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Solving my own problems... because I'm cheap!

I've been developing WordPress sites for several years now, both for clients and personal projects. The more sites I've built, the harder it has become to maintain them all (updates, backups, etc.) It got so bad that my personal website was actually hacked due to an outdated plugin... not a fun experience.

So, like any Indie Hacker (or broke college student), I set out to solve my own problem. I needed to keep my sites maintained and I needed it to happen automatically - emails and screenshots would be a nice bonus.

Naturally, the engineer in me took over the would-be entrepreneur and I began building.. a lot. By now, most of you reading this are screaming "LEAN STARTUP!" and you're right, I know. I just can't help myself sometimes šŸ¤·šŸ¼ā€ā™‚ļø.

Several weeks and a lot of coffee later, I've added email notifications, screenshots, and a dash of machine learning (used for detecting vulnerabilities). The result? -> sitemgtx.com a SaaS app that manages, updates, and secures WordPress sites.

Now, there are a few companies that offer a similar service. Only, their model is based on employees actually managing the sites manually. Also, they're a bit pricey for my liking -remember, broke college student talking here. Just an FYI in case you guys were wondering.

Anyway, if you guys have time to drop some feedback about my latest project I'd really appreciate it ( Is this something you could use? Why am I going to fail? Pricing? Additional features? etc.)

Thanks, happy hacking!

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    Competition is good. You donā€™t have to validate the solution or problem so much.

    Iā€™d try say competing on price is never a good thing. Iā€™d focus on a specific group of people and niche down. Maybe thatā€™s broke college students with Wordpress sites.

    And then maybe that means you need lower your pricing. But it should also mean this customer might require less from you in features and support.

    Having a customer first thinking in making choices is good

    1. 1

      Very good points, thank you for taking the time! I believe you about niching down, do you think quora and reddit are good places to find the target market?

      1. 2

        Yes reddit and Shopify forums were the two places I used to get to know and find my target market.

        If you can find a target and where they are regularly it can be a huge evergreen marketing funnel.

        1. 1

          Sweet, thank you for that! Super helpful šŸ‘Œ. Iā€™ll definitely be looking into that!

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    Just curious. What does it take for one to use the term "AI" in their software?

    1. 1

      Honestly? Not too much, and a lot of companies are being called out for it. AI is a big umbrella that includes all aspect of a computer imitating a human being. This can be accomplished with a decision tree (a bunch of if-then statements), machine learning such as simple neural networks, or deep learning (a lot of neural networks- used for data science.

      For my software specifically, it uses a relatively simple neural network to determine how ā€œat riskā€ a website is by scanning its internals. This would fall into the realm of machine learning, so a bit more complex than simply if-then statements.

      Does that kinda make sense?

      1. 1

        Yes. Thanks. I'm getting the impression that, if it's an algorithm that processes data in order to improve itself, it's AI.

        1. 1

          Yes Sir, more specifically machine learning.
          This article explains it better than I can and I think should help clear anymore confusion.

          https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/differences-between-ai-and-machine-learning-and-why-it-matters-1255b182fc6

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