Public roadmap 🗺️

If you're new here, I'm André, a tech entrepreneur and founder of LaunchFast, a stack designed to help web developers significantly speed up their project development time. I post daily updates on my journey and progress.

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Alright, folks! Here's the menu for today 📖

• Asked customers for feedback
• Add upvotes to the roadmap
• Allow people to discuss roadmap features publicly on 𝕏
• Add mailing list for product updates
• Spoke to Jan Sulaiman, Global Director at 1NCE about database performance needs
• Lisboa Innovation For All
• Current metrics
• Next steps

Let's get to it.

Asked customers for feedback

Today I’ve sent an email to all the people who bought LaunchFast.

I’ve asked for their feedback and haven’t received any replies yet, but I want to make them feel supported and that I’m here to help if they get into trouble or find any problems with the product.

Added upvotes to the roadmap

I’ve improved the current roadmap so customers can vote on their preferred features.

Non-customers can still see the roadmap, but cannot upvote.

This is how the roadmap looks at the moment.

(This is a screenshot from my local dev environment, that’s why there are no upvotes.)

Allow people to discuss features on 𝕏

You’ll also notice that every feature has a “Discuss on 𝕏” button. This isn’t in production yet, but it will be tomorrow.

Since the repo is private, users can click that button and discuss this feature, in public, on 𝕏. Each feature has a corresponding post with a small description, like so 👇

The downside is that users need an account on 𝕏, but I’ll try it like this for now and see how it goes.

Added a mailing list that users can subscribe to, for product updates

I’ve also added a newsletter subscription form for users who want to stay up-to-date with LaunchFast as new features are released.

If you’re one of them, feel free to subscribe!

Spoke to Jan Sulaiman, Global Director at 1NCE about database performance needs

I’ve spoken to Jan Sulaiman, Global Director at 1NCE, an IoT company, about their database performance needs. According to Jan, hitting the 500k writes/sec performance limitation of SQLite would “require hundreds of millions of devices.”

According to Jan (slightly edited for brevity): "[As] a very rough estimation, right now, we have around 5 Mio active devices. Our customers send, on average, one message per 15 minutes.

So that means we average 5556 messages/second.

This would also align with our overall Downlink/Uplink capacity. For our European Breakout, for example, we are currently averaging around 40 Mb/s downlink and 75 Mb/s uplink traffic. And that Breakout is handling around 2,2 Mio active devices.

Since you ask about write operations, we only need to look at the 75 Mb/s. Here I assume an average of 2 KB per message that needs to be written. If I use the bandwith, I also get roughly 4578 write operations per second.

So, it's pretty close to the first calculation.

Long story short - while we probably have quite a high number of operations we need to handle and millions of active devices - we still would never get to 500k+ transactions per second 😁"

This ties into first-principles thinking and my explanation for choosing SQLite over any other database (MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB, etc), even if hosted on the same machine - SQLite is a zero-configuration, zero-latency database, and it’s just a file, making it dead simple to manage. Other databases require you to manage a server, connections, and authentication (offering another attack surface for hackers), and you won’t benefit from their higher performance anyway.

Hosted databases like Firebase and Supabase solve this problem by managing the database for you, but you pay an even higher cost: your performance is now subjected and limited to the network’s bandwidth and latency.

In the best-case scenario, you add a 10 to 30ms overhead to every single query you make (this should be enough not to use them), in the middle-case scenario, you add 50 to 200ms of overhead if there’s enough traffic, and in the worst-case scenario, the database is being DDoS’d and you can’t connect to it, making your app dysfunctional.

But I digress…

So what’s the opportunity here? Jan agreed to be my guest on one of the videos I will do as part of LaunchFast’s documentation 🎉

Lisboa Innovation For All

Lisboa innovation for all is a social innovation prize from the Lisbon City Council, organized by the Unicorn Factory Lisboa and supported by the European Innovation Council, which aims to discover and support innovative and impactful solutions that can be applied practically in the city of Lisbon.

They’re offering 360.000€ for projects on education, healthcare, and migration, and now that LaunchFast has been released, it would be a perfect opportunity to show, in public, what a developer is capable of with a powerful tool like LaunchFast.

Current Metrics

LaunchFast will launch on MicroLaunch on the 1st of September!

MicroLaunch is a relatively new platform created by Said, and I’ve found a few errors, but I look forward to seeing how LaunchFast does on microlaunch and how much traffic it will bring.

At the moment, LaunchFast is hovering at around 40 users per day.

Next Steps

This was the plan yesterday:

• Engage more with Product Hunters ahead of the next launch (after payment and AI integrations potentially)
• Create the documentation for LaunchFast, which includes video format that will also serve as content for social media
• Integrate payments and AI into LaunchFast
• Allow customers to suggest and prioritize items in the roadmap ✅
• Engage with current customers to assess their experience and potentially fix pain points ✅
• Add a newsletter component to the landing page to allow users to get notified of updates to the stack ✅

As for the next steps, I don’t know in which order I will do them, but this is the general plan:

• Engage more with Product Hunters ahead of the next launch (after payment and AI integrations potentially)
• Create the documentation for LaunchFast, which includes video that will also serve as content for social media
• Integrate payments and AI into LaunchFast
• Register LaunchFast in more directories
• Improve the current directory
• Possibly apply to “lisboa innovation for all”

That’s it for today, folks!

Have a great weekend and see you tomorrow!

P.S.: If you’re interested in LaunchFast, feel free to discuss and vote on the features you’d like to see come onto the product!