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228 Comments

Share your website and how you made it

I'm wondering how everyone made their websites.

  • SITE: share your website
  • TOOLS: what tools you used to build it
  • TIME: how long you spent to build it
  • CHALLENGE: what was your biggest challenge?

I'll go first in the comments below.

  1. 12

    Site: https://divjoy.com

    Tools: Next.js (React), Bulma, Vercel

    Time: 6 months until alpha (way too long lol)

    Challenge: I spent a lot of time building the built-in editor, which is complex. In retrospect I should have started with something simpler. Some of the more advanced editor features aren't used very much and it's harder to cut them now that some people are using them.

    1. 3

      Nice project Gabe, concise website. I built without doing research too. I'm now taking a customer discovery course, started last night. It's painful, I don't want to do customer interviews, but I know it will help me avoid spending time on the wrong features. Tomorrow our teacher is prepping us for the big assignment to interview twelve real customers.

      1. 2

        Good call! It was painful for me at first as well, and super hard to break out of the habit of talking about my product, rather than focusing on the interviewee and their needs, but now I quite enjoy it. So much easier than wasting time building the wrong thing.

      2. 2

        Sounds like customer discovery could save you a lot of time in the long run though. What course are you taking if you don't mind me asking?

        1. 2

          Don't mind at all. I'm taking a local course though RIHUB (a Rhode Island organization) that helps small business within the state. You might be able to find something similar in NY.

          https://rihub.org/mentoring/

          which is based on MIT's VMS program: https://vms.mit.edu/

    2. 2

      This looks great! I'd definitely use this in the future. I see that Material UI is still in the works. Any idea when that would be ready?

      1. 1

        Material UI will be live January 14th along with some other nice stuff. Going to be launching it on Product Hunt 😊

        1. 1

          Awesome! How long is the discount good for? Lol.

          1. 1

            Will probably have the discount going on through the Material UI launch :)

  2. 8

    Site: https://nocodechart.xyz/
    Tools: Reactjs, Nodejs
    Time: 2-3 months
    Challenge: Turning table to chart, generating JS code for chart

    1. 1

      This is neat! Just learning a little bit of code and can was wondering how I could include visuals.

    2. 1

      Great use of color. Green stands out when most sites don't choose it, smart choice.

  3. 7

    Website: SVGBackgrounds.com
    Tools: WordPress, MemberPress w/Stripe, Vanilla JS, SVG
    Time: I spent at least two weeks on the website, not including the month building out the product functionality.
    Challenge: It was my first time with eCommerce, so finding and integrating a solution was by far the hardest part.

    1. 2

      This is so fun! Looking to make my first website one of these days, so seeing stuff like this is real cool :)

    2. 2

      I love your svg editor and idea of the site :)

      You might also think about patterns on the front that sometimes people looking for.
      I am talking about snow, birthday party confetti, fireworks etc.

    3. 1

      I know it's been a while but are you still using Memberpress? What are your thoughts now on it now?

      1. 1

        Yes, still with MemberPress. It's a solid option. If I made another membership type site or something with subscriptions, I wouldn't hesitate to reach for it again. Stripe works seamless, PayPal integration is easy but clunky.

        I've tried WooCommerce, but it's incredibly complex and tough to customize for my specific purposes. It's built for physical products, so it's a bit awkward to customize it for strictly digital.

    4. 2

      This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

      1. 1

        I started with $5/mo and $50/ year. At first my collection was 30 free and 30 paid backgrounds. Churn was high until I started adding more to the collection over 2 years. I also started dripping content for monthly users which helped entice yearly subscribers. When I reached 200 backgrounds in Feb, I changed pricing to what it is now.

        The price change was scary and results aren't concrete. It definitely encourages yearly, which is favorable. As LTV (lifetime value) was around $25 at the time, and now its up to $35+ but I'm definitely getting less subscribers and monthly subscribers don't stick around as long.

        I'm starting a new experiment with one-time purchase products on my newer site Visiwig.com. Hasn't received enough exposure to learn anything yet though.

        1. 2

          This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

  4. 1

    SITE: https://resumes.guru
    TOOLS: Laravel, Livewire, and Alpinejs
    TIME: 2 months
    CHALLENGE:

    • The idea kept changing. First 2 weeks, I rebuilt the project 3 times with 3 different toolsets. Before I decided to use Laravel.
    • This is the first project that I built in Laravel. So it took me the next few weeks to learn all the tools above.
    • I spent a lot of time building the template for the live preview of the resume and the template for printing as a PDF.
  5. 6

    Site: https://versoly.com/
    Tools: https://versoly.com/
    Time: 2 years
    Challenge: Building a SaaS to build it

    On a more serious note haha

    Site: https://saaspages.xyz/
    Tools: nextjs
    Time: 2 weeks
    Challenge: Few issues getting hosting working

    1. 2

      Ha, that's pretty genius building your own web builder to build it's website. Did you put that fact anywhere on the website?

      1. 2

        I did, but I must have removed it while doing edits.

    2. 1

      Versoly looks really cool, might use it myself as landing pages are always a struggle for me. 👍🏾

      1. 1

        +1

        Was the same for me for a long time.

    3. 1

      This looks fantastic!

    4. 1

      Versoly in particular looks awesome. I am sure it was a ton of work. Did you build it all by yourself or did someone help you?

      1. 1

        Thanks, me and a co-founder. I do the frontend.

        I had a lot of code from another project for it.

        1. 2

          Quite impressive for a team of two :)

  6. 4

    Site: https://www.logology.co
    Tools: AWS Amplify, Gatsby, React, Rails, styled-components, CSS animation.
    Time: 18 months and counting
    Challenge: How to use rails as a backend, and then integrate with AWS Amplify for a blazing fast frontend.

