What's everyone doing this weekend?
Just curious. I'll be working on my personal productivity app, to make my future weekends more productive :)
Just curious. I'll be working on my personal productivity app, to make my future weekends more productive :)
I'm working on my side project:
http://webdef.com
Research Companies
Find the technologies used on a any company website, how much money they spend each month, and a list of their emails.
Chris, what does the spend mean?
Hey Brian, thanks for asking!
Each result for a website is added to a queue. I then manually research how much their service costs. Most sites have a pricing page. I then average that for a total spend on the website.
Did that answer your question?
Could I tell somebody else what it means? "No. I don't understand it." What do you average it against?
Hi Brian, sorry I wasn't very clear. Always room for improvement :)
@tadasant explained it better than i had initially (his comment is below) and I expanded a bit on what he said, here:
https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/whats-everyone-doing-this-weekend-0e891ed41d?commentId=-LIXqBMMuQ_uRyihVLwD
Love the feedback! Thanks for taking the time, very much appreciate it!
My understanding is that he's attempting to derive a service's cost of operating. E.g. if they use Algolia search, and Algolia's plans are offered at $10, $20, or $30 a month, that's +$20 to the total spend of that service.
But I imagine that's very difficult to do accurately without having a sense of traffic volume? Or am I misunderstanding as well?
Hi Tadas!
Thanks for chiming in, obviously I need to do a better job of explaining myself :) Always room for improvement!
With the first paragraph you wrote, you hit the nail on the head.
Thanks for that!
So yes, if a company website, say HackerNews ;) uses the Algolia technology, and those indeed were the 3 pricing tiers, I'd tag Algolia costing HackerNews at $20/month.
If the company website, HackerNews, had two more technologies averaging $10/month and $50/month, I'd estimate that HackerNews has a monthly spend of $80/month ($50+$10+$20).
I then take that and apply it to a more generalized 5 star (or 5 dollar sign) rating system.
My rating system is "Low", "Medium", "High", and "Very High" Monthly Spend for a company website.
In terms of traffic volume, has no effect on my estimation. Could it? Sure. Would bump them up to another tier most likely.
Is my estimate dollar-for-penny precise? Absolutely not.
Does this provide you with a good gauge of how much (if any) a company website is spending on technologies? I think so.
For me, it's a value add, so I'm going with it. At least for now :)
Did that clear things up? Or am I still doing a horrible job of it?
Conceptually that makes sense, thanks for clarifying.
Moving away from the contrived 10/20/30 example, here's Algolia's actual pricing: https://www.algolia.com/pricing
That's an enormous range: from $35/mo to the second tier being $479/mo. How do you reconcile that?
Then, as @from_30_to_greatness pointed out below, back end technologies are basically invisible. How do you know whether a site is a super-light front end-only distributed on a CDN leveraging a $50/mo headless CMS, or running a custom built Node app on a beefy AWS machine racking up $2k/mo?
Maybe I'm getting too technical and these details are edge cases that don't matter - but I guess I don't understand the business value you're creating. Why would someone be interested in having a super rough estimate of the expenses of a particular service?
Spitballing here: I could see myself being more interested in having 1) a simple list of technologies (not focused on spend) so that I could browse my favorite/respected sites for ideas of what services to integrate with my own product(s) 2) do more hands-on digging and actually get in touch with website owners to understand which tiers of third party services they're doing vs. how much traffic they're handling - perhaps as a tool to answer questions like, "When I launch this app to my 300 beta users, am I going to blow through the free tier of service X?".
Yea, you're right. That is an enormous range.
Even worse, a lot of sites will say something like $99/month for the first tier and "Call Us" for the second tier. So how do I reconcile that?
Well, I do reconcile it, though i view that as my "secret sauce" as silly as that may be :)
I guess it just comes down to do my paying customers hold faith in my estimates? Much like do Google users hold faith in their ranking algo's?
So for now, as a very ALPHA side project, I've just added something that I view as "reasonable" for now. Hard to say at this early stage of the game honestly.
Super awesome that you called that out though! Thank you!
In terms of backend technologies that are basically invisible...
Honestly, nothing anyone can do about that! So I don't even try or even concern myself with it.
I'm not trying to get EVERY technology that a company uses.
You need to look at it from a value add perspective. There is a whole industry out there providing similar services who also cannot get those "invisible" technologies. Yet somehow they are thriving...
In regards to your spitballing idea, awesome! Keep them coming :) Totally love them!
"1) a simple list of technologies (not focused on spend) so that I could..."
Go use BuiltWith.com (or several others). Their software rocks and if you sign up for a free account you get just that.
I'm not competing with free.
"2) do more hands-on digging and actually get in touch with website owners..."
Awesome idea! Sounds like a killer value add!
Cool. Must be a very satisfying project.
That's awesome man!
Edit: I like your thoroughness: http://webdef.com/search/70
Thanks James! I was curious what my own software would say, about my own software :)
That's so meta. Love it!
