What are you working on this month? (September 2018)
It's September! 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 September.
That's all! Can't wait to hear from everyone and see what you're working on.
I'm working on Cronhub - a painless cron monitoring tool for developer teams.
I've set the following goals to achieve this month. Most of them are tasks that will help me to find a product-market fit for Cronhub. Still a bit far from that point but excited for the journey.
Better user onboarding with Cronhub CLI. Building the first version of the CLI now to easily integrate server cron jobs with Cronhub.
PagerDuty integration
Reminder alerts. For monitors that have been down for longer than a day.
@tigran really enjoyed your post a few days ago.
Thanks. Planning to write more about different topics. Let me know if you have suggestions for a topic.
Well as an aspiring-developer who just shipped his first front-facing web-app in mid-August, and seeing as your are a professional developer, I'd love to see a little bit of behind the scenes.
I've made so many (well, several) code-related mistakes with my first launch despite working on it for 4-6 months intensively. For example I've paid little to no attention to exception-handling* (something I'm still far from mastering), I've skipped DRY on a lot of occasions (and was therefore bitten later), my codebase is big and I have 0 tests to show for it (is that something you apply at Cronhub?). All is going fine and I have about ~100 users, but my confidence is a bit shaken after dealing with a lot of bugs I discovered.
*Incidentally, most exceptions that I deal with these days happen inside cron-jobs (celery background tasks).
These subjects may be too broad or too technical, but if you can talk about your general attitude when introducing a new feature or building a product it would great. Also the tools you use - I'm still working on automating command-line stuff that I do regularly, etc...so if you can write about those in the context of Cronhub it would be really interesting.
Loved the stories you shared. :)
Thanks! :)
Loving following your progress man! Is Buffer a customer? If not, why not?
Thanks man! :) Very soon when I finish the pagerduty integration. I created Cronhub to use it for my Buffer cron jobs in the first place so yeah :)
Your Medium article on your first 10 customers inspired us and gave us some new marketing ideas! Thanks!
Ah so glad to hear that! Thanks for reading it Matthew! :)
nice idea! :) it's always a pain to check the status of chron's job scheduled
Recently read about Cronhub, really nice tool. I'll probably use it for my App as soon as it needs some background jobs, at least it's on my todo list. :)
Awesome, thanks a lot for the support, Kevin! :)
Looks & sounds really promising. It's always a hassle managing your cron jobs. I read an article about Cronhub earlier, looking forward to seeing you expand. Good luck!
Thanks, Dennis! It means a lot to me!
Looks cool @tigran!
Thanks @charlieharris :)
pagerduty 💯
😀
I'm working on Autocast - a podcast production automation tool.
I got this idea when my friend I started doing podcast together. I soon noticed that there are several tasks I'm doing every time when working on/publishing new episode. So my goal is to automate them.
I'm just really looking forward once it'll be ready because my life will be so much easier! haha
Great idea Vaclav!
Also love the style and clarity of the landing page, thinking about starting a podcast in the long term and I'll be sure to check it out by then.
One remark on the landing page though, whenever I try to select text on your landing page I get a purple outline around every element (div so it seems). Being a dyslexic guy I like to select the text I am reading (I am weird like that, haha).
Let me know if you need a screenshot :)
Keep up the good work!
Hey @Twan!
Certainly send me link to your podcast once you start one :). I'm both curious about what your podcast will be about and how can I help you to make your podcast life easier!
Regarding the selection bug - could you please send me (Twitter DM or email whatever you prefer) a screenshot? It seems that I can't reproduce the behaviour.
Thanks!
Just send you a DM on Twitter!
I currently run a blog about working remotely so if the blog gets some traction I'll put some effort in interviewing some people about their experiences working remotely. Again long term, haha.
Just left my email for Autocast, looking forward to the updates. ✌️
This is a fantastic idea! Definitely love it! Let me know if you need some more development help 😉
Thanks for the offer Stephen!
Awesome idea! Any plans to integrate with other hosts?
Thanks!
What exactly do you have on mind @coreyhaines?
I love the marketing automation part of it but already have a host. Integrate with Libsyn, Transistor, Soundcloud?
Several people already told me that. I'll probably do that.
What's the ideal scenario for you? Automate certain tasks on Autocast and when it's done upload it to one of the mentioned services?
Precisely. I'd want to upload and then publish and then have Autocast do all the automation for marketing tasks immediately. Maybe set up rules, so I wouldn't have to manually schedule posts to go out at a certain time every time, etc.
Great! That's very similar to MVP I'm building.
What does automated workflows look like? @mlejva
For example - once a new episode is uploaded you can have a workflow that automatically generates promotion for your episode: Instagram post, short video for Instagram story and Twitter & Facebook post. You just provide text and background image, everything else does Autocast for your.
Another example is automatically generated Youtube video on the server from your audio file.
For the youtube part, something like https://upload.fm ?
Yes, this is looks similar to what I'd like to achieve.
Great landing page and idea - joined list
And like that you are using Vue :)
Thanks Pete.
I love Vue! It keeps overhead really low and let me prototype quickly :)
Nice tech choice
Thanks :) it's combination of:
Frontend - Vue
Backend - Nginx (Digital Ocean) and Firebase
Vaclav this is awesome. As someone looking to start a Podcast, I love that this takes a lot of the cumbersome tasks out of the equation!
Thank you Shane!
I'm glad that you get the idea, that's exactly what I'm aiming for :)
Make sure to leave me your email here so I can let you know once the service will be ready.
Awesome! Programmable Workflows and Team Collaboration are exactly my cup of tea. Listed my email.
Thanks Isaiah, I'll keep you posted!
I love the idea of automating as much of the podcast production as possible. How long have you been working on this and when do you expect to launch? Full disclosure I’m also building a podcasting app: www.callcast.co the idea was to simplify podcasting - especially the remote aspect of inviting guests onto your show. (maybe we could collaborate somehow?)
Hi Adam!
I've been working on it for about 2-3 weeks. I hacked landing page together yesterday to find out whether people are interested in such service.
I have a full time job so it takes a while. I mostly try to code every day even when it's just 15 minutes. It helps me to stay in the flow and be "ready" for the weekend hacking.
I'd like to launch some of the features by the end of the month. That's when my school starts and I'll have even less time..so..I really have no choice, haha.
Callcast - it's interesting take on the collaboration problem. I must say that recording podcast remotely (two people recording remotely) it's super pain in the ass. So I think you're really solving real problem. My friend and I always spend about 30 minutes trying different call services.
I'm happy to discuss anything, so feel free to DM me on Twitter for example :)
Sounds good, I'll ping you :)
Love it! Just signed up.
Thanks, I really appreciate it!
looks awesome. nice homepage as well. From a web-designer perspective, it's looking really good.
Thank you very much Antonis. I'm glad you like it. I wanted something simple and easy to read.
Hey Vaclav,
I just finished building something similar for my product. Would love to collaborate or just talk more about your future plans. I'm 100% certain we can help each other!
Sure! DM me on Twitter!
Looks interesting, signed up
Tiny tip: add name=email on the input to enable browser suggestions (less friction + I think folks have come to expect it)
Thanks for the sign up Siddhart! It's fixed :)
What makes Autocast different from Anchor (https://anchor.fm)?
I promise I'm not trolling here, just trying to understand the podcast world of tools for my own potential needs.
Of course, no problem!
My ultimate goal is that all you need to do is export your audio file. After that everything happens automatically - podcast promotion, upload, distribution, no hassle when working on podcast in team. I even believe that to certain point the editing can be automated.
My aim is to maximise time you're actually creating a valuable content.
This sounds like an awesome tool. I would love to try it out for my upcoming podcast!
Thanks Max! Make sure to leave your email here - Autocast so I can give you update once the tool will be ready :)
Done. Good luck with the building process!
Love podcasts things. Will follow you. Good luck!
Thank you! I'm a vivid listener for years but started doing mine own podcast last month.
I'm often surprised how many things aren't solve in this industry. For example podcast hosting still feels super old and clunky.
I'm working on Cooee Network -
Cooee Network is the new way to target over 1.5 Million designers, developers, and small business owners. We feature products that solve real problems, products that deserve to be promoted and talked about.
interesting... could be needing this for my product launching soon.
Please don't hestiate to get in contact with me. Just launched a campaign to help https://www.producthunt.com/posts/2000-slack-groups get to #1 on PH
What does the engagement look like on the accounts in your network? These days I see lots of accounts with artificially inflated follower counts. I'm sure yours are legit, but adding some metrics to demonstrate that would make me even more interested. Awesome numbers though!
I've never paid for any followers, all my growth has been organic but I can appreciate why you would think that - there are a lot of fake accounts. Instagram engagament has taken ever since Facebook bought them, there starting to introduce there algorithims so we will pay ads to reach our followers.
I'm working on Founders Podcast
For every podcast I read a biography (or autobiography) of an entrepreneur and pull out ideas you can use in your business.
