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One year in and I figured out the positioning

One year ago I understood what type of tool I need in my day to day work.

I needed a tool that will make me more productive in starting and maintaining Django apps.

The biggest pain point was the deployment process, especially a painful amount of initial effort that goes into the first deployment.

So the first year I've spent making deployment functionality.

This February I was somewhat satisfied with how it works and shared it with the public.

Then with all these global COVID19 related tragedy and isolation and everything I was too tired to think straight and lost my focus.

I forgot why exactly I have started https://Appliku.com .

This week I had a bit more time than usual and started talking to several people about Appliku.

I've made a new landing page and asked them for feedback.

Everyone was mostly happy with the design, thanks to https://unicornplatform.com .

But people were very confused by what exactly is Appliku and what I plan for the future, what features I plan to add.

"Will it support other languages? What about building the frontend part? What about running nodejs apps?"

"Is it hosting, reseller or something else?"

"What's the point of using Appliku if it is not a hosting?"

"What about scaling? Can it scale my app?"

"Wait, do I need to write code by myself?"

I became super sad, confused and generally got into all these thoughts.

I started thinking that I explain everything wrong.
If so, I need to understand who is my target audience. I had feature requests(more like questions, since I don't have users yet) that were conflicting with each other due to different types of audiences.

I took a day off of doing anything in front of my computer and started thinking. Something felt missing, something was completely off. But what?

By the evening, I realized: I have missed my focus.

I was comparing Appliku directly to Heroku. I thought about how to position Appliku in a way that it had benefits when compared to Heroku.

I quickly realized that those who already use Heroku are unlikely to move anywhere until they are ready to hire a DevOps department and go with EC2 or something.

Solo/Indie makers most of the time don't have money to pay for anything so they will probably do everything by themselves. Or they will because they lack skills and time to deploy apps themselves.

Maybe somebody with revenue will want to switch to Heroku, but it is risky to do and hard to convince them. If their app is making revenue, then you probably don't want to risk everything by screwing things up in this early stage.

Enterprises are out of the question here, because I know what goes into the sales process here. I am not ready to do all this.

I have spent the whole day thinking about it and finally recalled what was the initial idea: Help Python/Django developers in the way like no generic platform can possibly help.

Just like GitLab. You may have labeled it as a direct competitor to GitHub, but it is not. It is a platform that has so many useful stuff built-in, that it can't be compared to GitHub. Especially, when GitLab provides most of that stuff for free, but it is a different conversation.

So Appliku is not a deployment app. That's not the future, it is a core feature.

Right now, I am thinking of it this way:
Appliku is the all-in-one cloud platform for creating, running and managing Python/Django apps that help boost developers' productivity and run apps with cost-efficiency and flexible scaling.

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