What are you working on this month? (May 2018)
Can you believe it's already May? 😢 The upside is that it's time to share what you're working on again, 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 May.
That's it! Can't wait to hear from everyone and see what you're working on!
I'm working on marketing my product, https://bastions.co. It's currently built up to the point of being ready for use so I'm trying to generate some buzz around its value with some content marketing and outreach.
In a sentence, bastions allows website owners to automatically test their website's most important functionality. Think contact forms, sales forms, interactive features, etc. It's focused on ease of use and speeding up the regression testing process.
My goals for May:
Write and publish 5 articles focused on bastions' value and QA in general
Share each article on HN, IH, Reddit, and within my own network
Integrate bastions with GitHub and BitBucket (allowing for test-on-push functionality)
My current content marketing efforts can be found at https://utan.io. I'd love to hear any feedback regarding the content, my approach, or the product itself.
Awesome product! Bookmarking it for when I'm looking for something like this.
Curious why you're blogging on another site? "Content marketing" is a vague term but at its core, it's the effort of sharing value with potential customers and building the brand association back to your product. How is utan.io tied back to bastions.co?
I fear you may be missing out on a lot by not blogging on bastions.co in terms of SEO, lead capture, brand association, etc.
Thanks! I think it's pretty great myself.
That's a very good point and something I haven't even thought about. Utan Digital LLC (utan.io) is the official business behind bastions. Marketing is by far my weakest trait, but this is something that should have been more obvious to me. Thanks for the feedback! I need to add a blog section/subdomain to bastions for sure.
I see! That’s definitely a tough one having one business own another. But yes, I do think it would be wisest to blog on the site you’re actually trying to drive traffic to.
Glad I can help! Make sure you’re capturing emails well.
Interesting product - will keep it in mind. Good luck with your content marketing efforts! Consider a writeup here on IH too ;-)
Thanks! Once the product has proven itself I'd love to contribute to IH with the information. I've still got a lot of growing to do before then!
Yeah I'll look forward to that!
Cool project! Not ready to use this yet (our landing page is just built off Wix right now). But have bookmarked for later when we build our own site.
One of my main goals is to write more in May as well. Want to be accountability buddies and do a 30 day writing challenge together?
Here's what I'm thinking:
we both commit to write everyday (~30 minutes a day)
the commitment is for the next 30 days
everyday (during the 30 day challenge), we check in with each other and hold each other accountable?
Sure thing! That sounds like a good exercise in discipline and productivity. Feel free to email me at kinman@bastions.co if you're still interested. We can keep in touch however works best for you.
Awesome. Sending you email now!
Hey, great idea!
Just a quick tip - it might be useful to put light borders between each section of the "step 1", "step 2", etc. It was a lot to take in all at once and my eyes glanced over multiple parts at once and got confused.
Jip. Sounds like we're in the same boat.
I'm marketing our product Flamelink.io, a headless CMS for Firebase to help make adding, managing and content in a user's Firebase project easier with our smoking hot user interface. :-)
All the best marketing Bastions @kins. I'll pass the link on to our Devs and see if it's something they'd like to look into.
Yeah! Awesome!! Good luck with Bastions :)
Very nice! After setting up rukidoo.com with basic Analytics and Mailchimp integration, I was just wondering how would I notice if these would break. I can't do test signups and test views all the time.
(Bit unrelated, but I noticed that Mailchimp's included js blocked loading the main page for >10 seconds, took long to fetch. So fetching it from own site instead).
This looks really interesting! Would love to chat at some point to see if there's any link up with a product we're working that's for the design phase of doing a site!
Absolutely! Reach out to kinman@bastions.co anytime if you’re interested.
I'd like to hear more about the integrations with Github and Bitbucket.
Sure thing! I received a request to integrate with GitHub and BitBucket webhooks so that your tests in bastions can be run after a push into one of your repositories. I haven't implemented it yet, but I plan on users being able to "assign" a repository to one of their verified websites within bastions. Then they'd register a webhook within GitHub/BitBucket to a specific bastions endpoint to run their tests on every push. I've also thought of allowing users to specify a commit message for bastions to look for in the payload instead of just running the tests on every single push. This would put more control in the hands of the user (which I would prefer).
Oh nice. That makes sense.
This sounds Awesome. When will it be done and how did you come up with the idea?
Thanks, I appreciate it! The product itself is ready for use in a production setting. I use it to test my own websites and there are currently a few early adopters that use it as well! I came up with the idea after having QA issues on another side project of mine. For several builds in a row, my registration form was breaking for mostly unrelated reasons. Dependency issues, environment issues, etc. I wanted a way to setup automated regression tests for my website that didn't require writing a custom script each time.
After hacking around last October, I ended up writing a library that could be pointed at a webpage and automatically test a form with no need to specify values or write any code at all. It can classify input types, make a solid attempt at filling them in just as a user would, and submit the form while watching for any issues. There are some "fail-safes" built in, such as the ability to supply custom input values for tricky fields, but for the most part its hands-free. It will even integrate with many available CRM's to ensure the lead made it all the way through. The product has grown since then to include general regression testing, but that's the gist of its beginnings.
This looks great. Just wondering if it’s possible to record user actions into test cases without manually adding ‘clicks’?
Currently no, but that’s definitely something I want to add down the road.
I'm working on Snooze Tabby (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/snooze-tabby/ododnaepjbicadkebdookecppfhjdmhp).
It's a small browser extension for snoozing tabs.
I have been procrastinating for a very long time and now i finally launched something.
I launched it on ProductHunt and it was received very well (375 upvotes as i'm writing)
It feels really good to have launched something and im already working with a few users on optimizing the extension.
Woah, this is awesome. As someone who has a lot of tabs open at one time, this is a godsend. I also appreciate the simplicity of the extensions website, good work!
Thank you! :)
Let me know if you have any feedback.
Congrats it looks really nice! and is wonderful that you have users that are giving you feedback. Did you relied only on google web store to popularize it or did you post/share it some places as well?
Thank you. Some places picked it up and wrote about it (Lifehacker and some others) also ProductHunt was driving a lot of traffic.
Very happy for you. The name of the game is to consistently beat procrastination and build cool shit =)
This sentence on the description of Snooze Tabby perfectly sums up my use case: "Don't want to add it to bookmarks because you're gonna forget it or you don't really know if the article/website is worth saving?"
Just added the extension! If I have feedback, where do you want me to send it? My email is jonathan@tribefive.me. Feel free to shoot me a note.
Cheers,
Jonathan
Thanks Jonathan!
You can reach out to me on mail@snoozetabby.com if you have any feedback or issues :)
Added. I have 25 tabs open so I'm your primary market. How long did it take to make?
Awesome!
First version took my a day or two to make. Then i added stuff and redesigned it a bit.
Nice Idea, Sometimes I just ended up not reading the article just because of don't remember that I had that tab in the list.
Will give it a try :)
Thank you.
Let me know if you have any issues or feedback :)
Great idea. Will be quite useful!
Thank you, let me know if you have any feedback :)
Great launch on PH it was at the top of the page a lot time for me. If it wasn't for Stripe releasing Atlas you would have for sure been product of the day.
Thanks! Yeah Stripe was pretty hard to compete with, but im very happy with the result. I've got a lot of feedback from users already and have improved the product a lot already.
Hi Jace,
Just installed it, very useful extension.
I used to pin tabs to come back to them later, but can use SnoozeTabby now.
Thanks for building this :)
Thank you, im happy you like it :)
I'm chugging along with https://pullreminders.com which helps teams review and release code faster with Slack reminders and metrics for GitHub pull requests.
April was a very eventful month. I got my first batch of paying customers and went live on the GitHub Marketplace.
This month I'm really trying to focus on marketing and converting trial accounts into subscribers. I am hoping to 3.5x my current MRR and get to $2,000+.
Cool project! Would love to know more about the "idea behind the idea" of the leaderboard and how it's impacted the experience. Have you written about it anywhere?
As background, on Tribe of Five (my project), we tried out some light gamification recently during our beta test. It exposed a whole bunch of unintended edge cases that made us take pause to think more deeply about it.
