PyDist
Your Own Private PyPI
I launched PyDist on Product Hunt! I think it was a bit too niche to do well, but I did get 11 upvotes. This included a couple of great reviews from current customers (who I emailed as soon as the post went live). I also directed a little traffic to it with a Twitter campaign.
I got tweeted by the maintainer of PyPI (https://twitter.com/di_codes/status/1121810910887272448), which generated a small but very high-quality bump in traffic, including my first paying customer!
In theory I'm ready for users! Now I just need to find them.
I should have put up a landing page a month ago, before even starting to build it. Live an learn I guess.
I really wanted a name where I could own the .com domain. It took a page of brainstorming and a lot of Namecheap searches, but I was able to get a completely unregistered domain, so it only cost $9.
It's a lot better than my working name was--PPPI (Private Python Package Index)!
I started coding the actual package index on Jan 19 (or so says git).
I knew going into it that the back-end would be a small fraction of the overall work, but I think I still underestimated how much else there was to do. By the time I completed the first version, I had spent maybe 1 week on the package index itself, another week on the web back-end, and more than 2 weeks on the front-end "polish" and landing page.
And that's where the real work begins.
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