Blogboard.io

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/blogboard

After delaying this for a while, finally put blogboard up on Product Hung. Results so far: currently at position #19 with 54 votes. Received 50 signups and several positive comments.

Didn't bother with networking or having high profile hunters post the product.

I Launched the blog several weeks ago at https://blogboard.io/blog to try content marketing.

By writing the blog I'm doing several things at once:

• Testing the main product (search engine for tech blogs) by looking for stories and lessons I can include in the blog post
• Writing shareable marketing content
• Practicing my writing skills.

Content-wise the first post seems like a success (https://blogboard.io/blog/code-review-best-practices/). I received thousands of visits from HackerNews, reached #4 spot there, got ~20 user signups, got shared on Twitter by a dozen of accounts, was translated in Chinese.

The second post (https://blogboard.io/blog/rethinking-engineering-interviews/) got a bit less traffic, mostly from r/programming, but with way fewer signups.

On the tech side, I first wanted to implement a headless CMS solution with Ghost in the background and the blogboard.io Vue app to display the blog at blogboard.io/blog. Only after implementing this (which was fun btw) I learned how painfully clunky single-page web apps are in terms of SEO.

Then I switched to the current solution - run a separate ghost instance and reverse proxy blogboard.io/blog to it.

In order to get the blog to look more consistent with the main app I slightly modified the default ghost theme, changing fonts, colors and headers.

Blogboard (https://blogboard.io) helps you search and discover engineering blogs of leading tech companies.

About a year of working on it on and off, I've finished something I'd call an MVP. I have tons of ideas for improvement, but I think the current state of the project is enough to test conversion rates for content marketing and get some user feedback.

The current version includes 100+ sources (blogs), thousands of articles, full-text search, "More like this" search to help you discover similar articles, recommendations based on topics instead, bookmarks/collections like in any reader app.