Cheers,
Jonathan
I haven't written about it – I should :)
The idea behind the leaderboard was to provide visibility to teams on how fast/slow folks are at turning around code reviews. One thing that has been interesting is that I've gotten feedback that the leaderboards incentivize unproductive behavior of trying to do code reviews TOO fast. Most users seem to like the leaderboards though.
Looks neat! Are the leader boards and metrics downloadable as a document, or just available via URL?
Currently only available via URL, but users have requested having them posted into Slack in text format as well.
As an engineering manager or startup founder, I could see real value in being able to snapshot this data and share it with C-Level/Investors/etc via a PDF or image or something. That might be a huge value prop for your product -- quantify a dev team's performance to prop up the middle management that spends the $$.
Thanks for the suggestion! That makes a lot of sense. Will definitely make note of it. Right now I'm working on figuring how to surface the metrics/data in the most simple and actionable way for engineering teams. Some notes here.
Nice! Any chance you're using ruby/rails for this?
This sounds good, best of luck!
What marketing tactics are you going to use to get to that MRR? How are you planning on converting trials to paid users?
Hi @coreyhaines - the three marketing tactics in my deck right now are:
Guest blogging on developer-focused publications
Building a neat tool that I'll give away for free
Maybe experimenting with sponsoring some newsletters
I think you got your head in the right place! Best of luck, sounds good.
Any idea of how the Newsletter sponsors cost?
Also what is your current MRR
Current MRR is around $700. Newsletter sponsorships can range from $30 - $1000 per blast from what I've seen.
I'm working on https://remoteleaf.com.
My goals
Write the medium blog post about the how it's going in April
Implement the design changes
Come up with the better email template design
lot's more and I'm excited about it.
This service looks great, bookmarked for if (god forbid) I'm back on the job market later in the year.
Great, Thanks!
As someone who has looked for remote jobs in the past, I think this email list is a great idea. I wonder if you should offer a one day trial as personally I'd probably want to see the quality of the list before paying.
I guess you have growing competition from the remote job boards. Right now, many of them are quite empty for non-technical jobs. Good luck!
Currently in the trough of sorrow/making changes based on the feedback from a successful launch of Hackterms, a crowsourced dictionary of programming terms (think Urban Dictionary for programming terms)
That is indeed a cool project!
I could definitely see this extend to other domains, a la stackoverflow/stackexchange.
I think you could even sell something like that as SaaS for companies! They usually tend to be full of custom in-house jargon and acronym and having such a tool might actually help with new hires on-boarding... Don't you think ?
Thanks, Eric! That's a great idea, and it took me way longer to get there than you. Initially, I thought of Hackterms as a repository of knowledge; after it started picking up steam, I considered porting it to other fields, as well as any groups with a niche lingo (for example - gaming groups. WoW has a lot of weird terms!)
Only then did I step back and realize that I could white-label Hackterms as a dictionary platform and sell it - exactly as you suggest - to companies as a way to onboard employees. I hope Hackterms (err... Amazon... terms? Snapterms?) might fill the niche between complex documentation (on things like Wiki & Confluence) and word-of-mouth informal onboarding that takes place for new employees.
I think this would be most useful to companies with over 50 employees, I don't know the first thing about selling to companies of that size. Any ideas?
Well, I am good at ideas, not so much at selling. So take the following with a grain of salt.
Create a landing page explaining your product (Glossary? Termidex? Glossdex?) with a reference to Hackterms as a call to authority. And then start by companies in my area. To see if I get some interest from them. Just calling them or passing by.
Also tracking the web for discussions happening on jargon and other things. (i.e: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/6wrh08/what_corporate_jargon_annoys_you/) and shameless plug links to the landing page.
I hope that helps.
Wow! That's a brilliant website (I'm a devops engineer by trade). Are you planning to expand it to cover older periods and other computer related things like hardware?
Very cool project. Just signed up! As a non-technical co-founder, this is a cool reference I plan to leverage when my other co-founders start getting into the technical details of our implementation!
Saw in other comments you are pivoting into a B2B SaaS product. Seems like a solid hypothesis. To prove validation, in a previous life, I used to work at Goldman Sachs. Huge company...lots of acronyms and internal jargon. We had an acronyms intranet page. It was a terrible experience but still very important resource for me.
Best of luck!
Cheers,
Jonathan
Thanks, Jonathan! That's incredibly encouraging to hear. Do you mind if I reach out to ask you a few questions about your GS acronym experience sometime?
Of course! Happy to help if I can.
Email me at jonathan@tribefive.me.
I really like this idea. As a non-tech, I could see it being really useful. One thing I was discussing with someone lately is that I hate not knowing what I don't know about tech - which makes it intimidating to try and build things. I often want to know "if something is possible" and a general understanding of the work/costs involved. It would be good if you incorporated elements of the Investopedia model and sort of talked about "how things work".
Thanks, Lindsay! I completely relate. Right now, Hackterms is focused on individual terms, but really simple explanations of processes would be a possible next step. For example, what does it mean to migrate from one database to another? What does it take to get a logo? What do UX and UI designers do? How long do sprints normally take? Etc, etc. I think there's a real niche in the "I don't need to be an expert - I just need to know enough" space.
I remember checking this one out when you first shared it. I think I'd make the login wall less aggressive... Maybe just require logging in to edit but let people browse as lurkers.
Hey alchemist! I hate making useless accounts, so I only require it to contribute a definition, request a definition, or add a comment. You should be able to look up any definition/browse the site without logging in!
Cool project!
One little thing: the bottom of the "+" button doesn't quite line up with the search input on my browser (Firefox 59 on Arch Linux)
https://screenshots.firefox.com/gf1yEoKAs88SuxMz/www.hackterms.com
Thanks! I need to test on Firefox from now on :\ I'll get on fixing it!
Still working on making improvements to Seeker. I want to actually get a few things shipped. Pagination for job boards, allowing people to write their own custom CSS for their job board, and allowing people to connect their Twitter accounts for auto-tweeting new jobs. Additionally, I want to get self-creation of jobs for premium users added as well.
In the downtime, I'll probably be thinking up some more features for premium users, to be honest. I want to entice more users to upgrade to premium but I also want to make sure everybody can grow their job boards.
Cool project! Does Seeker focus on creating the job board or does it also allow for candidate reviews (after they come in to interview)?
What is the ideal size of company you are targeting?
I don't recall how jobs got posted on my old company's website (~500 people) but we did use Greenhouse to prepare for interviews and write reviews for each candidate.
Hey there Jonathan, thanks!
It focuses mostly on creating the job board for companies to post their jobs to. I don't have any ATS integrations built-in and I don't plan on adding any. I researched other job boards and realized that companies posting there just link to their ATS system when posting a job to a site like Designer News or Panda Jobs. So I just kept it simple. :)
It takes a lot of discipline to keep a project simple. Love to see that you are taking a disciplined approach. Best of luck!
Thank you Jonathan! I appreciate it. :D
Hey @iheanyi! I found Seeker on Twitter and I love the idea! I am thinking about implementing it on my website :) Thanks for building it.
Awesome Rich! You're very welcome! Let me know if there's anyway I can help you out on it, I'm only an email / tweet away. :D
Two suggestions:
Bring more visibility to the product. Maybe consider some screenshots on the homepage of various capabilities and what value it provides to users.
Elaborate on how you're different. Is the only reason you're different that you don't charge monthly—only a cut of each job?
Hey there @coreyhaines! Thanks or the suggestions! I think that the landing page definitely is in need of a huge redesign. Especially with premium features being launched, I want to make sure to communicate that to users.
I also think that the differentiator is key as well. There's a monthly charge for premium features but the free tier still allows users to make money. I do think there are some other features that I currently have (and am currently integrating) that allows users to share their job postings in an automated fashion with their communities via Slack (and soon Twitter). But I definitely think that these features can really be marketed to the end-user better.
I'm working on https://unpayd.com/, a debt collection agency for entrepreneurs/freelancers who have overdue invoices out with clients. We help people get these overdue invoices paid while maintaining positive relationships with their non-paying clients.
After getting some encouraging initial traction in terms of users + overdue invoices submitted, our biggest challenge for May is to improve our collections process. Our goal is to collect $70,000 for clients by the end of June (we're about 1/3 of the way there!).
