Devmates.co
Prepare for coding interviews
Hello Indie Hackers👋,
I'm working on Devmates.co.
We are resolving daily coding problems which asked by top tech companies together. We share our solutions, give some help if anyone stuck, support each other and just hang out together on the internet. 🍻☕️💬
I decided to start working on Challenges because I believe that the best way to learn is learning by doing. So I want to make some challenges on a weekly basis and work on something interesting together. You can collaborate with someone or do everything by yourself.
Challenges - micro-projects where you can learn new technologies, frameworks, languages, API, algorithms, approaches, etc. I hope it gives a chance for juniors developers to practice coding on some real projects. Senior engineers can learn something new by doing.
For example, they can try to resolve it using a new language or framework. Challenges don’t have any language/framework/technology restrictions so you can resolve any problem using any tools.
My motivation is to build a community around it and allow people to learn something new by making small projects. If someone stuck they can ask questions to people who are also working on the same “tasks” and get feedback.
Right now you can see the first challenge named "Conway's Game of Life". It's a kind of classic coding problem that can be implemented in different ways and can be asked in real interviews. It's not just plain "algorithmic" problem, you should visualize it or adding some additional "behavior". It's a kind of "test" version of challenges but in the future, I want to provide more interesting ideas.
So if you are working on some APIs, frameworks, etc let me know. Maybe we can collaborate and I can provide interesting challenges based on your Project. I think it's a great idea and would love to hear your feedback.
Hello Indie Hackers🙌,
I want to share the new layout of Devmates.co.
The previous one was good enough and pretty high conversion rate but unfortunately not enough space to promote new features. I tried to redesign a little bit and see how it works.
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Hey, I just subscribed!
Here is some feedback on the landing page.
Having another element clipped over the get started button is in my opinion making it hard to click it, or just doesn't look good. Maybe also "1,696 JOINED" text could be clickable to submit.
"What people say about us" section looks uneven, I would maybe switch the first and the second comments, or maybe align them vertically centered.
Icons8 link at the bottom goes to an empty page.
Great job, looking forward to the first challenge.
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Hi Burak! Thanks for such detailed feedback.
Fixed order of comments in "What people say about us" section and Link in Footer.Don't have any ideas about "Joined" badge but will think about it, thanks! 🙌
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Looking at it on mobile.
It’s not 100% clear from the heading what this is? I think it’s a daily email but there’s no mention of that anywhere. Or maybe I’m wrong and it’s a forum?
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Hi Paul! Thanks for you comment.
I've started as daily newsletter but right now built an app on top of it. So, devmates.co is two in one.
Daily Newsletter with coding problem.
Web App where you can share your solutions, get feedbacks, ask questions, etc.I decide to change layout of landing page to make it more clear but unfortunatelly it's still not so clear ^^.
I should mentioned somehow that we have newsletter and webapp. Any Ideas?
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I'm no expert but I'd try to focus the copy on the first action you want a visitor to take which is sign up for the daily newsletter. So then it's maybe as simple as saying in the subheading of the page that you're sending out problems in the daily email.
Right now it doesn't say and the only clue is the email icon in the subscribe input box.
Then down the page go into how it works which you're doing already. Also, the gray font on those tabbed boxes is really hard to read (I'm now looking at it on desktop).
Maybe I'm looking at it too deeply and it doesn't matter at all !! Just my first impressions.
And... if you are a newsletter at the core, think about listing on Inbox Stash 😀
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If you click on the illustrations, they get big.
I think this is not intended. ;)Everything else looks good.
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Looks good, great job!
I really like your illustrations, where did you get them?-
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Hi, thanks for feedback!
Check Icons8, you can find a lot of nice pictures and icons here.
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Hello Indie Hackers,
Today I launched the beta version of Devmates.co (you can check it here: https://devmates.co/home). I’ve started as a newsletter website and start building a community around it. It was fun but people started asking about features, like:
“It would be nice if we can share/save our solutions somewhere”.
