Show IH: missstart.com - Finally! A place for sharing your startup journey and stacks
Looking around this forum, we know that indie hackers like to share stacks, their startup journeys and talk about them. We have built a place just for that, and the best part is, it is "free"!
We appreciate your visit to https://missstart.com and have fun there!
You can see our journey of creating Miss Start by visiting here, https://missstart.com/journeys/journeydetails?journey=KcLZuiGW2bCiHpWtK&display=comments
Our motivation is based on that there are a few places to share the tech stack of startups, but these lack the features to also share the marketing stacks, the startup journeys and for discussion of those stacks and journeys. We think these features are very crucial to share among indiehackers.
Please also visit our forum to give us feedback on improvements.
Hey Jessie!
I think a resource like this, once it has gained a sizable amount of users, will be invaluable. I absolutely adore Indie Hackers, but one feature that I have hoped for would be a way to allow users the option to highlight their own journeys in some fashion (e.g. a section in a user's profile where they can post progress reports, etc.).
As a first-time Indie Hacker, I often get lost in the sea of information out there, such as what hosting solutions might work best for me, how to approach customers, etc. So learning from others on what they've tried out and have had successes / failures with would be pretty cool.
I took a visit to the Miss Start journey page and think that if you organized the information in a more vertical fashion, made the font a little bigger / more contrasty, it would be easier to glance at :) (the homepage could also benefit from better contrasting font colors as well).
Good luck!
Hi so, thank you for the valuable feedback. You are right about the visibility of the text, I will give it some thoughts and adjust them.
You are right about the vertical display of journeys. If you login with twitter and go to the "Add journey" https://missstart.com/addjourney page, the add stacks forms organize the stacks in vertical fashion.
I will work on implement a vertical mode of the journey display so that users can toggle/choose between horizontal and vertical modes.
Hey Jessie, just tried to visit the site but I'm getting a server not found error - are you down for maintenance or have you moved on to another project?
Hi Jessie, congratz on the site overall 🙌
However, I am having few design/ux issues with the site:
hamburger menuon the DesktopBut I have one question that is, I believe, more important than issues above which can be relatively easily fixed and that is - why do you believe that tech/marketing stacks are crucial to share among indiehackers?
Hi svenkapudija, thank you for your feedback.
It's a quite common practice to do this. Indiehackers' mobile version hides the menu behind the hamburger icon as well, even though the desktop version of indiehacker shows the full menu. We chose to hide the menu behind the hamburger icon to keep the site look cleaner.
We are using bootstrap to position items on the front page so that it's responsive to the device screen size. We will look into the padding and margining to see what can be improved. The same goes with the icons.
You are right about the last screenshot. It's should be easy to do some styling to make the timeline of the journey more pronounced.
Recently, the indiehackers' forum has a thread about what stacks indiehackers are using, and this topic has a lot of replies and interests.
Your last question touches upon an important issue. We don't think that indiehackers "only" want to share the tech/marketing stacks; there are other startups let indiehackers share the tech and marketing stacks. What we want to focus on is the journey, the process, the road to success that indiehackers take for their startups. We want to spark conversations about their journeys, so we have to touch on the tools (tech/marketing stacks) that they are using. In contrast to other startups, we don't think the stacks are meaningful by themselves, but the journeys behind those startups are valuable references to be shared among indiehackers.
Every stack item is a business decision and has a lesson behind it. Without the stack items, we can't tell the stories about these business decisions and lessons, and without these business decisions and lessons, there wouldn't be much to tell about the journey of this startup.
I want to emphasize that the journeys and stacks do not have to be added all at once. They can be saved and edited later.