Fast.io

We've dramatically improved how you customize your site. Plus, we've improved the way your folder and files are rendered. Now you can create a beautiful landing page for all your content in just a few clicks. Go from boring Google Drive links to beautiful Fast.io landing pages. It's great for professional file sharing, replacing your social media bio-links, or creating a mini personal homepage.

Next up today is File landing pages. You can enable the landing page for a file by clicking the palet ( 🎨 ) icon on the file row and enabling the landing page.

Here's an example:
https://tlangridge.imfast.io/Videos/MVI_1333.mp4/view/

File landing pages work great for PDFs, Videos, Audio, and even Photos.
PDF: https://demosite.imfast.io/Ebooks/The-Machine-Stops.pdf/view/

Last, but not least, we made some tweaks to improve share-images. Now, if you add a header image or background image (or if what you're sharing is an image), we'll use white text with a dark overlay. This makes it much easier to read the text in the image and improves the overall look of them. Here's what mine looks like now:

https://tlangridge.imfast.io

Every day more people are taking advantage of Fast.IO's simple folder pages to share professional and creative work. We love seeing the creative community adopting our tools so we’re “doubling-down” on this feature and adding some powerful enhancements.

Here’s what’s new:

💈 First, you can now add your own branding to the page. Display your company logo or personal profile picture on every shared folder.

🎨 We now also let you pick from a few default color themes, including dark and light options, and we now also let you completely customize every color on the page so you can make your FastIO content destination completely match your brand.

🖼 Last, but not least, you can now also add cover images and thumbnails to every folder (and file) in your site. This way you can create a completely “on-brand” content destination or file repository to share with your leads, clients, partners, or fans.

I didn’t mean for this to sound like a marketing pitch, but I’m excited for what this feature actually lets you do. We’re going deep with creatives and brand and I can’t wait to share the next set of features we plan to launch soon.

It's been a while, IndieHackers. I feel like the past 6 months have flown by in what feels like a matter of weeks. In that time we've onboarded 15,000 people into our synced, large-file, CDN platform - a few big customers, too! It's been exciting to start seeing our platform get some serious global use.

As exciting as that's all been, it's still taken much longer than we thought to grow an organic userbase and we don't feel like we've reached true "product-market fit" yet. And so, we pivot.

Some of our biggest wins have been unsolicited press stories about the product which have resulted in permanent steps up in our daily signups. We've gained an almost cult following among junior front-end developers who have found our product to be a great place to host their portfolio websites and we've also gained a number of e-learning, software distribution, and media production companies among our more serious users who are pushing out some pretty impressive traffic numbers.

More importantly, almost daily we get a least one message from a user telling us they think our product is amazing, or that they love it. We know we're on to something - we're just not entirely sure exactly what it is yet. And yet, it's getting clearer.

Since launch, we spent a total of about $1k to test paid ads testing the Amazon S3 file hosting market - probably too small an amount to really vet such a large market, but still, the results were not good and we've moved on from such strategies.

Instead, we're doubling down on creating a better publishing experience within our product in the expectation that it will help increase our growth through word-of-mouth.

A few months ago, we also saw a new opportunity in the market that our technology could address with only minor changes. Since then we've begun laying the groundwork for a re-launch of our product, adapted to focus on a new target customer.

A few weeks ago, we launched the first minor feature to support this new vision; a customization tool that lets you change the theme of your shared folder and file list.

Next, we'll be launching much more capable customization tools and a set of features focused on helping our users capture value from the people who come to download your content. You can read more about that here: https://fast.io/landing-pages/

Wish us luck!

This post is a few days overdue, we launched on November 20th and we've signed up exactly 520 users since then as of this post.

For the first two days we were trending on Product Hunt and Hacker News, so a majority of our new users came from those two venues. As a result, we captured some interesting anecdotal data based on users who've signed up since then. There's no doubt some bias in the data due to our association with MediaFire but still, here it is.

Storage Provider breakdown of our first users:

Google Drive: 42%

GitHub: 28%

MediaFire: 10%

Dropbox: 10%

OneDrive: 8%

Box: 2%

(forgive the formatting, I'm not sure how to do anything other than plain text in here)

About 10% of those users are still active as of today, I think that's actually not bad but I think we could be doing more to re-engage users after signup - better email onboarding and remarketing is on my to-do list for today.