So I decide to start building a simple web app where I can post coding problems and allow people to share their solutions and discuss them.
I shared the link to all my subscribers to test everything and right now I want to share it with more people. You can find the few bugs here and there but feel free to report about it and I'll try to fix it asap.
I would love to say special thanks to @harrydry and marketingexamples.com for the marketing ideas, inspiration and @anthilemoon for community that you've created and invited me.
Would love to hear your feedback.
Link: https://devmates.co/home
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Nice work Alex! I've enjoyed watching this grow.
And no need to thank me haha! It's all your determination / cold outreach. Site looking good. I like the mentor feature.
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I would also recommend to read your "Kanye Story" (https://thekanyestory.com/) for everyone who think that something can be impossible.
I "met" you when i read this story:) So if you don't want me to say thank you for "marketing examples" I will thank you for "Kanye Story" :DD-
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Very flattering. Thank you Alex
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Happy Tuesday Indie Hackers👋,
The devmates.co reached 1,500+ users.
Below I’ve shared some thoughts which helped me do it.
Last few weeks I decide to stop doing what I’m usually do for getting users - contact them directly. I decide to try sharing link on different platforms like reddit or dev.to.
I decide to do it because contacting users directly don’t scale and It will be hard to scale it somehow.
What I’ve done:
I shared the link directly to devmates.co , share link to problems/solutions to show what users can expect, share just problem and trying to start discussion. Everything sounded like a plan in my head. But it won’t work.
First of all I faced that reddit is not very friendly platform for promotion anything.
I got more traffic but it was not a good quality. My conversion rate decrease by 3 times and I got few haters:D
Dev.to is friendly platform but a lot of people are posting there every day so your article can be lost somewhere in the thread very fast.
I decide to stop doing it and return to my previous way of getting users - contact them directly. I would recommend to do it for everyone who just start creating something.
Why?
You can control who can be your users.
You can get honest feedback in friendly way.
You can start building a great relationships with different people.
I thought that’s better to have 1000 users and growth slow than have 100,000 visitors and 0% conversion rate.
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Thanks Alex for your tips! And good luck!
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You are welcome! If you will need any tips or some details - let me know. I'll share everything that I know:)
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Now companies send 3/4 days "coding challenges" because of people promoting free labour like you, speculative work is bad and unethical, should not be accepted in any industry
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Srsly? Do not confuse homework from companies with hourly coding interviews - which any company are doing. We are sending coding problems to learn algorithms and data structures and be more confident on the real interview.
Usually on coding phone / on-site interviews you will be asked 1-2 problems in 1 hour + some behavior questions. Also all the time you have a choice - say no and choose another company which will not ask you anything.
By the way, I would love to know your opinion about how top tech companies can filter their candidates? By what? Photo or resume? Just note that they gets thousands of resumes on each position.
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Most of tests I've been receiving requires at least 3/6 hours for someone with reasonable experience but some companies been asking me to build production apps as part of the interview, spending few days learning a new technology/tool/whatever is ridiculous, but also shipping the whole code does not guarantee an offer because you know we have to do the cultural fit.
I am happy for your success just sayin not every company is SpaceX, Amazon or Google, usually the best candidates don't want to work for a shitty startup with 12 employees so there's a thing called working-interview, it's not very popular in the tech industry, sending automated message to 200 applicants is more fun
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Love your hustle and the site design is so cool. Keep going, it keeps us going,. Reddit is full of pretention for some reason and very negative. Wish someone would tell them to calm down and help build things lol
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Hi Steve. Thanks for feedback, really appreciate it. 🙌
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That's that magic number for subscriber based sites!! Congrats!
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Thanks man!
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Nice work Alex!
Would you be interested in getting mentioned on careermove.io newsletters? The audience are mostly freelance developers who might need your service.
In return, you can also tell your users about CareerMove's freelance platform.
