Everbase

I'm back! I had to take a 3-month hiatus from working on Everbase due to some intense RSI pain. So there wasn't much progress, until recently. Some time for recovery and an ergonomic mouse later and I'm ready to get things done again. Last week I released a web scraping API and I'm very happy with it. Let's hope my users feel the same.

Surprisingly, Everbase has reached 100 registered users while I was away. Growing that further is my goal now. Currently, I'm working on improving the documentation and I'll attempt to also get some Google traffic that way. People searching for "GraphQL + X", where X is something Everbase does.

I also found and fixed a few nasty bugs in my open-source GraphQL library. It has gathered a couple of stars, but not that many, so I also want to promote it a little. I might also move it to GitHub because it seems that GitLab ranks a lot worse on Google.

For now, I'm just glad to be back. Onward to 1000 registered users.

A week into our launch, we have acquired our first users. Two to be exact. That's not a lot, but it matches my expectations. As I've mentioned in my launch post, I don't expect a lot to happen in the short term when it comes to users. A malfunctioning API can break your website, so it makes sense that people don't want to use one that just came out. The main goal right now is to get the name out there and to gather feedback.

I've gotten a good amount of feedback from people on IH. I've learned that GraphQL is a tough sell for people who've never used it. I need to do a better job of explaining why Everbase uses GraphQL and how it is better than a REST API. But it's also a good idea to focus more on marketing to people who already know and use GraphQL.

As planned, I invested a couple of hours to promote Everbase. We are now on the APIs.guru list of GraphQL APIs, which is driving a decent amount of traffic to our site. I've also submitted Everbase to ProgrammableWeb today, where it is awaiting review.

Most of my time this week went into building a new GraphQL server library for Crystal and I'm very happy with the result. After a bit of testing, it will be released as open-source, which should give us further exposure to the GraphQL community.

Overall, I'm happy with how it went. I intentionally did not set any crazy expectations so there is no reason to be disappointed. I improved the service and did a bit of marketing. Rinse and repeat.

After applying the last few bits of polish, I just went for it and started marketing Everbase. While there are still a lot of things I want to do, none of it is essential for day one. I’m far beyond MVP territory at this point.

Marketing a new SaaS product is not an easy task. I’ve started promoting it on Reddit and I will post regular updates here on IH. It’s exciting to be a part of this community that supports each other, I love the positive vibes here.

I will not post on HN and PH just yet because I feel more mature products do better there. I'm also not sure we can handle the load to our backend. At the moment the backend is hosted on a single server, but a more potent setup based on Kubernetes is coming soon.

There are a few libraries that I built for Everbase that I will release as open-source, which will hopefully get us some eyeballs.

Other than that, I’m not sure. I’ve always had a hard time marketing a new product, and I get why. Most of the things I use myself have been around for quite some time, and I wouldn’t build my business on a brand new service either. So I will take it slow, spend a couple of hours on marketing every week while continuously improving the service.