FusedHR
Time and expense tracking for businesses
Background: Architected and developed by 3 senior engineers working in a FAANG company.
We wanted to share some insights into our tech stack, which we designed meticulously, keeping in mind the needs of indie product developers like ourselves. Our goal was to create a highly efficient, scalable and easy-to-maintain stack.
Here's a quick overview:
- .NET Core Backend with Domain Driven Design (DDD)
- React Frontend with MaterialUI
- NoSQL Database on CosmosDB
- Hosting on Microsoft Azure
Let's dive deeper into the reasons behind choosing each technology:
1. .NET Core Backend with Domain Driven Design (DDD)
As indie product developers, we need a powerful and versatile backend framework. .NET Core is an open-source, cross-platform framework developed by Microsoft, which allows us to build high-performance, scalable applications.
Moreover, Domain Driven Design (DDD) enables us to focus on the core business requirements and model our software accordingly. This helps us in maintaining a clean and modular codebase. With DDD, we can easily adapt to evolving requirements, making it an excellent fit for indie developers who often need to pivot or iterate on their products quickly. This topic is so big that it can have it's own post.
2. React Frontend with MaterialUI
React has proven to be an incredibly popular and powerful choice for frontend development. Its component-based architecture, excellent performance, and wide ecosystem of libraries make it an ideal choice for indie developers. We can create reusable components, which streamlines our development process and saves us valuable time.
MaterialUI is a React UI framework that follows Google's Material Design guidelines. It offers a comprehensive set of pre-built components and styling options, ensuring a consistent look and feel across our application.
3. NoSQL Database on CosmosDB
As indie developers, we need a database that can scale with our projects as they grow. CosmosDB, Microsoft's NoSQL database, is a perfect fit for our needs. It offers seamless scalability, low-latency access to data, and support for various data models, including document, key-value, graph, and column-family.
By using a NoSQL database, we can store data in a flexible format, which makes it easier to work with and modify as our application evolves. This flexibility is essential for us, who often need to adapt their data models to changing requirements and make data migrations super easy.
4. Hosting on Microsoft Azure
Moreover, Azure's pay-as-you-go pricing model is budget-friendly for us, ensuring that we only pay for the resources we use. This enables us to keep our costs low while still benefiting from a powerful and reliable cloud platform. For example, we have set automatic schedules to shutdown certain dev environments when there is no work being performed -- and the static web hosting has a free plan which is perfect.
We hope our insights into our tech stack choices have been helpful to you. We believe that this combination of technologies provides indie developers with the tools they need to create successful products efficiently and effectively.
Feel free to share your thoughts and experiences with similar tech stacks or any questions you may have about ours.
Free and unlimited access to all features for FusedHR early adopters
We also offer an early access program that gives all features on the platform for free forever to accepted users. Apply here to try FusedHR for free and transform the way you manage your projects.
Hey fellow indie developers!
As you know, building and launching a product can be quite an adventure. Today, I'm excited to share our fantastic experience soft launching FusedHR, our time tracking, billing and expense management product for small to medium businesses.
The Soft Launch: Offering a Lifetime Free Plan for Closed Beta Participants
To ensure that our product was tailored for the needs of our target audience, we decided to run a closed beta program. The sweetener to entice participants? A lifetime free plan for everyone who joined the beta!
It turned out to be a fantastic decision. Our community of indie developers embraced the opportunity and provided us with invaluable feedback, helping us shape FusedHR into a truly user-friendly and effective tool. The closed beta allowed us to identify and address any bugs, gather suggestions for improvements, and ultimately ensure that FusedHR was the best it could be.
Our Learnings
The soft launch and closed beta program taught us a great deal. Here are some of the key takeaways from our experience:
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Incentives matter: Offering a lifetime free plan was a game-changer. It encouraged users to provide honest and thorough feedback, knowing that they were shaping a product they'd have access to for life. This not only helped us improve FusedHR but also fostered a sense of community and loyalty among our users.
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Communication is key: Establishing open channels of communication with our beta participants allowed us to quickly identify and address any issues. We learned that being responsive to user feedback and maintaining a dialogue with our community played a crucial role in the success of our soft launch.
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Iterate and improve: The closed beta gave us the opportunity to test, tweak and perfect FusedHR before its official launch. We learned that embracing an iterative approach to development enabled us to create a more polished and refined product in the end.
What We Would Do Differently Next Time
While our soft launch was a success, there are always lessons to be learned. Here's what we'd do differently next time:
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Set clearer expectations: While our users were excited about the lifetime free plan, we could have done a better job of communicating the expectations for their participation in the beta. In the future, we'd provide clearer guidelines on the type of feedback we're looking for, and how users can best contribute to the product's development.
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Plan for scalability: The response to our closed beta exceeded our expectations, and we quickly realized that we needed to scale our resources to accommodate the influx of users. Next time, we'd prepare for potential growth more effectively to ensure a smoother experience for users and our team alike.
Don't Miss Out – Sign Up for Our Closed Beta!
If you're a fellow indie developer interested in time tracking and expense management tools, we are now prepared again to invite you to join our closed beta program! We're still looking for enthusiastic participants who can provide feedback and help us make FusedHR even better.
Sign up now and be part of our growing community of developers shaping the future of time tracking and expense management for small to medium businesses. We can't wait to have you on board!
In conclusion, the soft launch and closed beta of FusedHR have been an incredible learning experience for our team. The feedback and support we received from our community have been invaluable, and we look forward to continuing this journey together. Remember, there's always room for improvement, and your insights can help make FusedHR the best it can be. So, let's continue to collaborate, iterate, and create amazing products for the indie developer community!
Happy coding!
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