So far I have created podcasts about:
-Steve Jobs (Apple, Pixar, NeXT)
-Elon Musk (SpaceX, Tesla, PayPal, Zip2)
-Yvon Chouinard (Patagonia)
-George Lucas (Lucasfilm, THX, Industrial Light & Magic)
-Jack Ma (Alibaba)
-Peter Thiel (PayPal, Palantir, & Founders Fund)
-Levi Strauss (Levi Strauss & Co.)
-Ed Catmull (Pixar)
-David Packard (Hewlett-Packard)
-Paul English (Kayak)
-Henry Ford (The Ford Motor Company)
-James Dyson (The Dyson Company)
-Danny Lewin (Akamai Technologies)
-Jim Clark (Netscape, Silicon Graphics, & WebMD)
-Evan Spiegel (Snapchat)
-Danny Meyer (Shake Shack)
-Jeff Bezos (Amazon & Blue Origin)
-John D Rockefeller (Standard Oil)
-Phil Knight (Nike)
-Sam Walton (Walmart)
-Ray Kroc (McDonald's)
-And more....
I think I have the format down. Now I just need to find a way to make the podcast sustainable 🤔
You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts
Sustainable podcasting is the best! People pay you to learn, read, explore, and grow! I love your episodes so far.
Thanks Heliodor! I have a new podcast on Walt Disney based on the book Walt Disney: An American Original by Bob Thomas. It will be out Monday.
Very interesting format! Packing all the insight and nuggets you would get from reading a biography, cutting away all the fat, great! Maybe you could try to get the publishers of the books you read to sponsor your episodes?
Thanks for the response and the idea!
I am committed to ad free podcasts.
I've "burned the boats" in this regard.
There are a few reasons I have made the decision to exclude ads from my podcasts:
I don't think the future of podcasting (or digital media/products) is ad based. This isn't a unique thought. Consider for a moment that podcasting in the United States is a $300 million industry mostly advertising. While podcasting in China is $4-7 billion mostly paid subscriptions. You can read more here: https://www.marketplace.org/2018/09/13/world/fomo-china-7-billion-industry
Ads won't improve the product. One thing I am learning from reading all of these biographies and autobiographies of Founders is they all focus on what is best for the customer over everything else. They have a maniacal focus on the customer. There is this great story in The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon, about Jeff Bezos' intense focus on his customer's experience: Bezos was obsessed with the customer experience and anyone who didn't have the same-single minded focus bore the brunt of his considerable temper....A veteran of long distance provider MCI, Bill Price came to Amazon in 1999. He blundered early by suggesting in a meeting that Amazon executives should be permitted to fly business class....Jeff slammed his hand on the table and said, "That is not how an owner thinks! That's the dumbest idea I've ever heard!" Jeff's point was how does spending more money on plane tickets for Amazon executives improve the customer experience? It doesn't. So we won't. (Bill price resigned a few months later)
Building your business on the reliance of a 3rd party is not a good idea. I like the podcast Reply All by Gimlet. One of the hosts, Alex, posted this comment in the Gimlet subreddit:
"The thing you should know is that Apple has just introduced really granular metrics to podcasting - we can see now when people start the episode, how long they listen, where they fall off, and where they skip. It's early days, but I can see a future where advertisers will say "before we sponsor your show, we would like to see your metrics - see if your listeners are skipping ads." Who knows? This is a young and volatile business model. But as the ability to detect who's listening to ads and who's not improves, it might have an actual effect on shows. I have talked to folks at other podcast networks who sincerely believe that once these new metrics on Apple Podcasts go into effect, some of their shows will simply fold up and blow away because sponsors won't want to pay for them anymore."
That is ridiculous. Imagine spending years building up your business and then having its existence determined by a 3rd party. CPM's for podcasts are high right now. But history shows us high CPM's don't last forever. Podcasts that rely on advertising money will fold when that changes.
Anyways I hope that wasn't too long. I am passionate about podcasting as both a medium and as a tool to help entrepreneurs learn. I think about it a lot.
I've learned a ton from the Indie Hackers podcast and in case Courtland ever reads this: Keep up the good work!
Really like this idea for a podcast and I'm sure "namedropping" all those founders gives good SEO value as well :)
Thanks Joi! Some people have definitely discovered Founders while searching the Apple Podcast directory for specific people :)
I love that you have a good variety of entrepreneurs in the mix especially some non-technical ones. For me, that's the most intriguing story!
Thanks tt.
I agree.
There are interesting stories in any business.
Some of my favorite lessons have come from "non-technical" businesses:
-Phil Knight's book about his journey founding Nike
-Danny Meyer's book about hospitality in the restaurant industy.
-Sam Zemurray's life story about starting out as a street peddler of bananas and eventually running the largest fruit company in the world.
-James Dyson's autobiography is about his several year attempt (5000+ prototypes built) to fix design flaws in vacuum cleaners! And it is one of my favorites.
The lessons in their experiences are applicable to any business.
Very cool. I am currently Reading about Howard Hughes. I think you could take some of his PR stunts for your podcast. Great idea.
Hughes definitely knew how to get publicity.
There are a lot of parallels between Howard Hughes and Elon Musk in this regard. I just finished reading Space Barons and the story of Elon showing up in Washington DC with a 7 story rocket on the back of a custom trailer comes to mind. He wanted NASA's attention and he got it.
Which Hughes book are you reading?
I slogged through Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness. I decided against making a podcast about it since the majority of the book is about his declining mental condition.
I have the book Hughes: The Private Diaries, Memos and Letters in my queue. Hopefully that turns into a Founders podcast one day.
That's an impressive list right off the bat. I love content centred ideas like this one. Not being a technical guy, these kinds of ideas inspire me to create something people would like "consuming".
I'll check out your podcast for sure right after work. Good luck and keep at it!
Thank you! I've been learning a lot from all of these books and the response to the podcast has been great :)
Very cool!
Be sure to check out Autocast in this thread -- might be useful/spark some thoughts?
Thanks for the suggestion Marc. Will do.
Awesome idea! There sure are a lot of founders to pull from. But I imagine there’s an end at some point
Hi Corey.
When I first started I thought that too.
Now I realize the actual problem isn't that there aren't enough books.
The actual problem is that there is no possible way I can cover all the books that exist that we can all learn from.
On the podcast I repeat this phrase I heard from the founder of Brain Pickings, Maria Popova:
Books are the original links. They lead us from one idea to another.
Almost every biography of a founder mentions other founders that they were inspired by.
For example:
When I read the Steve Jobs biography by Isaacson I was introduced to some of founders that inspired and influenced Steve.
People like Edwin Land (founder of Polaroid), Bob Noyce (founder Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel), David Packard (founder of HP), and Nolan Bushnell (founder of Atari & Chuck E Cheese)
As a result I made podcasts on Bob Noyce, David Packard and Nolan Bushnell.
I have the book Insisting On The Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land and will eventually turn that into a podcast.
This phenomenon made me realize something:
If I can make Founders podcast sustainable, given a long enough time period I may be able to document the history of entrepreneurship.
I think that would be pretty cool.
Brainstorming some ideas for draftss.com that would enable us to give back to the community.
Some suggestions would be great.
I like the design except the "Do you want to see more samples" thing. It looks very odd. The service is very well explained.
One thing is unclear in "Experiment" plan. "One Task" means one task per month?
Yes, it meant one task per month.
I shall make relevant changes to improve the text on the chatbox ASAP. Any suggestions about what we can write instead?
lnks.to
Getting more themes online for users
Ironing out some bugs so I can start focusing on marketing
Making a decision on taking investment or not
Oh, I love this. I thought it would be a fun thing to build when seeing solutions such as https://lnk.bio Good luck!
Cheers mate, I'm hoping a few of my features that I'm going to roll out will keep me ahead of these guys. I suspect it's going to be a competitive market.
Nice landing page!
My one critique would be that your first line "The solution to the 'one link in bio' problem" didn't make sense at first glance to me. I get it after a second of thinking, but I bet that phrasing confuses a couple people, especially those that don't know they have the 'problem'.
I bet there's a better way to word that, like
"Stop swapping out your link in bio"
or
"Turn 'link in bio' into 'links in bio'
Hi Brett, thanks for the feedback.
I know what you mean, it reads a little 'clunky' to me too. Only thing is, that's how users describe the problem and I haven't come up with a better way to describe it yet.
I'll sleep on it and try some up with something a little better tomorrow.
I'm currently reading a book about copywriting that might help.
I have this bookmarked on copywriting:
https://copyhackers.com/2015/10/copywriting-formula/
Hundreds of copywriting frameworks.
Dope, I will dig into this now. Cheers
Great looking landing page. It's an interesting structure in that you make the benefits really clear all the way through but I still don't quite understand exactly what it is until the final section. Does it convert well?
Also, as you mention bugs, I can't close the navigation after opening on mobile (in case that hasn't come up yet).
Thanks for your kind words, Emile.