    My big challenge is that front-end is infinitely scalable because it's serverless, but the backend is just rails on Heroku, so way more complex to scale. To fix it, I just export the data from the backend (the logo catalog) every time there's an update, and import as JSON files to the frontend. That way it's fully scalable. But it's a pain to manage. I wish there was a simple way to make a rails backend scale as easily as AWS functions.

    1. 2

      I love the design... c'est très beau 😍😍
      Same black and white concept I have for my personal site (still in figma 😅)

      1. 1

        ahah cool, can you share it? (if you want to)

    2. 2

      I've seen your site before, it's top notch. Cool to get a peak behind how you made and manage it. Thanks for sharing.

      1. 1

        Thanks, SVGBackgrounds looks good too :)

    3. 1

      This might be one of the best public facing sites I've ever seen. Great work on this!

      For your issue with backend scaling, it sounds like you need a pipeline in place. Everytime you push frontend code to master, kick off the CI pipeline to generate the logo catalog, and have it built with your frontend code (in the same artifact)

      1. 1

        Thank you so much, it feels very encouraging :).
        The pipeline idea would definitely help. With the next feature that I'm building (search logos by keywords), just using .json files will be impractical though, so I need something on top of it.
        I'm thinking of importing the json files to DynamoDb. It's not sexy but very fast and auto scaled, for a couple of months I've built small features with it and it works well.
        The CI pipeline idea could work like this: export json files form postgre > import to dynamodb. This gives me an auto-scaled database.
        Thanks for the idea!

    4. 1

      You should be able to Dockerize your Rails app and deploy that to AWS Lambda. Let me know if you need help.

      1. 1

        This sounds awesome, I didn't know about it. I'm not sure how that would help though? What I'm looking for is really a way to scale both rails and the postgre database behind it, and it doesn't seem like that would be covered here.

      2. 1

        You can't deploy images or run containers via Lambda.

          1. 1

            WHAT! that's actually crazy, didn't know about that. Thanks!

    5. 1

      This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

  7. 4

    SITE: https://71Lines.com
    TOOLS: bubble.io
    TIME: 12 hours
    CHALLENGE: design a custom image for every feature

    1. 2

      Hope you never have to refactor and the lines-of-code count changes haha. Looks super cool though I have some extension ideas so I have it bookmarked.

      1. 1

        ahaha that was fun buddy :) great!

    2. 1

      Definitely helps to have those images, worth the effort. What do you use for the "talk to me live" feature?

  8. 3

    Site: https://shareddo.com
    Tools: MERN Stack, Redux, Material UI
    Time: 5 Months
    Challenge: I knew only basic HTML, CSS and JS before building this site, so it was a challenge to learn so many new tools (backend framework, database, frontend framework etc) in such a short period of time.
    I'd also started building it initially using Firebase but had to switch to Mongo and Node later on because of firebase's pricing.

    1. 4

      Interesting, the simplicity is well thought out. I really like the option to not log in to get a glimpse of the product.

  9. 3

    SITE: https://blesstest.com
    TOOLS: Laravel, Vue.js, GraphQL, Tailwind, MySQL
    TIME: I start 2 years ago probably after 5 months it was alpha version. I am still sometimes adding new things.
    CHALLENGE: Drag and drop questions editor, SEO on Vue SPA

    1. 1

      Drag and drop is a hard feature to integrate, I usually avoid it, even if it is a good choice :(

  10. 3

    SITE: https://stackprint.io
    TOOLS: Webflow
    TIME: Probably 20ish hours
    CHALLENGE: Fine-tuning looks as I couldn't find a template I was comfortable using as-is, get nice code blocks in blog posts

    Webflow is a nice tool overall, the biggest downsides are the price and getting sth like code blocks to look nice. I will probably go for something like gohugo.io for the next project as there are nicer templates imho, the blog will be easier to maintain and and it's way cheaper to host.

    1. 2

      Powerful setup, came out well. I've tried Webflow before, I too don't like the pricing model and the closed hosting. Works for the company, not for super casual web designers. Let me know what you think of gohugo.io, first time I'm seeing but looks solid.

    2. 1

      How did you get those code blocks to show up nicely on your blog?

      It's quite annoying that Webflow doesn't support markdown.

      1. 1

        That requires a bit of custom code, I followed the guide here: https://www.hackernoon.com/adding-code-blocks-in-webflow-cms-with-language-highlighting-hr3mr31dq

        I agree, markdown support would be a total game-changer for blogging.

        1. 1

          I followed the same tutorial :D

          The whole blogging experience on Webflow needs a bit more work. Unfortunately, it seems like they're much more focused on their e-commerce features, which I totally understand.

          1. 1

            I wish they were focused on e-commerce... Without customer login, there's no e-commerce.

            Totally agree about the blogging experience, and the rich text element needs a lot of improvements. On the design aspect though, Webflow rocks!

  11. 3

    Site : https://theslice.co/
    Tools : Carrd. Super basic. But it’s does the job.
    Time : A few hours.
    Challenge : My website is essentially only one page, so I had to create the illusion of multiple pages.

    1. 1

      Looks great and I like the idea. Just subscribed!

    2. 1

      Carrd was a great choice for you. For what it is accomplishing, and the fact that it took only a few hours, its really powerful. I spend way too much time on my own sites.

  12. 3

    Hey matt!

    So, here we go. I know you know this...but I post for the rest.

    SITE:

    A growing collection of more than 120 layout blocks and components built with Tailwind CSS V2 ready to copy paste on your Tailwind project.

    TOOLS:

    • Tailwind CSS
    • AlpineJS
    • Rainbow, for syntax highlighting, but did a custom color.
    • Clipboard.js
    • Codepen Post to prefill editor api.

    TIME:

    • 4 days without the codepen api.

