Owl Duty

I revamped the landing page and revisited the branding. I also improved the copywriting. In this post, popular during 2 days in the first page of Indie Hackers, I explain what I learned during the process:

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/i-revamped-my-landing-page-and-heres-what-i-learned-d41c509bbf

First of all, Happy New Year everyone!

In november 7, 2022, I published "Would you quit your day job and go all out for your project?" *(1). I managed to get 16 votes and several comments from indie hackers sharing their thoughts (see linked post below). All these answers helped me to take a final decision: to pause my freelance activity (gross income of ~ $110k/year) and switch full time to Owl Duty and the development of my open source library Grillon (see my first product page post). Thank you all!

I will have financial support from my life partner plus some extra savings I have made for this time. This will allow me to focus on Owl Duty, open-source, and many other personal projects. I also applied for the Github Accelerator program for Grillon, who knows? If you're interested: https://accelerator.github.com/

So far so good, I really enjoy spending my time to meaningful projects and working for myself. I finally have more time (ironically), a better work/life balance as I learn a ton of new interesting topics from frontend to backend to marketing.

I have always made strong decisions, sometimes resulting in a lot of stress, but I realized that's how you evolve quickly in your life/career/projects and even personally. I started as an employee, then as a freelancer and now I want to build my first SaaS (full-time).

I'm not only working on Owl Duty. I have side projects : I'm also developing a video game, thinking about another SaaS, setting up an high pressure aeroponics system, ... while doing house renovations. That's how I'm wired, I need all these projects and testing new things. Will I have enough funds? Well... I'll find a way, I'm sure. Otherwise? That's a ton of experience in my life and to put on my resume before I try again :) .

So now if someone asks me "Would you quit your day job and go all out for your project?", the answer is definitely yes. Not without preparation, but yes. Please subscribe to https://owlduty.com, there is a newsletter and I will be sending the very first email soon!

See you!

*(1) https://www.indiehackers.com/post/would-you-quit-your-day-job-and-go-all-out-for-your-project-247270f36d

Here we are owlduty.com! I'm proud of this one, I wanted eye catching colors 😍.

It's very important for me to create a landing page but for early adopters. It helps me prepare my pitch, explain what I envision and project myself in the business.

🤖 I don't have much time with a kid, multiple projects, and a day job! I always reuse the same personal template and process. I use Tailwindcss (extremely efficient CSS framework), github to host and version my code, Netlify to get a HTTPS certificate with a CDN and automated deployments (check it, it's an amazing service), and Mailchimp to collect subscriptions and send campaign emails. All of that for FREE, except the domain name with OVH.

🎨 As I said I don't have time, so I also used undraw.co to get my landing page illustrations. Also I subscribed to plus.undraw.co which is absolutely amazing and allow me to support this project! I coupled their on-brand covers tool with favicon.io to transform an owl emoji to an image. I used the owl emoji as a logo, a favicon and a brand communication.

It's not perfect of course, but enough to get it done and iterate! Now let's back to the code and collect, hopefully, some emails for my early access.

✨ About the early access : By subscribing now, you benefit from free access to the services and products of the early access and will receive e-mails from our newsletter. Once you subscribe you get a forever access.

🦉Follow Owl Duty and get more info about how I run this business. I'm "building in public" as they say.

I recently released an open source library named Grillon. This is an end-to-end HTTP API testing library written in Rust. I started working on the next version when the idea came up : Why not create a SaaS on top of it? I written a blog post about this library if you are interested : https://theredfi.sh/posts/grillon-e2e-http-testing-rust

I'm a big believer in open source, but I also love to create online services. So why not to do both? Plus I have 7 years of experience as a test engineer that will help me to understand my end-users and better shape my services.