DiffHub

DiffHub is in private beta, on average I onboard about 10 new users a week, which is ok for now allowing me to talk to each one individually, get feedback and at the same time iterate on the product.

Yesterday it was a bit different, beta requests started to pile up in my inbox, but had no clue why as I didn't do any marketing push.

Checked analytics and noticed lots of users come from https://stackshare.io ... but, who submitted it?

I keep a daily log in a markdown file, I write about the building process, what I work on, how I feel about it and other relevant or irrelevant notes. Checked that, it was in the notes! 🤦🏻‍♂️

Seems I submitted it a week or so ago, like in most app directories, just to get listed, no planning, no expectations.

2 things I've learned:

• audience can be found where you least expect
• a product log is valuable, but also fun to read your thoughts & assumptions from previous weeks

Just deployed a new landing page for the service, not a major design change, but big changes in terms of page structure and content.

I created a demo video so potential users can see how easy it is to create an automated test for their website.

Updated the whole copy, focused on benefits rather than features, got rid of tech jargon and hopefully made it appealing to non technical people.

Any feedback would be much appreciated: https://diffhub.com

Thanks @olly for the previous page review on this topic https://www.indiehackers.com/post/post-your-saas-landing-page-and-ill-do-a-five-min-video-review-today-18464aaebd

For the past 6-7 weeks I've been constantly talking to the beta users, listening to their feedback and thinking how I can make their life easier.

I've tried multiple iterations, cut down on features (yep, initial MVP had too many) and used the time to solve the critical points. Today I'm happy to be able to wrap up a major update and have users play with it, looking forward to hear what they have to say.

Started to think about pricing, still torn between freemium and free trial.

If you want to give it a try https://diffhub.com

Achieved the goal to have the MVP ready within 6 weeks, worked during weekends and very early in the morning, woke up almost every day at 4am to be able to dedicate on average 3h/day for it but also keep up with client work, family and workouts.

I got in too much detail for now with some of the features and spend more time that wanted on minor things, but I learned a lot and I'm happy to finally be able to the get first users try it out and listen to feedback.

Last week I did less coding and spent more time analysing other products on the market, reading about automated testing and refined the idea. The direction became much clearer: build a service that solves the initial problem, which requires no code to be written and be so easy to understand and use so I can have my clients set up their own tests.

Just put up a landing page page with a MailJet subscription widget, tweeted about what I'm building and started a Google Ads campaign. Got a couple of leads interested in trying out the beta version, but the beta version was just in my head so I need to start executing on it, refactor everything I built so far.

Two weeks into it, I have the frontend built with Vue & Tailwind CSS and the initial functionality working, the developer in me is very excited as I created and solved a ton of problems.

I have in mind plenty of use cases, I could use this tool for end to end testing, competitor website monitoring, product price change alerts, uptime monitor, web archive, basically I have a product that can do everything for everyone.

Did a screen recording and sent it to a few clients, the feedback I received was really valuable but not that encouraging: nice but too broad, figure out which is the problem you want to solve and do it well.

Back to the "drawing board", 4 weeks left.

I know I want a tool to alert me on page changes and have an overview of what changed, kind of how you see code differences in GitHub. There are some services out there doing it but the pricing is ridiculous, I can also do it in Jenkins but just too big bazooka for this and don't really enjoy writing tests.

I'm planning for some time to build a shiny new project, a SPA that runs serverless, so I'll jump into building this.

I heard DHH on a podcast episode talking about the 6-week project cycle from Basecamp, so I decided to apply that and set the goal to have a decent MVP ready by the end of November.

I was working on a web scrapper to help a client extract and structure data from their old site, when realised I can use pretty much the same tech to solve another problem: monitoring changes on older projects.

It happened quite often, especially on Wordpress projects, that a minor code change from the theme editor or non tech savvy person doing a content updates to have a major effect, broken links, broken layout or even worse.

It also happened that I get to find it out by accident, a couple of days later, so I need a tool to prevent it.