DialTone
Automated phone system for Shopify stores
Talked with a fellow indie hacker from our local group, and he suggested offering a free plan to gain some customers. My hope is that it will give me a base to conduct interviews.
Since there are some costs associated with providing each plan (each number has a monthly charge + usage fees per minute), I decided the plan will include a free local number and 100 minutes per month. My hope is this will be enough for many smaller stores or for stores that are just starting out. I kind of think of it as a marketing/research budget.
And I can always disable it if it's not working. Maybe cap it to 6 months.
After spending 4 days building out the backend, I spent nearly as much as time on the sales page.
But I did all the design myself (logo, page design, copy writing, css), so it kinda makes sense. Also, I think a clear sales page is probably just as important and deserving just as much attention as a backend.
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Congratulations! 🎉 Could you tell us more about how you have built backend for dialtone. Stack & hosting, db etc.,?
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Thanks!
This project is built using SvelteKit https://kit.svelte.dev
I chose it because a) Svelte has been a joy to use, and b) it can deploy to cloud functions (I'm using Vercel). That means I won't have much to do to scale this up - which is kind of important for a phone system.
The app is basically an integration of Shopify and Twilio. Specifically the Twilio Voice API. It uses Twilio's Number API to pick and assign a Toll-Free number, and then when a call is made to the number, Twilio calls one of my app's endpoint which returns Twiml (xml format for phone systems). ie it could return
<Say>Thanks for calling Margies Cup Cakes</Say>and Twilio would output that as speech with a synthetic voice.The other integration is with Shippo https://goshippo.com, I use them to lookup tracking numbers. So if the caller wants to check their order status, they enter their order number and zip code, the app calls Shippo's API to get the latest info and then reads it back to the caller.
I also did the design work myself, with a lot of inspiration from the Refactoring UI book https://www.refactoringui.com/. That part has actually taken me more time than the backend.
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Second this. Also how you came up with the idea
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I had this idea a few months ago when I was running daily experiments:
https://1000experiments.dev/posts/e-commerce-phone-systemThe other day a consulting client mentioned they have a heavy phone support workload around the holiday season, so I figured this project could maybe work.
What it had going for it: I felt most of it could be built in a week, giing more time to do marketing, and I likely have a first customer. So to me that's enough to try it out.
Also, I used to work at Shopify, so I know a lot about the system, which can't hurt.
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Featured your product on my SaaS Community - https://my.chandrasaas.com/c/saas/dialtone?
Good luck to you Joshnuss
Venkat
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Thanks Venkat! Much appreciated
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Congrats.
Fyi, the <strong> tag in the <p> under your <h1> isn't bold on my mac/chrome. I don't think the font weight is included in the page. Rather than include the font weight may I suggest just adding the colour #324d67 (same as H1) to the <strong> to make it pop but fit in.
Also much appreciation for your svelte repo's. They have been super helpful while learning svelte.
Good luck with DialTone.
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Thanks for the suggestion @_goodjobjohn! I'll update the styles.
and glad you found those repos helpful, svelte is pretty nice to work with.
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Just curious, are you a backend or full stack developer by trade?
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I do a bit of both. Most of my career was backend, but lately doing a bit more frontend too.
More projects here: https://github.com/joshnuss
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Decided to use the Labor Day weekend to start a new SaaS project. I reviewed all my ideas searching for something that could be coded in a week. I wanted to make sure that I could get to a decent launch within a month, but I know from experience that coding should take a maximum of 25% of the time.
The rest of the time needs to be spent on marketing, design, and customer research.
After 4 days of all-day coding, the core features were done, and I consider the project feature complete for a launch. Though there is a lot of UI tweaking to do, that can be done in conjunction with marketing, and it provides visuals that are shareable. So it gives me new material to share every few days.
Wish me luck...
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