    CHALLENGE:

    • In this very moment, I am trying to actually use the API but I am struggling to use my own custom button, because, well...I am useless hehe

    1. 1

      "4 days" is impressive. Definitely goes to show it doesn't make sense to build a product for months or years before launching/getting feedback... especially when you can knock out a pro design in days like you.

      1. 1

        Well, the blocks took me longer though but the layout and so on...

        Definitely goes to show it doesn't make sense to build a product for months or years before launching/getting feedback

        Definitely, a waste of time, push and make it better, of course, push something usable.

        you can knock out a pro design...
        Wow, those words coming from you man...such a legend, made my day. thank you.

  13. 2

    Site: Tailwind + HTML 5
    Tools: React Native
    Time: 8 months
    Challenge: lot of user research and feature involvements

    Thanks, @Visiwig. We are building a new platform where community managers could easily manage their groups.

    So here is the design of our @arouundapp when you want to create or copy new events. Exciting!!!

    SneekPeek

  14. 2

    Website : https://remidiy.com
    Tools : Next.js, vercel, remark
    Time : 1 day

    Challenge: The challenge was not in building but in understanding the logic behind building my own blog versus medium or ghost or webflow.

    Justification : I can add my own animations and I love building on web and it should reflect on my blog which will be my digital hub and every line of code and text I write is going to compound overtime

    1. 1

      This is a good setup. A lot of people overthink their website, thinking they need a ton of content and visual elements, but this cuts to purpose. Solid.

  15. 2

    https://www.teststacks.com/

    Tools: Webflow + Mailchimp

    Time: A good few months calendar time. It's not a complex build, but the content took a long time.

    Challenge: Being able to say "this is good enough". I kept tweaking the copy and content for a long time. And I'm still not happy with it. I finally decided it was better just to launch and refine / add as I went along...

    1. 1

      I think this is better than "good enough", and that you're in a good place to launch and refine from here. I don't see any bad design choices here, but the one thing I'd suggest is giving your CTA buttons a hover state. I like to make sure that I give users every clue possible that something is a button. In your case, it's as simple as making the purple buttons slightly darker. That's all I'd recommend. Good stuff.

  16. 2

    Site: centipenny.com
    Tools: react, node, mysql
    Time: 20 months
    Challenge: Learning react to do it. Figuring out how to make money letting people charge as little as $0.0001 for stuff and all of the fun accounting that goes along with it.

    1. 1

      Hey Bart. The concept is smart, but I think the messaging needs to be more refined and concise. If I wasn't intrigued I would have left quick and had no idea what you're product was.

      For instance you can shave off a lot of words without losing meaning:

      From:
      Micropayments with an "easy button". CentiPenny is a micropayment service designed for real world business use cases. Whether you are a digital publisher, a content creator, or a gaming company, CentiPenny has a solution for you.

      To:
      Easy micropayments for digital content.

      That's just the first section, but I think everything is pretty wordy. Cutting the fluff will go a long way. I think you're concept has potential, good luck.

      1. 1

        Thanks for the advice!

  17. 2

    Site: https://chatkitty.com

    Tools: Stackbit, Angular 10, Stripe

    Time: 6 months

    Challenge: Balancing the time needed to create a marketing site and decent UI with time to build out the backend and chat technology powering our Chat API.

    1. 2

      I like clean websites, and the animations are a nice touch. Solid work Aaron.

  18. 2
    • SITE: https://hopscotch.club
    • TOOLS: Next.js, styled-components, framer-motion (animations), figma (design)
    • TIME: about 4 days
    • CHALLENGE: biggest challenge was in getting the animations to trigger at the right point. I used an intersection observer hook, but still it was just quite a challenge to get it working well on all elements on all screen sizes.
    1. 1

      Ooh, really like this style. Clean and well put together. Came out great.

  19. 2

    Site: www.aladinbs.com
    Tools: Didn't want to over think it, just went medieval with it.
    Time; I'd say around a 40 hours.
    Challenge: Coming up with a design I liked.

    1. 1

      I like this quite a bit. Nice style my friend.

  20. 2

    SITE: https://brren.com/
    TOOLS: Next.js, PostgreSQL, digitalocean
    TIME: 3 months (work in the evenings and on weekends)
    CHALLENGE: find new users...

    1. 1

      Cool concept. For new users I'd take inspiration from Stripe (the big eCommerce company). They started by manually helping users "sign up" and integrate their product. Manual work doesn't scale, but it helps you learn and build the minimum base you need to get a snowball effect. Good luck.

  21. 2

    Site: Undertow Podcasts

    Tools: Github Pages, Bootstrap, Transistor

    Time: Pretty fast. Built this when I was first learning what the heck Git and gitHub and web development really were last year.

    Challenge: staying on target to completion. As I continue to be a learner, it's easy to get distracted and want to constantly start over or start anew.

    Satisfaction: 7/10. It did what I needed it to: display my podcasts in one screen. However, it's pretty basic and I'm looking forward to transitioning to a Jamstack site built on Hugo next.

    1. 1

      A lot of people get stuck and stop, so its great that you got to a point where you didn't leave the project in limbo. All of us are learners :) Good luck on your transition!

  22. 2

    Site: https://www.trophi.com/

    Tools: MERN / Redux

    Time: 2 Months

    Challenge: Getting feedback on the website. Finding new users

    1. 2

      I like what you're doing here. I've been thinking about a similar idea for a while now but wasn't sure how to best implement it. The Trophi branding goes well with your comment award system, smart thinking. The site unfortunately looks like it was built in the 90's though so you might want to focus on getting that up to modern standards moving forward.

      1. 1

        Hey Matt,

        Thanks for the advice. I'll definitely sink some more time into the aesthetics.

    2. 2

      I'm not quite sure what the website is for, there is nothing explaining what I'm looking at.