What do you think?
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Hi! Thank you. First of all it would be nice to know some real numbers;)
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Hello Indie Hackers👋,
The devmates.co hit 1000 users. It’s a special moment for me. Thanks, everyone for the support.
Below I’ve shared some thoughts which helped me do it.
🐣 Start small
When I start working on something I have a lot of ideas and awesome features in my head. But the trick is to start small. Don’t try to automate everything or build a complex system from the beginning. Just try to resolve the user’s problem immediately.
🚀 Provide real value.
Try to resolve some problem. With this product, I’m resolving my own problem - preparing for the coding interviews. I’ve received a few invites to FAANGs interviews. When I start preparing for this I realized that coding interviews doesn’t correlate with the real job at all.
Сoding interviewing - it's a skill which you should develop. I’ve started searching and resolving problems which were asked by companies. To be more accountable on this process I decide to do it together with someone. I made a newsletter from this and now we solve these problems together
👨💻 Speak to your users
Don’t just put your link somewhere and wait till everything goes well. Try to take part in conversations, answer questions, write comments, be active in those communities in which you want to promote your product.
Let me know if you have any questions.
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Your product looks great, I loved the idea of receiving the solution next day, if you can't solve something, you can't just rush it up and look the solution, you are force to wait... And probably while you wait you can realize how to solve it or at least have new ideas!
Congrats for the milestone!-
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Hey Mariano👋
Thank you for your feedback, really appreciate it.😉
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By the way, Can I add your feedback to devmates.co to "What people say about us" section?
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Brilliant, what's next?
Keep it up
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Hi Danny! Thanks.🙌
I have huge plans on it. I'm trying to keep everything simple and continue working on growth users count.
Also working on adding new feature that will help people become better engineers in more convenient way. I hope it will works:)-
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Ohh, if you don't mind me asking - What's the new feature? I'm always interested in improving my dev skills
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Enjoy hearing about your progress, great work!
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Thanks Nathan! Trying to do my best😉
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Bang on!
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Hi Danica👋
Thanks for your feedback.
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Looks great!
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Thanks Pete. Love to see you here🙌
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Love your idea. Great execution!
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Good stuff Alex!
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Thanks Harry! 😉
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Great work Alex! Love what you're building with Devmates!
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Hi Alin🙌
Thank you! I'm trying to do my best. If you have any tips/hints/advices/feedback/whatever - let me know😉
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I like the design. I like the idea of receiving the solution the day after because in case you couldn't solve it, you get an idea of the approach and everything.
How will you differentiate from the "competitors"?
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Awesome. I recently wanted to dive onto the Arc.dev community and really underestimated their coding tests that were part of their vetting process. Mainly because I was doing them while my kids were running around instead of later in the evening.
I bet this will be handy to train myself and shake off some "rust" from my problem solving mindset-
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Hey Edwin,
Can I add your feedback to devmates.co to "What people say about us" section? -
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Hi Edwin. Thanks for join us🙌
Would love to hear your feedback later😉
Let me know if I can provide more value for you.Have fun😅
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Thanks for sharing your progress! I like the simple description of how it works on the homepage, and the inclusion of the logos of companies people want to get jobs at. It inspires confidence and legitimacy! Good job, keep going!
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Hi Joel! Thank you for your feedback. 🙌
Let me know if I can provide more values for you😉
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Congratulations on passing 1000! Just signed up myself. Love the idea of solving a puzzle a day - this looks like a nice complementary brain tease to the daily chess puzzles I'm doing on my commute
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Hi Jules! Thank you for your feedback. I appreciate it.🙌
Let me know if I could provide more value to you somehow.
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Congrats, it's big news for maker!
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Thanks! 😉
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Awesome product Alex!
Just wondering, have you begun to monetize this yet?
What are your plans for monetization?
Thanks!
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DAMN CONGRATS!! Your product is freakin' awesome! Signed up for sure!!!