I haven't sent a huge amount of traffic to the site, and this is a newer version of the page since I looked at the stats to be totally honest, but the my conversion rate has been somewhere between 1-3% in the recent past.
Have you experimented with pricing at all? Seems like with the traction you have, you could be leaving money on the table. Awesome product though!
Hey Andrew,
I haven't played around with pricing yet. The project was pretty much an MVP until a week ago, I'm trying to build it up to something more substantial to justify subscriptions at the moment.
Stay tuned!
Hi everyone! I'm an MIT 2018 grad and YC alum(ish) and I'm running food processing factory in Nigeria on the African continent.
The economy here is at a stage comparable to USA pre-industrial revolution (except importing 21st century goods), so after failing with 3 tech-first models and analyzing the actual market, we decided to take lemons and make lemonade. We're running an industrial processing factory. Tech-enabled though!
My goal for September is to kick off operations & make a sale.
would like to hear more about your thing. Sounds impressive.
We just kicked off operations last week. We sold a by-product yesterday! Our first sale. Someone paid us for something we produced! : D
Together with two friends we are working on JPlanner - an online marketplace for trip recommendation directly by locals.
We got this idea cause we love traveling and we always struggle to find unique experiences that are not tourist trap.
When we travel we want to live our journey like a locals and there was no solution tailored for our need so we decide to build it :)
Soon we will release our first version!! :)
Great landing page, seems it is getting better and better. Hope your launch goes well.
we also have a DEMO if you want to take a look :)
thank you very much :)
That sounds cool! Would really like this when traveling!
A friend and I talked about building a site where you could "book" a local to cater an experience to what you want to do (night life, outdoors, family stuff, etc).
I've also thought about making it easier for people to start local communities. I've traveled to a few places that are slowly growing because of tourism, and there's usually a very poorly-made website devoted to the local area. Would be cool to have a hosted app that builds those communities and provides useful features built in. I guess I wouldn't be surprised if there's a WordPress plugin for that already :)
I just released Review Scraper API, which provides a standard JSON for reviews from 50+ review sites including Amazon, Yelp, TripAdvisor etc: https://www.reviewshake.com/review-scraper-api
I would have loved to have this when I started Reviewshake, so decided to make it available to anyone. You could use this to build...
Amazon product analyzer - use product reviews to generate reports about Amazon products
Marketplace platform - aggregate and show off reviews for sellers on your platform.
SEO analysis tool - reviews impact SEO, and this is your tool to build data around it.
Financial analysis - use reviews for various sectors to analyze public companies and build models around their stock price.
Machine learning data - use real reviews to to train your machine learning models.
Aggregator services - include real reviews on your restaurant, lawyer or <insert niche here> website.
Real estate analysis - use reviews to analyze real estate trends by neighbourhood, city, state and country.
and many more... :)
This seems pretty awesome and I'll definitely have some use for it in the future, but unfortunately the site is loading super slowly and I was unable to signup (received a 504)
@willie thanks so much for your comment! this tool is actually separate from our main product (which is under a lot of load now - working on it!)
you can sign up for this Review Scraper API here: https://market.mashape.com/reviewshake/review-scraper-by-reviewshake :)
Scrapers tend to need to be updated often as the target site changes (and attempt to block scrapers). What’s your plan to continuously support this?
For sure! We use this for our main business (Reviewshake) so we do have an incentive to keep it maintained.
I've been working on Hanhi for about two years now.
I started creating it when I was sixteen because, as one of many self-taught programmers, I was frustrated that the main way to prove oneself was through an expensive and time-consuming traditional education. Thus, I created my own credentialing system that allows companies to create peer-reviewed competitions. Ever since then, I've been working on it and thinking about how else it can be used.
Feedback is greatly appreciated!
Nice! Any support for Safari coming?
Thank you! And I don't know, but I'll look at other open source date choosing platforms.
Sounds really interesting. How many competitions have you run so far?
Thank you! So far, only two people have created a competition. But hopefully that will increase in the future.
I'm working on Intuition. It's a Saas app that automatically generates reports and insights from the metadata stored in your Git repositories to keep dev teams in sync and nontechnical stakeholders aware of what's going on.
I'm at a point where I'm mostly happy with it as a full-fledged MVP, so now it's all about promoting in, gathering feedback and deciding what to build next. I'm also taking part in Startup School to keep me motivated and to develop a cadence of check-ins.
I'd love to hear what you think!
Interesting idea... will check it out!
There might be some collaboration opportunities down the line.
it looks amazing. Good Luck!
Cool stuff! Good luck.
Aiming to do a full re-launch of Frontend Mentor by the end of the month.
Brand new re-design and all new front-end coding challenges will be released.
Will be a busy month!
Nice project! Do you have a business model behind it?
Thanks Glenn! 🙂
For the re-launch the challenges are going to be full landing page designs (including both mobile and desktop designs).
The challenges will be free for anyone to do, but if they would like to see some fully-documented solution code for how a professional developer would build it they can buy the solution.
I'll also have another offer whereby people can pay for a personalised code review of their solution. The price for this will also include the pre-made solutions.
Sounds interesting, I've always like the idea of coding challenges 🏆
Glad to hear you like the idea of the challenges Abraham!
Keep an eye out later this month when I announce the re-launch 👍
I'm working on PDFShift, an api to convert HTML documents to high fidelity PDF with a single POST.
The service has been released three month ago and has a steady growth which is awesome.
I plan to release it to ProductHunt this month (scheduled to be featured on September 11, stay tuned ;) ), and my bigger view is to grow it to 5000$ MRR by the end of the year.
I'm happy to help anyone setup their account, so feel free to reach out!
That looks great. There seems to be a lot of competitors in that field already, so I'm curious: what makes you think your service will be better? What's your differentiator?
I'm relatively new, so there is no big differentiation right now, but I have a few ideas in mind I plan to implement.
My main work right now is having an awesome customer experience while providing a great tool :)
Duolingo for math
This sounds like a great idea. My co-founder and I are tackling education too. We're working on Squally, a game to teach people how to hack.
We wrote a small article about it: https://medium.com/squallygame/how-we-wrote-a-self-hacking-game-in-c-d8b9f97bfa99
Our goal for September is to continue to grow our mailing list at 35-50% week over week, and launch a Kickstarter.
Nice. Good luck with that Kickstarter.
Interesting idea. What stage are you at now with it?
Hoping to start private beta this week
Not even sure why but this intrigues me. And I'm curious why Duolingo -- as in, there are a lot of concepts you could apply to helping people with math, so what led you to this one?
Will you be selling to consumers or schools? Schools can be a pain, though once you get in there can be a nice market pull.
Yeah, it's just a quick way to communicate. Duolingo applies a few principles that I think have a lot of value:
Spaced repetition
Rapid feedback
Streaks and other patterns to encourage regular effort
A chance to improve a small bit at a time on your phone.
There's another principle that I want to apply, and that is 2-sided testing. That is, every question asked is a chance to update information about where the user is and also about what part of the curriculum is working and what part isn't.
I'll start by selling to consumers because the feedback loop is more valuable. Getting individuals to want to use it matters more than getting institutions to want to buy it.
Oh wow - this is a great idea!
great idea.. especially if you enable multi-language ;-)
that way i can learn a new language and math at the same time!BOOM!
Working on www.contractsummit.com
Core functionality is working for the app but need to spend some time getting the homepage sorted. It's basic and a bit bleurgh but put it up there so I have something at least.
Goal for September is to have something I am proud of.
Seems like a good idea.
I'd consider having less text. Or maybe structure it into some sections?
I'm just to lazy to read it all.
Thanks for the feedback! Agreed. Been reading through this article today: https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/landing-pages
Implementing some of that advice tonight!
That's a useful article, thanks!
We're working on https://squadpanel.com a tool that implements a who is who for organizations, events, groups of people.
My goal for this month is to finish the public pages feature. The idea is that organizations can enable a public page where they can share a view of the organization and his members, a small description, website, email, etc.
Working on https://VisualSitemaps.com
Launching in early Q4.
Seeking warm intro's to Agency Directors, Product Owners, and UX Influencers.
You can beta-test it now:
https://beta.visualsitemaps.com
u = vsm
p = vsm2018!
please send me your feedback/intros: artur@visualsitemaps.com
nice work, I tested it. looks great
This looks great! Went to signup via your beta and give it a whirl, but.... I never go the confirmation email, so I could never get in :( Sort of lost my enthusiasm after that. Do you really need it??
Email confirmations (ie double-opt-ins ) are great UX practices.
It prevents users making mistakes when they enter their emails.
For example you could fudge an email.. then get thrown into our app, start using it.. and upgrade to a paid plan all in 1 session.
But if you log-out after that session.. with that bad email,
You are kind of screwd. And you will need to confirm your id with our support team (time/$) ..
Plus another plus to the email confirmation is that you prime our delivery notices to you, as we will send you app notifications and other transactional emails.
