Simple Dev

You can now get an annual membership on Simple Dev for just $10 for the first year. This is an early bird special reserved for the first 100 paid users on Simple Dev.

An annual membership will give you full access to all of the tutorials currently on the site and any tutorials added to the site during your membership.

You can sign up here if you're interested: https://simpledev.io/sign-up/

I've experimented a lot with the pricing on this site to see what makes sense. I adopted this strategy after seeing a couple of other Indie Hackers use it. Hopefully it works!

Yesterday I got my 1st paid user for Simple Dev (simpledev.io), although I didn't realize it until today (I'll need to check my email settings to see if I can fix that). This is the same user I mentioned in my previous milestone who was the 1st to sign up for a free trial on my site.

For a moment I thought the user might end up canceling because there was a problem with the user's credit card, but it ended up working in the end.

Today also happens to be my birthday, so I'll take this as a good sign. 🎉

Today I got my 1st free trial signup for the Monthly Plan on Simple Dev. The free trial period is 7 days. If this user sticks around for the full trial, they'll convert into a paying customer, which will be exciting to see. The Monthly Plan is currently set at $9/month.

I'm not exactly sure how this user found my site. My analytics tell me they came from the UK version of Google, but I don't have much more insight beyond that. I'm not sure if they googled "Simple Dev" directly or some other phrase. I've only done a little marketing up until now. I should probably start doing more.

This past weekend I finally reached 10 free users on Simple Dev. 5 of the users are people I know in real life, but the other 5 are people I've never met. Here's how those other 5 found my site:

• 1 found my site through a link I shared in a Facebook group
• 1 found my site through a milestone I shared here on IH
• 1 found my site through a Simple Dev tweet
• 2 found my site through Google

It's interesting to see how many different ways people will find your site.

For this month, I plan to add more content specifically for free users, so now is a great time to sign up if you're interested!

This week I added code/command previews for free members to all of the tutorials that cover syntax or commands on Simple Dev. Now free users can easily look up HTML/CSS syntax, Git commands, and more, without needing a full account (although I hope some people end up converting 😁).

I created this feature fairly quickly, so I'll probably go back and revise the previews over the next couple of weeks to make them better.

Here is a short demo video: https://youtu.be/a2hgOYZnLsQ

On Simple Dev, I group all of the tutorials around a certain topic (like HTML or CSS) into what I call topic pages. Up until this week, the topic pages were just a collection of headings and links. After thinking about it for a bit, I started to feel that the format was a little hard to read.

To make things easier, I decided to add code/command snippets directly to the topic pages so that people could more easily skim through the page. After changing a few of the topic pages, I realized that I've basically turned them into cheat sheets. I think now some developers will be able to just reference the topic pages to get the code/command they need. Some snippets will probably need to be updated to make more sense, but I think this is a good start.

For now, these new topic pages/cheat sheets are free -- you don't even need to sign up to view them (although I wonder if I should make people sign up for a free account to see them 🤔). Also, the topic pages for some topics like Text Editor Basics and GitHub Desktop haven't switched over because the new format doesn't make sense for them (at least not yet).

Here's an example: https://simpledev.io/npm/npm-basics/

I recently enabled the membership feature on my site Simple Dev (simpledev.io) again.

For a short period of time, I only had 2 paid plans on the site: a monthly plan and a 6-month plan. However, I recently attended a workshop on acquiring customers that emphasized the importance of collecting email addresses. After thinking things over, I decided to add a free plan to the site which gives access to the HTML, Text Editor Basics, and Terminal articles.

I posted about the free membership plan in a local coding meetup's Facebook group on Thursday. The group has over 1,000 members. That same day, I got my first free signup! I'm not 100% sure if they signed up because of that post, but I think it was a factor.

I'm considering changing the free membership to include more sections (or I might swap out some of the sections for others). If you have any suggestions for what you'd like to see in the free plan, let me know!

Recently, I added a membership feature to my site, Simple Dev, and put most of my articles behind a paywall. However, I've now decided to temporarily disable the membership feature and make all of my articles free again.

My plan is to keep them free for at least a month. The reason why is that I'm planning on making numerous UX and content improvements over the next few weeks, and I want more people to be able to see them. After it's been a month (or longer, depending on how this coronavirus situation turns out), I plan on enabling the membership feature again, but this time the cost of membership will be much more affordable. Let's see how this goes!

I published my first article on Medium. This was actually my second attempt at writing an article in the "style" of Simple Dev (although the style/format of my articles has changed a lot since this first one). The first article I wrote I never published for some reason.

Since publishing this first article, I've moved on to publishing my articles on my own website, simpledev.io, instead of Medium. I might still use Medium for blogging about the progress of the site, though.