I'm Building The Ultimate DevTools Alternative For Front End Developers - Ship CSS 3X Faster
Hey Indie Developers, creator of intab.io here 👋
Wanted to share with you my short journey on why I stopped working on a large SaaS product to build a browser extension for developers from scratch and why I believe this really could help front-end devs improve their CSS workflow.
🤔 Why build an alternative? What's wrong with DevTools?
I built InTab because I got sick and tired of switching between my code editor, my web page, and DevTools while writing my last SaaS product CSS which involved quite a bit of CSS, to say the least.
Writing media quires for me was always damn tedious and time-consuming especially in apps with a complex layout as I had to spend the entire day adding some little margin here some little padding there while resizing the browser window hundreds of times just to make it looks great across all devices.
I wanted a CSS editor inside my web page to see changes in realtime (no code editor switching), something that shows me all devices and all screen sizes in one place, something that generates media quires for me so I don't have to keep resizing the browser window guessing breakpoints sizes, something that keeps all my CSS changes even after a hard refresh (unlike DevTools)...
I thought there will be a browser extension to solve this but guess what nada!
so I started building... and after 4 months it is finally live!
🔨 How did you build InTab?
I have used Svelte solely to build InTab and I have to say that it was a great decision. I found working with svelte was much easier and more straight forward coming from other frameworks like Angular and Vue.
Using a compiler rather than shipping a large vendor size bundle is the future! building InTab was no easy task and it required quite a bit of code and a large variety of 3rd party libraries but the final bundle size didn't exceed 400KB which is crazy!
🚀did you launch this anywhere else?
I only launched on Reddit so far and it went viral with more than 1.2K upvotes; which was surreal! I am launching InTab also this week on ProductHunt so if you see it in the coming days there please do not forget to show some love by giving it a quick upvote ;)
💰 Is this a subscription-based product?
NO! no way! like any developer I freaking hate paying for ongoing subscription fees especially when a product doesn't have any major servers costs linked to the service it provides. There are some browser extensions on the market today asking developers to pay a subscription fee and I really find that absolutely insane. You only have to pay once for InTab and you get unlimited future updates for free. period.
🤓 Why there is no free version?
I honestly do not have the time to support a free version and all the headache that comes with it. I have another SaaS product I am working on and my time is limited so having a paid version at a fair price with decent support is much better than having a free version with no support and no continuous updates.
🔮 What is your future plans for this extension?
I am sure that no code is going to change the far future landscape so developers need to adapt to keep up with the next disruption by shipping code faster. I strongly believe is low-code is the next big thing in the near future for developers, not no-code! I am going to continue to develop InTab to help developers ship CSS faster by adding more modular components and templates. A more visual editor will also be added to quickly tinker with some CSS properties values.
💡 Final thoughts/predictions
I truly believe that developers should stop wasting time using old tooling if they are going to keep up with the no-code disruption. We are wasting a tremendous amount of time switching everyday between code editors, terminals, and the browser. The browser is where we check the result of our work so why don't we have our entire development process wrapped around it.
Reducing the gap between working on something and seeing its results in realtime is crucial for shipping code faster. You might argue that there are already tools that solved this issue by creating online editors like Codesandbox, Stackbliz, and others but I don't think that worked developers because they wanted to own their own code locally with the ability to work offline. There are always risks involved in relying 100% on cloud solutions so we better keep using them as a backup solution just like Github.
This is was my very first post on IH so hope liked it and If you are interested in trying InTab you can check out the free live demo, no signup, no credit card required → intab.io
Cheers!
Cool product! Congrats on the Reddit launch. Did you find that a good % of that traffic converted to purchases? In what subreddit did you launch?
I primarily use Sass - I'm sure this would still be useful, but what limitations can you think of regarding Sass instead of straight CSS?
I would say traffic from Reddit never converts well, conversion rates are always suboptimal for any paid product, I would only use it for exposure nothing more so expect 1% or sometimes lower conversion rates.
A smart tactic to use instead is to provide free content or free tools on Reddit to drive traffic first and then convert that traffic using a much longer funnel.
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I honestly don't use Sass in any of my projects to avoid any extra tooling and wasted compilation time for something that doesn't provide any significant productivity ROI but I got a lot of requests from devs asking me to support Sass in InTab so definitely it is something in the pipeline at intab.io/roadmap
hope this helps
Haven't seen a public Trello roadmap like that. That's neat.
Agreed on Reddit. I'm sure plenty of people that initially saw you on Reddit will eventually convert down the road after they your brand again down the road.
Building for developers is no different than building for any other category in the market; build an audience, provide massive value, and then offer a complementary solution. (but this takes a lot of time and hard work)
BTW, what's your acquisition channel for DinoSaaS? have you tried pushing content on Reddit or you are focusing on other developer-oriented acquisition channels like StackOverflow and Github?
Well I'm only just getting started with it so nothing proven out yet.
There are a handful of Reddit communities I've started to become active in. I'll probably focus my energy there and Twitter initially.
I believe there will also be opportunities to have content syndicated through blogs owned by other companies - ex. developer tools, Bootstrap theme creators, etc.