FIers

Created a newsletter.

Started with 60 subscribers. First post had 60% opens, 80+ views and 1 unsubscribe.

https://firefriar.substack.com/p/building-a-simple-budgeting-tool

Currently posting on the fiers.co website, Medium and Substack. Learned that it's a lot of work to keep these in sync. Once posting I'm also sending a tweet and replying to others who have tweeted something relevant. Not expecting big wins overnight :).

The first person I did not know signed up for an account. They found the site through a post I made on Reddit. In addition to signing up they created a forecast and sent me an email.

I kept acquiring a couple users per day and engagement was very high with visitors (including the ones which did not sign up).

More like a prototype. I shared this with people I knew. You signed up with just an email address and no password. There were lots of bugs. But it worked.

And I received positive feedback.

I went really old school with the site. PHP, Apache, flat files on disk for the database, jQuery, Bootstrap and hardly any ajax (and definitely no React). It felt good to get back to my roots.

While driving to go skiing with my kids, I came up with my idea. I spent the entire day in the car and on the slopes refining the idea in my head.

By the time I got back home I was pretty convinced that the idea had legs. I shared it with a friend who didn't think it was terrible. That was all I needed and it was off to the races.