Im open to hearing opposing arguments/case-studies where this xtra standard level of Auth was disadvantageous ( data to prove it would be ideal ) thanks
You're hilarious! :)
My opposing argument/case-study is that I never received your email confirmation, so I could NOT confirm my account, and I could NOT use your product.
LOL - Did you not read the comment you just responded to?
Improving and adding features to observely.net - your automated competitor analysis.
I plan to add various features to better filter and view the Graph that represents the competitors social media following data (like extending the range, % changing etc.)
I also hope to add some sort of Top Posts Overview to show the best Social Media Postings of your competitors in a simple way.
And I'm thinking about starting to charge soon, as observely.net is currently in beta and free.
Looks cool! Perhaps you could use reviews in there as well: https://www.reviewshake.com/review-scraper-api :)
Yes, definitely something I'm considering! Saw your product already a few days ago here on IH, it looks really nice! Might be in touch soon :)
That would be awesome, would love to work with you! You know where to find me :)
Working on https://www.pricingbot.co beta.
It's a price monitoring tool for eCommerce / marketplace sellers and dropshippers.
This month I'd like to:
Get 100 beta signups ( I'm at 55 right now)
Launch the MVP
It's web animation technology.
You can actually try it from here ...
Copy the text below to a new bookmarklet in your browser bar
javascript:prefFile='';void(z=document.body.appendChild(document.createElement('script')));void(z.language='javascript');void(z.type='text/javascript');void(z.src='https://gif.com.ai/static/inspector.js');void(z.id='modi');go to any website and click the bookmarklet and it will webclip something on the page to your GIF webtop.
gif.com.ai features an algorithm that is used to create unique looking gif animations.
You'll get an imgur to your creation automatically :)
Super!
I'm working on https://www.requestwatch.com. Just a fun side project. I know there are few similar webhook debugging websites, but RequestWatch has the cool functionality to respond with custom headers, body and status codes which is really helpful when working on integrations.
Making a course: Learn React while building a game
The idea is to make the end goal a little more interesting, learning just the concepts gets boring
Landing page is up: https://frontend.army/react-game
2/12 lessons ready, hoping to finish this month
This would have been something to let my kids start programming.
Depending on the prerequisite knowledge I think that this would be an interesting group, and market it to their parents.
Love this concept to make learning fun!
Recently launched Workorder.io 👉 for Freelancers to create a personal order + checkout page to sell their services directly to clients
Goal for September - this is a side project, so I'm looking to gain some sources of reliable long term traffic where the app can simmer and grow. I'll be adding a few additional features.
Next? There are some other projects I'll be moving onto, but Workorder.io will be worked on modestly over the next while.
Nice idea. I worked 2 years as freelancer and then more than 2 years in R&D department of the biggest freelancer marketplace. I work inside and outside and I know how hard all sides of being freelancer;)
This sounds like a great idea, especially getting to know freelancers and about what they need.
I launched My Thoughts a mood tracker for Amazon Alexa.
You can:
Track your mood by saying:
Recall when was the last time you felt a certain way:
Remember how you felt the last time
Ask about how you were feeling last week
Here's a landing page https://autenti.ca
I would love to hear what you have to say about My Thoughts. What's your reaction when you hear about a mood tracker for Amazon Alexa?
Hi you guys,
So to break the ice - I’m currently working on HelloWord.io, a headless CMS which makes managing your ‘static’ website’s content a breeze. I actually just launched the landing page (which is actually really simple for now) to make sure people can sign up for the alpha version. I haven’t posted anything about the project so far on any platform whatsoever, this is the first time :-) so, little bit proud!
With HelloWord.io, any content manager is able to click-to-edit manage any website’s content. No coding required whatsoever. I’m currently doing some research as to how my pricing is going to work and what type of subscriptions I’m going to implement, as well as continuously developing the product itself. In the background I’m already using it for some of my own websites, as test cases.
Any feedback about the product and/or landing page and/or idea is welcome, I’d love to hear it!
Hi,
When I saw your site my first question was : "what differences with other headless CMS" (like contentful).
Maybe your could explain that or provide a comparison table ?
Thanks a bunch for your reply! I’m definitely aware that this idea isn’t unique (anymore). In fact, I have used Contentful myself and got inspired by similar tools.
One thing I’m trying to achieve is to keep this as low-level tech wise as possible. I’ve noticed tools like Contentful are fairly tech oriented and sometimes feel a bit bloated, like overkill for the purpose. I’m aiming to make HelloWord.io as easy to use as possible for people without a technical background.
A comparison table is actually a great idea, and perhaps I should have this explanation be more prominent on the current website.
Thanks again for your reply and I hope this short answer is sufficient.
I'm still working on https://bardoapp.com an app that helps you to do better estimates and provides you easy and flexible time-tracking. My two biggest goals for September are:
1.) Launching the Community Part this week which works basically like Stack Overflow for tasks and estimations (here's a quick example: https://bardoapp.com/community/estimate/setup-redux-for-react-app/).
2.) talking to the first customers
3.) add one or two smaller features to the community or continue working on time-tracking.
I'm working on my Ultimate Hero course: https://vuehero.com/ultimate-hero/
Specifically, I'm working on recording the different parts of the course, setting up a payment solution and working on the landing page for the course.
Interested in learning Vue.js? Then you should definitely check out this course :-)
Been working on Honest Money (https://honestmoney.app/), a premium personal finance app that costs $2 / month.
Building HM is mostly to scratch an itch of mine. There are tons of similar apps out there, but none that provide a really great experience of just tracking your transactions. The main options out there either feel bloated with advertisements or sell your data.
Currently testing with friends/family since it hasn't gotten through to the App Store yet. If you'd like to try things out, you can download on the Play Store (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.honestmoney.honestmoneyapp) or ping me at jonathan@honestmoney.app and I'll invite you to TestFlight!
Biggest goal for September will be to hit 20 subscribers (and ideally 10+ that aren't people I know directly).
Nice UI on the app, looks interesting!
🙇Thanks @hackashaq323! Let me know if you'd like to test out an early version.
RemoteFilter.com - job application filtering for remote companies.
I want to help companies that are hiring remotely save time spent on reviewing 100s of applications and filter the candidates for them.
It's sound like something that will bring me a value, cause I am working as a Junior Recruiter.
Working on iDIOPAGE, just shipped some significant product improvements last night and will be working on outbound sales for most of the month. Also taking part in YC's Startup School which I hipe will keep me focused on the right things.
Emile, this is a great looking product and definitely I see a need, especially for marketers.
@channingallen Thanks for giving this opportunity.
As I shared in last month post, this month me and my team moving on automation testing feature. It basically bring selenium on cloud. You can automate your testing script in single click. With lambdatest.com automation feature, you will be able to run scripts in different programming languages and their frameworks like JUnit, Maven,Gradle,TestNG, Cucumber, JBehave, Gauge, Selenide, Serenity.
And this feature will be live by mid of November 2018.
I am thinking about the scope for my book "VPS for Makers".
Would appreciate any comments here: https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/writing-a-book-on-server-deployment-for-makers-and-need-advice-about-scope-51c55916da
I've been working on https://duct.cloud - an IFTTT + AWS Lambda BYOF (build your own flows) tool.
Duct, has been in the works 10 months and I admit that I didn't do enough research out of the gate. Learning from my mistakes there're a bunch of changes in the works. However, it's live and working. Now starting a dev-shop (https://lumberdev.nyc) with a friend to make additional income for Duct's development and to put food in my mouth.
Hi all 👋bit late to the party but have been working on https://beta.wavey.tips over the past month as a project to learn more coding etc.
Wanted to build a small app to create lists and explore backend, frontend and everything inbetween with it. Will aim to keep iterating on it slowly. Would appreciate feedback, whether through the Typeform on the site or here :)
working on mvp for https://interstatehq.com , it will be a service for you to post your product update and can act as a product changelog as well.
I'm building Moonscape - a cryptocurrency tracker app for traders.
I'm focussing my efforts on building a tool for traders to help them track their frequent trading activity across many crypto exchanges, and keeping on top of profit/loss and other metrics for trading.
I'm working on a beta version and here's what the app does currently:
Automatic Imports
Position Breakdown
View your positions by currency pair
See your position details - stats like realised/unrealised pnl, average prices, and individual trade information.
---
Here's what's coming:
What I want to release soon:
Exchange support for Bittrex, Bitfinex, Binance and eventually more.
CSV imports for the exchanges using original files, no need to fill-out a Moonscape spreadsheet. Simply upload the CSV file the exchange gives you and we'll work the magic ✨.
Things I'm adding later:
Watch-list of prices.
Alerts - (this is a big one) including price/position alerts when your positions hit a certain profit loss, etc.
I'm working on DevLifts - a fitness company for developers.
We rolled out a new business model (recurring memberships instead of a one-time purchase) in July and it's been going really well (despite being 100% based on Zapier/Mailchimp automations and no app yet).
