Daito Authenticator

2023 will be an exciting year, for so many reasons.

One that I am particulary excited about is that we plan to hire several new team mates for Daito. We are starting with a full stack dev position (see here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/hiring-full-stack-ruby-on-rails-developer-for-daito-authenticator-jobAd-2ce97b97ec) and will later on extend that with non-dev roles.

I have recruited and hired people in the past, but not since Covid hit. It will be interesting to see if and how the interviews feel different, now that 100% remote and async work is finally a lot more common.

Not sure what exactly happened (Google algo update?), but I am celebrating a solid 50% increase vs. 3 weeks ago in clicks I am getting from Google.

The site has 1000+ pages (it includes a directory) so the long tail definitely plays into factor here, and, probably even more important, the average age of the page in the index. Most of them are now 6+ months old.

Looking forward to the next months. It would be so awesome if this trend continues or at least stabilizes.

Weeks in the making, but today we finally launched QR code support for our web-based authenticator. Classic case of "how hard can it be?", it took a lot longer than we thought to get this done in an acceptable way.

Not soon after the feature was deployed we got our first trial signup who experienced the feature. Within less than 2 minutes this user went from trial signup to creating the first 2FA account in Daito and using it. I'll have to do some SQL magic, but I think this is the fastest time-to-value we have seen so far.

I am now hoping for improvements of all major growth & usage KPI across the board. An uptick in the metrics would be really nice.

What's a great feeling for a startup founder?
Getting that notification that the customer subscribed to a paid plan.

What's the next best feeling after that?
Getting that notification that the customer is adding more and more seats to the subscription. :)

What do B2B customers want? In Daito's case they really wanted to be able to enforce 2FA on some or all users in their company account to really make sure their 2FA tokens are secure.

Really happy this feature is now live and customer adoption is very positive.

How do you secure a 2FA authenticator? With 2FA, obviously!

Turns out that getting that done was a bit more complex than we anticipated. But done is done! Feels good to finally have this live.

Sent out the mail to all users, announcing this new feature. Took less than an hour for the first customers to start using it.

This took a lot longer than expected, but I found somebody great who is fitting into the team I think and who can help me working on growth topics, specially content.

I recruited, hired, built teams in the past, but when you do it without corporate resources, just you vs. the world out there, man, it's a whole different ball game.

Implementing Stripe was quick and somewhat easy, but also often frustrating. Fulfilling German compliance requirements regarding information on invoices and emails was not that easy to get right.

Getting billing live is a big step as we now have a working end to end process, from first signup through to billing.

Hard to believe, but the first year of working on Daito is coming to an end.

A year ago, after a summer of thinking, talking, researching and experimenting, I inched closer and closer to my idea of building a web-based 2FA authenticator. And now it's been online and available for a while and has its first customers. Nice!