Routine Tribe

After becoming more engaged in indie hackers yet again, I saw a lot of people talking about how they did list building work prior to finishing the product.

Given this, I decided to put more effort into building out the landing page and getting hosting set up early. While it's not finalized, I did make major headway on setting on the landing page today. Additionally, given I want to have a stellar landing page that helps convert people to sign up for the newsletter/launch campaign, I decided to take the time to actually design mockups.

This will allow me to add graphics to the home page that will make the landing page more compelling (hopefully).

I still need to set up some basic analytics prior to publishing everything, but it felt good to get the domain setup and have a more fleshed out landing page.

I got my initial prototype working! It's ugly, it needs some love, but it's validating to have the data structure implemented and the ability to track habits and routines on a daily, weekly–or whatever–basis.

I also implemented the payment functionality first. I started with this because I want to charge for this product (unlike all my other forgotten products), so I wanted to make sure that was implemented from the ground up.

I've begun working on a landing page to get some initial feedback about the product. Following this, I'll polish the UI and work on getting my first customer! Onward and upward.

Every project I start without knowing what the name is. To me, names need to develop organically as you start to build the project. Ideally when naming you want to hit a few key items, and a few nice to haves:

Name Must Haves

• be pronounceable
• be easily spellable if you just hear it for the first time
• relate to your product (i.e. don't name your product Apple if you're building computers. This obviously can work, but requires more effort and branding, and for indiehackers like us, we want to focus on product and growth, not branding imo)

Nice to Haves

• Good Top Level Domain (.com, .io, and a few others are the ones I try for). You can use one of the newer types like .video, .ninja etc, but I try to have it so that if you told your mom to go to the website she wouldn't say, "what?"
• Short (I personally try for 3 syllables or less, and max of two words)
• Be real words (I've done it before, but I don't like made up words as much as two words put together. I.e. RoutineTribe is better than Routini imo)

Tools
The best tool I've found for finding a domain name by far is namemesh.com. I always pick my product name based on what's available through namemesh!

First step–what the hell am I building? I sat down and put pen to paper to figure out what exactly I wanted to build. Immediately I started to see scope creep happening with more and more features being added, but I militantly just moved them to the future feature list.

Once I had a basic layout of the product and code architecture, I designed the prototype in Adobe XD within 2 hours, focusing on simplicity.

See the full blog post about starting here