FeedbackHQ
Collect customer feedback in Notion
Four days after setting myself the target of launching FeedbackHQ in 2022, I've shipped it!
Sharing my goal publicly definitely gave me the kick I needed to take the leap -- thanks to the Indiehackers community for helping with this.
Now FeedbackHQ is live and I'm happy with the product, I'm going to focus on marketing.
Initially, this means improving the landing page (it's a bit thrown together at the moment, please let me know any comments you might have, all feedback is welcome -- or use the widget!)
Then I'll be planning next steps for doing some actual marketing. I'm not too fussed about making $, so I've included a generous freemium tier which I'm hopeful will be useful for incentivising people to take on the friction of integrating FeedbackHQ with their websites/apps.
Next update will be sharing how the launch and first couple of days of FeedbackHQ went 👌
I've indiehacked a couple of side projects in the past: an A/B testing tool (rewritten twice, shipped zero times); and a Twitter keyword monitoring tool (renamed three times, bought two domains, shipped zero times)... but I've never actually pressed "Publish" on a side project before.
There are a few of reasons for this:
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Laziness. I love building software and making a product. I'm not really a huge fan of selling it online. Once I've gotten the enjoyment and dopamine from building the damn thing, there's very little motivation for me to actually put it out there
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Shipping products alone is daunting. If something doesn't work -- it's entirely on you.
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Time. I'm super lucky to have an amazing 9-5 job that I absolutely love. I work with a great team on a product I really believe in and have great pride + passion for. If I'm feeling in the mood to program in the evenings, I'll often prefer to do a bit of my day job than work on something of my own!
So I'm making an extremely late New Year's Resolution for 2022 -- to finally ship a side project.
I've built FeedbackHQ on and off across five months of evenings and weekends, and everything is pretty much ready. I just need to do a few final tests and then I'm stepping into the unknown -- shipping!
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Just crossed this bridge myself this past month. I 100% recommend it!
Even with just the code side of things, there are all sorts of stuff you don't think about until your product is actually shipped.
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Yep - looking forward to being on the other side of the bridge!
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Heavily relate to the thoughts behind shipping products.
Reminds me of an essay: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/04/11/the-development-abstraction-layer-2/
In particular:
Any successful software company is going to consist of a thin layer of developers, creating software, spread across the top of a big abstract administrative organization.
The abstraction exists solely to create the illusion that the daily activities of a programmer (design and writing code, checking in code, debugging, etc.) are all that it takes to create software products and bring them to market.
Finding this out slowly myself: only once you start shipping do you begin to viscerally notice all of the "business stuff" that we developers usually take for granted :-)
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This was a really interesting read, thanks for sharing. It's nice to just focus on code but at the end of the day that isn't enough!
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Sounds good. Shipping at first was really daunting. I was super nervous the first time I published a SaaS. But once you get into the hang of things you'll be deploying constantly.
Just remember to do marketing.
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Cheers Iain! Yep the marketing part is still one I've yet to figure out. Will be focusing on that fully once it's deployed
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My fav book on the subject is 1-page marketing plan. It's small and simple. Another good one is Traction.
My first two attempts I sucked at marketing and then spent months reading books. Third thing I launched got more hits in the first 24 hours and the other two did combined for the entire lifespan.
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I can totally relate to this. I've had my fair share of products I built but didn't actually publish, so I'm actually making one of my products open-source, so that I get the excitement of building something but also some visibility. Hope it works for you this time and looking forward to reading your findings
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Awesome! Every step brings new challenges and new things to learn.
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Good luck with taking the plunge. I've just made the leap myself - side project became my main project. It being pre-revenue makes it a bit of a scary change, but I'm hoping that it will payoff long term.
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Hi Will,
You must have already seen it, the testimonial.io success is a proof it's something needed. All the best!-
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Thanks! :)
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Your story sounds like my story. Well done and congrats on taking the leap!
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Cheers, appreciate it!
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