Awesome landing page. Really liked the design. Felt very friendly and inviting.
A month ago, I picked up a small consulting gig. After it was done, I felt the pain. Had to chase down payment and that took quite a few hours (collectively).
It was quite frustrating so I can really see how Unpayd is solving a real problem!
Thanks so much Jonathan! When you had to chase down that payment, was there any communication in particular that got the client to pay? Or was it just consistently checking in? I ask because we're always trying to improve our collection communications :)
Hey Noah - how about we chat over email. Reach out at jonathan@tribefive.me. Happy to share details 1:1!
I am Rich, maker of failory.com - Right now I am working on a side project inside Failory which will (probably) be called the Startup Cemetery.
This will be a resource for entrepreneurs and startup owners with +100 analysis of why big companies, such as Vine, Juicero and Yik Yak, have failed.
Do you like the idea? Any feedback is really appreciated!
Btw, you can request for early access here: https://richclominson.typeform.com/to/n6DZWF
Sounds cool. Just signed up for your e-book!
Why are you focusing on Startup Cemetery this month instead of investing more directly into Failory?
Cheers,
Jonathan
Hey @jianinglai, great question! I am trying to convert Failory from the website of interviews with failed startup ownrs, to the website about startup failure, with lots of cool tools and content pages about failure in businesses. Does it sound like a good idea?
On the surface, it makes sense. Will the new site still be focused on entrepreneurs or will it be abstracted to talk through all failures in business?
I guess the missing piece of the puzzle (for me) is WHY you are doing it. Did you hit a local maximum with Failory? Are your users begging for this pivot?
Cheers!
Jonathan
Hey Jonathan,
The reason why I am doing this is that I would like to monetize the website with other strategies, such as premium content and a community.
I am sure these approach of creating tools will help me increase the MRR.
Cheers!
Just discovering Failory for the first time somehow, I love it! I was just recently lamenting to someone how there isn't enough honest content from entrepreneurs about what didn't work. Just signed up, looking forward to more content like this!
I like the idea of analyses of big company failures, but to be honest, I'm not sure how relevant the learnings from those will be for indie hacker types?
Hey @Kotlove! Thanks for your kind words and I am glad to hear you find Failory interesting and useful :)
I agree with you that these analyses are not really relevant for indie hackers, but I think they can help startup owners and entreprenuers.
I'm working on CommuteJoy - a tool to help companies organize a bike commuter challenge!
It basically just aggregates data from Strava (and soon Fitbit) and shows you who is racking up the most miles on the bike.
I built this for my brother's company, who are using it now (for free) with their offices all around the world. I'm trying to determine if anyone is willing to pay for a tool like this. If I can't get a paying customer in May, I am going to shut it down.
I think this tool could also work for groups of people doing any sort of fitness competition, ie. a step counting competition, training for a race, or just want to track their fitness goals together.
Ideas on new features or finding customers would be appreciated!
I really like the idea of accountability! (for full transparency, I'm working on an accountability project as well)
Re: paying customer
What is higher priority for you? To make this a B2C product or a B2B product?
I've thought a lot about this because my project could be either (or both). However, we had to admit to ourselves that we couldn't approach both paths at the same time.
So we prioritized B2C first. That decision alone has helped us focus much more in the past few weeks.
Hope this forced constraint can help you too.
I am starting to develop a tool which is something in between Chef and Ansible, using SSH for controlling servers, but using Ruby for configuration (like in Chef). I also would like to use an immutable data structure to avoid the issues in Chef and Ansible. I have a huge fear that I am putting myself in big troubles since it sounds a big project.
That's a big thing! I had a similar idea - to implement Ansible-like agentless configuration managment tool in ruby with Chef-like DSL.
It seems we had the same or similar idea. I was thinking to read the DSL (like a Chef cookbook) and compile a file in JSON with all the instructions in sequence (including the instructions for idempotency). Then a process will execute the instructions (mainly bash commands). I would like to keep a history of these files and store it in a shared location like on S3 (similar to Terraform).
Yes, that's very big.
Do you have a blog post or a readme describing your project? It sounds interesting!
Have you used Fog to create servers and connect to them via SSH?
I am preparing a blog post about the daily pain caused by some current tools and about things I do not like in Chef and Ansible. When I will have something working I will publish it on GitHub. I am using Vagrant for development. I do not want to create infrastructure with this tool, Terraform is very good at doing that, I want only configure servers.
Hi,
I am working on ChartPoet (https://chartpoet.com). It is a one click report generation tool for digital marketers.
Biggest goal for May is to ship the product and try to get at least 10 active users.
This is very cool! My first internship was as a marketing intern and my whole job was to create reports like these!
The site looks awesome too. I would recommend targeting other agencies, since they probably have to generate these types of reports for their customers quite often.
Hi Paul,
Thanks a lot for the feedback
Is there a way I can reach out to you (email ?), I would love to know more about your experience with creating reports.
I am available at gaurav@chartpoet.com
Happy to chat, but honestly don't think I would be of much help now. I worked on that stuff about 7 years ago. We were basically posting on Facebook/Twitter and then measuring the impressions and putting them into a word document for the client. I have no idea how this sort of thing is managed nowadays, since I don't work in that field anymore.
This is super cool! As someone who just started using these marketing websites, one thing I have been searching for is a tool that integrates these digital marketing websites with Slack. I would love to just be able to see weekly or daily report come up in my Slack. If you have that coming down your pipeline, I would definitely be interested in your tool!
Hey this is a wonderful suggestion, will try and add a slack integration
Hi Gaurav, is it a competitor to http://funnel.io?
Hi Ismael,
Thanks for mentioning Funnel, did not know about them. Will check them out.
Hey Gaurav,
ChartPoet looks neat. I'm also working on a similar product with a different approach.
Also, I think we reside in the same city (Mumbai) - I would love to catch up with you & discuss synergies. :)
Hi Bilal,
Long story, but not in Mumbai as of now. I will update the site :)
I am available at gaurav@chartpoet.com if you want to discuss.
As someone with a pretty common name (Steve) I have been fighting in recent years with getting the username/handle I want on various sites. I have stolson here, st0lson on twitter, and others in that vein.
So I'm working on Acct.Watch, which will monitor handles for you across sites and then you can just forget about it! Most of the work is done, so I'm very much hoping to launch in May 😉
If you're interested in getting in early, helping me test ( will give perks 4 bugs ), follow me here on IH or shoot me an email at steve (at) stolson (dot) com.
Interesting idea Steve! Do people (who squat) ever actually give up usernames / handles though?
Feedback: I just clicked on "how it works" from your landing page but nothing happened =(
Best of luck with your project!
Hey Jonathan,
Thanks - handles do get recycled over time. The website still does need some work :) but thanks for checking it out!
I'm working on Remote Junior Club (http://www.remotejunior.club), a community for junior developers chasing down the same dream, that of landing a remote job.
Fun fact: I landed a remote job while building this! I just finished the MVP today, feel free to try it out!
Good luck to everyone else with their products! Let's have a productive month! :)
Very cool project and very cool to see you got a remote job while building it!
Love the accountability angle too. How structured is the accountability part of your experience (ie. are there daily requirements to submit CV's and check in with each other)?
I ask because I'm also building an accountability product too called Tribe of Five (www.tribefive.me). Happy to chat and trade notes about what I've learned along the way if that is a big part of your experience.
Cheers,
Jonathan
That's a really clever idea — I think a lot of people would love to check this out. Might even be a cool idea to target or partner up with some of those online coding schools!
Thanks Matt!
Yes, other people have mentioned the same thing in the Slack chat we have as well, so I guess it is something I will keep in mind.
Hope to see you joining! :)
Tried it out, signed up for it too. Liked it as it was basic and simple, and I like simplicity. One thing I would add would be also remote internships too as I think Junior Developers are also looking for that.
Thanks brother :)
Since the job board is handpicked content by us, you can easily add any internship you find interesting and believe will help others.
Hope to see you try it out some more. Feedback is more than welcome since I am building this for us. So.. jump in the Slack chat if you want to bounce around ideas!