      1. 1

        True, I should have given a better explanation. Basically, it is a forum but instead of the typical single comment thread that can sometimes lead to a conversation being dominated by one train of thought, you have a for/against format.

        This way opposing views will be pinned next to each other and you can get a better idea of what the other side thinks

        Do you think a page explaining the site would be useful?

  23. 2

    Site: https://dota-showcase.com/
    Tools: Laravel (php), MYSQL, MongoDB, Redis, jQuery
    Time: 1.5 years (having full time job)
    Challenge: Fetch steam market prices

    1. 1

      Beautiful site, very unique colors / graphics.

  24. 2

    Site: https://theankurtyagi.com/

    Tools: WordPress

    Time: 1 month (way too long I know)

    Challenge: I spent a lot of time in design, keeping in mind my experience & suitable as a mentor. I recently started blogging on my website as well. let me know your feedback please. It would be really helpful.

    Stay awesome,
    Cheers!

    ​- Ankur Tyagi

    1. 1

      It's solid, I like the unique colors and consideration to make sure there is good contrast for text using your colors. Only thing I'd change is the newsletter paragraph. I would convert it into bullets for readability, or more precisely skimming:

      Every Friday, I send out my “2-1-1” newsletter with:

      • 2 tips on coding career
      • 1 life relationship tip
      • 1 fitness tip
  25. 2

    SITE: https://thatswhy.app

    TOOLS: Laravel Jetstream, TailwindCSS, Laravel Cashier (Paddle), DigitalOcean, Cloudflare

    TIME: 4 months

    CHALLENGE: Scalability! Yes, Laravel Vapor exists but to save time we decided to use the good ol' horizontal scaling approach. If needed we could switch at any time to Laravel Vapor though.

    Having a lot of fun building and scaling it!

    1. 2

      Good stuff. I really like the subtle hero background on your Astronatic site.

      1. 2

        Thanks man, cool thread you got here haha.

  26. 2

    Site: http://supercharge.dev/
    Tools: Next.js (React), Bulma, Vercel, Firebase
    Time: 2 months
    Challenge: Biggest challenge was to automate a process to bundle the package after changes due to the project structure, and also customer discovery and marketing.

    1. 1

      I'm taking a course on customer discovery. Did you learn more than you thought you would? BTW, nice straight-forward layout.

      1. 1

        That's great! Not yet, it's a problem I am still struggling with. Maybe you can share with the community on your learnings on customer discovery!

        And, thanks for the comments :)

        1. 2

          Yeah, I'm trying #buildinpublic on twitter and it will be a topic I talk about. Probably will share what I learn with IH if it becomes a blog article, thread, or something.

  27. 2

    SITE: https://www.figmabox.com
    TOOLS: Gatsby, TailwindCSS and Netlify
    TIME: One week for development and a few other days for non-development stuff
    CHALLENGE: This is my first live production website with Gatsby, so setting things like meta tags, sitemap, robots.txt, ...etc was quite challenging

    1. 1

      Looks interesting, I haven't tried Figma but it's been in the back of my mind. Does it make sense for a solo designer?

      1. 1

        What makes Figma a better design tool is not only the collaboration feature. It's the mature features it has like auto-layout, variants, and it's developer-friendly, unlike Adobe XD. And of course the huge collection of plugins

        1. 1

          Alright, you convinced me to check out what all the fuss is. Afterall, there is likely overlap between my audience and Figma users.

  28. 2

    Website: The Twitter Growth Dashboard
    Tools: TypeScript, ReactJS, Bulma, MongoDB (Realm)
    Time: 3 months
    Challenge: A clean UI that triggered action.

    1. 1

      Looks cool, but it's not obvious what I'm looking at. Seems like this page wouldn't be the landing page though :) We'll talk more I'm sure.

      1. 1

        I'm glad you like the webapp Visiwig. I do have a "landing page" but it's more of a back door. My guess is that most people that will visit at this moment will come from tweets and Social Media posts with enough information to click the GumRoad button.

        That GumRoad button is what I know needs to optimize! And I'm ecstatic that we will talk soon :) Thank you for the DM!

  29. 2

    SITE: https://tandim.ma
    Tools : Node.js php
    TIME: 4 Mounth
    CHALLENGE: Get traffic

    1. 1

      I can't understand the site, but the graphics look good. I like that organic blog near the bottom.

  30. 2

    Hey! :-)

    • https://pagemtr.com/
    • BlueFish Editor :-)
    • 5 months + the time spent yet not counted, let say - jumping in for a moment, and ending up with 3h spent on something :-)
    • Making it super stable, and reasonable (done! :))
    1. 2

      Looks good. I'd throw out the suggestion to have a demo report, to see what you're getting, but then again, I might not be your audience.

      1. 2

        As usual I started with small steps, and ending up with the whole new landing page :-) Thanks for the inspiration. You were the trigger to get it done.

        1. 2

          The purple background is new, correct? I like the boldness, well done.

          1. 2

            Yup, and a few other things. Thanks!

      2. 2

        Thanks! You are absolutely right. I will put some demo on the page. There are people who are happy with creating an account to see the results, and there are people who want to see it without any action.

        Good point!

  31. 2

    Howdy,

    Site: https://www.devtoagency.com

    Tools: Ghost Pro

    Time: 2 hours

    Challenge:
    Ok I feel i'm cheating as this is just a theme on top of Ghost, BUT I should say my biggest challenge was the mental gymnastics programmers do when trying to choose a stack. I probably spent 4 weeks deliberating on what platform to use, and really had analysis paralysis around self-hosted or hosted.
    In the end I woke up one day and realised I was never going to do this if I didn't fucking get out there and do it, so I signed up for Ghost Pro, used a free theme, built a logo in Canva - and we are off to the races!