My goals this month:
Get to at least $2k/mo revenue (we grew 200% last month, hoping to do it again)
Decide whether or not to use SugarWOD in the short term so we can launch and app sooner than later and start providing even more value for our customers, or if we'd rather wait until we have our own open source app complete.
Finish the v1 of our API so our community can move forward with the other open source projects
I built http://poemix.xyz/ several months ago and I'm trying to think of a way to monetize it currently or to see if there's any interest in it's use.
It creates A/B rhyming poems out of two different bodies of text and is powered by a library I wrote myself.
I'm working on onboarding the first customer for HostedMetrics.com and making sure everything's going well for them.
The goals for this month are to:
create more content in order to increase the company's visibility
send out some cold emails looking for customers
fix the narrative on the front page (basically, redesign)
implement a billing solution so that I can accept payment
i am working on nairaluck.com.ng - an online game of luck.
*Its based on the concept of a unique card game: you have to select 3 identical cards out of 9 cards, and you always win at least 10% of your stake.
*Its almost complete, i am anxious as this will be my first "successful" project.
*i can top up your account for test purpose just indicate in the comments here
P.S
The payment gateway at the moment is in sandbox mode. you can sign in with FB.
I am working on https://github.com/flatlogic/react-native-starter - mobile application template built with react native.
In my company we have been working a lot with react native and decided to extract and open source sort of a starter kit to bootstrap mobile app development.
Hey that's really really cool! Hit up the blogs that show in Google results when you search for "learn react native" and such and ask them to put in a mention to your template.
That's a great idea! I'll definitely do!
Thanks, Barry
I'm working on Vaconga, a web app that helps you group up with compatible friends to go on vacation with.
I've observed that many people my age (20s/30s) miss out on going on vacation many times simply because nobody has the will to contact friends, find out who has the same dates available, if you have compatible budgets and if you can agree on where to go.
Vaconga removes this friction by:
importing your friends list from social networks and email.
asking you to input your filters (available dates, budget, interests)
showing you a list of your friends ordered by compatability: Those with similar dates, budget and interests are at the top
allowing you to ask them to group up
once a group is created, showing the group a list of destinations compatible with your filters and allowing you to vote on where to go
once the destination has been decided, allows you to book the various parts of the trip directly from the site.
This whole process could theoretically be completed in an afternoon whereas it typically would takes weeks if not more with a high dropout rate.
What do you think, does this have value for you?
One big problem I'm currently considering is that the social aspects might hurt adoption rates. People might feel that they will be perceived negatively if they choose to rely on a service instead of personally talking to friends and acquaintances.
Any feedback is great but I'm particularly worried about this latter potential problem.
If it'd be me considering this idea, I'd be worried about frequency of use, or lack of.
A successful consumer website or mobile app must be able to get its users' attention constantly. People use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc, every single day and build a habit out of it. People literally type the letter F in their browser and press Enter if they desire to go to Facebook.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is Vaconga, which people will use to organize two or three events per year. It's not even the middle of the spectrum, where you talk about active weekly users or active monthly users.
Now, if you can get enough money from being an affiliate for flights, hotels, and car rentals, you might be able to make this site a financial success even at low traffic.
Thanks for the feedback, that's definitely a valid point.
Low frequency of use can definitely be a problem simply because users might just tend to forget about it after their first time using it since it would be so much time later. Most travel sites work the same way though and don't seem to have a problem with it. Maybe the social aspect of Vaconga might make this problem more influential?
One feature that could help with this is that the members of the group get email notifications when prices for their suggested destinations dip below average, kind of like Hopper or Skyscanner. I could actually just integrate their APIs for that if they allow it. That way it keeps users engaged.
I'm working on Deployo - One click command execution from anywhere
I find it to be a lot of fun to work on and I also use it extensively for Tripscovery -The cheapest weekend flights in your inbox every week
For Deployo, I am in the middle of figuring out how to make the configuration easier, more readable and most importantly versioned.
For Tripscovery we are preparing to launch and also trying to make it more configurable, as our beta users had awesome suggestions.
How does Tripscovery earn money? Or what's the plan? For me would be nice to know (as a user) if booking with Tripscovery has some fees to it (I couldn't tell from the landing page). Is the price the same as booking without you?
Hi Josef,
The plan is to earn money through affiliate links. Every time somebody buys a ticket through links in our emails or website we will get a small cut. This does not affect the price of the ticket in any way. The price is the same as if buying directly on the airline website.
We, our friends and our families also use Tripscovery extensively so it would not make sense for us to charge ourselves extra :D
Mostly working on the new engine of my project LinuxJobs.fr (reaching 1k€ MRR) these last weeks.
The first version was developed by someone else and I'm taking back the development myself in order to iterate faster to provide new features and fix bugs.
One of my goals is being transparent about the development to create a community around the coming website LinuxJobs.io for the US market https://www.linuxjobs.io/
Do not hesitate to subscribe to stay tuned!
Woohoo, I am late to the party but here's my plan;
Currently enjoying a vacation until half of September, but I still have some goals for Remote101;
Create a content calendar for the end of September and plan ahead for October. Too often I find my self desperate for a subject, leaving less time for the fun part; writing.
Start with social media. A bit late to the party, but I first wanted to have some content. First I'll have to come up with a fun way to deliver value, instead of making it a "notification channel" for every new post.
My goal for this month is to double my email subscribers from 10 to 20.
I'm working on https://crankwheel.com/ which is a specialized screen sharing solution for sales teams.
The primary goal in September is to significantly improve our existing APIs as well as add APIs that enable all reseller actions to programmatically (like create companies, extract reports of all companies for that reseller, and so forth). This is needed for a channel partnership my co-founder and I are building.
Improved my landing page
https://laystack.com/
Based on your feedback
https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/show-ih-templating-api-for-developers-is-there-a-market-for-this-7c5fb245c3
And kept working on the PoC Live Demo
A couple weeks ago, I registered http://BrisaBoards.com with what I hope is a unique (and useful) way to organize/be productive easily.
I've built 3 other sites over the past few years that I hoped to monetize, but I'm horrible with promoting to actually try to get users. Self-promotion can be tough as an introvert, and I've spent a tiny bit of money on advertising in the past with very little luck, a combination of bad execution and ideas that don't interest people ;-)
Trying a different tactic this time: Open Source! I'm hoping open sourcing makes it more useful, and I'd rather my code actually get some use than languish on an unused proprietary website. But, obviously, still going to have to figure out how to get people to try it to form a better idea.
Hello Channing! You did not tell us what YOU are working on this month :) In my case, at Emaww, we are working on a Touch Emotion Detection API to enable apps and websites sense users' emotions when they touch and interact with content. Who would be interested to use such API?
I'm working on https://www.phpjobs.app/, it is live but I haven't shared publicly (except this post) as I'm still doing some fine tuning.
Still a work in progress but I hope to "launch" in the next few weeks.
Fun story, I showed it off to a potential customer (a recruiter who was trying to recruit me) and got some useful insight into pricing and competitors and what I would have to do to convince him that my prices were worth what I'm charging.
I'm working on making my first sales and optimizing the marketing automation processes on ProducerCoffee.com, a little side project I created to help fellow indie filmmakers navigate the complicated and confusing process of hiring union actors. It's currently just an ebook and some resources, but the goal is to iterate and build a software solution once I understand the needs better.
I’m working on findbetterquestions.com
Just went from one customer to 0. Have to double down on marketing now.
I'm working on pageclam which is just a simple tool to take snapshots of webpages. It's mainly so I can actually ship my own project rather than just contract work. Only started today so no website yet but the twitter account will have some progress updates. Doubt I'll finish this month as I have the 'day job' still but we'll see!
I’m working on a janus based webrtc service API
Will continue to work on https://imageresize.xyz and https://zipcodetools.net
I'm continuing to get Brooklet ready for pilot users. Currently, users can track date-ranges, cycles, categories, counts, temp, speed, length, mass, and time. This month I need to support the graphs that visualize the user's information: area graph, bar charts, timelines, and categories.
As a stretch goal, I'd like to design and build the global and timeline view navigations.
This month I'm continuing to rebuild an app with a Python backend and Vue frontend. I'm also starting on a bootstrap course. I've tried a number of ideas and my biggest challenge is finding an audience willing to pay. I'm interesting in what I can learn and apply.
I'm working on Mergify — an automation service for GitHub pull requests.
The service's working fine and we had great feedback from our users and first customers.
However, that was our MVP. Now, we'd like to add the features that our users asked for, which require some good refactoring!
ideagrid.org. It's a place to discuss new ideas and validate features. Still very much in beta. Would love to hear suggestions! Thanks.
We're working on NowRenting, an all-in-one tool for landlords. (Listing syndication, tenant screening, background checks, lease management, online rent payment & lots more.)
We've got a lot of features built right now; September will be focused on streamlining our UI, fixing bugs and improving the features we already have. We're also trying to do some market analysis to get a better idea what our potential users want, and we may adjust the pricing model on that basis.
