fireful

After the last update, I went to Reddit to ask for some first impressions. Following the post, I got about a hundred visits with some returning visitors, and one who read the Reddit post about a week later happened to invest quite some time into using the app and providing some very valuable feedback.

I wasn't expecting the Reddit post to be so effective: It has ranked quite high up the Google results for some of my target keywords, and I can see more new users coming in through that post in the future.

More unexpected was the impact of a few engaging users on my overall motivation. Since the post, I've been feeling much better about fireful.

This week I decided to soft-launch fireful.io as-is for free.

Another six to seven months passed by with fireful sitting on the back of my mind occupying a huge chunk, when finally last week I decided to come face to face with the question: "Abandon-ship!" or "All hands on deck!"?

I quickly fired up the app, and the question immediately followed: Why the heck have I not already launched this working awesome looking baby?

I did some digging deep down to answer that question honestly, and I think the reason is I just don't feel comfortable pushing something when it's obviously just marketing.

Now that the product is free, I feel that I can be genuine as I communicate my product in firebase forums, Reddit, Facebook groups, etc, and maybe then I will start thinking that I did something valuable worth asking money for...

At least that's the story I'm currently telling myself. Guess my next post will tell whether I got it right.

After spending way too much time on small details building fireful in the last weeks, motivation loss was beginning to creep up on me, eating away at my will to complete what I had started and triggering short runs of self-doubt and anxiety.

About a week ago my reasonable self told me I had to quit everything I'm doing, just throw together a simple website showing what my product does and communicate the idea out. Then I read this blog post about early access (open beta invite) strategy: and thought it would be a good way to get over my perfectionism, show what I have and see if there is any interest.

I'm basically collecting emails of people who are interested in trying out fireful in their firebase projects. I'm monitoring how many of my visitors are signing up, so if I see any potential here I think this will give me the motivation to really focus on fireful in the coming weeks.

Fireful is a form (or admin-panel) builder for firebase projects which gives developers a super easy & quick way to throw together forms to manage their firestore data.

I talked to a few developers using firebase for small apps and websites, and all had myriad issues using firebase console:

1. Ugly and cumbersome firestore editor
2. No validations so things could break easily
3. Uploading images & linking from firestore a big hassle

I had already built a form-generator for firestore for another project and decided to build on it and see if others would show interest.

After 6 months of working on it as a side project, I'm now getting ready to launch the beta website where I can showcase the current features and ask for feedback.

Really looking forward to being a part of and hearing back from the IH community after being a silent follower for over two years!