Starting building in public, 3 years after joining

Hi there! I'm James. I've joined IndieHackers in 2019 and I've finally started building a product (name TBD) that lets you easily publish blogpost from Obsidian, a markdown based note-taking tool, similar to Notion.

I'm making this because I write everything on Obsidian and I wanted to be able to effortlessly and quickly publish to my blog from Obsidian. Obsidian already offers Obsidian Publish, but it is too expensive ($20 monthly) for a simple blog. especially when, I don't need most of the features it offers.

After looking around for ages, I ended up rolling my own custom plugin and server which let me publish a folder into a NextJS blog. At this point, I wasn't thinking about making it into a product so it had a lot of rough edges. (There is video of the prototype at https://twitter.com/james_sidenotes/status/1614583245404004352?s=20&t=oKlU2swEjHLumv_v4aURqg)

The custom plugin worked very well. But after a while, I started dreaming about making what I had into a product to start my journey as an indie developer. I had some time off start of the year, so I used that time to bootstrap an very rough alpha version.

Progress so far

During the week off, I've set up the initial MVP and DevOps environment. This included:

rewriting my Obsidian plugin.
building a bare bone app for publishing and managing blogs, including registering custom domains. (I could probably share some of my journey deciding between what tech stack to use! I had to choose between Phoenix, SvelteKit and NextJS. Ended up choosing NextJS + Supabase)
setting up a CI/CD pipeline so that pushing my Github repo automatically deploys to staging & runs migrations etc.

Below is a screenshot of currently working staging blog.

What's next?

My current goal is to get the app ready for Alpha-testing by end of February. For that I need:

A simple landing page with email collection
One, semi-polished theme for a blog with very bare-bone features
Obsidian plugin published
User onboarding process
Polishing publishing logic
Decide on the name

I'm still working full time, which means I can only spend 1 to 2 hour per weekday on this project for now. As an engineer, I tend to spend way too much time polishing up things so I'm trying really hard prioritize those things that are absolutely necessary for an alpha release - but I'm already failing :)

Thank you for reading so far and I'll see you next week in my next update!