Also Hawk, a visual user tracking tool. We're just finishing a round of performance optimizations, and feel like we're closing in on a set of features that will provide really useful UX and debugging insights while still being extremely easy to use.
Hi !
I'm currently working on Volrod
Volrod centralizes all your e-commerce orders (from eBay, Amazon, Shopify, WooCommerce) in a single place and allows you to perform bulk actions (mark orders as ship, print shipping labels, etc) in order to save you up to 3 minutes per order.
I've just released the landing page and finishing the product.
I would love to have any feedback on the landing page !
I'm working on putting together my last 10 years of learning as a technology advisor. Looking at starting "chiefoutsider" program for small to medium companies!
I'm working on a blog writing service for small businesses in the UK at https://www.contentfever.co.uk as I wrote some great B2B content that drove a lot of organic traffic for a bespoke software development company in my last job.
I designed a card game in August and now I'm dealing with all the printing and Amazon bureaucracy... I will sell the card game via Amazon FBA, so I need to get the printing company to send the decks directly to an Amazon warehouse. Situation: a lot of emails back and forth :D
Interesting! Would this mean that the game is only available in an individual region (ie us, canada etc)?
Also, any more info on the game itself?
Hey, sorry for the late reply. The game will be available on Amazon.com and Amazon.de (Germany/Europe). It's a party card game on the topic of cryptocurrencies: https://playcryptocards.com (for the upcoming landing page just add /new to the URL ;) )
I'm creating PressPal - a marketplace for discounted offline advertising in the UK.
Current goal: Final user interview, ideally with someone who works in an OOH (Out of Home) media company like JC Decaux.
Next goal: Turn key insights from interviews into an affinity map to help define the MVP.
Great post! Amidst the great apps being built here, presenting my simple, humble tool, I am building to quench my maker's thirst. https://usemapmojo.com/
Would love if you nice people check it out. Do sign-up if you need this. Indie Hackers will always get a good offer. ;-)
I feel there is a lack of information on your landing page, it doesn't really tell me enough about what I'm paying for. Bulk it up with product features, testimonials etc
Working on MusicButler which I launched less than 3 weeks ago and has ~100 active members. It's a music notifications service.
Some of my goals for September:
Build a better workflow for how it pings the external services from which it pulls info.
Send the relevant music releases for each user inside the email notification itself (more challenging than it sounds).
Improve the copy and the design.
Improve onboarding.
Frontpage of indiehackers?
Pretty cool, I've been looking off and on for something like this for a while and it's annoying to realize that a band I like released an album two years ago without me knowing. Can I import more than 200 last.fm artists?
Thanks for the feedback Robert! I haven’t focused much on LastFM because the vast majority of users import from Spotify and Apple Music, but I just just checked and it seems possible. I’ll add it to the list and let you know when it’s ready.
1: Quitting my job at SPACE10.
2: Launching own Agency focusing on 'Growth Marketing'.
3: Also changing our offerings a bit on my side project http://signkit.io
Building out Surfboard and would love feedback! It's a growth marketing platform that helps you build & test onboarding, announcements, and upsells in your product (or static site) without any additional coding.
I got the idea while building another project with some friends. I realized we were using 15+ different marketing and analytics tools for a simple website, and none of them were integrated with each other or very good in the first place.
Eventually, I'd like to evolve it into a full development platform with a marketplace for reusable components that anyone can use in their web app.
I'm working on Android game about railroad.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.smadec.maxx.railroad
If you say what you think about it - it would be great.
A garbage or a normal thing?
Idea validation for a top secret mobile app startup.
Trying to generate some more Android dev freelance leads.
Four blogs posts in one month. Woo. I just set this goal now.
I am going to try and build my first twitter bot. Hopefully people will find it useful. Should be a quick build, trying to get it done by the end of the week, will update this once it is done.
I have started working on my SaaS Growth Hacking Blog. I've been putting it away but finally set a new goal to publish 1 post every Wednesday until end of the year.
I'm building a job board site. Haven't figured out what market for sure I'm targeting. I'm taking it slow because I'm using elixir/phoenix which I'm still learning. My goal is to have it launch by the end of the month.
Do you think learning new tech at the same time as building something new is a hindrance?
I'm sort of doing the same thing by dabbling into Vue when I could go all in with Traditional MVC.
Yeah, it is a bit of hindrance because it adds another layer of complication to what you're building. Also, you don't always know if you're using the right tool for the job. Using the wrong tool for the job has caused me some pain in the past just because I wanted to learn something.
I still do it mainly because it keeps my interest and I can at least justify the time I spent on a failed project as learning experience to myself.
I am working on https://workrituals.com - Platform for tracking daily rituals, memories and feedbacks for professionals. It also offers analytical insights to understand our ritual pattern which will give detailed information on our energy inside work life.
I am also part of YCombinator Startup school program for 2018 and busy finishing some nice work. I am eagerly waiting to get your valuable feedback for improvements of my platform.
We're working hard on https://hypervault.co, a password manager for teams.
Tomorrow we launch an LTD of the app publicly in a Facebook Group for the first time and we're super excited. We hope this can be the start to gain traction.
Hey guys! I'm working on Setup Scout – a place to discover tech, accessories, books, and other gear by exploring the desks of creatives.
Yes, it's (still) just an Instagram page. This is a way of gaining an audience while my partner and I develop the website (I design, he codes). But it's already functioning nonetheless, IG has proven to be a great platform to test this.
The idea for Setup Scout came out of my own need and curiosity – whenever a really interesting work space pops up on Instagram, there's always a bunch of people (myself included) asking for the items in the photo. "What's the monitor model?", "What's that lamp called?", "Where can I find that keyboard?".
The problem is – almost no one ever responds to those questions. So I thought a website that's all about featuring desk setups and their items would be interesting for that particular group of people.
The concept is simple – I contact the owners of the setups and go through the items one by one, collecting a full list. Then I tag those items in the photos which then become "live" and clickable. When you click, you get full info on that particular item.
There's more about the owners and other site content as well, but that's for when the site launches.
Which is my biggest goal for September — to finally launch the website. Getting anxious!
I'm working on a tabletop speaker:
https://imgur.com/gallery/WaBVggY/comment/1473956191
...that takes advantage of TI's amplifiers with built-in DSP. I also like the combination of old-school green circuit board with the wooden cabinet.
Working on Hashgear, https://www.hashgear.shop -- creating physical products automatically from trending hashtags. After 6 months of dev, branding, and legal+insurance work, I'm finally ready to launch. Going to start with a soft launch to IndieHackers next week, keep your eyes peeled. :)
My goal for September is to find a non-technical founder to build something awesome! :)
Still working on Ceev.io - an online resume designer. This will be month 7, which is the longest I've stuck with a personal project.
This month I want to work on adding plans and features for businesses. I've had several people say Ceev would work great for their company (mainly recruiters generating resumes from clients' LinkedIn profiles) - now I just have to develop a few tools specifically for them, and add another pricing tier.
I’m working on launching cultivateandkeep.com (not live yet) as well as creating a free crash course on SaaS marketing on my personal website at learn.coreyhaines.co
Looking to revamp our landing pages on https://logmyhours.com. Broke 1k MRR a few months ago, but traffic has seemed to level right off. Hardly any ranking keywords on google :(.
I’ve just released Bigger Picture – it increases an image’s resolution using Machine Learning. I found the demand from Reddit where a good number of people seem to want a photo enhanced to be printed.
Been tinkering with some lightweight Wordpress plugins - mainly releasing things I built for myself, like Post Expiration Data: https://wordpress.org/plugins/post-expiration-date/. Also some small information sites, like https://ontbattery.com/. They are designed to be hyper-specific information for people trying to solve one very particular problem (for instance with their Verizon fios battery dying).
I'm working on https://hukomo.com , a niche-ish jobs board for IT contract (freelance) jobs in the UK.
I'm really just investigating the feasibility of the specific niche at this point.
This month my goal is to get the board up and running for recruiters to post jobs, as well as pull jobs from existing sources and use them to drive traffic so i can better determine viability.
I launched https://designmonk.co affordable design service.
Wow, that's really cool. I had a bunch of questions about how this would work, but the site does an extremely good job of answering any question.
Thanks Mitch! Let me know if you need any help with the digital design.
I'm working on DraftFast, an optimizer for Daily Fantasy Sports that aims to eventually be a sports investors' best friend for data-oriented sports betting analysis. While a number of other DFS optimizers are already on the market, there doesn't exist tools that 1) connect traditional sports gambling and DFS and 2) are transparent about their approach. I want DraftFast to provide sensible defaults for making sports predictions but also allow the user to be creative and share their own prediction models.
I'm a casual DFS player and built this tool originally for myself, but after positive feedback from friends decided to build out the product more. The tool is free and I intend for 90% of the features to be free.