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Hey man! 🙌
Thank you for your feedback. Really appreciate it. 😉 I'll do my best and will try to provide more value in future.
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Congrats and really interesting idea which I think will work wonders.
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Thank you Sean🙌
I hope so😉
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Go spam somewhere else dude.
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This comment was deleted 3 years ago
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Hi Li👋
Thank you for you question. From the totally beginning I just went to my potential users and start talking about my product directly. I want to get honest feedback.
I'm still doing it actually..
I don't know what product are you building but I guess this approach will work for you also. Just go to your potential users/customers and talk to them. -
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🎉 I just passed 500+ subscribers for our daily newsletters - https://devmates.co .
☕️ In the morning I open Twitter/Reddit/LinkedIn and start searching for potential users. I make the list of them and then start introducing myself and share a few words about my project.
🙌Do things that don't scale (http://paulgraham.com/ds.html)
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How do you engage people on Reddit? I find that Reddit can be really strict about no self-promotion or linking.
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Congratulations!!! This is absolutely brilliant, Alex! 🎉
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Thanks Courtney🙌!
I'm trying to do my best😉
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That design and UX is amazing! You should share how you thought about it, how you planned and finally how I did it!
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How did you make the landing page?
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Great Idea !!
Subscribed ! -
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I love this. I signed up. How do you plan to be different from leetcode in the long run?
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Would you mind sharing some example messages you have used for your DMs?
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Awesome growth. Question for you...
Are you sending DMs on twitter or tweeting out in the open? I'm trying to get more traction from twitter for my newsletter and using content but I need to be doing more of the doesn't scale stuff.
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Thank you! 👍
I'll try to answer as it is.😉
I'm just try to find people who might be interesting in my product and then try to contact them - very simple, nothing special.
Main part of this simple action is "might be interesting in my product".
How I contact them - doesn't matter. For some of them I can't contact directly because they close their DM, so I contact them publicly. If I can contact using DM - I do it.About your newsletter. If your potential subscribers/users/listeners in Twitter - just find them and try to tell about your product.
🙅♂️ Don't be annoying. Don't sell anything, just tell on what are you working and describe why they can be interested in it.
🤔 Do you have any content that can be interesting for person? Make TL;DR and share with link to full episode/article.
💪 Try to help people using your content. If you are sure that you provide real value - you know where to find these people ;)👨🏫For example: @harrydry don't hesitate to help people with some marketing tips. Do you know on what he is working? Website with marketing examples;) If people love what he is talking about - they will check his website and subscribe if they like it.
Hope my response if helpful for you😅
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Good write up. And thanks for S/O Alex!
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You are welcome!
Always happy to help🙌 Especially if you are doing awesome things
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Very helpful thanks.
I've been trying to follow @harrydry examples for repurposing my content on twitter.
But I really want / need to do some more direct 1 on 1 outreach. Will start doing as suggested 👍
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You are welcome😉
Share results if it will help you get some traction.
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Congrats! Are you planning on monetizing in the future?
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Thanks Maciej🙌
I have some ideas, but right now I'm working on providing more value for users.😉
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Good stuff right here, didn't knew about this
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Thanks Michael! You are welcome to join us😉
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This is awesome. Once you get other people writing about you and linking to you in their blogs I.e top day coding challenge newsletters. Then you’ll have traffic coming in without having to do direct. It’s a great way to start a fire though. Props. Also notice you worked at upwork that’s pretty dope.
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🙌Thanks man!
Hope people start writing about me soon😅Yes, I spent awesome time at R&D Department at Upwork. We've built good platform and millions of people are using it around the world. I guess it's top freelancing platform. I'm proud that I was the part of it.
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Wow, you've done it so fast! Congrats Alex. Mind elaborating on what % of people who come to your website sign up?
You could divide your new users (analytic) / email subs ...