We've also had a premium conversion rate of 1% since we launched, which again, I believe could be better, perhaps we're giving away too much for free. Our sales funnel is not very mature yet so we'll be spending more time on improving it and testing alternative messaging and paid advertising targeted at several use cases that we've seen users exploring based on our conversations with early enthusiastic users and our analytics data.

Some of my favorite tweets from our launch users:

"⚡️ Just tried & deployed
@fastdotio
in just 2mins!
💨 "WTF" - "WHAT THE FAST!!"
Mind-blowing fast deploy! - https://ilovefajarsiddiq.imfast.io
💻 Can't believe the future of static site is here.
😎 You can add other cloud provider:
@googledrive @Dropbox @onedrive and many more."

"literally 2 days ago I've been looking for cheap CDN and everything was starting with ~50$/month which is a lot if you want to use just a fraction of bandwidth and storage - big upvote for this one"

"Amazing! Firebase only has 20+ server locations so http://Fast.io is really ahead here. Looking forward to the Akamai deployment!"

Also on our agenda - maybe we can come up with a better tag line "Simple Enterprise File Hosting" might be a little too abstract? Any suggestions for a better one?

Okay, that's enough for now! Back to work!

What a day, first Product Hunt launch, and now we're trending on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21589213

We've received 62 new customers today already, off to a good start! Things are picking up and we've received a lot of great feedback already. If you're on HN, feel free to join the conversation over there too!

What a crazy day. Shout out to the other IndieHackers (Versoly and Servicebot) who we launched with today and congratulations!

We're excited to be officially launching Fast.io today!

Our platform is a solution for designers, developers, and marketers looking to automate everything needed to host and track files and static websites at an enterprise scale.

We developed Fast.io because we recognized that the process of deploying static content today is complicated and time-consuming. Solutions like S3 require manual uploading, a separate CDN configuration, a manual review of raw data logs, and tedious cache flushing each time you make an update.

We want to get content online quickly with the simplicity and ease of use of cloud storage without sacrificing the reliable scalability and performance of a CDN

Fast.io tightly integrates with your current workflows and preferred cloud storage service (Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, MediaFire, Box, and GitHub) to manage files. It includes an integrated CDN, using CloudFlare and Akamai for lightning-fast global deploys, a visual dashboard, and detailed, accurate analytics data sent to Google Analytics and Mixpanel.

We’d love for you to check it out and we appreciate any and all feedback - https://www.producthunt.com/posts/fast-io

If you’re curious about more of the benefits and features of Fast.io, here is an overview of what our simple enterprise file distribution network delivers:

• Free Features -
  Continuous integration from cloud storage or version control
  Files up to 500MB each
  100GB free transfer per month
  Foolproof Analytics collected directly on the CDN
  Custom domains and free included SSL (HTTPS)
  Automatic updates and global deployment from cloud storage or version control
  Automatic image optimization
  Automatic code minification
  Automatic directory listings
  Slack integration

• Premium Features -
  Files up to 1GB each
  200GB free transfer per month
  $0.06 per GB additional transfer
  Password protection
  Custom error pages

• Business Features -
  Files up to 20GB each
  500GB free transfer per month
  $0.05 per GB additional transfer

We still haven't officially announced our launch and yet we got our first paying customer today, totally organically! Great news to wake up to on a weekend.

We've been onboarding quite a few new users every day now thanks to some simple outreach we've been doing through social media (Facebook groups and Twitter). Slowly it's starting to seem like we're gaining traction among design and marketing agencies.

We still have a lot of work to do before we officially launch, but we're planning to go live on Product Hunt next week.

We're rolling! We've been user testing and requesting feedback from friends and colleagues so we've had plenty of people sign-up already. Today, however, we received our first unsolicited signup and usage! We're not sure how they found us, but it feels great to see someone fully utilizing our service (successfully!) for a real use case.

We did it! Finally! We're not officially launched yet, but being able to invite our first test users into the service is a huge milestone for us. Our MVP ended up being far heavier than we'd planned - keeping things simple is very difficult! We're proud of what we've built and can't wait to officially launch it in the coming weeks.

It was a quite a blow to lose our key front-end developer. We regrouped and decided to take the opportunity to redevelop our entire frontend in React and redesign the UI to target the use cases we identified in our initial launch. We hired a new frontend-developer and began work of rearchitecting the UX and flow of the entire app.