Just got my first sale in my side project mydevportfol.io that I haven't touched in months. Funny how €4 can get you back motivated about a project again! :D
I actually sort of abandoned it the last few months in favour of another side project, a chrome extension for Managing chrome extensions that I built with a friend 3 years ago that's seen steady organic growth and desperately needed some love and attention.
Also the 9-5 is kicking my ass, but it's all good, really focuses the mind on prioritising the little spare time I do have. :)
What about pumping out a PDF version of the output portfolio?
Yeah that's an option too alright. Do devs need a printed version though? I was aiming for this to be an online portfolio as opposed to a paper CV or something. But I have thought about it and I think it'd only take some styling to work out...
The dev's don't need a printed version, but they're not the end consumer of these CV's, are they?
Hiring managers will definitely want to print out a resume. They'll want to be able to email it around. You'll want to control that generation to ensure that they get a beautiful version.
I can understand your feeling about the €4 you earned :)
Two years ago, I developed a tool and sold two copies with $78 in total. I was so excited because it indicated that once we build something really useful. People is willing to pay.
But I didn’t continue with that one, as it’s a tool that’s only for specially cases.
It would be nice to have an example page to look at before having to sign in via GitHub.
Wouldn't it!
I haven't been able to get to it in months, but that sale has spurred me to squeeze in some time for it. What else do you think the homepage needs? in my opinion it needs:
Examples of sites the tool can generate (screenshots, links)
Clear explanation of the process
Reassurance as to why GitHub access is needed (both read and write) - and possibly provide a way for users to proceed without authenticating with GitHub
... anything else??
You've pretty much nailed it with that list.
I've already started work on it. Cheers for calling me out on it :)
A few weeks ago I launched ViaTranslator (https://viatranslator.com), which was a big milestone. It allows any website to localize the content to each user's native language using just a few lines of javascript.
I've switched gears to marketing mode now (which isn't my specialty) but I've stuggled to figure out how to find prospective customers. I'm having trouble figuring out how to find customers that have not internationalized their site but have a need to. I'm looking into google paid search ads since I'd be able to target intent based on specific search keywords.
If anyone has any experience with Google Adwords feel free to reach out! I'd love to chat and pick your brain a bit.
Hey David,
Cool product! Check out this guide to Adwords by Neil Patel. It's a bit long but it's step by step. https://neilpatel.com/what-is-google-adwords/
Before you buy any ads, do some free keyword research at Google's Keyword Planner and then start searching terms. If your product starts at $20, I'd recommend not bidding any more than $5 to start out.
Also, free trials are essentially standard nowadays and that might help you get some traction. Make sure you have superb on-boarding and upsells to annual billing.
Wow this looks great! You weren't kidding about it being long but this looks like it has a lot of good info for someone getting started. I just bookmarked it and will read it when I can find the time
Hey, I tried to translate your website to Spanish and it says "Could not translate, please try again"
FYI It should be working again now.
Hey @ajimix thanks for the heads up! It looks like there's an issue with some of the caching. I'll take a look at it later tonight when I get home from work.
Consider advertising on ReadTheDocs. You'll be advertising to developers who are busy building their products. You can request a prospectus through the site that will include the various stats and costs.
That is a great idea. I'll look into it. Thanks!
This looks great, nice work! If you can consistently deliver accurate translations then this seems pretty valuable.
What processes are you using to find customers at the moment? This seems like something which could be at least partially automated.
Thanks! Right now I'm compiling a list of smaller startups (under 50 employees) that I'm preparing to cold email. I've also been posting the site to various websites such as IH, HackerNews, Reddit, etc. And then I've been looking into some paid search ads too. Marketing is all foreign to me so I'm learning along the way.
Pretty much the same process as me and I'm learning along the way too so I know how you feel. I'm just trying to stick to one/two traction channels and not second guess myself too much on whether I'm doing it right.
Hi David, congrats on launching! It's pretty impressive, and I hope to use it in a future project of mine.
Thanks Steve!
This looks really interesting! I've been getting some queries from users about supporting Spanish and French languages in one of my products so I'll definitely be checking this out.
As for the Google Adwords, I'm also no expert, but I've found https://opteo.com to be really useful.
Thanks @hschutte! Feel free to reach out if you'd like to know more. My email is in my profile.
Opteo looks interesting and something that could be useful as I'm ramping up my paid marketing. Thanks for the tip!
Hello Channing. Keep up the great work with IH. It is one of the best communities on the web.
Inspired by IndieHackers and the Hackernoon interview, I am trying to plan out a website that focuses on long-form articles in an interview & story format which focuses on the creative side of building and releasing products.
Little background: I've been obsessively reading about startups and entrepreneurship on IH/Product Hunt/Reddit, etc., but never put my nose to the grindstone to ship something of my own. I ended up falling in love simply with reading about how others found the inspiration and creativity which lead to their product (this could be a painting, drawing, book/novel, etc.) and so I want to leave behind this dream of creating something of my own and instead create a community which shares the stories of other successful artists/authors/developers, their struggles, etc.
Once I have it fleshed out and up and running, I would like to think of tangential revenue-creating services that could compliment the readership - such as things related to understanding what creativity is and how to cultivate it, tutorials for artists/writers, or something more direct like writing/editing services, but not sure yet.
Anyway this is a brain dump thanks for reading. If you have any suggestions I'd love to hear it!
That sounds really cool. I love reading the stories behind various businesses (even relatively unknown ones). I'm bootstrapping my own product currently and I'd be happy to discuss the process behind its inception/build/launch. Just PM me down the road if this sounds interesting at all. Otherwise, I look forward to reading stories on your website!
This is the first time I threw something 'out there' so I'm happy to receive some feedback! I will keep you in mind, for sure.
My immediate goals are to settle on a name and get a little landing page up over the next few days, and then start working on a list of maybe 25 questions that I'll narrow down to 10 or 15 which will hopefully "standardize" the format of the articles. At least at launch. Off the top of my head, these questions would cover:
Who are you?
What is your product?
What were you working on before it?
What inspired you?
What activities were driving your creative process?
Did you have any struggles/challenges along the way?
Tips/suggestions/lessons learned
Closing section for self-promotion (the creator deserves the opportunity after sharing their story)
Those sound like good talking points to me! The thought of 10-15 points (each potentially resulting in 2-4 paragraphs) sounds a little overwhelming to me, but if the responses were 1-2 paragraphs each that wouldn't be so bad.
As far as a name/domain, I love branding and would be happy to be someone that you could run ideas past when the time comes. Looking up domain names and dreaming of what product might live there is a bit of a hobby of mine. I'm used to saying 'PM me' without thinking about it, but my updated email is on my profile here so feel free to reach out if you'd like to.
I have the opportunity to get Afterword dot io as a domain name. Mind sharing your thoughts? If you're a ready, you've prob seen it quite a bit. Wikipedia definition:
An afterword is a literary device that is often found at the end of a piece of literature. It generally covers the story of how the book came into being, or of how the idea for the book was developed.
It seems to fit my concept pretty well, but does it stand alone on its own? Does it need to? Content is king, afterall.
I love that! It sounds perfect. Great job! I thought it was good yesterday, so I went home and slept on it, and now that I'm thinking about it again I still really like it. Looks like it passed the sleep-on-it test, haha.
Cool idea! It kind of reminds me of what Tim Ferriss does through his books (Tools of Titans). He's helping crack the code for tips and tricks his guests have used in their journey to go become world class at what they do.
It seems like you are sort of doing that too, but specifically for the inspiration and creativity which lead to their products?
Let me know once you have a first version up. Happy to help where I can.
Cheers,
Jonathan
Yes! That is exactly right. I have a deep appreciation for the arts and books, and something I never see focused on is the inspiration/creativity phases that these creators went through in order to bring their 'products' to life. For example, the backstory/origin stories of what inspired them, how they nurtured and tapped into their creativity, the circumstances and position they were in that lead them to create it, etc.
Of course, If I can find the right format, this can apply to even website and app development, but I'd like to focus on authors and artists at the beginning I think. It will be a little easier for me, that way, and I can more easily market and identify my 'readers'.
I am currently trying to come up with names for this idea.
I'm working on a Blog to Book service, https://pixxibook.com - B2C, physical product, so quite a challenging indie project.
