Invest And Forget

https://github.com/immccc/cryptoswapadvisor (PolyForm NonCommercial license)

Hey everyone!

It's been quite an exciting ride releasing this project I've been working on these past months, and watching it grow from a Telegram digest with crypto coins to invest, to a full bot as a service in multiple flavours.

As briefly mentioned in my profile here, I'm a SWE hidden behind full time jobs that, despite being quite stimulating and challenging — working on systems at scale with high throughput, high availability and that sort of checkpoints anyone loves to put on their CV — every time I start a side project it becomes an unfinished one, with the only value of experimenting or playing around with some idea.

But now here I am, releasing on Product Hunt and Indie Hackers something tangible.

That said, I'm shutting down the service in the coming days. But I'm not taking this as a sad retreat, rather a relieving one. Let me explain: right after deciding the product was ready to be exposed, the only remaining piece was outreaching and getting real beta users from outside. That would give me feedback, let me measure the conversion funnel and track interest.

But after digging into related crypto forums and spaces like Product Hunt, I noticed a feeling of exhaustion around bots and crypto. It's a market that has been subject to lots of scams, hypes and bad vibes. I knew this beforehand — I was hoping that bringing a product focused on honesty would gain traction, but the channels are pretty closed for announcements. Building a long-term reputation takes real energy, and I just don't have it right now.

On the other hand, places like Product Hunt or Indie Hackers, which are fine for self-exposure, require people to know about your launch beforehand. On top of that, some people appeared offering upvoting services with bot farms, or publishing on dubious aggregators in exchange for money. Leaving those practices aside without judgment, it looks like the game doesn't start here. Promoting a product has to happen well before the launch itself.

Anyhow, I got some upvotes, and despite being just a few, I value them like gold. They mean that people took the time to look at this project among a pile of new ones and found it interesting, which means a lot.

For the progress of my career and life overall, the best option for me is to step aside, but use all this effort as a signature piece, and also give something back to the community that might be useful. I'm releasing the source code on GitHub, with a license that gives me credit in case someone finds it interesting to redeploy this as a commercial service, while keeping it free and editable for personal use.

For real trading, a connector to an exchange like the Binance API would need to be built. There will be caveats like slippage, minimum coin amounts to acquire, and that kind of thing that will cause the portfolio suggestion to deviate from the real one. But I still hope someone gets some value out of it.

Thanks again for the upvotes, and to all the users who joined and started a simulation on Invest & Forget!

Cheers,

Ismael.

So... here we are, launching this side project of mine on IndieHackers :)

I'm Ismael, a passionated SWE with a bunch of years working in the IT industry in software at scale, but unable to finish any side project I start. Experimenting is nice and dropping your own stuff feels ok when you just want to take learnings and experience. Or, in other words, when the focus shifts to something else.

But not this time! I finally set a personal goal to come from the start to a viable product, and after some months, scope changes and some testing, I'm now finding myself in a moment that the product needs to be exposed to the world.

This is crucial because any feedback I'll get will help shaping the future of this product. I think it's an interesting one to have as a side platform for investments, and especially for bringing some trust the crypto market does not have unfortunately.

It won't make anyone rich for sure, but given current times we are living, it's always interesting to have ways to cope with inflation.

I would absolutely love your feedback. Roast my landing page, test the tool, or just drop a comment if you've also struggled with finishing your side projects.

Thanks for reading!