Avo
Build a CRM in a week
I just had a busy marketing week with Avo.
2nd product of the day on Product Hunt, featured on Hacker News front page, and featured in Ruby Weekly (mostly because of the HN post).
It seems the community found out about Avo and is quite curious. We've got our work cut out for us 💪
I published an article summit up this weeks marketing efforts:
https://avohq.io/blog/launch-on-hacker-news-product-hunt-and-newsletter-ruby-weekly
Yes, we're doing it! It feels like showing my baby to the world.
We're #2 right now Avo for Rails
So, if you love our product, being an indie hacker and the start-up world, shoot us a message on the Product Hunt launch page.
This was my dream as an indie developer. Reach the front page of HN. I didn't even plan that launch. It was the spur of the moment to write the HN post and in less than 20 minutes I landed on the front page.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31824877
The post got 274 points, 140 comments, and more than 5K people landed on my homepage.
I got a lot of feedback from non-users but also from a few people that tried it. Good stuff there.
On Thursday I'm doing a Product Hunt launch 🤞
One of the lesser things discussed in the Indie community is, "How do you stay alive" until you get PMF or get profitable?"
Today, Avo got its first significant sponsor Equipe Technique. They pledged to sponsor the project with $500/month on GitHub. It is a big help for me, as it helps me not worry about how I will pay the bills tomorrow.
I spent a week with the ET team doing a workshop for Avo.
If other companies need a little bit of help and consulting work on building apps 10x faster, get in touch with us ✌️
Today someone bought, with his credit card the first subscription to Avo 2.0
We had customers that paid for the 1.0 one-time license but this is different someone really trusted us to buy an annual subscription.
In the past few days, about 30% of our 1.0 customers upgraded to 2.0 and some started a (no credit card required) trial.
This is a good sign! Can't wait to see what the future brings!
After about two months of work, I managed to push 2.0 out the door. It's got two significant features and a lot of fixes.
Dashboards are an excellent way of presenting aggregated data to your users.
The new responsive design makes viewing your data on mobile a beautiful experience.
These features are not fully finished, I still have a few things to add to make them better, but I just wanted 2.0 to be published. I can work on them later, and users can enjoy the new version and bring on feedback while I improve them.
Please go check it out!
This is so cool! Over 100 apps are running Avo in production.
Numbers grew steadily over the last year, but mostly in the last month when we resumed development and started talking about the upcoming features and plans.
It feels nice to have people use a product you created.
Thank you for that!
10K! That's a big number. More than half of them have been in the last month alone. This is a good sign that people are starting to use it.
I've been starting to talk to people and interview them about their struggles with setting up admin panels to see how I can improve Avo even more.
When we first started building Avo (March 2020), we used the tools we had at hand. Rails and VueJS. We kinda knew deep down that going the VueJS road might bite us later, but we said we gotta start somewhere.
Since DHH launched Hotwire back in December, we knew Avo should use it. We could see all the advantages of going full Hotwire & Rails. We set ourselves the goal of two months to do the refactor. We went a little over by finishing it in 2.5 months, but we’re glad we took this road.
The hotwire rewrite PR has more than 30K updated lines, 180+ commits, and touched 850+ files 📈
We had to rethink how we display the data and re-use the code to our advantage. Hotwire helps out a lot. We have Turbo enabled and use a lot of frames throughout the app. We love using frames when rendering associations. has_many uses the same views we use on the index page, and has_one association uses the views from the show page.
Speaking of views, we took them a step forward. During the refactoring process, we ended up with a lot of views. As you might know, Rails tends to slow down a bit when dealing with a lot of nested views. That’s why we implemented the fantastic view_component gem to take advantage of the performance boost.
We rewrote the public API too. We weren’t thrilled with the original one. After a lot of experimentation, feedback, and outside help (Thank you Thomas), we made some changes.
The final product
After all of that, we ended up with a fantastic product to start our journey.
22 fields out of the box ⚡️
Excellent Active Storage integration 🎁
A lot of field options 💪
A familiar DSL to declare your resources 🤓
Grid view 😎
Rails associations 🤝
Filters and Actions 👌
Advanced authorization 🔑
Localization 🇪🇸
Tons of customizations ✨
All of that 👆 wrapped into a beautiful package powered by Ruby on Rails and Hotwire ❤️
Today we're releasing Avo Community Edition. It's a free to try and use in your app right away without purchasing a license.
This is the first step in building a community around it. We're betting a lot on how the community will help spread the word about Avo.
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