The tech side is looking good. Now I really need to ramp up the marketing.
Cool idea! This sentence really resonated with me: "...your readership is unmoved but you are fortunate that your writing was really for yourself, not them"
I just tried it out from my wordpress blog and think I found a small bug on the preview: https://cl.ly/3B3L022F3K2C
What are your marketing plans for this month to get awareness for PixxiBook?
Haha that's funny. That's is really just a placeholder text but maybe I will keep it. Same too with the small preview bug you spotted. I still have many such corners to tidy up.
It turns out that blog to book MVP isn't very M. In fact, feature-wise I have only really cut back on themes and book formats, customisation etc.
Marketing I have no idea. My rough idea is to put it in front of some Random bloggers (whose blogs I have been testing with so I know they will look good) and garner some feedback and go from there.
Thanks for looking at it. I appreciate all feedback very much.
I'm trying to figure out how to generate more traffic (and more signups) to https://stori.social.
I'm going to:
write some articles and share them on Medium, HN, IH and Reddit
cold emails to influencers/social media agencies
learn more about adwords / facebook ads
Any other things that I can try?
Writing is a great start! What is your specific writing goals?
If you are up for it, I'm looking for an accountability buddy for a 30 day writing challenge!
You'll be a good accountability buddy if you can commit to:
write for at least 30 minutes a day
try and write every day
check in with each other and hold each other accountable
Let me know if you are interested.
Cheers!
Jonathan
I'm working on a personal project to track my habits/productivity against my mood/depression, to see if certain actions have a bigger impact on my well-being than others (e.g. of going to the gym, doing yoga, and reading, which has the biggest positive effect on my mood on average over time?)
Here are a few screenshots of how it's looking so far https://imgur.com/a/E6xwDYq.
I'm not sure it's in a good enough place for other people to want to use it, but feel free to sign up at http://uprite.co/ if you'd like to try it out :) I'd love to get feedback.
Marketing our product Flamelink.io a headless CMS for Firebase.
Currently spread quite thin across helping our team generate articles for Hackernoon etc, creating video tutorials and monitoring various forums for opportunities to find out how users could benefit from it.
Also doing a fair bit of 'cold-calling' to Dev houses to arrange demos etc.
As a 'Target Market' (I do apologise for the marketing speak), I'm finding Developers a particularly tough nut to crack. ;-)
I like the sound of this. A bit like contentful.
I am building my product on firebase (dB, hosting, auth, etc) and I need an integrated blog. Would this help me? It's hard to tell.
Obviously one of your major selling points is that it is integrated to firebase but what does this mean? Does it reside in my own project's db and share users? Who hosts the ui? What are the benefits over a non integrated CMS?
I'm currently building a privacy-focused, open-source social network, ChitChat.
https://github.com/harrisonturton/chitchat
I've noticed that Signal/Telegram/Whatsapp all offer secure messaging, but no-one offers the full social networking package.
I plan on monetizing via advertising that only used public information. The process is 100% transparent, and users are fully in control of their data (i.e. we don't save stuff they delete).
I'm working on PageMagic - an easy to use website content editor that can be added to any website.
I've just built a demo, which you can checkout from our homepage:
PageMagic.io
This month I'll be focusing on finding more early customers, especially businesses that build websites, pages, landing pages for their customers (e.g. agencies or page builders).
I'm working on two projects right now. One is local to San Francisco and the events, it's a really great product called Skipcard (www.skipcard.com). Please let me know if you're in SF and we can chat in detail.
Second project is Cryptkey. I want to grow the user base sign up for the pre-launch to around 100 emails this month. You can go to our URL here: www.cryptkey.io
Let me know if I can help anyone this month.
Working on my kid art screensaver product - just put https://rukidoo.com online. I have the following short-term tasks:
Write content pieces about digital processing of kid art, to popularize the site.
Produce art assets for some new screensavers (pretty manual work so far), experiment with effects.
Feature some online demos of the screensavers.
Bonus goal: try to not get distracted by staring at the screensaver for too long :)
Love the idea, my kids are obsessed by watching our google photos rotate through on the tv via chromecast
Great! Shoot a bunch of your kids' drawings to preorder@rukidoo.com and you'll get a free screensaver ;)
I'm putting the finishing touches on the MVP functionality of HostedMetrics.com and focusing on marketing marketing and more marketing!
A good chunk of that is going to be AdWords as I'd like to first explore how much the direct path to customers costs.
I'd like to have 10 people request the private beta.
I already wrote one article recently and am starting to see a trickle of search traffic inbound. Ideally, I will put up one new article.
To save you a click of curiosity, HostedMetrics.com provides hosted versions of metrics platforms, such as InfluxDB and Graphite. The value proposition is that the same way AWS gives you a quick and painless MySQL experience, I give you a quick and painless InfluxDB experience. Fully hosted, managed, and configured. Just send you data to it!
It looks cool! I am a DevOps contractor and I was thinking to provide a SaaS in IT infrastructure.
Thanks! SaaS in infrastructure is a great way to go. It removes the guesswork and creativity and lets you focus on learning to execute a business!
I got inspired by indiehackers to start Goodly (www.goodlyapp.com). We have a functioning prototype and nice landing page.
Our platform allows companies to offer student loan assistance as an employee benefit with employers contributing a set amount per month toward eligible employees’ student debt.
This is especially useful to attract diversity candidate. I have some nice stats on the home page if you are interested.
I would love to get your feedback on the product and how best to approach sales and marketing for this product.
Love you guys Thanks @channingallen for an amazing community.
This is the kind of idea/project with potential to do a lot of good to the people. We need more things like this. Good job.
Together with @Constantin_Melniciuc and @sashamelniciuc we're preparing the official launch of Tap Battle Multiplayer.
A small mobile game meant to entertain and train your tapping speed.
For those with android you can already check it out here:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tapwars
As I write this I am uploading the final build for iOS to be reviewed. If you want to try it on iOS drop me a line and I'll invite you to our test flight.
Good luck to all and have a productive and eventful May
just curious, how you monetise it? (don't have android :( )
Hey. We're serving ads. We started about 4 days ago and got a ~ half an euro with ~10 daily active users. Not much but promising. Next step will be in app purchases.
Working to reach our pre-sales goal for Indie-Ignitor.com (if you happen to know any plugin developers lead them the way, of if you want to start a plugin business yourself share some feedback)
Another goal is to finish all the GDPR preparations for all websites and side projects
I'm working on Prescriptive. It's a productized service where we deliver unlimited marketing actions customers can take to create highly personalized relationships with their own customers. These are things they would never see without deep analysis (which is what we do). The dashboard shows them the digital marketing action to take and the insights that derived that action. They can do this themselves or they can assign it to us to do for an additional fee.
I have the landing page done. The product MVP is done. Just getting ready to put it out here for critique.
Sounds pretty cool. Would this be only for existing customers, or would this be useful for marketing towards new customers as well. I'll keep an eye out for it once it's up!
Thanks David. It would definitely be good for marketing towards new customers - I should have mentioned that it could be for current and potential customers because the things we learn from existing ones give insight into how to attract new ones but on a more personalized level which is how people want to be marketed to these days.
Hi Shane, sounds interesting - have you got any examples of the marketing examples you'd recommend, so we can get a flavour of the offering?
Happy to put forward my side project if you need an example to draw inspiration from 😉
Thanks Ben! Yeah the insights come from specific data we collect which is a culmination of email support tickets, social customer service, social media comments, online comments and social listening. These are things people just usually file away but we use them to come up with 1:1 marketing strategies which is something that can create massive growth and higher valuation for startups. The actions are digital marketing tasks which can range from chatbot creations to simple content marketing. It's all based on this deep analysis. I will definitely have examples of the dashboard as I'm finishing a case study that grew a startup it went off pretty darn well. What do you have going on?
For this month, my main focus is to find 100 fellow entrepreneurs who want to test out the Tribe of Five app when it launches (expected: June 1).
In order to do that, I just:
Re-designed the landing page (www.tribefive.me)
Wrote an article on Medium about 3 product lessons learned from our recent beta test
I am going to continue:
Writing on Medium
Spending time every single day meeting and connecting with like-minded entrepreneurs (in real life at Meetup events, online with fellow Indie Hackers, etc)
If you are an entrepreneur serious about making progress in the next 30 days, let's be accountability buddies!