    1. 1

      It's smart to use tools to plow through tasks. Devs have the hard job of having unlimited options to get you from point a to point b. That can be true for one line of code or choosing a stack. I see it a lot, and experience it myself: analysis paralysis.

  32. 2
    1. 2

      Interesting "backend". That's always fascinating repurpose various tools.

      1. 2

        I wanted to keep it as simple as possible and see how far I can take it.
        So far I am quite happy with it.

  33. 2

    Site: https://www.powertools.dev/
    Tools: Hugo, PowerTools :)
    Time: Launched it initially within a few weeks but have been iterating for 3 months now
    Challenge: Getting the messaging right (which we are still working on) was much harder than building the website. Any feedback from the IH community is appreciated :-)

    1. 2

      Cool. I like those rotating gears that subtly are in the background.

      1. 1

        Thanks - that was fun to do!

  34. 2

    SITE: www.lunchsofts.com
    TOOLS: Wix
    TIME: 4 hours
    CHALLENGE: None

    Just a quick and slick website -- No tech needed for now!
    Probably took me two extra hours to come up with the logo and make the design!

    1. 1

      Have you tried using Editor X (also from Wix)? Regular sites are not mobile responsive and you'll have to edit both versions almost each time.

    2. 1

      Nice, pretty straightforward, but nice, bold colors.

      1. 1

        UPDATE - Switched to softr.io to make a quick web-app for a quick launch:
        lunchsofts.softr.io

        Currently writing the content, but I really like the look & feel of it!

  35. 2

    SITE: https://tappy.so/?ref=ih
    TOOLS: Jitsi, WebRTC, Rest, Electron, React
    TIME: About a year
    CHALLENGE: Acquiring new users in somewhat saturated market.
    We are looking for teams who want to give it a spin to born remote communication tool. "Talk instantly with your team”
    We often hear from teams, "We are just okay using Zoom or MS teams for our team communication."
    Since the pandemic, we went through forced adoption where you have to fit your workflow into a couple reliable video conferencing tools that are not even designed for team communication and say "its okay".
    We want teams/companies who are open to adopting a new tool that is initially designed for internal communication. What our team notice from the current remote work tool is that "Slack is a chat app" that is quite time-consuming to write every single word to communicate, and "Zoom is for scheduled meetings" which is quite formal and dull. We want you to be able to reach out to your team spontaneously and synchronously, which ultimately makes your workflow a breeze.
    Our team believes that people will look for tools that enable one simple job very well. The remote market will be hypersegmented. Our team will keep on trying to provide the best value for teams to be more productive with our one simple solution.

    1. 1

      Smart concept, nice site. I think you're onto something. I'm following your journey.

  36. 2

    Site: https://convier.me
    Tools: TALL (Tailwind CSS + Alpines JS + Laravel + Livewire)
    Time: 1 month
    Challenge: Documentation, documentation and documentation...

    1. 1

      Hope you are up for a suggestion, even though your design is flushed out and strong, I'd recommend changing the icon background color. They match your CTA buttons, and therefore look like important buttons. They look good, but a simple reverse, making the BG white and the icon stroke deep blue might do the trick. Again, solid design, its just that one thing sticks out to me.

  37. 2

    Piano-v.com
    React - express - mysql [typeorm]
    Time: not long, but it spanned a long period cuz I didn’t have the time. All in all, probably 2 months for the build and testing + 1 month of research to build it on my own.
    Challenges: dealing with midi and its eccentricities. Also, UI, I suck at UI.

    1. 1

      It's a cool concept, I played music since 7th grade (drums). Reading piano is tough, so I'm curious if this works for any of you users well?

      1. 1

        it's still in its infancy so i don't know whether there's gonna be a market need or not. It certainly works for me though, i'm horrible at reading double clef music.

        1. 1

          Yea, it is tough. A lot of founders have built their first product for themselves, including me. Good luck!

  38. 2

    Site: http://projekt19.com/
    Tools: Webflow
    Time: 10-12 hours
    Challenge: Getting started

    1. 1

      You have quite the ambition. Why 19 projects? I set a goal of 6 this year, based on ideas I already sketched (that's why 6) and I think 2 months per project is aggressive as is.

      1. 1

        I've held the domain/brand for almost 10 years - it seemed like a good brand. It's ambitious for sure.. - I am not saying each product will be a full blown idea - but I've had hundreds of ideas - that I just toss out. This way I can build them or just validate them and at some point focus on one more then another. Either way it's a good way to learn the ins and outs of online properties;)

  39. 2

    Site: https://explodingniches.com
    Tools: WordPress, MySQL, nginx, AWS
    Time: Dev time (20 hours).
    Challenge: Choosing WordPress for a content heavy site was a no-brainer. The biggest challenge was to figure out how to present the contents to the audience.

    1. 1

      Didn't notice at first, but I see some remnants from the twenty twenty theme :) You did a good job with a concise opening to visitors. I knew instantly what I was looking at. After looking at lots of websites today, I can confidently say it helps having instant context when you first start looking around a new site.

  40. 2

    SITE: https://www.danielwirtz.com
    TOOLS: NextJS, Airtable, ChakraUI
    TIME: Two weeks
    CHALLENGE: I wanted to build myself a book and tools page that shows my favorite books and tools up to date. Getting this running with Airtable took some time.

    1. 1

      Interesting setup. I like the simplicity of your website. P.S. I used to play rocket league, miss it :(

      1. 1

        Thanks! I also only play Rocket League casually once or twice per week. But it's good for some leisure time. :-)

  41. 2

    Site: https://www.nairagazer.com
    Tools: Python, Pandas, Gensim
    Time: 1 month
    Challenge: Having to read research papers to build an efficient news clustering model/algorithm. Many articles I read wasn't straight forward and I had to read a lot before I could make my conclusion.

