands.
So I ran my site through it and you asked for my email (cool preview, btw) - but I haven't gotten any information in my email on how to sign up or any further instructions :-)
Are you using email to try to convert any users who've tried it out but then left?
Ouch, there should have been an automatic email sent, but it failed due to a bug. Check your email. Thanks for informing!
This month I am going to work on the user management of CodingVideoz - A curated list of coding videos to enable people to submit and vote videos.
Cool idea, how will you monetize this?
If all worked as planned it's going to be a community based content website, which means I can learn from a number of similar sites in here. Including IH to monitize it, I guess they use ads and affiliates.
The idea for CodingVideoz is cool but you need to rethink the colors on the landing page, the current colors are cold, and the contrast ratio between text and background is bad making the text hard to read on worse monitors. Chrome dev tools show the contrast ratio to be only 1.5-4. Read more are at https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/accessibility/accessible-styles#color_and_contrast
Thanks a lot, this is very practical suggestion. Will try to look into it.
I'm working on setting up the website for TribeStack (currently on https://tribestack.landen.co/), a content marketing service for B2B tech and SaaS companies. We just had a customer who picked the top-of-the-line package renew their subscription, so we're excited to carry that momentum forward and add more customers in August.
Yes, I think you can probably niche down as well. When we speak to everyone we fail to speak to anyone. As Hannu pointed out your headline confused me as well. I went on to find out what it is.
So following can be improved upon on your site:
Headline & Top hero content -> Probably who needs content marketing at most, speak to them?
One or two testimonials would help along with the link to that article (if you are just starting that's fine)
It would be great if you can speak about results on your landing page - Say grown their subscribers or leads to x percentage. Would really help your customers to connect.
Thanks
Thank you for the pointers! I like the idea of talking about quantifiable results on the homepage.
You are most welcome :)
Do you actually write the articles? If so, maybe adding a sample of the work would help?
I'm definitely going to have some samples up once we have a more substantial body of work. Thanks for the feedback, Matthew!
The headline "We don't know how to market law firms" felt confusing to me, though otherwise the titles and copy on the page are spot on. Your pricing is probably x articles/month? At first glance, I only saw that 2 articles cost $250 so consider making the offering more obvious. Other visitors may not hang on as long as I did :P
I wasn't sure about the headline myself; I've changed it to the other one I had in mind.
I didn't fully understand what might be misleading about the pricing section. The monthly price includes the articles, content planning, email newsletter, and social media posts. Is there something I can do to make that clearer?
Probably because I was tired I missed the /mo part of the price on the first look. Adding "2 articles /mo" to the features list might be clearer (or not, it might be good enough as it is.)
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