Details: For the next 30 days, we make a commitment to work on our projects every single day. And day-to-day, we check in with each other to hold one another accountable.
Interested? Get in touch (jonathan@tribefive.me)!
I'm primarily working on a web-based time tracker called Punch: https://usepunch.com/
We're taking on our first (free, testing) users and opening up to early-adopters for a discounted, life-time rate. I imagine there are loads of us here in the same boat: looking for users and customers!
We recently released version 2 of www.scrlapp.com/ Our mobile app allows you to create a seamless post on Instagram’s carousel feature. A visual effect that helps users tell a richer story. We added more features that our users have been requesting like adding more panels and adjusting your layers. Download the app! https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scrl/id1289057196?mt=8
Looks like a great app. Unless you have major competition in the space, I could see this doing really well - free version with branding, paid version without.
In the past, I've made panoramics manually for Instagram and it's a bit of a pain - even just cropping images into thirds using just iOS apps.
Working on shifting Codemason (https://codemason.io) to a freemium model.
I know conventional wisdom seems to be stay away from freemium but I've thought on it for awhile and ultimately decided it's a gamble worth taking.
Codemason is built for developers and the way it's marketed needs to appeal to developers.
Going freemium is going to let me focus Codemason on helping developers and then I can use helping as my marketing.
It's still entirely bootstrapped but I'm hoping to be able to offer some free server credits to users as well to make it even easier for people to get started
I'm working on learning full stack react so that I can make a web app for my iOS app Clock Out, http://clockout.work.
As of right now, the app allows users to easily track time across jobs, with tools like exporting, a calendar, and backing up that data to iCloud.
I feel as if I've gone about as far as you could go with it, without building a web app, and I really want to start a subscription for more advanced features like team management, expenses, mileage tracking, etc.
I'm hoping to have an MVP completed by the end of the month that just mirrors what the iOS app already offers.
I'm working on a site that tells you how old an actor or actress was when they started in a film.
Did you know Tom Hanks was 38 in Forrest Gump?
I'm working on building as many side projects as absolutely possible :-) List here: https://www.indiehackers.com/@mollerhoj/my-dogme-95-site-projects-project-2adfe00f34
Working on my first ever SaaS side project — Dimer
Dimer helps you in publishing your documentation online by offering distraction-free writing experience, extended markdown and beautiful, handcrafted themes.
🤞
Just arrived home from new orleans, I was in startupbus northamerica competition.
My project was on finals and it's a website to edit hardware synthesizers from the browser.
Finished some really good things in the competition so my goals for april will be to finish a full editor for one synthesizer so I can add more models easily.
Wish me luck :)
I'm working on Capture (https://capture.techulus.in/), a dead simple screenshot automation tool. My main goal for may is optimising the API performance. I'm pretty happy with the reliability of the API as well as the server costs, so performance is my next major priority.
Sadly there has been no marketing efforts for the past few months, still not sure where to begin. Most of the traffic I get is still organic and search based. Any help in marketing would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers!
I actually started working on my first product this month! https://www.navu.io/. We launched an MVP and are testing out our product for free to see if people are interested.
Working in education, I have seen how parents struggle with supporting their child's education. So, my friend and I thought what if we connected parents directly to teachers to ask their questions? I have seen that sometimes parents can't access the teachers at their own school for a variety of reasons, and also, it is clear that sometimes that they don't know what questions to ask their child's teacher. We thought it would be cool to test out if parents would be interested in talking to another teacher, maybe someone who is an expert in whatever question they have. As we grow, we could include more resources like articles and links to suggested activities.
Our goal for the month is to get more people to sign up, so we can talk to our customers! Would really appreciate any tips and/or feedback to reach this goal.
I am working on a todo list/workflow tool.
You can create todo routing and escalation policies per team or project and when you create a todo it will be directed to the appropriate project / team.
If the todo will not be solved in a certain time it will be escalated to a specified person.
Furthermore you can define workflows for different types of todos.
Hi! We are developing a smart aggregator for crypto news with an intelligent tag system. The data from various sources processed via AI algorithms and displayed in a unified news feed.
For now our MVP is in progress and we hope to launch it in May. Here is a link to our landing page: https://cointop.io
Would love to hear your feedback.
Our team: @dmitrytk @EvGe
Preparing for an accelerator we were accepted to for our HR platform.
Also hoping to ship a 1 day project to help people quit social media.
Love the idea of helping people quit social media! What is that going to look like?
Hey! I've been working on ipdata the last 8 months, and we just yesterday broke $1k in mrr! I'm working on pushing more content this month and improving our seo as well as a couple of new APIs ;)
I'm working on my product (https://www.frontpile.com). It was released a few days ago and now I'm announcing it to my target audience. I'm learning a lot while I'm working on the product. I'm also looking for people to be part of this product.
My goals is getting more sign ups and try getting people participating in this project.
Kind regards.
Hmm cant open the Website „Server not found“ :(
I'm working to bring more eyes to our startup, https://AfricanStockPhoto.com. We're building Africa's largest collection of royalty-free, contemporary photography.
We've been live for a while and got great traction after being featured on Producthunt, and are now trying to find sustainable ways to reproduce the 'PH effect'. Our early marketing efforts have been somewhat haphazard, but my co-founder recently discovered the Bullseye Framework which really helps to bring structure to what's otherwise a daunting task. May's goals are to use the framework to identify a few traction channels that excite us, and run low-cost tests in them.
I strongly recommend Bullseye Framework for all the other founders living through a "product is live, now what?" moment. It's no magic bullet, but I find it hard to remain focused and fully productive without having some kind of structure to our growth efforts.
Working on building up my audience (using a podcast) before actually building a product. Trying this becuase the product-first approach hasn't worked well for me so far.
Am working up https://sidehours.com to be a bit more centred around the offerings, and implementing some free elements and a ratings/review system.
I am working in the initial steps of designing a product that predates the concept of joint accounts and online bank accounts a la Revolut or N26. We have a MVP and we are now focusing on polishing the features in order to land VC and a bank partner. It is being a struggle but very rewarding because we are learning a lot.
Interesting - do you need a bank partner, or just access to payment/deposit systems?
In this first stage we need to protect the customer deposit up to 100k euro as per EU rules. So we need to reach an agreement with a bank in order to setup a deposit account individualized per customer. How you do that? We need to have a bank with us from the start.
I’m working on Kemento https://www.kemento.com
Goals:
create a platform to store memories or life stories
create multiple timelines, for partners, children, personal etc
entirely private, no networking but you can share a memory or a timeline
subscription based, monthly or yearly, you are the customer
zero third-party data sharing unless absolutely necessary, Stripe for example
I’ve been working on the MVP for some while, building the brand, backend systems, front end desktop version and more recently the iOS and Android versions.
There’s also a tvOS and Samsung TV planned.
Although I've been working on this for months, the recent Facebook scandal has pushed me forwards. I’ve added a three step Facebook import process too.
I'm working on Userstand (https://userstand.com), which is an app that helps you automate the boring parts of doing user testing and user interviews (i.e recruiting participants and synthesizing the feedback).
My biggest goal for this month is to get my first paying customer :)
Very interesting, useful to validate any changes or even an idea.
Thanks Chris, I would be happy to give you a personal demo to you and interested people from your agency. I'm quite eager to get feedback. Let me know :)
This is an awesome community. Thanks for that!
I just sent out my resignation letter today and will work on my side project full time.
I’ve been working on it on the weekends with limited time for four years. I’m planning to work on it for at least three years full time and see how it goes.
Working on a product is like running a Marathon, we should prepare well for a long time battle. :)
I'm working on my Fortnite (game) player statistics website, http://ramp.gg/
I've only spent a couple of nights on it, but my goals for May is to:
Automatically refresh player stats once a week
Use said stats to graph their weekly performance
Show leaderboard on frontpage
Optimize for mobile
Launch
I'm working to release my next small mobile game, Invader Endless, it's a space invaders inspired game for Android where the aliens keep coming, but in rows not blocks, and endless onslaught of aliens to shoot using an array of different weapons. It's the fourth in a series of similar games I've released and part of my plan to go full time indie dev hopefully later this year.