    1. 1

      Wow, that looks like a hard concept to pull together all those different sources. Keep it up!

  42. 2

    Site: https://nodewood.com
    Tools: Vuejs, Nodejs, PostgreSQL, also Nodewood itself
    Time: Between one month and a year, depending
    Challenge: I built Nodewood to be a SaaS web app boilerplate, so in order to use Nodewood to build the Nodewood site, it was kind of a "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe" sort of situation. The actual visible marketing site is a VuePress site, which is easy to use and build with, but the documentation took months of work in parallel with building the library itself. Some actual near-literal pulling myself up by my own bootstraps here. =)

    1. 1

      Looking sharp, I like the design. Did you make the "waves" svg section dividers?

      1. 1

        Thanks! I didn't actually make the design for the sight, it's forked from https://github.com/tailwindtoolbox/Landing-Page

        1. 1

          Ah, well you picked a nice design and saved good time I'd imagine.

  43. 2

    SITE: https://www.chatarr.com
    TOOLS: Lamp Stack - Linux.. Apache... Mysql.. Php ... also javascript.
    TIME: 2-3 Months... still constantly improving it.
    CHALLENGE... Doing everything on my own... could easily delegate 20 coding tasks right now... and that's not even mentioning setting up the business side of the Startup.

    1. 1

      Looks like a lot. There are no words on the site explaining what your site/service is about. Is that on purpose?

      1. 1

        ...p.s. I get the idea its about the chatter of the internet, but not quite sure.

  44. 2

    Site: https://castcloud.fm
    Tools: NodeJS/Typescript, React, PostgreSQL, Stripe, AWS, Kubernetes, CloudFlare
    Time: 2.5 months so far
    Challenge: This is has been two-fold so far, one product related and one technical:

    1. Paring down features to really reach an MVP status (almost there). Im building a podcast hosting platform, so reaching some kind of minimum level of core features/parity with other platforms is pretty important in order to attract users.
    2. Figuring out how to effectively distribute content (CDN) without breaking the bank. Turns out hosting data is pretty inexpensive, but bandwidth fees can catch up to you pretty quick if you're not careful
    1. 2

      Solid website, I think its a good fit for your product. Best of luck, keep us posted how your MVP does.

  45. 2

    Site: https://www.listenaddict.com/
    Tools: Ruby, Rails API, PostgreSQL, Svelte, TailwindCSS, Heroku
    Time: 6 months
    Challenge: developing the algorithm to automatically pull people names out of a block of text

    1. 1

      Nice site, I've looked at tons of websites today and not many start in dark mode. I'm digging it.

      1. 2

        Thanks! 12 different color themes too, because why not.

  46. 2

    Site: https://qlo.morflax.com
    Tools: Vuejs, Bulma, Buefy, Scrollmagic, Lottie, GSAP, Blender, Adobe After Effects
    Time: 2 weeks
    Challenge: Making scrollable animations

    1. 1

      Big tool set. I use GSAP too. How hard were the scrollable animations? Been noticing those occasionally. I mean, cool effect and well executed.

      1. 1

        It was hard to start and integrate together all the stuff, because ScrollMagic and Lottie was a new tool for me. I was doing a lot of experiments with this site and this took a lot of time. But was a fun experiment.

  47. 2

    Site: https://www.chromabill.com/
    Tools: Wix.com
    Time: 2-3 months
    Challenge: Spent a lot of time revising the designs over and over again to find product-market fit.

    1. 2

      Pretty site, would not have expected WIX.

      1. 2

        Thanks, appreciate it. I'll be transitioning it over to Webflow this year.

  48. 2

    Site: https://www.dynablogger.com/
    Tools: It's a blogging platform I built in Ruby on Rails, hosted in Kubernetes.
    Time: It took a few months, although I spent some time with the infrastructure too so I am not sure how long the project itself took.
    Challenge: The biggest challenge for me came AFTER building it.... I am totally new to marketing, selling and things like that so I have no idea of what I am doing :)

    1. 1

      Yes, marketing is tough. I'd try to find blogging groups on social or FB... not be spammy, but connect with some bloggers.

      1. 1

        The most difficult thing is that the best communities on Reddit, FB etc that would be perfect for me, don't allow self promotion :(

        1. 1

          Make some friends who could post for you ;)

          1. 1

            If I knew anyone...

  49. 2

    SITE: https://remotejamstack.com
    TOOLS: Next.js (React.js), Vercel, Firebase, GraphCMS, Stripe
    TIME: 4 months
    CHALLENGE: Limited time to work on it daily as a solopreneur

    1. 2

      Wow, quite the toolset. Yea, time is a killer. The best thing you can do in that position is simplify, simplify, then simplify. Good luck with the launch, site looks nice.

      1. 1

        Appreciate the kind words! Definitely starting out simple as possible without sacrificing quality or too many features!

    2. 1

      Really cool that you include a roadmap on your website. I wish more products had that level of transparency.

      1. 1

        Thanks! I definitely believe in being transparent about my progress and the goals of the site and will continue to post there.

  50. 2

    SITE: https://rysolv.com/
    TOOLS: Node, React, Graphql, Postgres
    TIME: 10 months (and counting...)
    CHALLENGE: Integrating with Github, adding payment platforms

    1. 1

      Looks cool, I have one quick suggestion... It took me 30 seconds to figure what the site was for. I would simply flip the screenshot(left)/description(right) ("a crowdsource plat..."). If you look at heatmaps, users generally look on the left first, and I feel like that's why I missed that description.

      The concept is cool and you explain it well.

