Cleavr
Simply provision, deploy, and manage servers and apps
We built Cleavr to simply provision servers and deploy apps to reduce the friction that keeps us from working on crafting awesome web apps.
It's been just about 3 years since we've launched Cleavr.io, a cloud-based server and composable app management console, to the cloud as a SaaS.
Wow! We can hardly believe it...
As a product, Cleavr.io has seen an increase in MRR nearly every single month since its launch, with only a few exceptions. The growth hasn't been quick, but has certainly been steady.
As founders, we're still pretty far away from Cleavr.io, and our other products feedmas.com and doneo.io, providing us with a sustainable revenue source for us to live off of. But, it has been successful enough for us to hire a few team members and to support them full-time. Which is really awesome within itself!
Looking back at the last 3 years, there are 3 things we've learned and experienced that really come to mind.
1. It ain't easy
Coming up with a web-based product or service that people actually want to purchase and use... it ain't easy.
You've certainly seen the indie-influencers out there that will say something like "you only need to sell 1 thing a day at $1,000 to earn $365,000 a year." 馃檮
It's just so easy, right?
Well, the truth is. It isn't just that easy. But, along with a good product, good marketing, and tenacity, it could be achieved. Afterall, most "over-night successes" take about 5 years to get to, right? 馃檪
2. It's fun as hell
Just because it isn't easy, doesn't mean it isn't fun. We've been having loads of fun building our products and building relationships with our customers.
Having a product that supports tech, which is ever-changing, means we are constantly learning and applying new things. Nothing like that to keep our minds sharp!
As you've seen many times elsewhere, working on your own products, your own babies, and in the way you want to, certainly trumps the majority of experiences working the ol' vanilla-corporate gig.
3. Work the way we want to work
We also get to do things the way we want to do them and in ways that make us feel most productive at providing value.
Our team members are also super awesome. We look for individuals who are similar to us, where learning, stretching beyond comfort zones, and taking ownership are fundamental traits. Not only does this allow us collectively to be super productive, but it also provides us, specifically as founders, to have the peace-of-mind that we are not bottlenecks in getting things done or in instances where critical issues arise.
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3 years down. Only 2 more years to go become an "overnight success." 馃檭
Have you noticed how many providers for the layers of your tech-stack these days are now offering 'Cloud-hosted' paid options to house one layer of your multi-level tech stacks?
We've seen back-end, front-end, CMS, usage analytics, and so on, providers offer Cloud-hosted options for their single layer of your overall stack. This creates disparate systems, multiple accounts, and more things to keep track of and less control over how you host your web apps.
Our customers at Cleavr.io are awesome and we constantly see them use new tech stacks, new technologies, and new methods to make their apps awesome. And, the great thing is, they can maintain control over these different frameworks and platforms they are bringing together to create their products while keeping their overall costs down. Instead of racking up the costs for having each layer hosted separately, they use Cleavr to bring it all under one roof.
Wow! 2022 went by quickly.
As we were thinking about what to write for our latest newsletter, it was a bit of a shock to to realize that it's December and the year is almost over.
Even though 2022 feels like it's been a blur, looking back at all that we've accomplished this year was also a shocking realization.
This year we've expanded Little Bets from being a one-product company to now being a multi-product company.
- Cleavr.io continues to be our flagship product and we added a good amount of new features and enhancements
- Feedmas.com is a customer feedback and support management system that we created to remove some of the bloat of external tools we were using and to streamline our support intake and issue management processes. It became the right-sized tool we need for the purposes it serves and allowed us to bypass other tools that have become wayyyy too much CRM'y recently
- Doneo.io is an endpoint status (uptime monitoring) and troubleshooting tool that we developed originally to better streamline DNS record management but quickly became an endpoint monitor and server / endpoint troubleshooting tool that we use often to help pinpoint where issues are for many of the Cleavr support requests we get.
Check out our newsletter to learn more about what we've accomplished in 2022.
https://cleavr.io/cleavr-slice/2022-year-in-review-Cleavr
We can't wait for 2023 and see where we are going!
pssst... a little bit of a spoiler... we are working on an AI content generation tool that we have some pretty interesting ideas for it's usage... 馃か+
One of our earliest strategies was to attract new users by creating educational content and then posting it on Medium, Dev.to, and Youtube.
It isn't too difficult to come up with ideas to write about. Because of the nature of what cleavr.io is, we tend to come across new frameworks, plugins, server management ideas, etc, quite often and then just show what we did to come to a solution.
