ReferCodes

I’ve been slowing catching up on the Indie Hackers podcast and thought I should probably try to get more involved on the Indie Hackers forums so I went ahead and filled out this ReferCodes product page.

I’ve continued working on ReferCodes over the years as a side project. It’s been fun to have a live product with real users out there that can be a bit of a playground for me to try out new designs, technologies, and ideas.

My initial hypothesis that this would grow via people sharing it with their friends hasn’t quite turned out to be true. Some people do that but the vast majority of people on ReferCodes don’t have any of their friends on it. Google has been the number one driver of traffic.

I often wonder if I should keep working on ReferCodes or if it would be better for me to work on another idea. But ReferCodes keeps being fun to work on, gives me an opportunity to learn new skills, is incredibly low maintenance, and is profitable in that it costs me practically nothing to run and gets my own referral codes used a good amount thanks to building up some Google juice over the years.

My next goal for ReferCodes is growth. It’s not something I work on full time but I am curious if with just a little more effort put in the right areas if I could double or triple the traffic. The growth is currently very slow but steady. I would love if I could speed it up.

I had continued slowly working on ReferCodes and getting friends to give it a try. One or two randos even seemed to find it although I’m not sure how. But now that I’d shipped the MVP, my perfectionist tendencies were kicking back in.

The same friend who had initially challenged me to build this told me it was good enough and that he was going to post it on Product Hunt in a week. My immediate thought was, “it's not ready!”, but my gut knew and my friend knew that getting something out there fast, even if it didn’t feel polished, was the right move.

ReferCodes got a lot of great, friendly, early-adopter users who provided helpful feedback and it ended up being the #5 Product of the Day just behind Elon Musk’s Boring Company Flame Thrower.

I built the MVP in a month using Django and started getting my friends to sign up and try it out. I had to fight my instinct to wait to share it until it was “perfect”. By truly scoping it down to a minimum viable product, I was able to get something out there to start testing the hypothesis that this was even something people would want.

I picked the name, ReferCodes, simply because the domains refer.codes and refercodes.com were available. Didn’t love it but I’ve always liked naming products with names from which you could actually guess what the product does. I liked the refer.codes domain because it would give users a nice, short vanity profile URL that would be easy to remember and share.

The MVP had two main “features” beyond just being a simple CRUD app. The first was that I curated the referral programs that I added since I hated finding referral codes on RetailMeNot or Reddit that lied about what you’d get for signing up (e.g. “use mine for $10 off”, “use mine for $20 off!”). Most referral programs offer the same reward to all users regardless of whose referral code you use.

The second feature was that I used regular expressions to match referral links to referral deals which both made it quick to add a new one just by pasting your referral link and allowed me to validate that a referral link was legit.

I was catching up with a friend after we’d both listened to the Blake Mycoskie episode of the How I Built This podcast. I’m someone who always has a lot of ideas but I also naturally think about all the reasons a particular idea wouldn’t work. I’ve built things before and been disappointed that they didn’t go as well as expected.

One company Blake started was an outdoor advertising company in Nashville. He had seen the gigantic billboards on the sides of buildings in LA and thought why not do the same thing in Nashville. I wouldn't have thought there was an opportunity because it seemed like the idea of putting billboards on the sides of buildings wasn’t new or novel and if someone wasn’t already doing in in Nashville, there must be a reason.

But Blake had a bias towards action and just gave it a try without wasting very much time thinking about whether or not it would work. He ended up selling that business to Clear Channel only nine months later.

My friend challenged me, “what’s the best idea you have right now that you can just start building today?”. I looked through the latest ideas I’d jotted down and a place to share your referral codes/links with your friends seemed like quick, simple thing to build so without much thought, I got started building.