Hunting for indie makers, new customer, back to Trello - Weekly backlog 2020/01

In November last year, I realized that I'm not going to reach one of my yearly goals of publishing 30 blog posts by the end of the year, mostly because of my non-existing writing habits so I decided that I'm going to change that. I started to write daily "backlogs" about the things I accomplished, my struggles, ideas, etc. It is also a good way to get a better picture of what I've done in the past 5 days as in some cases I felt like I didn't do anything but I knew that wasn't true.

Now I feel that my blog is not the right platform to publish these backlogs as there is almost no way to get feedback and advice there so that's the main reason I'm going to publish them here from now on.

Here goes my first weekly backlog of 2020.

2020.01.06. Monday

As I decided to "revive" CreativeDevJobs.com at the end of last year, I started the week by collecting and posting new positions on the site. Since I’ve been following the technique to search for creative agencies instead of creative tech positions this process became a bit faster. I started to develop a list about a bunch of creative agencies and if I can’t find anything new, I just grab this list for some help.

I’m still working on my goal to get the first 100 responses for The Maker Report so I spent a few hours looking for indie hackers and makers on Twitter and I followed them with the MakerReport profile. This is not the most effective way to get new responses, but I was able to generate a few "leads".

Oh, and today I started to write my daily backlogs again.

2020.01.07. Tuesday

While I was searching for new positions for CreativeDevJobs yesterday, I found more than I wanted to, so I posted some of them yesterday and the rest today. I’m not sure if it’s still true, but a few years ago I heard that it can help to get better positions in the SERP if you post new content on a regular basis (is this true?). So that is another reason I’m trying to publish new positions on the site at least every second day.

This was also the day when I posted about the Maker Report on IndieHackers. I can’t say it took off, probably I didn’t choose the best time for it. I don’t want to spam the platform, so I’ll try other ways to reach more members of the community.

A few hours after I published the post, I decided to change the title of it to make it a bit more "attractive". I don’t want it to look like clickbait, but I want to catch the attention of other indie hackers and based on my previous experiences, you can’t do that with a friendly title.

2020.01.08. Wednesday

A few weeks ago I moved my product development related tasks from Notion to Trello (more details about this decision in this weekly backlog, in the Friday section ). Today I started to create separate boards for the products I’ll keep working on in 2020. These are the following:

I’m not shutting down my other projects, but at the moment I think, I’m not going to add any additional features to them.

I’ve made a small change on the homepage of CreativeDevJobs. The position type and levels lists take up too much space and on smaller screens, it looked like that there are no positions on the page so I "closed" these lists. I used this layout on the category previously, so I could adapt that solution on the front page easily. After that, I uploaded a few new positions on the site.

I kept searching for indie hackers and makers on Twitter for Maker Report. The account has more than 100 followers by now and I think that’s pretty great. Although it’s getting harder and harder to find relevant profiles.

2020.01.09. Thursday

I decided that I’ll rebuild 2.0 from the ground as I’ll change the core concept of the product. Previously this was just a tool to select random winners from Instagram comments and mentions. There are a huge amount of tools out there that are doing the same thing and for free. So I don’t think I’ll make any revenue just by saying that my app is using the official API endpoints and that’s better. I worked more than 5 years for a social media agency and I developed hundreds of Facebook apps while they were popular so I think my advantage is that I know the whole process behind a contest managed on social platforms. Selecting a random winner is just a small slice of the pie. I’ll focus on other features (like getting in touch with the winners, selecting additional winners, creating blacklists, etc). At the moment I have about 45 user stories but some of them are covering more than one feature.

I made some changes to CreativeDevJobs. From now on, I’m displaying a timestamp (posted x hours/days/weeks/months ago) next to the positions. This way visitors will know that the site is maintained and new positions are added regularly.

I also removed the featured positions from the list of latest positions. I saw in the code that I wanted to do this when I was creating the site but somehow I forgot to add this "feature".

2020.01.10. Friday

A new store just installed my Shopify app on their store 🎉 Now comes the part when I have to wait 5 days (trial period) to find out if they really like it and will actually use it.

I was wondering if I should get in touch with these customers during the trial period to offer them additional help. I automatically send them a message with best practices and getting started information when they install the app, and in that email, there is a line that says: “If you have any questions, don't hesitate to get in touch via email at a ###. Or just send a reply to this message.”.
Maybe that’s too dry and missing the personal touch that would make the product better by providing great support.

I spent a few hours hunting for indie makers on Twitter and followed them with the Maker Report profile. At the moment, Twitter looks like the best channel to reach out to the target group of the survey.

I also sent a few DMs to those makers who started to follow MakerReport and asked them to help reach more indie makers by tweeting about the report. We’ll see how it turns out.

Todo for next week:

Reach out to more indie makers about Maker Report
Update yearly goals on my personal site
Create user stories for DiscountHunt updates
Clear idea backlog (dump the items I’m not going to work on)