ChartBear

I'm excited to announce that ChartBear has officially exited beta!

A huge thanks to all beta users who provided valuable feedback and helped shape the direction of the product. I made a few small adjustments based on their suggestions, including implementing a credit-based pricing model to make it easier for users to try out ChartBear without a long-term commitment.

Thank you for your support and we can't wait to see what you create with ChartBear 💥

Despite the good number of users who have registered to the beta, I realized that I should show more of ChartBear's potential.

I've therefore made the ChartBear's editor publicly available so that the users can play around with it (https://chartbear.app/demo) and see how easy it is to create amazing charts 😎

The final goal is, of course, to attract more beta users to then collect even more feedback to improve the final product 💪

It took me 3 months of night work (just a couple of nights work per week and some weekends) but I finally launched the MVP!

I did it all by myself: wireframe, design, copy and of course, development. The feeling of launching something that you made is awesome!
Like any self-respecting MVP, it went live with some trade-off. I already made the mistake of shipping a fully-featured product without even validating the idea so this time I tried to avoid that 😅

Some things I left out:

• More charts: I focused on the most common ones and I'll build more if I gain some traction
• Dark theme: both for the website and the charts
• Writing tests (what about you? Do you write tests for an MVP?)
• Fancy animations
• CloudFront for serving the charts

It's always hard to find the right trade-offs but I'm quite happy about my choices.

A few words about the tech stack for those who care about it:

• Laravel on the backend
• Typescript/Svelte/Tailwind on the frontend
• D3.js for producing the charts
• A node.js Lambda function for generating the chart images, triggered from an API gateway
• Charts are then stored and served by an AWS S3 bucket
• Hosted on Heroku

It costs me 7$/month and the chart images are rendered in ~700ms on average and it's already ready to be scaled! 💥

I've always been drawn to the indie maker scene and in the past, when I was still a freelance, I also tried to launch some products but I failed miserably... and that's a good thing, right?
For five years now I'm a software engineer in a scaleup (and father of two, but that's another story) so I have very little free time. Despite this, I kept following all the solo developers on Twitter for inspiration. I promised myself that I would have tried again at the first opportunity to solve my problem.

A few months ago I've been asked to build a reporting Slack bot for our internal stakeholders that had, among other things, to send them some charts. I evaluated some services during my make-or-buy process but I wasn't totally satisfied by none of them, mainly for two reasons: firstly because in most of those services the data are sent as query parameters, and being sensitive data in my case I didn't want that. The second reason was that the rendered chart images were not as cool as I wanted and I'm the kind of person who likes beautiful things 🤩

So I did some testing and I realized there was room for a new API to create awesome charts in seconds so I started drawing some wireframes of what would become ChartBear.