Thanks Doppelbock! I try :)
The problem I have with all sites that claim to be able to do this is they can't possibly produce an accurate result in a large number of cases. Sure it's easy to detect what front-end libraries are being used... but anyone who actually cares about that can use the dev tools to figure it out. Though it's nice for convenience, so I get it but my issue is more that if the front-end is calling a back-end API that is returning a JSON response there is zero way to be able to tell what the back-end tech behind it is. Much less how much is being spent on it! So I fundamentally think it's just not accurate to say that you can 'find the technologies used on a company website'.
...is that just me?
LOL that's funny James!
Am I about to feed the troll? Oh-well, here goes (deep breath)...
You may want to get your head out of the code and start to think more about it from a business perspective ;)
What? Im not trolling. I'm curious.
I'm saying "I don't think it's possible to DELIVER that value proposition, so how can you make the claim?"
Again, not trolling, just curious.
You say "think about it from a business perspective".
OK... so I look at the site and I click to see what technology does pornhub run on? It says 10 technologies. Suggesting the site has the info, you just gotta sign up to get it. In which case you get an email address in exchange for information. Then it turns that information is not... accurate? But thanks for the email!!!
Is that it?
I've seen ones that don't force you to give an email to get information. They just simply show you a bunch of front end tech and that's it.
What's your take on it?
Oh boy :)
Well, I am indeed delivering on my value proposition.
My claim is that this software will find technologies on a company website.
If you go to webdef.com and search for a company website you'll get technologies that it uses (unless my very ALPHA software hit an error).
Seriously, I have no clue why you claim I am not delivering that.
Further, you mention that my results claim more technologies than I'll show you unless you give me your email.
Nope.
I don't do that.
From a business perspective, I have zero issue with anyone doing that.
We are "indie hackers" and not heavily capitalized companies after all ;) If that's a viable path to revenue, more power to you!
But I'm not doing that.
As per your example of PornHub:
If you go to http://webdef.com, click "pornhub.com" under recent search (I was waiting for someone to try a porn site!) you land on this search result: http://webdef.com/search/193
You said:
"what technology does pornhub run on? It says 10 technologies. Suggesting the site has the info, you just gotta sign up to get it."
Ummmm, nope.
It says 3 technologies.
If you scroll down a bit you'll find a section called "Undefined Technologies" and find 5 more listed. Those aren't "hidden results that you only get if you give me your email address" and nowhere on the site do I say or even suggest such a thing.
The only thing I am NOT willing to display for public consumption are the email addresses.
If you have a problem with that, welp, sorry! Not gonna do it.
You'll need to access a password protected, non-publicly crawlable area of the site to get that info.
On desktop it's a bit easier to see that the data is displayed publicly but on mobile i didn't realise you could scroll down to see the data cos it just shows the sign up / CTA at the bottom and that looked like the end of the page.
Hiding email behind the sign up is totally fine. Of course. Zero issues with that.
Looking at the data available for pornhub... they use Google Analytics? Well... that's not surprising. What's the back end? And a 'low monthly spend'? I would think their monthly spend is enormous.
Enjoying the weekend with the complete draftss.com team. We all need a break, don't we!
Spending the weekend at home working on v2.1 (if the version matters) of my ios app HappyFeed.
Currently at 40 subscriptions and had a well-known Angel challenge me to reach 1800. Doable, maybe... right?
I'll be taking plenty of cold brew breaks, it's hot and humid on the East Coast!
That's a really sweet landing page for an app! Did you use a template of some sort or did you make it yourself?
Thank you! Designed and built myself in React/SCSS. I borrowed some design concepts from similar apps (Calm.com for example) and used Unsplash.com for images
Honestly, building those 4 little animated GIFs took the longest, but it was a good learning experience 😅
Nice man, I made a gratitude app earlier this year but yours is way better! Kudos
Thanks! It's a surprisingly crowded space, but I think there's plenty of room for competition, especially with different approaches (completely offline for example)
Funny enough, I'll try to be working on a visual code add-on for dart/flutter. I feel like making components is tedious currently because you have to make so many files in a fresh project. Even if you use a starter project you have to copy/change the code to suite. I'd rather use a combination of code snippets, templates, and fancy file-system interaction to make the development process go faster...
Of course the first issue I've run into is that even creating an add-on for visual code requires another project, so I'm making an add-on that I can do rapid prototyping in first.
Tools to make tools to make tools.... If any interested I'll post prototypes as I make them.
Important to note: the above is in addition to watch movies/play board games with wife, have friends over and take dog out for walks! :-)
Definitely important! One can't be coding _all_the time...
I'm interested!
Will post as updates happen. =)
Testing new tools for http://mattsgrowthtools.com/ :)
hey Matt, nice & clean.
Thanks! :)
I'm breaking ground on a SaaS project. Contemplated blogging and talking about it along the way to launch. (not sure). But yep, that's what i'm up to this weekend.
Still rocking on with https://www.datagekko.com
The weekend is still going a bit slow, but the week was fabulous.
Current plans for the weekend are:
Completing the upgrade of Noticeable.io to Polymer 3 from Polymer 2 and deploying it to production.
Learning more about Deep Learning applications and looking into the viability of a portal to connect Researchers and clients.
Enjoying my last few days of freedom before starting a 4-month-long full stack development boot camp.
