I recently launched my MVP, and I think I have some pretty cool things in store for indie hackers in general.
However, only two customers (which are my friends) are on the platform.
I could use some feedback. I recently launched a blog post in an attempt to make some SEO traffic, which also describes some of the points of the product (such as getting everything up in the cloud quickly without pushing images and without using a container registry):
What do you think of my product in general?
Would you consider using it? Do you have any ideas for improvement, or general ideas in terms of a marketing strategy?
I like it!
It's actually what i'm looking for right now.
I have 2 questions:
A plan is for a single container. Kubernetes support will be coming up later.
If you sign in you can see the dashboard. Right now, you can't do much from it though. It has just the basics. That's the UI.
The product is primarily operated via the CLI though. The UI will receive an overhaul and improvement later.
You definitely need to make an example with a local project.
It works when I use your docker compose but not the one in my project.
I had to push the image to docker hub which defeats the purpose...
Interesting - I'll do that. I probably also need better validation.
You may be hitting a bug. Can you share your docker-compose.yml?
version: '3.4'
services:
dotnetdocker2:
ports:
- "5035:80"
image: ***/dotnetdocker2
build:
context: .
dockerfile: Dockerfile
Ah - but that image is private I assume? That way, Dogger has no way of reaching it. I'll make sure there's better error handling around this kind of stuff though, so that it's more clear what the problem is!
Instead of using
image, try usingbuildand then refer to aDockerfiledirectly.ok, sorry, I'm still a beginner with docker.
I removed the image line and now it's working.
Ah that's okay.
Yeah, that's one of the key points of this service. You don't have to push an image to a registry first to host it, which is something you normally have to do.
Nice idea. I went through your medium article.
Isn't what we do in CI/CD platform?
I have been using Google Cloud Run since the alpha phase.
A quick note which I wrote last year https://viggy28.dev/article/cloudrun-cicd/
I am down for a customer interview (or something along the line if you need)
The point is that it takes quite some time to set up all of this. If you (like me) have 150+ spare time projects and just want to prototype something quickly, you don't necessarily want to set this up for every project during the startup phase.
For spare time projects, I just want to be able to deploy directly. I don't want to both set up an image registry, a build server, a build script etc to get it running in the cloud.
As you scale, CI/CD is probably the best option though.
Hello,
I read your blog post and tried the "Try it now in-browser".
After waiting for a while, I can see the logs of mysql and apache. However closing the modal... nothing (the server is gone ?)
I do not see why I would use your service instead of directly using other Cloud providers with container hosting services. Especially, if I build a dockerized app, I have to build the image with my code. So I think I did not understand what your offering is or what are the target users
Thank you for your honest feedback and thank you so much for trying a demo - much appreciated!
The demo is just there to try the experience of provisioning a server. But the magic is really in the CLI.
See this blog post: https://medium.com/@mathiaslykkegaardlorenzen/hosting-a-docker-app-without-pushing-an-image-d4503de37b89
Basically, you can just write
dogger-compose upinstead ofdocker-compose up, and it will run in the cloud - without needing to push an image first.If that makes more sense?
But obviously I can do better at conveying this message in the website.
Ok, if i do not need to push an image first, I can use any standard images?
Everything is supported. Just write a
docker-compose.ymlfile locally like you would normally do when running your app locally.And then (no matter what that file looks like) you can use
dogger-compose upinstead ofdocker-compose upto see it in the cloud.Sorry, but I am not sure what you mean by "Standard images". Can you elaborate?
Unfortunately the naming has some quite bad connotations, at least in Britain (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogging_(sexual_slang)) and anyone from the uk will think of this first. This may be true of other places but not entirely sure. It’s probably not something you want your app to be connected with and would certainly make me think twice before clicking on the link.
As for the homepage of the website, it’s not entirely clear to me what the value proposition is. The blog post made me feel like it was a way to quickly throw up a WIP or for development however the website first point is being highly available which matters more for production cases. I’m not entirely sure from the website when I would use this vs something else.
I agree on the premise though that deploying docker contains is challenging and can be simplified. The best app I have used for this is https://www.cloud66.com/ which will build a docker image, put in private registry and can deploy to a Kubernetes cluster. The target is definitely for production workloads though and is still quite complex.
What I personally think would be great for your app is to position it as a way to get quick previews running somewhere. For example if using GitHub or GitLab it could listen to commits or bot commands and deploy an instance of that sha into the cloud, alternatively from the cli locally.
Oh wow, well this is embarrassing 🤣
Thank you for being honest about the name! I think this is critical enough for me to consider another name obviously.
This is all very good feedback so far. I hope others will chime in as well.
Didn't know about Cloud66, will check it out.
When you mention that you don't know if you'd use it from the website, is that because the website is badly designed? Or is it more that the website isn't really selling it to you?
The idea with previews is not a bad idea at all! I'll definitely take that into consideration.
@garymardell would you say the name "Doggo" would still be associated with those kinds of things? Is there any other name I could use potentially to avoid that association, while still keeping my mascot?
Also, do you think Doggo is something people will remember?
The word doggo is perfectly fine and no connections. I think the name would work. It’s definitely more “cute” of a name.
This comment was deleted 6 years ago