Would love to hear feedback! I'm a big fan of Indie Hackers and this is my first time posting :-).
I'm working on a tool that helps to communicate with designers. Kinda trello for images - you can add tasks linked to image area. Not a huge thing, but will make at least my live much easier. Prototype is located here: https://telepath.pro/design/page/new (demo@telepath.pro / demo) You can add few tasks and then send sharing link to designer to see tasks, work on them and upload new version. Then you see what tasks are done and can resolve them.
My plan for this month is to release the first version and bring few customers.
I just put my interest/landing page up! https://hudddl.com/
This month my goals are:
Talk to 10 people about how they organize events
Post on twitter 6x daily
Write one article about my project and publish here on IH
Joined the waitlist.
Nice to-do. Am sure you are considering to use tools like buffer for the Twitter target.
All the best. :)
Thanks Shree! Yep, using Buffer for Twitter :)
Hey, interesting idea. IMHO planning tool is interesting, but too abstract and it is more expensive to find customers. If you just make it "camping with friends" planner only you might get first customers faster and cheaper. After you check and polish your software you can expand for other niches. But this is just my opinion :)
Thanks Sergey! Appreciate you sharing your thoughts.
My idea is that private events (like a camping trip) would be free for people to create, but public groups would cost money (like Meetup). Thoughts on that?
Must try to see!
But my thoughts are:
if you just a Meetup competitor, it will be hard to compete with Meetup on his ground. Find a niche where you can be better than Meetup and start there to find first customers.
private groups gives you no traffic, people will not post on Facebook "I've just created new private meetup on Hudddl. Come see it no one!". Starting from public events will give you more chances.
Before you talk to potential customers read "The mom test" book, it helped me to reconsider how to look at my product.
Good luck!
I'll read that. Thanks Sergey!
I'm going to be launching my AR app in the coming days, just need to get the App Store screenshots all prepared.
I'm then working on closing a contract gig for an AR music video for a big artist.
I'll also be reaching out to some folks to gauge an idea I've had.
With any free time I have I'll continue to read Code Complete 2 by Steve McConnell and work on my Swift skills, and once my idea is validated I'll dive into my next project full time.
Implementing a WebRTC autoscaling cluster service , api friendly
Hi all, I am working on https://www.producthunt.com/posts/snipper-app - a modern snippets manager with lightweight GUI, syntax highlighting, and Markdown support.
It helps to stay more organized and productive during your day to day job.
I've released it today to App Store. So it's going to be a busy month for me : )
We launched www.nerdro.be a few days ago, and have realized what it actually takes to run a physical product business. We're working on a better experience, from top to bottom. Also trying to figure out logistics. Shipping overseas is really expensive. lol
I've built a cofounder dating newsletter.
Link?
Im working on https://mailforge.io - Mailforge - E-mail marketing software.
Its been a long road getting to the current stage, and this month we opened up registrations, so that we can get some more valueable feedback.
Hopefully within a few months, we can do our pivot into the e-commerce niche with hopefully stronger automations than our competitors. It´s not gonna be easy, but were gonna try.
some random ideas :
1 - As a hardcore Mailchimp user.. i need to see a comparison chart.
2- i'd love to see samples of great case-studies.. on the home page. As of now it looks too generic to me to stand our from the crowded space.
3 - Perhaps consider hiring a few top designers to create templates that are flexible ( ala Canva )
4 - Consider expanding model to automated email marketing/drips.
god speed!
Thanks Arthur, some good pointers.
We will be greating landing pages comparing us with competitors very soon, also for SEO purposes.
We will defitnally add some social proof like cases and testimonials, once we have them :)
Great, we could do that. Also to populate our template library in the application.
We just started work on the automation flows, so that will come very soon.
Thanks for your suggestions.
Looks cool Jesper! What's your USP against the competitors you mentioned?
What editor are you using for your email templates? Reason I ask is that I'm in the market for one for my startup :)
Hi Pkallberg, thanks for your comment. We have developed our editor ourselfes with VueJS, we also have a Popup editor.
Well were competing in Denmark to begin with, and the e-mail platforms here are lacking certain features for e-commerce. Simple automations, and trigger based e-mails like abandoned cart, reminder to previous customers if they browsed certain products without purchasing. Basicly things to keep your customers going to your shop, and not to others.
We also thought a bit about the idea on making a feature, where our platform would try to predict an e-commerce customer´s purchasing pattern, so that if they buy razer blades every 3 weeks, then that customer should be getting a reminder 3 weeks after their last purchase etc. Many fun things to do!
I will be working on Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course on Coursera. I'm hoping to complete that by end of October.
I plan to create a landing page for my long-term startup, Marta. I'm having difficulties reaching my target market (clinical professionals in Latin America) so I'm hoping to utilize this landing page to get a signup list.
It'll be my second month of full-stack development boot camp, so if I can power through that, then I'll be in a good spot for the third (and last) month.
Hey, I’m working on https://termstrack.co
It’s still really basic and needs a lot of refinement, it’s my first foray into web development.
I’m hoping to gain some users and try to validate the idea. If nothing else it’s been fun coding a web app when all I’m used to is native app dev :-)
I know I should "do one thing and do it well" but I fail to. I experimented with monorepo + monolith architecture and I find it very cool. As it's easy to pivot to new ideas. See https://github.com/amirouche/socialite
I've decided to learn electronic device repair so I can offer customers something that an outsourced developer could never 😈
For the last few months, we've been working hard on new mockups and features for https://smartmockups.com.
This month, we're gonna finally end the beta of our Custom Mockups editor feature and release an alpha version to all our users. With that, they'll be able to create so-called mockups from any photo inside the browser, within a few seconds.
Also, new pricing and plans are gonna be released so I'm pretty stoked how this is gonna end up!
https://invis.io/CBNUBSRVHSM - The organized list functions of Todoist + the ease of sharing content of Snapchat. I want to be able to easily send and receive action items and things to do/check out. In the spirit of "put something on my calendar" I want people to queue things up for me to look at. Eventually I want it to deeply integrate with my calendar. Looking for feedback.
I'm mainly working on https://scrapebook.net =)
I want to reach 5k MRR with that product only. I'll do that easily.
Move to the big city
Workout often
Build & launch the MVP of my first for-profit product
Hello! When you say 'often', can you say a little more? How oftern are you training now?
I’m working on www.newskillstudio.com
Any feedback would be highly appreciated . Thanks.
Waaaay too many competing fonts.
find a better-designed template on themeforest.
Trying to get potential customers to actually pay for my product. I'm aiming to raise $500 before releasing the first batch of my physical product, a "smart" coffee.
https://thenoocoffee.com
https://www.skillsmap.io/ - career development platform for software engineering teams
Adding some features requested by our current customers.
Working on our value proposition and establishing product-market fit.
Set up self-onboarding.
Finishing our engineering growth framework template.
Getting as much feedback as possible.
I'm working on https://mochiboard.com/ - a social accountability buddy tool.
I made this during a time when my friend and I started having regular weekly check-ins on each other's work progress to keep one another on track on our projects and side projects.
I've been using it along with a few others and it's just really cool seeing what everyone is working on (even if it's totally different from your stuff) :)
Here's snapshot of Mochiboard's board as of today (so meta, I know!):
Product - 52 tasks
Monetization - 1 task
Growth - 9 tasks
Marketing - 3 tasks
Bugs - 4 tasks
New Feature Suggestions (Community) - 1 task
This month I'm continuing to get more signups and feedback on product, identifying the superuser who loves the concept and wants to be a part of our little community!
i'd like to see more of the actual product. currently only as a bkg that is very dizzingly moving when i try to scroll down. please kill that. consider a 30 sec Screencast Video of the end-to-end example case . Now it's hard to reconsider moving off of Trello + Pomedoro.. how will this help?
I'm finishing up the launch of https://prescriptive.io which is a done-for-you machine-learning based customer chatbot that takes your business to the next level! My goals for September are to do Advertising, Press Release, and of course take on some initial customers who can provide feedback.
I'm working on Banqi AI. You can view details at http://theheroicforge.co. It's a game plus an Ed Tech SaaS. I got the idea while taking Artifical Intelligence through the OMS CS program from Georgia Tech and it took something like two months to get our full grade back from the first assignment in the course.
I've broken the work into 5 milestones. I plan on completing the first two milestones this month and completing the MVP by the end of the year.
I'm working on https://befolks.com - app for organizing betting contests for friends. In September I plan to refresh the landing page , add some new features like enhanced statistics and finally release version 1.0 :)
I'm working on Voicepods.com - a text-to-speech service that attempts to make the speech as realistic.
This started when I realized I listen to a lot of podcasts but all of my favourite content is written. Voicepods has the ability to publish your project as a podcast to your favorite podcast app (iTunes, Google Play Music, etc). This month, we're going to publish two podcasts ourselves. The first to read research papers out, and the other to give a summary of the blockchain world.