Well pinky..I am doing what I always do on the weekend..plotting to take over the world
My childhood just came rushing back.
i think lots of kids here don't know pinky and the brain
I'll be working on some key features of my soon to be launched project http://axonotes.com . It's a read-it-later tool with powerful learning features primarily targetted at students/learners. You can save and organize all your learning material(full webpages & pdfs) in a library, annotate important stuff, and Axonotes will use spaced repetition to optimally remind you to review your stuff so that you never forget it again.
Just recently built the landing page. Have already made a chrome extension. And tested basic CRUD backend functionality, auth etc on a bare metal digital ocean server. This weekend I'll be working on trying out and implementing learning algorithms(spaced repetition) and integrating them with my backend apis.
The simplest SRS algo that is about 80% ~ 85% effective as the state of the art ones like Anki is simply to space the repetitions as follows:
1 day
3 days
1 week
2 weeks
1 month
3 months
6 months
1 year
I used Anki for years back in 2008~2012 including learning 10,000 Japanese vocab inside a single year. Years later I built an Android App with my own quick SRS to help me drill Korean verb conjugations. That exact algorithm is ridiculously easy to implement and still highly effective, so if you're just pushing out an MVP don't even think twice about using it. Deep experience with SRS taught me a lot of great things about learning and made me a much more resilient person overall. It also taught me it's hard to sell SRS to people who can't take the pain it imposes on you. I consulted for a guy doing a project years ago who developed a book/program for teaching Japanese Kanji and ran pilot programs with several local schools and universities and because he got really good results he wanted to take it things to the next level and build an app with SRS, so I was brought in to help with the SRS design. Ultimately though school kids were a terrible audience for an SRS because you have to do it every day and they just aren't up for that. It's fine for university students who are sufficiently motivated but any time you fall significantly behind on reviews climbing out of it is brutal. Been through enough 1000 card catchup review sessions to know that pain deeply.
Good luck with your project!
Thanks for the detailed insights. Very helpful. Really appreciate it.
Nice! Spaced repetition is such an effective method for learning. I'm interested to see how your project turns out
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Starting New Businesses in 20 minutes or so. https://coffeeforcopy.carrd.co
Made a landing page for dev-first A/B testing tool:
https://easyabtest.com/?ab=ih
I'm creating my first product in 72 hours
I wrote about it here 👇
https://akshaykadam.me/blog/72-hours-product/
am going add more sections to my classifieds website www.zimexapp.co.zw and also finish up my news site and finally upload it
I'm building a landing page to test interest in some dashboards I've built in hackathons!... https://darraghoriordan.wixsite.com/pulse
Trying to analyze the user behavior and analytics software data generated on Engigogo through Product Hunt Launch.
I'm hosting office hours for $20 Coach -- and polling people to see if I should shudder a business that's slowed down and nobody is in love with anymore.
Gonna try and build my first PWA, mostly just get site persistence with no internet and data storage client side. It'll be interesting.
hacking open source to find inspiration
Launching the project I have been working on for the last year, Expat Empire!
My goal for the project is to make it into the best resource around for information on working and living abroad, and my book Passport to Working in Japan that I also released today as Expat Empire’s first paid product will be the first step towards this goal. The book is packed with 120+ pages of detailed information on how to find a job and move to Japan and is 25% off for the next week only, so don’t miss out! :)
I'm going to be fleshing out the front end of my side project:
https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/skeeper
I'm designing it right this second and i'll probably implement this evening or tomorrow, let me know if anyone here thinks these things would be interesting if I wrote about them and documented the process
My grandmother is having her 90th birthday party, so I'm traveling and seeing family on the weekend. I might try to write a bit on the plane, but I imagine I wont get too much done on my project this weekend
I'm dedicating my weekend to implement new native proxy app for macOS when I'm so struggle when using Charles in working-day routine. So I make my own one 😂
It's still in Pre-Alpha version. If anyone are interested and want to become first user. I'm so appreciate that 🙇🏻♂️
I'm gonna relax first.
Otherwise than that, I'm going to work on my side project, that is something, there haven't been a lot of time for, the last few weeks, so I'm looking forwards to pick up where i left off :)
Have a nice one, and thanks for sharing!
I like the relaxing part, it's important! Thanks for sharing too!
I need to write some content for Bootstraplogos.com and design some new logos. And play in a lake!
I'll start building out the frontend of https://followalong.co so I can move from alpha to beta!
Working.
I'm slogging my way through the steep Ember.js learning curve :)
I'm going to drink coffee, relax, braintstorm, and play League of Legends.
Finally someone mentions coffee =). I'm brewing up a pot right now while I plan my day
Working on building two business simultaneously. I came across the "Getting a Brand New SaaS Business Off the Ground with Mike Taber of Bluetick", podcast episode today as I was doing market research for an HR/IT Platform, lots of helpful tips.
Main focus this weekened is building the website and prototype.
Lots. Some dev work, optimizing some ads to increase ctr and forcing myself to finally write some content/blog posts/whatever related to my project http://www.zinterim.com
I am working on my brand/ambassador app, brandfli.com.
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Awesome!