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🙌Thanks Harry! It's awesome milestone for me. I set a goal - 2x my subscribers each week.. today is 3rd week:)
Hope to get 1k on the next one.📈Conversion rate is hight but we should note that I'm contacting users directly. I'm planning to share all numbers when I got 1k subscribers.. Because right now it doesn't make any sense. It's like saying that conversion rate is 50% when you get 2 visitors and 1 subscriber:))
😉Anyway thank you for you support and want to let you know that I'm using marketingexamples.com when I want to find some new ideas.
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I thought it might be that high. Because essentially everyone is coming over directly! Interesting. Thanks for sharing
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Yes kind of 80% of my traffic is direct.. That's why it's hard to make any conclusion or share any insights/advices.
I'm just looking for people who might be interesting in it and just contact them. Nothing special, takes a lot of time and effort but it works.😊
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This comment was deleted 7 years ago
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You can do this look alike sites with bulma.io
I have some templates if you want to play around.
https://michael-andreuzza.github.io/bulma-express/
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🎉 I just passed 250+ subscribers for our daily newsletters - https://devmates.co . Main lessons of this - do things that don't scale (http://paulgraham.com/ds.html).
☕️ In the morning I open Twitter/Reddit/LinkedIn and start searching for potential users. I make the list of them and then start introducing myself and share a few words about my project.
I afraid of doing it before, but then I realized that the worst things that could happen - they will say "not interesting".
🙌 Don't let your fear stop from doing what you want to do.
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This is simply Amazing! Good Job
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Thank you🎉I'm trying to do my best
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Congratulations! That link you shared seems like gold, I just skim read it, but I'll definitely be coming back to it later to read in more depth, nice find! I'm in the midst of cold calling for my first few users, so I understand the pain lol! (so much pain!)
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Thx🙌
This guy know what he is talking about😉
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Why do you wait 24 hours to send users their first problem? Is it possible for you to send the first problem the moment after they subscribe?
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Hi ceater259👋. Thanks for your question.
I'm doing everything manually. I don't automate mail sending (except welcome email). But I'll fix this soon.Do you have any other feedback? What do you want to see soon?
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Hey Alex,
The formatting for the emails is a bit weird? I use gmail as my email client and the entire email from Devmates isn't wrapping, so you have to scroll to see the entire coding question. This is kind of annoying. Here's a screenshot of what it looks like. https://imgur.com/a/kowkj5w
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Hey,
Thank you for feedback. For me everything looks great: https://imgur.com/oBQHt3D .But I'll notice this problem and will try to fix it soon.🙌
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Got it. No other feedback as I just signed up lol.
Will let you know in a couple of days after I can use your product.
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The value is in the list. Great job! That is awesome progress.
And you are so right: every "no" allows you to think about how your offer could be better or how you could find a better audience. Literally a win-win :)
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Yes, You never know what will work until you try to do it.😉
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This is a great idea @alexwawl! Congratulations on this milestone!
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Thank you! I'm trying to do my best🙌
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yo alex - great work. and i absolutely love the directness of that tactic!
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Hey Harry👋 Nice to see you here😅
I bet that can work for anyone - just be honest, provide a value and be a human. Before sending message ask yourself a question - "Will I be interested when I read it?".
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Although I'm not the target audience for this currently, it's a very well designed website, love it.
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Thx 🙌
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Thx for feedback.🙌
Will fix it!
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Woohoo! I've reached 100+ subscribers.
I don't have any communities or huge amount of followers so I have only 1 way that can work for me - reach everyone directly.
So I filter all potential users, find their contact info and start talking about my product.
I decide to make quiet soft launch to test the idea and reach potential users. It helps me identify am I moving to the right direction and verify my next steps. Product is totally free so I don't make any money of it. I'm just trying to resolve my own problem:)
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Great news!
I wish you good luck with you project!The only tip I can share, is to find people (friends or other people) and receive honest feedback about your product. This will give you better sense of where you going.
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