  51. 2

    Site: think-boundless.com and strategyu.co
    Tools: Wordpress + Variant Page builder
    Time: A couple hours + years (had it up for 4 years)
    Challenge: Speed seems a bit slow so ive been thinking about switching but just havent gotten around to it. Stuck between faster wordpress hosting and full switch to webflow or something else

    1. 1

      I use WP a lot. Page builders are slow on WP, but help you quickly build websites. Depends on where you are in your journey. If spending double/triple your hosting costs hurts, don't upgrade. It will only improve your speed so much. But it should be a quick decision if you are trying to up your game and fully committed to your direction. Ultimately, I'd try to get away from the page builder if you're concerned about speed.

      1. 1

        helpful insights. i like the page builders. it doesnt hurt too much since im profitable right now so im going to try an upgraded host in the next couple of weeks and if im not happy im thinking i may just hire someone to build something in webflow.

  52. 2

    https://ironpal.co

    I used Gatsby, React and Novela theme.

    Built in 6 hours incluiding google analytics, logo and mailchimp setup.

    My biggest challenge was getting the DNS to work fine with github pages.

    1. 1

      If you could, I would make a bigger call to action for the app.

      "Web developer. Creator of Iron Pal workout log. Get it here" is not very enticing. Instead use some of you landing page writeup, that is much more powerful. "All your routines at your fingertips."

      1. 2

        love it. I'll change it. Thank you!

  53. 2

    SITE: https://bitta.work
    TOOLS: Angular + Firebase
    TIME: 1 month
    CHALLENGE: Attracting new users (it's completely free, so can't justify ad spend)

    1. 2

      I like it. I personally might not use it, but see it being useful to some users.

      Some ideas for getting attention: first you gotta figure out who exactly would use this tool. But let's pretend it's indie hackers. In that case I would manually approach indie hackers to provide rewards for the last section for completing the task. In that ask, they will check out your website. As hackers love sharing their projects, they might be interested in figuring out a reward they can provide to get a little exposure on your website. If you get a few really good rewards, you may attract a bigger audience too.

      Also, create some companion apps, tools, and written content that's sharable. Good luck!

      1. 2

        Thanks so much for the feedback! I'm really digging the reward idea (hadn't come up with that angle) and will see what shareable content I can develop over the next little while.

  54. 2

    https://www.potion.page/

    Built with TypeScript, React, NestJS, and Postgres.
    Used a fantastic monorepo boilerplate that ended up saving a ton of development time: https://github.com/chocolat-chaud-io/stator

    Took about 2 months.

    The biggest challenge was probably working with the Notion and Netlify APIs

    1. 1

      Sharp website. I don't know why but I really like those two circle blobs, even though they're just background design.

  55. 2

    SITE: https://clientlist.co
    Tools: Reactjs, Flask
    Time: 15-20hrs
    Challenge: Integrating React with Flask.

    1. 1

      Nice illustrations, where did you get those? Always love when I see fresh graphics.

  56. 2

    https://analyticstally.com/
    Tools - Flask, Vanilla JS, Tailwind CSS, MySQL
    Time - 3 months
    Challenge - Integrating google analytics API

    https://affiliatelist.netlify.app/
    Tools - Tailwind CSS, Airtable, Gumroad, Netlify
    Time - 1 week
    Challenge - Manually researching affiliate programs

    1. 1

      I see similarities in aesthetic between the two sites, but analytics tally has a bit more visual touch.

      1. 1

        I copy a lot of stuffs from here to there :D

  57. 2

    Site: https://midnight.pub
    Tools: Go and postgres
    Time: All my free time!
    Challenge: Remove all JS, make it work with basic HTML4 and CSS2, no analytics, as little footprint as possible

    1. 1

      Lol, I think you're the first to provide brutal honesty and pin-point accuracy for time spent: "All my free time".

  58. 2

    SITE: https://papereditor.app
    TOOLS: Vercel, TailwindCSS
    TIME: 2-3 weeks
    CHALLENGE: Coming up with something unique, fun and a bit naughty 😄. Technical challenge was to support: desktop + mobile + light mode + dark mode + 1x PNGs + 2x PNGs + 1x WebP + 2x WebP.

    1. 2

      This site is bold, I like the concept but might suggest a twist.

      I might make the opening animation snappier. Because of the pace, I was certain there was more, so I waited for 6 seconds staring at the cursor. Not all users may be as patient as me. Even though I use websites all the time and know to scroll, it wasn't my first reaction and for a moment I thought that was it.

      The twist I suggest is to pick a more descriptive review that explains what your app is. "In the crowded field of minimalist writing apps, this one stands out." The one you chose is probably the most flattering review you can get, but when that's all on the page, it's hard to understand what your app does. Users without curiosity may not go on to find out.

      Overall, creative approach to marketing your tool.

      1. 2

        That's some great feedback! 👍

        Thank you for taking the time to write this.

        1. 1

          No prob, you're welcome.

  59. 2

    SITE: www.testthetest.com
    TOOLS: React (Nextjs), Django
    TIME: ~about a year, on and off
    CHALLENGE: decided to outsource all the work rather than doing it myself, whoah!

    1. 2

      Looks good. One thing you may consider addressing... the logo is a scaled down PNG, and the text for the middle word is unreadable on my screen.

      1. 2

        Oh cool, thanks for these! There's a huge amount of work to be done still, I'm just subscribed to the bulding-in-public idea :) Quite embarrassed about this first version, so that box is checked...

  60. 2

    Site: https://pingr.io
    Tools: Bootstrap/VueJS
    Time: few weeks
    Challenge: perfectionism. When I finish it, I got a feeling that everything should be done in another way and I wanted to rebuild it immediately.

    1. 1

      Looks really nice! How has it been so far?

    2. 1

      Great use of icons, where did you get them? I really love the use of a light gray/blue with white graphic elements (screens) over it.