We built a pretty good library of content.
However, we noticed that this tactic of uploading to external sites didn't necessarily lead to as much of an uptick to our site usage analytics as expected.
- Donotfollow tags aren't your friend
You may or may not have noticed that publications such as Medium.com add tags to their links that tell search engines not to follow the links. This means that you're not getting the coveted backlink from these sites.
Of course, this doesn't mean that users couldn't just click on the links to go to your site. But, it does mean the SEO won't be improved since search engines are essentially ignoring this as a backlink.
- Add your content to your own domain
Our next move was to put our written content back into our court and created the Cleavr Slice which is our newsletter and blog.
Importantly, we added Cleavr Slice to our main cleavr.io domain, and not as a subdomain, as we want traffic to increase for this domain specifically.
- If you're wondering how to do something, so are others
Our first articles were ones that we saw were doing well on Dev.to. Interestingly, many of the articles that were the most popular were ones that involved doing specific and seemingly simple things on some popular web frameworks.
For example, Make a mobile menu display and hide with Nuxt / Vue brings in the most visitors. Which is great as Nuxt users are one of our main user groups for Cleavr.io.
- Add canonicals urls
The next thing to do after bringing content back to your site is to go to the other outlets where you have your content. Keep your content on these outlets, but check to see if they allow adding canonical metadata to the articles.
Dev.to allows you to add a canonical for their articles. Paste in the url to the article on your domain.
After we did this, our Google SEO jumped!
We were now catching the search engine traffic that before was sending users to other sites. Now they are coming directly to Cleavr.io.
- Create videos
If you can write about it you can record it. For all of our written guides, we create accompanying video tutorials and post on YouTube.
It takes a while, as anything SEO does, but now YouTube is a big referrer and our videos show in many keyword searches that we target.
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It's been a couple of years since we officially launched Cleavr.io and we feel like we've come a long way. The more we work on Cleavr.io, the more we keep falling in love with what we're building and, even more so, the great customers and fans we've come to know.
So... seems like a great time to share Cleavr.io with the PH community!
Please take a few seconds to visit our Product Hunt page and give us a shout.
We鈥檇 love to hear from you and are thankful for your support!
Wow... 2 years of hacking away at cleavr.io!
Just over 2 years ago, we decided to take a desktop-based server provisioning tool called Get Cleaver and bring it to the cloud as a SaaS.
Quickly rebranding to Cleavr.io, the cloud-based version of the application soon surpassed the monthly cash in-flow the desktop app was bringing in.
2 years of constant development and improvements, has brought Cleavr.io to new territories, more subscribers, more features, and new ventures.
But... we've never launched on Product Hunt... Hmmmm... Why does that feel so weird to say?
Let's fix that!
We'd love to hear your tips and tricks for 'launching on Product Hunt'. 馃檹
We've just launched team and project functionality with cleavr.io so that you can invite your team members, share resources, and collaborate together to get projects done.
We've been working on team features for a while now and are excited to make them available to our Pro subscribers.
If you are looking for a server management console and work a lot with Laravel and the multitude of Javascript frameworks, give cleavr.io a try! Let me (Adam) know if you sign up for an account and I'll up your trial time.
We have what I think is a pretty cool new feature we've just released for Cleavr.io which is that you can now connect to your self-hosted GitLab instances.
AND!
You can now provision a server and install your very own self-hosted instance of GitLab enterprise edition, all with just one single mouse click.
We love seeing what types of coding languages, tools, frameworks, etc that our users are into.
Strapi has long been a popular CMS option for many of our NodeJS users. We can see why, it's pretty awesome and only gets better.
One of our main goals with Cleavr is for it to be a time-saving service that lets our customers focus more on what they love to do.
This is why we've added some first-class treatment for Strapi by adding Strapi as an App Type in Cleavr with pre-set configurations, making adding and deploying Strapi apps as easy as clicking a couple of buttons.
Python's popularity doesn't show many signs of slowing down anytime soon. Flask and Django seem to consistently appear as two of the top ~5 backend web frameworks over the last several years.
With Python being so popular for new devs to learn and with it's near conversation-like programming style, it's not difficult to see why it's so popular; especially, since it's such a capable language to begin with.
We've created some guides to show users how they can deploy Django and Flask apps using Cleavr.
How to deploy Flask
How to deploy Django
The current steps are a bit of a workaround. We'll give some more first-level 鉂わ笍 for Python in the near future.