Does anyone develop a web framework for the Java programming language? Is anyone interested in developing an embedded database for POJO?
Continue improving https://botproxy.net It's a rotating proxy service that allows to configure single proxy and route requests through random IP in more that 15 locations around the world. Usefull to avoid IP location restrictions. It is also have access to open proxies, I want to improve how these open proxies are checked for speed and availability.
Hey @mylh, I work on detecting proxies over at ipdata :), I'll check this out.
Hi Jonathan, pretty cool service. Started recently? Would like to read your interview on IH how did you started, where did you get your fist clients. 25M requests/m is success I think.
I'm planning on doing that soon, probably this month or next :)
I’m currently working on a tool selection guide, primarily aimed to startups. It’s primarily focused on core tooling like communication and task management (slack + Trello vs basecamp for example).
There are a few listing sites out there now but too much choice for most people.
WordPress Sandbox Generator for quick test and demo sites, likely going to put it on a high powered server, for those who need more than just average "shared hosting" instances.
I'm working on wpplugincheck where I post in-depth reviews of Wordpress Plugins.
Currently the goal is to add more content in the reviews, push minor design updates as well as a comparison table of different plugins.
I'm working on an ed-tech app. Any teachers/professors out there flipping their classrooms?
I'm currently working on a chrome extension which will show the number of real time users on your website without having to open Google analytics at all times.
This week, I will be sending out for beta testing for friends to use. If anyone of you are interested to try it out and give feedback then please let me k
I have been working on Laravel Factory since 4 months. Beta version is live and we have received some useful feedback.
Laravel Factory saves hours of work for Laravel developers by quickly scaffolding a new web app. It includes features like Admin panel generation, CRUD generation, Relationships, packages integration and a lot more.
The biggest goal for this month is launching Laravel Factory, write more blog posts and work on completing a couple of open source packages.
Hey that's pretty cool. I can definitely imagine this growing into something like wordpress in the way you can just easily load in plugins/widgets
Does it export the code for you to then continue developing or is the idea that it's all managed through the UI and hosted through Laravel Factory?
Thanks for checking it out Ben.
Yes, we plan to offer CMS kind of solution once we are stable. The target will be a performant and secure CMS solution.
It exports the code for the developer to continue development.
Vertol
Vertol is a digital asset management tool. Focused on making responsive images easier to manage for all your sites and apps. Built on top a CDN and paired with a companion Chrome extension. It makes updating your sites' images super easy.
MVP is ready for testing if you wanna try it out! Trying to get people on it and kick the tires.
Moving this month, but as soon as possible I'm gonna double down and get the word out.
Had some feedback thus far. Need to work on copy and messaging, and let people know why they need it.
Itching to start adding features, but need people to try it first.
I'm a dev, not a marketer or designer. So it's very much Function over Form right now.
Happy to answer any questions or comments.
Thanks!
I'm confused on what your product does. Can you explain it like I'm five in one sentence?
The chrome ext. turns your site into a slimmed down CMS, to let you quickly and easily update your site's images.
The Dashboard gives you helpful templates like Zeplin does for your CSS. Vertol will do that for your images.
Pivoting a bit based on some advice from Amy Hoy that my subconscious has been mulling over.
I was focused on learning to code, learning Bubble.is, and building out user stories for some startup idea. But then I thought, "this isn't what I'm best at—I'm best at marketing." So I'm pivoting.
I'm now focusing on launching my personal website to blog about SaaS marketing, going to put out a free course, start a small affordable membership to crowdsource marketing ideas and keep each other accountable, and then launch some paid courses.
I'm working on email for my web app for Elixir learners.
In the past month I've done a lot of work on the website itself, making it easier to publish and share written content along with the videos. This helped the site traffic triple during April while the associated YouTube channel only grew by a disappointing 16%.
I've set up and tested Amazon SES for outbound transactional email and I'm trying to figure out what will be the least expensive feasible way to handle replies to those emails as well as other inbound email. Once that's done, I'll start using transactional emails instead of greeting new user signups manually from my gmail account every day!
Welp, I'm continuing to work on the #bizamo project (http://bizamo.co), my "umbrella" project for all of the other ideas I'm trying to validate with the goal of figuring out what the F I'm supposed to be doing in this world! Not gonna lie, feeling particularly discouraged this week for some reason. Any inspo?
Working on a small business market place where people can build a small sales based business plus consulting connecting with companies providing tools to small businesses. Building small business to serve small businesses. Have very unique approach. Makes it affordable to everyone. Please visit www.smallresources,wordpress,com to see my MVP. It is raw but still in validation stage.
I just soft launched my Australia tech focused job board http://austechjobs.com.au/ so I will be building traffic and core functionality.
Top of the list includes:
Payments
Job filtering/search
Contacting companies recruiting
I'm in Australia but haven't looked for a job or had a CV for 20 years since I run my own thing, but I wondered if you need to do more to be useful for developers? Could you track past job ads from given employers so developers could see if someone is recruiting heavily or readvertising with a new rate, etc?
Could you offer a discussion forum for each listed job? That would put you offside with the employers and open you to legal risk, but you could make it so that employers paying to list could switch off commentary?
I have some ideas around improving the job seeker end of things in the pipeline - just need to balance that with the employers angle. My main focus initially will be rewarding high quality job ads - no recruiters, clear description, salary ranges etc.
Working on getting into a regular publishing schedule for https://www.learninvisionstudio.com/
It's currently a 'mostly' weekly newsletter where I'm publishing articles, videos, and resources, but I'm creating a design course as well.
It's gotten a bit of traction (at least as far as email subscribers go), but now I need to turn that into an engaged audience and an actual paid product.
Hi !
Completely new to IH, I am loving it so far. Reading all the ideas and launches around is motivating me. Anyway, for this month: I am starting to work on a long-standing idea of mine Co-owning helper website (sorry no fancy name for the moment). It would be a small website helping people to manage assets they bought/own together. It would provide an simple shared expenses calculator, helping with tracking with who paid what, as well as a booking calendar.
Imagine that you buy a car to share with a small community. With this website you could manage who gets it when, get reports on how much it was used by who, as well as track expenses like gas, repairs, insurances so that you you can balance the account at the end. I took a car example but it could be anything! It could be a community garden, a small workshop, a 3D printer, a horse, a lake house, you name it.
Anyway, first step is getting feedback. So IH, what do you think ?
Really interesting - not sure on the validation, but think that it would be good for things like porters/concierges in apartment blocks who might want to manage those things?
Sort of like a distributed sharing economy solution?
Yeah, sort of like set sharing economy toolkit. Would like to share something? Come here!
What do you mean on porters/concierges in apartment blocks? Would you tailor it to them at first?
Hi everyone! 👋
I'm working on https://picklecrm.com and a new smart groups/search feature where you can create smart groups from your contacts.
I'm also working on expanding our API and integrations with a zapier app (in beta, so if you want an invite, let me know!)
Happy Hacking!
Same as many others, I'm working on marketing my product: https://www.idiopage.com. It's a tool for easily adjusting your landing page for different user segments.
I started sending some cold emails with personalized demos last week and need to keep that going. Creating the demos means it takes a lot of time to send just one email (which then likely has no response) but I need to keep "doing things that don't scale" rather than creating the illusion of progress by writing more code.
Having said that, I am also planning to add some new "concierge" features as well as extending the editor this week.
Goal for May: 10 paying customers.
I Will be finalizing the beta for my side project, I'm basically done but I just need to do some final fixes. Then I will update my website with guides on how to use the beta.
This month I'll slow down the coding on https://pi.ctu.re and do a bit of marketing. I need some feedback from active users before I go on. I worked every single mornings, evenings and weekends of the past two months on this project, it's time to pause and think.
Meanwhile I restarted from scratch a fun little project to bootstrap an open source PaaS (Dokku or Flynn) on any cloud provider from the command line with a simple "curl ... | bash". And following that we can just do a "git push" to deploy like on Heroku. In the previous iteration I was using a custom JSON manifest and the gem Fog, but I found out that Terraform is doing exactly that, except better! So by the end of this month I hope that https://provision.sh will be fully functional and help devs becoming more devops.
