AnonAddy
Open-source anonymous email forwarding
Last Wednesday I added an update here that I'd posted AnonAddy to Hacker News.
The post has now been up for just over a week and currently has a total of 393 upvotes and 174 comments.
When I first posted AnonAddy to Hacker News nothing happened for half an hour or so, it received 1 upvote in that time I think. Due to the number of submissions to the site it had also now already fallen off the first newest posts page.
I thought that would be the end of it, buried and lost. Luckily I had posted it to Show HN: and it was still on the show newest page. All of a sudden it started receiving upvotes, it quickly went up to 10 or so and shot to the top of the Show page.
It then got onto the front page of Hacker News and stayed there for a day or so reaching a highest ranking of 4th!
I could barely keep up with the comments and for next day or so I was solidly replying on Hacker News or to peoples' emails.
It stayed on the first page of Show Hacker News for about 3-4 days!
The feedback has been absolutely great and almost entirely positive!
I'd definitely say this launch was much more successful than my launch on Product Hunt. Perhaps because I did it midweek instead of on the weekend or maybe because the audience at Hacker News is a better match for the site.
Here's the link for anyone interested - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21648096#21706517
To keep the ball rolling after the recent Product hunt launch I decided to post AnonAddy to Show Hacker News.
Ask me anything you'd like to know about it on there!
https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew
Oh and in case you missed it, AnonAddy has a Black Friday sale on until Friday.
You can get 50% off your first year on Lite and Pro subscriptions by using the following coupon code:
BLACKFRIDAY50
UPDATE:
AnonAddy is on the front page! Currently at number 4 with 180 points!
It's almost the end of today's (Sunday 24th) launch on Product Hunt and AnonAddy now has more than 50 paying customers.
I'm quite happy with how things have gone so far!
I think building up an existing audience on Product Hunt itself is definitely a big plus prior to launching and is something I'd look to work on if launching again in the future.
I'd still love to hear your thoughts on Product Hunt and any feedback you might have!
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/anonaddy
Thanks
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The UI looks beautiful. Did you use any framework or theme?
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Thanks very much. For the landing page of the site (https://anonaddy.com) I used the following template - https://github.com/tailwindtoolbox/Landing-Page just to get things moving quickly.
The site is all open-source and the code is available on GitHub - https://github.com/anonaddy
For the dashboard etc. (https://app.anonaddy.com) I did this myself, I just kept it relativley simple. I might update the UI slightly in the future.
The css framework I love and use is called Tailwind css - https://tailwindcss.com/
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Thanks, I will check it out. I like tailwind as well .
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Congrats Will! Very interesting project!! How did you manage to build up an audience on PH prior to launching?
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Thanks a lot! To be honest I didn't have any audience on Product Hunt when I launched, I think this was a bit of a mistake and I would try to build one there if I launched again.
I already had a small userbase on AnonAddy from posting on Reddit and a few other sites, so I sent my existing users an email letting them know I had launched on Product Hunt.
Since the majority of my users are very privacy conscious they likely didn't have a Twitter, Facebook or Google account that is needed to sign up to Product Hunt.
A fair few that did sign up on Product Hunt unfortunately had their votes removed from my listing as Product Hunt's algorithm mistakenly flagged them as "spammy" or "bots" which led to me missing out on a top 5 spot for the day.
Still happy with the results though and learned a lot even if it was a rather stressful day!
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Oh okay I see, thank you very much for your explanation, Will! I can imagine it was an intense day, but I'm glad you are positive about it!
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I've been putting this off for quite a while, always thinking "I'll just add that next feature or finish this bit off" etc.
But I finally decided that today is the day!
AnonAddy is an open-source anonymous email forwarding service that protects your real email address from spam by using a different unique email address for every website.
I did a fair bit of reading about how to launch on Product Hunt, I know it's not perfect but I'm happy with it so far.
I'm excited to see how the day unfolds.
I've got a coupon for 50% off your first year in the comments to celebrate the launch.
I'd love to hear your feedback and if you have any suggestions I can be doing throughout the day.
Thanks a lot,
Will
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Congrats. I'm also putting off launching my site as I keep thinking "after the next feature". What made you finally pull the trigger? What was different from the last time you said "after this one last..." ?
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Thank you. To be honest I don't think it was one individual thing that made me do it but more a build up of getting tired of putting it off and delaying the inevitable.
I was originally going to post it on the Thursday just gone, however I read a few posts that said posting at the weekend gives you a better chance to reach the top spots.
I've also been reading "Just Fucking Ship" - https://stackingthebricks.com/just-fucking-ship/
This definitely motivates you to go just for it even if you aren't 100% ready.
The problem is you'll never be 100% ready and there will always be some excuse to delay.
Perhaps it is the fear of failure that is the main driving force behind this.
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Perhaps it is the fear of failure that is the main driving force behind this.
This is how i'm feeling about reaching out to startups and asking them about buying a job listing on my board. It's driving me nuts, because I know I need to do this to get my sales but it's been very difficult for me so far.
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After a lot of user feedback requesting a plan with a lower price point I decided to launch the new Lite plan.
This plan allows users to have:
- 50 UUID aliases
- 1 custom domain
- 1 additional username
- 5 recipients
- 20 daily anonymous email replies
- access to paid settings
- 50MB monthly bandwidth
This plan is billed yearly at $12 per year.
When using AnonAddy you can create standard email aliases on the fly at your own unique username subdomain e.g *@johndoe.anonaddy.com (or .me).
However, many users prefer to use the UUID aliases that do not include any username information or link to ownership. These types of aliases cannot be created on the fly and must be generated beforehand.
I initially experimented with the idea of using a bookmarklet with a simple link to allow users to generate the aliases, however I quickly ran into CORS (Cross-origin resource sharing) issues and realised this was not going to be possible.
This left a browser extension as the only viable way to generate UUID aliases remotely from the browser.
I built the browser extension using Vue.js and Tailwind, it was a great learning experience and I'm looking forwarding to adding more features to it down the line!
After a couple of months or so I closed the open beta. Feedback and suggestions from users had been great and extremely valuable.
I gave all beta testers 3 months of the Pro plan for free as a way of saying thank you.
New users will now have to subscribe to access any of the Pro features on the site.
Started the open beta giving users the chance to try out all features on the site to help iron out any bugs and make it as stable as possible before officially launching.
I made a couple of posts on /r/privacy and /r/PrivacyToolsIO to find initial beta testers.
Initial commit made on GitHub, at this point I felt I had a MVP that I was ready to show the public.
I followed a TDD (test driven development) approach when building the site as recommended and taught by Adam Wathan. Having lots of tests definitely gives you confidence when making refactoring changes down the line.
3 Comments
Nice one. I suspect that HN audience appreciate anonymous things more than PH.
You had 50 customers after PH launch (?), it would be interesting to know if the HN audience convert more customers than PH...as traffic/upvotes is often a vanity metric.
Yes I agree.
That's correct, now sitting at just over 200 paying customers, I'll post a new milestone for that soon. I'm not running any analytics whatsoever on the site so cannot comment on the traffic spike!
Congrats!
Thanks!