Any good resource for developer tool products?
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Hi everyone, as of this last summer I decided that I would like to give a serious attempt at starting a couple of ventures. I've bought a domain and checked out an endless plethora of medium, edX, coursera and other courses aside my formal education. I have a couple of questions I could use some help with:
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I was wondering if there was a good resource on indie hackers on prior work to launch products for the developer tool market. I've read a bit on DataDog, bubble.io, other no-code/low-code tools and I thought many were inspirational and whatnot, I just don't seem to find a lot of technical content to guide my venture... even on their engineering blog. I'd love to learn how people that make popular frameworks, libraries and other things start off, set things up and gain traction.
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My second point of concern is that I'm hitting all sorts of walls with every architecture decision I make. I've tried hosting web apps in Heroku (where they wanted to charge me for security certificates), Firebase (where I'm having trouble with scaling my landing pages to add back-end functionality) and AWS where I'm somewhat stuck deploying things in EB.
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I suppose I could start breaking every technical issue I ran into and making very detailed posts on stack overflow, but are there any discord/slack communities out there that support each-other as they develop their products anyone knows of?
Thanks for reading, I appreciate any insights
I do not think the process is very different from any other product. Yes if you are aiming at developers then you need to make sure your tech thesis is strong. Since developers readily open the code and check (if open source that is).
In my case, I am just alternating between engineering, pitching, talking and product. My product is engineering heavy and has lots of fun stuff to show off. But that is fun mainly to the engineering audience. To the business folks (actual customers) I need to push the product site, which has not been updated lately.
Since the product is tech heavy, I get very happy remarks from engineers. Most recently I pitched to a YC funded startup's head of tech and they replied with a very motivating email. So I am hoping this goes on and I get some real users soon!
Hey there! Would you be talking about dwata for this particular case scenario?
I really hope your product takes off, I really like your landing page and what you've done. I was thinking of something similar when coming up with a no-code tool that I wanted to empower non-technical people with. I think the realm of database is also a great place to start too!
Would you mind sharing your tech stack for future reference? I particularly enjoyed the KPI metrics you've shared in the demo page. It looks to me like you're using a Cloud flare, react and some JS libraries, do you mind sharing your journey from the dev standpoint?
Hey thanks for stopping by the site. I refreshed the site yesterday so it is perhaps totally different now. Here is the product itself - https://github.com/brainless/dwata. dwata is open core, so the Community Edition will be free (beer and freedom) and open source always. I will focus on Pro and Enterprise editions soon. And here, here is the website - https://dwata.com (refreshed yesterday).
Thanks a lot
I'm also working on something that will be marketed to engineers so I'm following this in the hope of hearing some answers for your first question. If you have it, I would love links to the datadog / bubble business stories.
For question #2, I think sadly this is the process of learning. For what it's worth, recently, I've been using Google Cloud Run for basically every project and have been very happy with it. It is containers-as-a-service so you just give it a dockerfile and it does the rest including automatic horizontal scaling. The only thing I've struggled with is that SQL integration can be a bit janky but depending on your product, that might not even be an issue.
Hey there! Sorry for the late reply I usually do startup stuff during the weekends, did not expect such active forum haha.
I couldn't find the articles I had read on data dog (i'm sure its somewhere out there buried in some obscure medium post). Here's the bubble story from IH though: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/creating-a-100-000-mo-business-that-helps-people-learn-to-code-c5e87bdbf9. I also recently enjoyed the plausible story and their blog: https://plausible.io/
I know Firebase uses google cloud in the back scene anyway, so i might give that a shot this weekend. Thanks a lot for the insight!
On point #2, I certainly feel you. I've hit so many walls with many different services. For example, I was trying to employ AWS Amplify for one of my apps, and things were just not working with Authentication. It took me days to figure it out. I joined the AWS Amplify Slack Community, and could not figure it out. Finally, I got on a call with one of my developer friends, and he "paired" with me and we figured it out in an hour.
If you ever get stuck on something, I'm happy to talk through it with you. I found that sharing the problem with someone else in the space usually helps with these major roadblocks. DM me if you're up for the offer.
I started following you, and I joined a small bootstrap community on Slack (nuggetone.slack.com)! I'll let you know how it goes, but I'd certainly accept all the help I can get, thank you!
Thanks for this, I've signed up with this community also. How did you find them? And do you find Nugget.one useful?
I have to admit that I haven't dabbled that much with it yet. From a technical side, my woes remain pretty unchanged, but hopefully that'll change by the end of this weekend!