RestEz

One thing I didn't account for when the MVP was released was that users could find the app/sign up page without going via the landing page. This is leading to a lot of drop off in the sign up phase of getting users on-boarded.

To tackle this problem I've given the registration page a revamp which you can see here:

Some notable changes are:

• Switching from a page with just the form, to a split view with an explainer about RestEz and the sign up form next to it
• Removing "Confirm Password" in favour of having a show/hide password option
• Changing the CTA to "Create free account"
• Reiterating the fact that (right now) sign up is free

Fingers crossed these changes help convert some more direct traffic!

RestEz has been gaining some traction over the last week and we've been seeing 1-2 users on the platform every other day or so! This is of course very exciting.

However what I am more excited about is getting their feedback about the app and whether or not it solves their needs. If not, what do we need to do to improve it for them so they can get their full potential out of it?

Check it out for yourself at https://restez.app

It's been 3 weeks since the launch of the RestEz MVP and whilst the cold email outreach is going "ok", we're yet to get anyone onto the platform to actually do some testing for us.

I feel confident that there is a need for the product as I've had responses to my cold emails to say that it sounds interesting and they want to know more, so at least I've got that going for me.

The problem seems to be getting the users onto the MVP to get their feedback and let them shape the product at the early stage.

Is the MVP too early in development? Is it that I've not given enough time for people to go out and do some testing? What's a realistic time frame for this? Let me know!

I have some additions that I'd like to make to the app but I'd like to focus on what customers want first, rather than what I want.

Hopefully very soon I'll be writing about our first user feedback and how we're using it to update the product.

You can learn more about RestEz at https://restez.app, and if you yourself want to do some UI/UX testing then feel free! The MVP is completely free and we plan on letting homeowners access the app for free once we come out of beta.

The MVP for RestEz came together super quick, like, within 2 weeks of working on it for 3-4 hours each evening. But then I faced the problem I'm sure we all face, how do I host the MVP and how much will it cost?

With this being a Next.js app with Postgres implementation I knew that a good starting point was Vercel. However, I wasn't sure if I was going to fall within the limits each month, after all having an MVP that you can't even use isn't exactly a great start.

I spent a couple of days thinking about various different options, maybe I could use Amazon Amplify or an AWS free tier? What about the database? Where will I host that?

In the end I took a bit of a reality check and realized that with the MVP being mostly private it was highly unlikely I was going to reach the limits Vercel have on the free tier so that was that issue sorted, Vercel for hosting it is.

What about the Postgres database though? I already had a free one from Vercel that I needed so I couldn't just ditch that. After countless searches on Google I finally came across https://supabase.com thanks to a reddit post.

Again, they had a free tier available and with the clarity that I most likely wouldn't hit limits I just created a free tier account and tied it into the project on Vercel with minimal effort.

There we go, everything hosted for free, and I can figure out the rest later once I've actually got traction on the MVP. Now I can start collecting user feedback without burning a hole in my bank account!

What about the domain name? $25 USD, funded by a ko-fi for an open-source project that I own.

Now we just need to find that 1st, 10th, and 100th user to get some feedback and steer the project in the right direction.