I made a weTransfer clone with Vue, and something good happened 🤸🏽‍♂️

So I wasn't intentionally building a clone from the outset, I was merely solving a problem I was having in my industry which was 'sending huge attachments' back and forth between people in Asia (China specifically) and the rest of the world.

TLDR; i'm doing cartwheels

Why reinvent the wheel?

Sites like Dropbox are blocked, slow and require a signup for anything over 100MB. They recently launched their new Transfers feature which too is a clone of weTransfer

Wetransfer is great, why you made dis?

Wetransfer is awesome, it simple to use but lacked detailed analytics. The artwork is awesome but doesn't translate well overseas.
" Also why cant there be space for another service like this... " -- Thats me thinking out-loud.

I will leave out the features of SINOSEND for another post. Something happened along the way which has forced me to focus on 1 particular customer instead of building out the features i had intended.

Anyhow the site beta launched couple weeks ago, and I got a lot of criticism for building something that already exists without validation, and that I should find something novel and new.. some posts even told me to scrap it.

I honestly liked the feedback, it was honest, brutal and useful, I did drop some features, but I pursed with the mission anyway. I'd like to think that SINOSEND is different from other file transfer apps and hopefully will grab a small slice of the market,especially here in Asia.

So What happened already

Last week, I got a signup from what seemed to be a small company in the UK that had trouble sending files to their vendors in China & Vietnam. They signed up for a free account and within 2 days quickly transferred to my PRO sub.

I was starstruck, but it wasn't like I just saw Daniel Kaluuya, it was more that I landed a Whale of a customer even though I knew nothing about them at the time.

This was my 4th paying customer (the first one being my wife), but they were my first PRO subscriber. I honestly didn't even know my PRO subscription was working tbh. It turns out the company wasn't that small, they had locations in quite a number of countries. I was over the 🌜. They didn't subscribe to the annual plan , but rather the monthly plan which lead me to believe they were not sticking around so I had to get to work.

If I were to hold on to this relationship, I needed to spray all the bugs away, make sure things didn't break, reply to their questions and above all, make sure my app works! Sending 5+GB at a time to your backend storage on poor connections is hard 💪🏽.

7 days later, they are still using my service with up to 10GB transfers every couple of days and the system is holding up quite well albeit still with issues. Its amazing how much 1 customers analytics can make you go in to overdrive, behind the scenes they have no idea what we're doing to make the wheels spinning.

Whats the stack, you mentioned vue?

• Vue on the Frontend with Vuex & Vue Router , No dind't use NUXT
• Backend is all cloud functions on ALIBABA CLOUD, No server at all
• Rolled my own Auth which was a struggle with JWT , and things...(rabbit hole)
• Storage is all on Alibaba Cloud, Multi Region including China which makes my
  site work across the great firewall
• Grit (that means long hours and a lot of stackoverflow, yt and medium)

Why did I post this?

• It's like self therapy I guess, I;m not sure... most of my posts hardly get any responses but then again I haven't posted many.
• Feedback is the breakfast of champions someone once said, so yeah feedback would be nice.

There is still a lot of UI/UX work I need to do on mobile/ipad etc, its exhausting, the 1 customer I have hopefully will stick around.

Maybe soon my 5th customer won't be family! 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦

I'll continue to post updates if you're interested.

Thanks for listening.