Self Manager

Until today, my app didn't have a logo or icon mainly because I didn't want to invest the time or money for someone to create it.

But I recently started to actively participate in social media in an effort to find potential customers. A lot of value I've gained from Indie Hackers is that finding your customers early is key. I created Self Manager years ago but I never tried to market it. I built it and assumed that people would come.

They did not.

I've resurrected my app and am trying to be very active building community and finding customers. But it has been a very slow start. I've optimized my profile on Twitter and Reddit and it is still hard to gain traction.

I decided to create my own logo because I was tired of looking at my very uninteresting avatars on all my social media platforms.

Let me know what you guys, think.

"Hello there" <--name that movie...

Self Manager is back online! You can visit at https://www.selfmanager.io. It took a couple years, but I've managed to fix my deployment process and reduce my server costs to allow me to relaunch Self Manager!

I've made a couple changes since Self Manager was last live.

First, I moved the web application to it's own domain (www.selfmanager.io) instead of a subdomain for my LLC.

Second, I increased the price from $5/month to $15/month. I decided on this price after looking at competing products in the same market.

Lastly, I've learned a lot from the indie hacker community and the indie hacker podcasts. I am grateful to find like-minded individuals that share in the same struggle. It has inspired me to pick Self Manager back up and try to grow.

Here's to another crack at reaching Ramen profitability...

After a couple years of no growth and very little traction from online advertising, Self Manager has to go offline for now. I can't justify the server costs. I've also run into an issue with failing to deploy new versions of the web application to Azure.

Hopefully, I can pick this back up soon and really start to attract new customers. This is not "good bye", just a "see you soon".

After one month, my only customer cancelled their subscription. I followed up with an email asking for feedback but my only response was, "This is not something I'm going to use" which, while honest, doesn't help me iterate. Nevertheless I plan to add some additional features to help entice new customers to sign up!

I got my first paying customer! Technically speaking, the customer has a 30 day free trial, so they're not paying quite yet. Self Manager does require a credit card before you can start using, so the fact that the customer entered their credit card information is very exciting!

Hopefully our growth is up and to the right!

I started to write blog articles about Self Manager so I could get the word out. I knew nothing about content marketing but without any paying customers for a few months, I realized nobody knew the product existed.

After writing my first blog article, I started running ads and Facebook, Google and Twitter. This ended up costing a lot more money and was not cost effective.

It took about 8 months to build Self Manager, working nights and weekends. As was always the case, I was overcommitted so many weeks went by without touching the code base. I used ASP.NET and SQL Server running on Microsoft Azure since that is my primary skill set.

I finally launched Self Manager under a different URL and was happy I completed a very basic MVP.

Common advice is to avoid working on multiple things at once, but I still can't stop myself from doing so. This gave me a lot of anxiety because it was hard to stay on top of all of my commitments. Worse, I would break those commitments.

I just finished reading Getting Things Done by David Allen and, following the advice and process in that book, my anxiety and stress went way down. I was just using paper to "implement my system" and, as a coder, it was obvious that I could build a web app to do this.

So I did!