Show IH: Open Shippers
Show IH: Open Shippers
#product-feedback-request
Hi IH!
For the past few months I've been working on Open Shippers (openshippers.io), a place for solo makers to build and ship projects in the open, publicly sharing their progress as they take their products from conception to launch and beyond. Makers will post daily standups, log decisions made, and provide general commentary about their projects in real-time while receiving support, feedback, and accountability from the community.
THE STORY SO FAR
The Open Shippers story starts last summer...
I'd started getting up early in the morning to devote the first couple of hours before the workday starts to personal pursuits and side project work at the suggestion of a buddy and colleague of mine who was doing the same. Think of the financial aphorism "Pay yourself first," except applied to time in a day.
Every weekday morning shortly after 5:00 AM I'd join him in a Slack channel. After the obligatory "good morning," we'd each give our daily standup for our respective projects: what I did yesterday, what I plan to do today, and what's getting in my way.
I found that this daily routine of sharing my standup with a like-minded individual yielded several benefits:
- I felt accountable to someone else to ship. Every. Day.
- I received valuable feedback on the features I was building.
- I focused more on the things that mattered for MVP and less on those that didn't.
- I had a sounding board for things I was considering and decisions I was making.
- My productivity increased.
Sometime around the beginning of November, it occurred to me that there might be value in a dedicated place for solo makers to post their daily standups and journal their project progress. There already exists a fantastic ecosystem of maker communities online, and, while I benefit from many of them, I hadn't found a project-focused place to journal my day-to-day progress.
So I got to work.
From the point I first started working on Open Shippers I recorded my daily standups in a file (in addition to sharing them with my buddy on Slack). It was my intention to start using the application as soon as possible as I'm building it, eat my own dog food. Once the database was up I'd seed it with the prior standups from my file.
November turned into December, and my colleague got busy with work trips and other life priorities that prevented him from joining me in the mornings for a few weeks. I continued my routine of posting my daily standups, and I found that the practice was valuable despite his absence.
Fast-forward to today - I've finished the functionality needed to support more users than just myself. Open Shippers is in limited preview.
NEXT STEPS
There are many features on the Open Shippers roadmap, which I'll publish soon. I'll continue to develop new features in the open, with daily standups and updates.
I'd welcome any feedback that my fellow indie hackers might have on the site, and, if you're so inclined, I invite you to join me on Open Shippers in the limited preview to use and hopefully get value from posting your daily standups and interacting with other shippers.
Thanks for reading! What will you ship today?
-- Jon from Open Shippers
It would be great to have some more information on your homepage. It directly throws me into the app without explaining much what it's good for.
Thanks for the suggestion! Yeah, I debated early on whether to have a more traditional landing page or just take the user straight to the app. I do think I'll create an /about page that's more like a standard landing page that will show the first time a user visits, and thereafter they can navigate to it as desired.
I think that makes sense
I like the idea! I'm wondering how Open Shippers differs from Makerlog (https://getmakerlog.com) -- is it easier to follow projects?
Thanks! Yeah, my goal for Open Shippers is to be more project-focused, with the daily standups and updates on a project representing the running historical thread of that project. Less of a task log and more of an interactive journal (though recording tasks planned and accomplished is certainly a part of that).
On my feature roadmap is the ability to "follow" specific shippers and/or projects, so that if you care about a specific handful of projects, for example, it will be easy to see what's going on with those projects.
Btw, can you explain to me what the point of such projects?
Well, I understand it could be cool to report what you are doing, every day, but what's the point? Who is the target audience? Who is going to read all those reports?
IH does this. How is your project different?
Thanks for your question.
It's true that IH lets you add your projects to your profile and record milestones, but it seems to me that the purpose of that feature is not to post daily to that project with what you're working on that day, issues you're running into, etc... to get support/accountability/feedback.
If you have a particular question or question that you run into on your problem, the IH forum is a great place to pop into to engage the broader community on that particular issues, but IH is not meant for the daily details and updates of what's going on with your project.
In short, I'm targeting a different use case than IH, which is probably not obvious on the surface.
It wasn't for me. I guess you are more like "I done this", I have the need for something like, I just didn't subscribed to IDoneThis because I was cheap... $4/user was too much for a simple log.
You clearly need some changes in the copy of the landing. Keep the hustle!
Thank you for the feedback - I appreciate it.