Beautiful data visualization posters

Welcome Indie Hackers!

Today we sat down with one of the co-founders, Arpad, to share insights about building, growing and maybe selling his bootstrapped project.

How did you find the idea?

The original idea to make posters visualizing Git repos was inspired by apps like Papertrails which visualise Strava data. I wanted a way to celebrate a software project - to make something beautiful and meaningful which could become a gift for the team or client.

The idea of the dashboards which can be embedded on GitHub came once I'd started prototyping, and realised that the same repo analysis could be kept up to date continuously.

How did you come up with the name "Repography"?

The Git repo is at the center of the concept so I was keen to use the word "repo" and was wary of the Git trademark. The idea of making it "Repography" was to hint at graphics, and I also like that it sounds like a science. The science of visualising repos.

What was your main growth channel?

We're featured on the GitHub marketplace homepage sometimes, which is a nice free channel, but I think is mostly brand new GitHub users.

I think most new users see one of our dashboards on someone else's GitHub repo and want to have a similar thing for themselves.

I've done some blog posts which did well on Hacker News, but otherwise haven't been actively marketing Repography. That's definitely not my strong point!

What tech stack did you use to build the product?

The website is Next.js and the backend (APIs, webhooks etc.) is written in Go. It's all running on Google Cloud (App Engine, Datastore, Pub/Sub etc.) with a setup oriented towards easy scaling and low maintenance.

Would you consider selling Repography in the future?

Yes sure - the idea hadn't occurred to me because it's growing slowly and no effort to maintain, but yes if someone likes the idea and wants to be a bit more proactive about marketing then I'd certainly consider it.