I've just moved into my first home and currently looking into all the smart home solutions. It's more an excuse to use one of the many Raspberry Pis, Arduinos and Amazon Iot buttons I have laying around!
I'm working on party/board game (not sure what category it falls under if all you need is smartphone): https://dukesdream.azurewebsites.net/
My plan is to get as many people to know about it as possible during May. Basically to do something I'm not used to do.
I'm creating yet another RSS reader, flatreader.com
It's idea is to be super basic, because some of well known options have way too many features.
I want features, but right at the sweet spot... Any suggestions on your favorite features from other readers would be great. I was considering adding commenting on articles, but is probably overkill. Thanks for looking.
I have tried it just now. I would expect Google and Facebook login. Separate login is nice but I assume average user is too lazy. Another minor problem: if I add source I expect that it is automatically added to my feeds. Why where should be two steps if I want one.
Do you think commenting directly on Articles would be a useful feature?
I don't find commenting feature beneficial. If I want comments I can share article in facebook and have discussion over there. Yet another little thing that would help a lot. Instead of entering rss user could enter website and your service could collect available RSS feeds automatically and offer to user.
Thanks for the reply. Twitter login is working now.
I understand. I'm working toward not requiring the user to enter a feed, but will take a bit of time. Thanks again.
Social login is coming.. Good idea.
Very much appreciate you checking it out!
I just launched https://www.panocollage.com/ - an Android and iOS application that lets you create scrollable, panoramic collages for Instagram. Check it out - and let me know what you think!
It's more of a toolkit item than a product, but I'm working on a simple Node-based user management system to help ship future Saas products. Gets all of the boring Saas stuff setup and instrumented, so I can drop in my project when it's ready to be tested or launched.
I'd like to document the process of developing this, but I haven't decided on an appropriate medium yet, and how much of it should be public. Has anyone done some public writing / documentation about a private project?
Hey Sean - good luck with your project!
I agree you absolutely should start documenting the process of building this thing.
I would encourage you to start writing on the first platform that is acceptable whether that is Medium / Wordpress / PostHaven / etc . Later on, you can always move the content somewhere else if you need / want. (I personally spent way too much time worrying about the platform but finally realized I was just procrastinating from the real task at hand...writing content!)
Recently, I've made a commitment to write every day about my project (https://medium.com/@tribe_of_five). It doesn't mean I'm posting every day because most articles take me >1 day to write and edit.
In creating this routine, I've found that it's helped me sharpen my own ideas and thoughts.
Getting rough ideas out of my head into coherent words and paragraphs is tough. Much tougher than I expected.
But each day that I sit down and write, I find that I can think and speak more concisely about Tribe of Five. And as a nice side effect of documenting, there is now an evergreen piece of content out there that might help someone else who is going through a similar journey!
Finally, for what it's worth, I'm doing a 30 day writing challenge with a fellow Indie Hacker who also wants to write more. You want to join us?
Each day, we've made a commitment to write. You can write about whatever you want. You can write as long or as short as you want. But commit to sit down and put in some effort to get words on paper. And each day that you do, you check in. When you do, this makes the other person feel more accountable to follow through too.
If this sounds interesting to you, come join us.
Cheers,
Jonathan
Whoops, I already created a stand-alone thread, since this one wasn't around yesterday.
In short, I just finished the MVP for an app called MemorizeOnline, that is for memorizing the epic poem of the Portuguese.
Currently I am working on my Amazon price tracker for Crypto Mining Equipment (https://www.cryptominingdeals.io/). The idea is to provide a tool for miners to see if they are getting a good deal on equipment or if they should wait with buying until the price drops.
This month I want to work on the following:
Add a notification feature to allow users to receive an email when the price drops under a certain level
Refine the algorithm that generates automatic tweets on price drops and tweets them to my account here https://twitter.com/MiningDeals
Additionally I am working on adding AMP support to my Raspberry Pi blog: raspberrypihq.com.
Does anyone have any experience they can share with the SEO gains after adding AMP to a blog? Is it even worth the effort?
Recently launched Branding Guide (https://app.brandingguide.co) - been working on it a for a while and it's a streamlined way of storing and sharing brand assets. Primarily aimed at designers to speed up workflow and aid client interaction.
We're working on some other products with the same aim, would love some feedback!
Hi! I'm planning to work on marketing and adding some more customization to a new recent posts popup feature that I added on https://snapwidget.com today. I'm also planning to switch the current checkout flow to the new inline checkout that Paddle added. Should make the payment process a bit simpler!
Looks pretty cool. I really like your website, explains it very well (especially the gif).
I built https://2FB.me Facebook Share Links for Your Tweets. The idea is to bridge these two giants of social media so they work better together. And by better, I mean better for what your sharing on social. The app has many wounds brought on by raging battles in the social media turf war. But has survived to this day to make one thing possible. A truly connected world.
This sounds interesting but it'd be really great to see some examples and/or screenshots or something on the landing page.
A screenshot was just added to the landing page. Thanks again!
There is a video and blog with screenshot linked from the homepage. However, I think you are right. At a glance - it is hard to discern how this works. I'll consider adding the same screenshot that came from the blog to the homepage. I actually own the @shareU account too for this on Twitter but it got suspended out of the blue. Dealing with FB and Twitter at this level has been an eye opening experience.
Been tinkering around with the idea of building a widget to get on-page feedback. Have come across the problem of needing feedback on a product / design change organically from my users. Would be a simple widget which expands out a few questions depending on the page URL. Would expand the feature set as I figure out the key pain points for product managers and designers.
I've started working on the widget and a basic landing page. Though it's not functional as of yet - https://getsurveypop.com/
I'm excited to see this evolve! Hotjar does something similar, but it does so many other things that it's not the main focus. User feedback is sooo huge and often gets ignored!
It would be so cool if someone could actually write/draw on the page and submit that.
Thanks for the feedback. I was messing around with the idea of draw questions. Something like which section of the page do you think could use some improvement. I'll keep you in the loop about the development. If you don't mind me asking what would you pay for a tool like this?
I would find this way more valuable for my clients rather than me personally. I have less of a need for it on my personal projects because I have more one-on-one interaction with users, but I would definitely lead my clients towards implementing something like this... and they have much bigger budgets than I do.
There are some technical issues with screen capturing though. Images that don't come from the same domain i.e. from S3 or anywhere else won't show up due to security problems. Would that be a big deterrent or would it still be useful information with some/most of the images being missing. Perhaps replaced with placeholder images.
In general the site owner would (or at least should) know what is there, so I don't see that as a huge concern. I do imagine there are other big security/privacy challenges depending on how it works though.
Hi, I'm working on the project for my university. https://sd-scheduler.com
Let me explain what it does.
Students in my university has to present their project at the end of the class class. They have to invite 3 committee members. However, there was no easy way to check who is available. Students have to ask available time of each professors they want to invite. Faculties have to deal with emails and swing by. SD Scheduler solves this problem by providing available time of faculties and let students schedule on the platform.
Github: https://github.com/1kohei1/sd-scheduler
This is cool! Do you guys record the presentations? I ask because I'm working on a tool that does that sort of thing.
Hi, we don't record presentations. But I can ask professors to record them. Have you already released?
Yup. Check out: https://presentio.us/
There are two mode - one for recording live presentations and one for recording at home where you can re-record slides individually to create the perfect presentation. It sounds like you guys would want to use the former.
It is cool!
I will talk to the professor if they like to do it. Thanks!
Great idea.
Scheduling can be a tough problem to solve. In GCal, you can... somewhat...
This tailored approach could be interesting if you allowed people to make their own complex scheduling workflows and allow them to embed via iframe.. Thinking doctors, education.. A number of sectors could use this.
Nice work!
Yeah, that's something I have in my mind when I decided the database model. At this point, I focus on solving my college problem. If they like it, I will ask professors if they have similar scheduling problem.
I love it, great work! Solving a pain point that most everyone has had at one time in their life.
Thanks! I'm already talking with the faculties, and they love it. The coordinator of the class is thinking to start this summer.
This comment was deleted 5 months ago.