Coolify

2 months later, I finally decided to show it to the world by making a Product Hunt release.

I never thought it go viral on PH and HackerNews.
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/coolify

I fully spent the upcoming 3-4 days answering comments, feedbacks, and emails, and it was a pretty satisfying feeling.

When you know that you made something useful for a lot of people - but I think I do not need to explain this. If you ever had a small success, you know the feeling. :)

But the most satisfying things just came after. Companies started to contact me that they would like to pay for my product, even though it's free. What?

I quickly set up an Open Collective page (https://opencollective.com/coollabsio), so they can support my work financially.

It is an awesome feeling that my idea works.

Almost a year went by! Woah. Lots of things happened.

Since then I have fully rewritten Coolify, to be free of any hard-coded things. Now it is super flexible and full of new features.

It supports a lot of languages, databases, and open-source services that you can host with a few clicks.

On January 10, I release the first version on my Discord server and it was a huge success. Around 100 people knew about it, but the feedback was super positive.

After (almost exactly) a month after the first real release (v1), I finally decided to include service to the repertoire of Coolify.

It's Plausible Analytics. I have a lot of mindset in common with them, so I decided not to write my own analytics software (for now 😁).

You can install Plausible Analytics with one click! 🙀

Yeah, it's magical - at least for me. 🧙‍♂️

I'm planning to release at least once or twice a week new features, fixes, etc. I currently can stick to this plan. 🤞

So after the huge release, I've added new language supports, like PHP, Rust. Also, you can deploy custom docker files as well, which opens the door for lots of things. 🎉

Improved the update process, so I can remotely (with a remote script) how and what an upgrade process does. Fancy words, but it's super cool for a self-hostable app.

I decided to post Coolify to Hackernews, because for some reasons. No plans, no strategy, nothing. Just post it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26624341

Hackernews literally went on fire for more than 20 hours. I was in the top 5 for 20 long hours! No idea why.

Some said it was because of the catchy title. If I promote or talk about it, I say it's "an open-source, hassle-free, self-hostable Heroku & Netlify alternative". I never think about this title as a marketing thing, but it looks like it is. I really like what Heroku and Netlify do, and I would like to give the world an open-source alternative.

More about it: https://andrasbacsai.com/ive-set-hackernews-on-fire-how-i-did-it

Yesterday night, I shipped the first non-beta version of Coolify, which includes:

• Fully automatic updates from the frontend.
• Database support (MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, CouchDB).
• Code cleanups.
• New shiny UI - because of that, the UX is a bit better as well!

I was so excited, and it made my Twitter account blown up - at least on my scale.

I cannot wait to add more features!

After 8 days of the first release, I'm doing another. 🚢
It's not a huge release but still contains an essential feature.

Instead of installing all the things manually, a script does the same automatically in the background. 👍

Quite happy with it.

I'm getting closer to make the first production release.

Small steps and lots of iteration!

Yey. I released the first beta version of Coolify.

I call it a successful release because I received a lot of positive feedback and interest.

On the other hand, 15 new followers on Twitter, 14 GitHub stars. These numbers are huge for me. I'm not used to it.

Created a simple landing page for Coolify. Nothing fancy.

This is the first time I create a landing page before even publish the MVP.

I started to gather opinions about it, got pretty positive ones. They helped me to rephrase some words and finalize the design.