  61. 2

    Website: https://norde.io
    Tools: 11ty, Gumroad for payments
    Time: I think less than 8 hours for the initial landing page design and build. Since then I've added a couple of things, so probably around 10-12 hours. I didn't want to spend much time on it.
    Challenge: Didn't really have any challenge with the website itself. I've been doing front-end dev for a decade so no surprises. The app you can download is a whole different story though.

    1. 2

      The site is gorgeous. I can tell you've been doing it for years.

      1. 1

        Thanks, I just checked out your project and realized we are doing similar things! Your patterns are awesome! I've been itching to make a pattern generator that I might add to my other project, https://baseline.is, but it probably won't happen for a long while.

        1. 1

          Thanks and yes, we are definitely in the similar space, I'm trying to be more active on Twitter so I hope to keep up with you if you post progress there. My latest drive is Visiwig.com which is building up a collection of click and paste graphics. Still early to tell direction, but I think I might be able to help brands develop visuals quickly. Would love to chat and pick your brain sometime, maybe next week?

          1. 1

            Hi Matt! I'm creating a tool precisely for hackers interested to grow their Twitter Audience.

            Is there any chance I could talk to you and learn what would you be looking for?

            1. 2

              Sure sent you a DM at twitter

          2. 1

            Yeah sure, ping me at the beginning of next week since it's a bit unclear at the moment, I'm just coming back from christmas vacation and things are a bit hectic.

    2. 2

      This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

      1. 1

        SVG is the best way to handle vector graphics on the web. That's why.

        I'm more of a designer than a programmer and have been building on the web since 2003. I built with flash in 2007 / 2008, it was really the only way to create complex vector graphics (graphics that scale). But flash's death started over a decade ago. In 2015 potential grew with SVG as it become consistent across modern browsers... it was more common to see websites logos using the SVG format. After launching my SVG tool (2018), I saw even more potential with SVG and pretty confident in building my future tools centered around SVG

        I wrote an article on why SVGs rock back in 2018:
        https://bumpsetcreative.com/10-reasons-the-image-format-svg-is-rocking-the-internet/

      2. 1

        Haha I have no idea. Maybe more people are just discovering how flexible and awesome SVGs are. Probably also fueled by the fact that browser support has gotten a lot better in recent years.

        The app is built with Electron. I used Quasar which makes it super easy to do using Vue.js.

        1. 1

          This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

          1. 1

            Thanks!

            Yeah Quasar saves me time on having to figure out how to set up the build process for various things, like electron. It also comes with a lot of useful components.

  62. 2

    SITE: Fiddy
    TOOLS: React, Firebase, Sheety.co in the beginning
    TIME: Initially it took a few hours, but I've been working on it on and off since July 2020. You can check out the progress here.
    CHALLENGE: The biggest challenge was to implement the likes & comments feature.

    1. 1

      Just wanted to say that UX is great! :-)

    2. 1

      Cool, I think I listed one of my sites before the latest iteration. It's looking really nice, well done. The like feature seems like a tricky one to implement. I gave you a follow on Twitter and sent a DM because there are two duplicate listings on your site (sent screenshot).

      1. 1

        Yes, I think I remember! and thank you, I'll check it out.

  63. 2

    Website: vlad.qa
    Tools: HTML, CSS, VS Code, Vercel, a little bit inspiration from evanyou.me
    Time: 2 hours
    Challenge: I don't usually make sites (yet), I test them :) So even simple "hi it's me" site is a big achievement for me.

    1. 2

      Pretty good even if you don't make them "usually". Some people overthink websites, me included, so I think your simplicity is refreshing and powerful. Nice work.

      1. 1

        Thank you for your reply.

        I think the cognitive load is pretty high these days, so even my site looks too "wordy" for me. So I'm trying to simplify everything I can.

        What do you overthink your websites? How do you deal with this?

    2. 2

      This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

  64. 1

    Site: Noteable
    Tools: Typedream
    Time: 5-6 hours
    Challenge: Starting. This was my first website that I had to create, and while I'm proud of how it turned out, it was overwhelming to actually start, especially with so many tools out there. Luckily, Typedream simplified it for me!

  65. 1

    Site: estalee.com (defunct now)
    Tools: Django, React, DigitalOcean, Google Cloud, ElasticSearch, LogStash, Nginx
    Time: Worked on it over period of 2 - 3 years.
    Challenge: Estalee was an attendance platform used by students/professors at my university. The biggest challenge was an accurate and robust enough attendance and getting more professors to use it. I shut it down after it started to cost too much to maintain. Happy to answer other questions you have.

  66. 1

    Site: https://savoryscout.com
    Tools: Angular 7, Material Design, Stripe, Firebase Db, Firebase Cloud Functions, Google Maps Places API, Nexmo.
    Time: 4-5 months off and on.
    Challenge: The website is for displaying local restaurant specials in real time(Happy Hour, Taco Tuesdays etc) so people can find the best deals around them. Then Covid hit right after launch so I haven't put any time into it for the last 10 months. The target market fell off the map pretty quickly... A large challenge for me before Covid was gathering the data accurately. I want restaurants to manage their own deals but since I had no customers to start out with, I entered a few hundred restaurants myself just to have content on the site. I think it took on average about 10 minutes to enter each new restaurant and it's specials into the back end(I built a separate admin website to do that and other back end admin tasks) so its a little time consuming. Hopefully people can get back to restaurants soon so I can focus on it again.

    1. 1

      Just getting to this now. Only getting the logo at top, nothing else. Did you take it down temporarily?

  67. 2

    This comment was deleted 4 months ago.

    1. 1

      Nice, I like the section dividers, where did you get them? This year, one of my goals is to create a tool to generate those section dividers as SVGs.

      1. 1

        This comment was deleted 4 months ago.

  68. 2

    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

    1. 2

      Oooh, that's a well setup website for 6 hours, nice work. "What you've missed recently"... that section is smart.

      1. 2

        This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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