Brandy

4 days ago I woke up to a Twitter mention that Brandy was featured on BetaList. It's a nice way to get some early traffic but I wasn't expecting much to come out of it.

To my surprise the traffic didn't drop off after the first day as it usually happens with these. Three days in the traffic was still doubling every day. I decided to check BetaList again and to my surprise I found my product in the top 'Trending startups' list.

On top of the traffic I also got 30 requests for early access to the app so far. Not sure if this is good or bad but the conversion from visit to requesting early access is about 20% which seems quite good.

You can check out the post here: https://betalist.com/startups/trybrandy

Today I launched a private beta of Brandy - Shared space for teams to keep all their brand assets up-to-date. You can see a live demo and request early access on the landing page: https://www.trybrandy.com

Why I built Brandy:
During my designer days I got asked a lot for the latest logo, font, colour, etc. We tried solving this internally with a shared Google drive folder but that didn't work too well plus it meant a lot of overhead for the design team.

Let's say I'm a sales person and I need the latest logo for my presentation. Specifically the horizontal variant in white and preferably as a PNG with a width of 600px. Either the design team has to maintain 100+ files with the different variants or everyone will have to learn how to use Illustrator. With Brandy this is 100% self-service and the number of files designers have to maintain goes down 15-20x.

In the last 4 years of my career I also got to a point where I no longer design or code myself. I needed a project where I can exercise my building muscle again.

What's next:
Start testing with a couple companies and get to a product that solves the problem really well. Luckily we have this problem internally as I mentioned which makes finding the first user much easier.

Current stack:

• Heroku: App hosting
• NodeJS: Back-end API
• AngularJS: Front-end application
• Tailwind: CSS framework
• MongoDB: Database
• Webflow: Static landing pages
• Notion: Documentation/wiki
• Mailchimp: Email list subscription

Cost of running:
Webflow ($15) + Heroku ($8) + Domains/hosting/email ($5) = $28/month