Host a Palooza

Huge milestone!

After a lot of time the first Host a Palooza bits went online.
Nothing too fancy but a simple landing page with a video of the product in action.

This was necessary in order to start building up followers when the real product will see the light.
Yes, because if the product itself could be ready for prime time i still have some bureaucracy to sort out, so let's use this time to at least start spreading the voice and why not, learn to make some marketing?

I'm not really into sales and marketing, i wish i can just build/drive the product organically with users and their feedbacks, so i'll spend the next days at understanding how i can do it.

Yes.

Errors were made (read: over-complication, tech perfectionism, etc.) and a lot of side-issues popped out (read: VAT MOSS in EU - as i'm Italy-based) and the development slowed down.

I was extremely lucky to have friends and family giving me emotional support, and kept reading product stories on Indie Hackers to keep me motivated.

At some point, around July 2021 i had something ready in my hands that could be put on the market, and some stuff like taxes management on online payments got fixed by Stripe with new awesome product features on their side.

Need to take a bit of rest, august on the sea side and then in september the last push to launch at least a landing page to start collecting emails and build vibrancy around the product.

Two months after chatting with my brother about how difficult was for him and his friends to find a game server hosting, i finished to craft a very awful prototype. I'm not even going to call it an MVP, and you can find a screenshot here: https://imgur.com/a/bPF62ux.

I quickly forwarded the demo to friends&co and the response was good enough for me to keep investing my time into this new adventure.

We were in the first months of the COVID lockdowns, when the world understood that was going to get fixed in 2 weeks.
Suddenly a lot of people were stuck in their houses, wondering how to spend all that free time.

I'm an avid online gamer, and used to host a lot of stuff for my team mates in the past.
As an example, when i was a bit more young, i hosted the team's forum and TeamSpeak on a Pentium 133 and my home DSL, or TF2 game servers with custom maps full every day, at every hour.

FFW today: several games need an online server to play, and very often it's quite complicated to find one. There are plenty of companies offering game servers, but all of them require monthly commitments, and it's difficult to understand which is the better one. Some of them take days to take your game servers online after the payment and if you play multiple games you need to pay for multiple servers.

Here comes by brother, explaining all his frustration at finding a decent game server hosting: he plays with friends, and they play multiple games - very often even for just a night before understanding they don't like it.
We chatted a bit, and in the end it was clear that there was a lack on the market, so that's why i decided to wrap my experience (as a sysadmin and a long-time software developer) to try and build something like this

• game server hosting
• hourly billing, with pre-charged credit (no recurring fees/subscriptions)
• no signup required: you invite a Bot in a Discord Server and you are ready to go at creating/starting/shutting down your servers

I then committed myself to spend the commuting time saved by the lockdown at building something like that.