What wins have you had this week?
Congrats on making it to Friday! 🥳
I figure sometimes we have wins that are too small to share as a normal post, but would great to share within a comment as a weekly post.
So, no matter how big or small, what wins have you had this week?
Bonus points if you can teach us all something you've learned along the way. 🙌
Trending on Indie Hackers
First paying customer for Featurebase https://featurebase.app/
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Lessons: I wasted a lot of time last month trying to do something in private. Partially due to imposter syndrome/not wanting to look completely incompetent with unfamiliar technologies.
I knew working in the open let me iterate much faster, but I'd probably spent a week or two of procrastination, and 3/4 days of frustration before I gave up and moved to public work. Should have done this from the start. I won't make the mistake again.
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Read the README of any libraries that a tutorial recommends if they seem dodgy - almost ended up deploying a solution which broke Apple ToS.
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Here's a cool 170 page PDF from Google which gives a really good internal look into what they're looking for for with SEO. It doesn't directly affect the rankings, but it's an insight into where they want their algorithms to go.
Wow! So many contributions! And to ankidroid on top! I love Anki, I'm trying to learn German using it.
You have my follow. If you could have 10 of my follows, you would have them too.
That's a healthy activity map on GitHub! Well done!
It's been a busy week, but It's exciting!
🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
What made you leave and what made you come back?
I left because I decided to take a break from my side projects and to focus on my day job and learning.
I am back because I can't really stay away from all this for too long... :-)
Passed 500 subscribers on https://workspaces.substack.com 🥳
This is a dope newsletter, Ryan!
How do you get that info? Cold DMs?
Thank you!
90% cold DMs/emails
5% recommendations from people already featured
5% people responding to the weekly newsletter asking if they can also be featured
I'm not at the point where I have a growing queue of workspaces and don't need to frantically search for a new one to feature days before the newsletter is set to go out!
Awesome! I'll hit you up whenever I get to fix my workstation -- it's still a work in progress 😅
sounds good! whenever you're ready just let me know!
I almost hit $2k for the month!
Congrats!
This is my goal for February :)
Hi Rosie, thanks for this thread!
It's a small win but I had an interesting reply on Twitter! I've been pushing content for weeks now and somebody influential responded.
The lesson is that even if a lot of my tweets had no likes or retweets, I kept pushing and finally have optimistic results.
We closed our round of Angel funding so we can finally bring in a full time CTO. Pumped!
-Put the final touches on a podcast I've been working on (4 episodes in the bag prior to launch)
-Finally finished a Notion template I'm preparing to sell next week.
Hope to be much more active here in the coming weeks to share more progress, as well as finally put up a product page for something I've been working on for the last three months.
7 signups for JustFitness.io.
This is awesome -- I've been looking for a highly customizable fitness app for a long time!
Will definitely give it a try soon :)
updated Pleke's landing page with @LanaRafaela 's tips - highly recommend!
created the first video of my app
began soft launching by posting about my personal finance app on reddit's r/SideProject community
Well done, Mauricio! :) I'm happy I could help!
I've finished the third draft of my book, I worked like crazy the last two weeks. Which means... that I'll be able to propose an "early access" to my subscribers soon!
This is so huge for me. I want to publish a book since I'm 10! I'm so excited. It's Christmas again. 🎄
Here's the twitter thread speaking a bit about the experience, if somebody's interested 💫
There's more, but those two are the ones I'm happiest about.
What's your product about?
Essentially, it's a diagram builder. The catch is that it's also a game-engine in a very loose sense of the word. The idea is that you could create something kind of like a business model canvas, kanban board, maybe even a personal fitness diagram (using a template or from scratch) and chain together tiny chunks of low-code logic to make them interactive. When I say interactive, I don't simply mean that you can place rectangles or whatever, but that these boards can do things like ask you questions on certain dates and change tokens when everyone has done a certain action.
So you're kind of making games here, but fundamentally they're still tools which you're likely going to use for work and personal productivity. The idea though is to really blur the lines. I'm reluctant to say gamification since people default to thinking of point-based motivation, but it's essentially gamification.
The pitch is a work in progress. It's hard to describe it in a succinct way other than "better diagrams", but you lose people quickly since diagrams as a whole are frankly unsexy, with the exception (to a degree) being kanban boards and business model canvases.
Wow. I'm glad I asked! It sounds super interesting. It's a really cool idea to give more flexibility and interactivity with "no-code" to something as useful as diagrams. I never thought about that.
I agree with you on the gamification: it's not only about points. I think point based systems work well when you need to grind some hours repeating always the same stuff (like learning a language for example - Duolingo comes to mind) but gamification by itself is more a way to make things more thriving.
Unsexy things like diagrams help million of people everyday. The problem with following the trend: you have many competitors, people get tired of it pretty quickly, the noise around it goes through the roof. Glory to the unsexy!
Thanks for your description. It definitely make me think, which is always good.
I launched Nodewood into public beta! I had quietly opened it up a few weeks ago, and actually gotten a sale in that time, but I was working on adding explainer videos and reworking some text and images on the main page.
One of the nice things about building a SaaS starter kit is that you can use it to build out the very SaaS you're building (dogfooding), so a lot of the questions I get, I can answer really quickly, because I've had them, and usually I've updated the documentation with references. So my "something I've learned along the way" is definitely to use your own product, if at all possible!
Looks amazing! Well done i will definitely check it out for my next project!
Got another paying customer http://whichnocodetool.com/
Nice idea for a post ☺️
This week I started my very first public build 🚀 I've been watching others do it for a while, and this week finally got started too! 💪
Watching the MRR on Stripe grow is awesome after you put in a tonne of effort into writing and recording content so I’m delighted to surpass some major milestones soo quickly!
