I am joining hackers because I have started a small boutique software product consultancy upte.ch with a few friends of mine that I have worked with…

I am joining hackers because I have started a small boutique software product consultancy https://upte.ch with a few friends of mine that I have worked with for over 10 years. We have been running the consultancy successfully now for a little over two years to pay the bills. However, we have always wanted to sell our own products to at least subsidize the consulting if not eliminate the need to consult at all.

While running the consultancy we have slowly been trying to work on selling some of our own products. Our first attempt was reviving a side project we had worked on during our time across a variety of venture backed startups. We cleaned the app up a tad bit, added Stripe integration, reworked the landing page, and experimented with paid ads across various platforms trying to see if we could get people to convert. Sadly paid ads didn't work for us and we thought it would be too hard to live in a separate world to manually sell it while also trying to sell our consulting services to makers. So, we have paused development on it for the time being.

Given the difficulty of selling to two different audiences we decided that it would make more sense to focus our efforts on selling products that align with our consulting clients (makers). We also decided that we thought it made sense to work on products that were a smaller scale since we struggled to find dedicated time to implement larger scale changes to OrangeCal. Our theory is that sharing the audience with our consulting services will make selling easier by providing some cross-pollination.

So, we dug up one of my side projects that had gotten a little bit of traction without any marketing and decided to build on that idea and produce a product to help developers better deal with pull requests. So, we built an MVP of Pra and got it into the macOS App Store as a free app, https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pra/id1447158795?mt=12 The plan is to add a paywall soon and run it as freemium product.

Anyways, that is where we are at and I joined indie hackers to find like minded people to share with and learn from.

#hello-world