Beamsolver

This had been putting off the stripe integration for quite a while, and I finally decide to do it yesterday. It was actually the first time I worked with stripe so I had some learning to do, but in the end I managed to get everything to work correctly (I'm still using the test mode as I haven't launched the product yet).

Here are some insights on my implementation:

1. I use Supabase as my database and auth provider. I created four tables: customers, subscriptions, products and prices (supabase uses Postgres in the background).

2. I use Digitalocean to serve a simple express app as a middle layer between supabase and stripe.

3. Every time a new user signs up, I create an entry in the customers table. Then supabase fires an http webhook to my express api, calling a function that creates a brand new customer in stripe. Once the customer is created, I update the customer record in my database to match the information on stripe.

4. I have stripe set up to send webhooks to my express api, where I'm listening to changes on the customers, products, prices and subscriptions. Every time something changes, I update my database.

So basically everything is kept nicely in sync. If I create a new product in stripe, it appears in my database. This means that I won't have to make calls to the stripe API from my front end.

On a side note:
This is my first project with supabase and I'm loving it. It's so much better than firebase. The database is a real database (postgres) unlike the toys r us database that firebase has. If you are starting a new serverless app, take my advice and use supabase!

The content writing continues, today I wrote a nice article about shear and bending moment diagrams in beams.

Here it is: https://beamsolver.com/resources/shear-and-moment-diagrams/

I doubt a lot of people will be interested in this type of content here on indie hackers, but I wrote so I'm sure as hell going to share it :)

The pre-launch landing page now also has a "resources" section with some content that I wrote in the past few days. I never blogged before, and I have to say that I actually enjoyed it. Hopefully people will find value in it.

So far I've only written content, without doing any promotion. I don't even have social media pages up yet. I'll fix that in the following week.

I feel ok with the landing page now, and I told google to crawl it. Let's see if I can drive some traffic to the website in the following days.

After learning a bit about marketing, it seemed a good idea to smash together a quick landing page and start driving some traffic to the website.

This is just a pre-launch version, the actual beam calculator is not available yet. The landing page itself is temporary, and I keep finding stuff about it that I don't like so I'm constantly tweaking it.

I also made a promotional video (which still needs some work) that explains what my product does to the masses.

I made a big decision: I will launch at the beginning of January (I even put a timer on the landing page). The web app is done, it just need a bit more testing which I will do over Christmas.

While I think I am a decent coder, I know I totally suck at marketing. In fact, I have never even done it. So I started learning about SEO, call to actions, ads, and all that stuff. My plan is to make myself like marketing by learning how to do it.

Meanwhile, I kept improving Beamsolver by adding a few more features and polishing everything up.

I will now put the developing part of this journey a bit to the side, and start to focus more on marketing, whatever that word means.

After a month of coding, I have something that you could call a Minimum Viable Product. It's still very unstable and there are a lot of loose ends that I need to address, but the concept works. Here are some of the things I did:

CODING PRINCIPLES:
I hate using libraries, frameworks and tools for the front end. If I can, I always code everything myself. That way I have full control over my code and I know what to do when something goes wrong.

So for me it's just plain javascript, html and css. I don't even use a css library.

COMPUTER ALGEBRA SYSTEM WITH JAVASCRIPT
I wanted my beam calculator to be able to do symbolic calculations. I know that is what my target audience wants, and it's what will make me stand out from other calculators. I tried some existing libraries but none did what I wanted. So I wrote my own. I called it SylCas, maybe one day I will polish it up and throw it on github.

EDITOR WITH SVG
The user of my app needs to be able to draw a structure with beams, loads, supports, and so on. Sticking with my no-libraries approach, I wrote a nice little set of functions that allows me to draw the svg of a structure and provide some basic interactions. Simple but effective.

FORMULAS WITH MATHJAX
The one library I'm using is MathJax, to render all the formulas in the calculator's results. It took a while to get it to work with a dynamic UI, but now it does everything it needs to do.

I've wanted to build a beam calculator since I was in university. I've toyed with the idea for years, and now I finally decided to commit to it. I feel like I have enough technical skills to do this, but I know it will be complicated. This is the first time I create a SaaS!

So what is a beam calculator you may ask. Well, it's a software used to get the force diagrams and deflection of beams. I guess you have to be a structural engineer to know what those are, this will be a very niche product.