You can get listen to the first episode here: https://www.voicepods.com/papers/
Very cool :) How are you making the voices sound more realistic? I'd definitely like to consume articles/blog posts over audio with a service like this.
I've tried Google's API a couple of times and never really got it to sound good enough... The demo on your home page sounds more realistic though.
Thanks! At the moment, I'm using a mixture of existing models (Wavenet, Deep Voice, etc), as well as just applying filters until we like the results.
Would love for you to try it out to consume content so I can make it better.
Sounds good. How can I get started? Your site seems to be aimed at content creators as opposed to consumers.
Perhaps a Chrome extension could be a good start, before you have tighter integrations into the more common publishing platforms? Users can highlight text to put into your system for narration.
Thats a good idea. I've been thinking of getting around to that. For the moment, I do have an automatic extractor in the app so you can just paste the link and it'll attempt to grab the content correctly.
I'm finally publicly launching Mindstamp.io this month 🎉
Mindstamp helps you engage and qualify your audience by enriching your videos with interactive notes, questions, and personalization. You can watch me awkwardly explain it at https://mindstamp.io/demo.
On top of public "launches", I'm also working on getting cold emails to work for me and starting to dip into some content marketing.
Hoping to end September with a couple more paying customers 😎
I'm writing a book. After writing a post that went viral, i received hundreds of messages encouraging me to write. So it's coming.
https://idiallo.com/book
Very cool -- I remember your post. Best of luck!
Thanks Tristan
I just started working on a "catering" platform - we're vegetarian and since that my wife got really creative on what we eat. My colleagues won't stop asking what I'm eating and get very curious about it (some of them are vegetarian too) to the point they would ask if she could cook for them too.
So I decided to build something where she can plan for the week what she will cook and they can order in advance.
Maybe there is other people in the same situation, cheers!
Working on https://broadwaypricealert.com/ - Alert system to notify when broadway shows price drops.
In September im working on messaging and branding. Would love feedback !
Working on PokaTheme.com
We're trying to finish up some new Affiliate Themes this month. Lots of web development projects are running at the same time, but this is something we need to finish by the end of September.
Pushing hard to make some progress on IdeaMensch.com. Spending a good amount of time on launching new outreach efforts, automating ongoing processes and making our interviewees feel awesome.
Btw, if anyone wants to do an interview, it would be my honor to feature you.
Hi. Great product. I was looking for a feature like this! I appreciated being interviewed by a popular blogger for my startup when I was attending local events in California. And would be happy to talk about my current products with u.
More work to be done on Dependabot, which I'm full time on now.
It's up to $6.5k a month now, and growing well. I'm planning to add support for Go modules, as well as lots of little tweaks to existing languages. I'm also planning to put a lot of time into distribution efforts, mainly around open source adoption.
Greg this is awesome!!! Are you a part of the Botrepreneurs Facebook Group? If not, it's another great community of folks building bots.
Preparing Customerly.io for SaaStock Event in Dublin and WebSummit in Lisbon! We will be there with our booth and we are organizing all the marketing materials.
In the meanwhile, we are working on amazing new features to release before that date.
Our biggest goal is defining a scalable acquisition system for Customerly
I am working on mokens.io, which enables people to create their own cryptocollectibles on the Ethereum blockchain.
Working on peapods.com, instagram for events.
This is awesome. Definitely keeping an eye on it.
Working on Sk8 Plan (sk8plan.com), an appointment scheduling app for figure skating coaches.
I'd love to finish up my proof-of-concept, but I'm stalled (read: overthinking) whether it should be just for that niche of figure skating coaches or any non-mainstream coach (surfing, tennis, roller derby, whatever).
Only figure skating coaches can be too small niche to be profitable. How is your app different from similar apps (appointment scheduling apps)?
Thanks for asking! My biggest competition is spreadsheets and whatever coaches have cobbled together with notes, Google calendar, etc.
Some coaches have looked at appointment solutions for other industries, such as hair salons, but they pretty quickly fall short for this job.
Similar solutions exist for mainstream coaching (football, basketball, baseball, softball, volleyball, etc.).
There are two other figure skate coaching apps but they are impossible to use (I'm told this by lots of coaches who have tried them). I believe they were created by great coaches who don't know how to build a reliable app with decent UX.
As far as profitable, I don't need this to be the next $1b unicorn startup. If I can make something people want, and make some extra money from it, I'm OK with that. Or am I just telling myself that so I can't disappoint myself??? lol
Planning to release Meta this month.
It is a Visual Process Automation tool, mashed up with a CLI generator, targeted currently at devs or team leads who are tired of wasting time, and do not want to spend too much time to fix that.
No website yet, but I've written an article about it as it is a highly specialized product, and I have yet to find a narrow niche to fill.
Article link here https://www.indiehackers.com/product/meta
I glanced at your subject and totally thought "meta" was like some cool new lean startup term for something super early to your alpha/beta, lol.
After reading your Medium article, it does sound interesting. A little vague, understandably, but if you can improve on git flow that sounds awesome ;)
Haha, now that you said it, it is basically one letter away from Beta.
Thank you for going through the article!
My purpose is to give "you" a tool that allows you to design or pick a process such as git flow, and then rapidly iterate on it with the visual editor, so that "you" can improve on git flow in the way that exactly fits your project.
And you get a CLI for free.
Are you a developer? Do you think you could derive value from this solution?
Working on Content Creation and Seo keywords provider at fixed monthly price.
https://grumpytext.com/
Passionate about writing and thought to provide this service.
As every industry in digital marketing relies on content.
Content is the king they says.
Any reason why your blog isn't https? It was the first thing I noticed when going to check your portfolio :o
@brett We are still working on our portfolio section. We will soon do that.
This is very cool. I might be interested. Are the writers experts in digital marketing? How they find the content?
@customerly Yes.
Thankyou for the feedback that you liked it.
We have a team of talented and experienced content writers with degrees in English literature, technology, marketing, journalism and mass communication, enterprise management, etc., to provide you with well-researched, well-formatted and high value content.
We handle almost all the niches.
Moreover, Being affiliate marketers/niche site owners ourselves, we specialize in writing conversion optimized product reviews and guides that are bound to get you more sales.
For more info you can read our Faqs here:
https://grumpytext.com/faq
We are working on our content samples but you cans till check some samples here our writers have written on content marketing.
http://grumpytext.xyz/blog/available-widget-locations-of-mh-impact/
I am working on landing page (very first version) for my new product, modern communication platform for e-commerce: https://www.scalelead.com/
What do you think about the idea? Do you own online store? What problems are you facing?
Btw. I am looking for sales hustler/co-founder. Do you want to chat?
Building on https://slideskey.com - A simple tool for improving presentations.
I recently got out of university and this is my first product launch, so pretty stoked to get the beta version out the door this month.
Where/how did you get the artwork for the landing page?
The landing page looks great! I had some trouble however understanding the exact value prop of SlidesKey.
Is it something like a shared cloud storage folder with all the slides in it?
Good luck for the release!
Thanks Omar!
Definitely need to spend some more time on the marketing side so the value prop is clearer.
Simply put, yes it is.
It aims to solve the problem I faced both having to give presentations myself on some virus infected school computer, and watching others present at conferences. Getting access to the slides.
As I do not relate to this problem, please pardon my ignorance, if I'm asking something obvious.
What could be the benefit of using a dedicated solution such as yours to something like a dropbox or a google drive prepared link?
No worries!
A prepared link from google drive would look like the link below, which really is not something you can communicate to an audience or access on someone else's computer.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2ji_xNDq89wLfsFzM2F2U2x0UWs/view?usp=sharing
Working on StartupBase. For the first time, introduced listing fee to stop spammers. There are a bunch of new features in roadmap for this month.
Working on https://shohosh.com - Marketplace where sellers pitch to buyers.
You post what you want.
Sellers makes offers.
You choose the best one.
Sellers from everywhere will make offers based on your needs. Just choose the best one.
We launched today on Product Hunt got few feature requests and will work on them. Also we will work on redesign and fixing way how to make it more viral.
Great idea! Marketplaces are really hard, but I've found that this collection of readings can be helpful for thinking about them: https://andrewchen.co/marketplace-startups-best-essays/.
Are you starting by targeting a certain geo/demographic?
I really like this idea. I'm guessing you will go for the high end market first?
Just saw and upvoted you guys on Product Hunt :) Nice looking landing page, btw.
Thank you)
But as you can see we broke Product Hunt ranking system:D
Working on https://myquran.app
My inability to recite properly lead me to start this side project so that I can learn from other people. I've published MVP for android app, currently working on the web player.
https://myquran.app/recitation/50
My goal for september is to finish up the whole site and some modification for the mobile app, so that I will have free time to kickstart some marketing activities.
What do you mean by "finish up the whole site"? Sounds like a goal without end.
Looks cool! Do you need help with anything? It would be pretty handy if there was some sort of automated way of verifying that the pronunciation is correct. I've always wanted to try to build something for that.
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