After almost a year spent with a very toxic and difficult to work with founder building a product of his, neglecting everything that was my side project, I got an offer from different company this week. Such a relief.
But the real win is that I am back at indie hacking. I even started coding.
I've launched paid plans for P42 (code modernization for JavaScript and TypeScript):
https://p42.ai/blog/p42-now-supports-modernizing-private-github-repositories
Launched 1st issue of https://bit.ly/3cww4Iy
A couple actually.
I have redesigned and built the website twice, including better copy!!
from this two:
to the last design.
Also, sells are already better thanks to these changes:
I did pretty much this week that I am free from work.
Successfully completed 22 days of a daily Twitter thread on growth hacks (https://twitter.com/malavwarke/status/1355203748038111234) and planning to continue this further and in the process gained more than 50+ followers on Twitter and wrote a couple of newsletter article which got amazing feedback
https://malavwarke.substack.com/p/how-clubhouse-built-its-network-effect
https://malavwarke.substack.com/p/future-trends-of-2021
ps: I'm 9 short for passing 150 https://malavwarke.substack.com/ :P
# wins
https://zeer0.com got its first subscriber and it's first feature request. I also soft launched https://moogle.cc. Oh, I tweet as zeer0hq and I got yo, @rosiesherry as a followed. W00t!
Zeer0 - is a user friendly wrapper around AWS SES.
Moogle - converts emails into shareable urls. It's great for newsletter writers to get your newsletters into the hands of non-subscribers and to create discussions around emails. It basically takes your email out of your inbox and makes it into a focus of discussion and sharing.
I closed a whole host of issues on my github and someone forked me there!
I discovered Buefy which combines Vuejs and Bulma which is basically 100% of my frontend stack. That made me ecstatic because I can now starting fixing UIs across all my projects.
# not wins
Lessons:
Launch and first paying customers for http://7d2d.net/
Hell yeah! :)
Curabase is my thing: https://www.curabase.com
It is a selfish project for myself, YABT (Yet Another Bookmarking Tool). LOL.
This week was significant because it concludes a month-long sprint. This has given me a a few things to think about:
Have a long todo-list of small tasks. When you feel low motivation work on the small menial ones to build up momentum. Pretty soon the bigger tasks don't feel so big.
Building on #1 -- procrastinate by doing menial tasks. At least then your goofing off will have smaller pay off.
I gave up trying to be original and just used my favorite apps as "inspriation" for my own designs. I would not say I copied verbatim, but if you look at the Curabase and then Look at Basecamp or Github then you will see similarities. This removed a lot of anxiety about HOW to visually build things. I could simply look at these tools, say "I like that" and then build it. Works like a charm, and it is unique in its own way.
Do not create marketing to tell people what your product is. People don't have enough time or imagination for that. You have to SHOW them. All those shitty foo-bar fake data demos make it look like a half-baked Pre-MVP proof of concept. If you are going to fake the data then do it well. Fake an entire use case, scenarios, and work-flows. (This will be my next grind)
Script / automate the setup of your scenarios. You should be able to quickly spin up a fake customer in a niche space and be prepared to discuss the use cases with potential customers. It is also hugely helpful in testing.
Use the shit out of your product. Find your own pain-points when trying to make it your daily driver. Those are the easy ones to fix that bring the most value in the beginning.
Be proud of what you built. Take a step back. Write a post like this and reflect on what you've actually learned.
50% done with my MVP!
I launched my first paid online software development course a week ago (link to course).
Just reached a total of $150 in sales for it. Not a ton, but feels like a good start!
My mobile app Fresh Cards reached 100 units sold as well as hitting the 3 month mark since release!
I hired a designer to begin my branding for a new venture, not a huge success but a concrete step in taking things from concept to reality.
I was really happy about it because I was just reading Jekyll docs and perform all the rest by myself, even my friend was surprise.
Continued improvements to my algorithms on ListenAddict.
Started mapping out subscription tiers for Producer.
This week, we, SocialQ submitted our application to YC!! We learned that if you want to get funding, do not forget about the long term vision!
Finally got started on my first actual product Get Django SaaS.
Finally crossed 40K Downloads on my productivity app.
Planning a big feature release later next month.
Have been validating an idea and getting some people together to do it. I did a single reddit post that led to 25 people signing up and a few of them joining together in a discord! It was a ridiculous conversion rate, almost 25%!!
I am trying to crowdsource accountability for self learning. This is the simple landing page that I made https://groupsforlearning.com. Overall the response has been positive, but I am running into the fact that community building online does not just happen. But for now, I am in the give as much value as you can and try to really understand the problems of your target users phase of the project.
Javier, I am working on creating study material. Are you available to bounce ideas back and forth?
Founders want accountability? Now they've got it! 🙌🏽
I managed three more conversations with community builders to understand their experience of community platforms. Some really interesting themes emerging... for online communities it's all about onboarding & rhythm of information, while offline/online (ie physical spaces) are more concerned about their interactions with other communities, especially when it comes to events scheduling.
I also had a great chat with someone about how to manage these conversations and pull key data out. Have hacked together a Notion page based on https://dovetailapp.com/ which is far better than my previous system of scribble notes on envelopes.
Kicked off Google Ads campaign for SurveySays.app.
Need a few weeks of metrics before I expect much ROI, but I'm one week closer!
Well done Nick... paid search is such a weird world, I was experimenting recently!
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Well done on getting started, Tom!
What names have you explored? How are you going to decide on a name?