SimpleLogin

After so many delays, SimpleLogin is finally launched on ProductHunt today.

We were lucky that Ben Lang accepted to be the "hunter". We've also spent quite some time on the graphics for the launch.

94 upvotes so far, 12th in the ranking. Must say I hoped for a better result but this is expected as email aliases and online privacy aren't the most interesting topic for entrepreneurs.

After a failed HN show, I hesitated a lot whether we should aim for a PH launch and glad that SimpleLogin finally takes this step :)

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/simplelogin

SimpleLogin has forwarded 3,899,325 emails to date and the number keeps growing every day.

This isn't a big number in email world but shows that users are using SimpleLogin for their daily emails. This also reassures our decision of leaving AWS as otherwise our AWS SES bill will only go up. (We wrote why we left AWS in https://simplelogin.io/blog/we-left-aws/ )

Thanks to a post on a French Linux forum 1 last week, our number of users have exceeded 1000. This number is tiny for a SaaS service, especially a B2C one that has a freemium pricing but this milestone means a lot to me:

• our current landing page is still too technical and not easy to understand (I need to work on that aspect more ...) so people who sign up are usually those who get it :). And having 1000+ people who understand means there's a need for the product.

• the product is known mostly by word-of-mouth.

• the beginning of the project where I set up an alert for each new sign-up is still fresh in my mind. Now I can finally remove this alert :).

With more and more paying customers, we are going to do an official launch soon and I start posting about SimpleLogin on some forums like Reddit, HN, Lobster. Lots of positive feedbacks. But also some haters who somehow hate everything I do :).

Having haters s**ks because they are usually very vocal on forums and talking with them is just a waste of time, not to mention the angry feelings they left behind. But looking at things positively, having haters is a sign of increase in popularity :).

In the meantime, SimpleLogin receives for the first time a donation! A person who deploys SimpleLogin by himself (the product is open source and can be self-hosted) contacted me and asked if he could donate. Of course no one could refuse that :).

If you never heard about alternativeto before, it’s essentially a website listing alternatives to popular softwares. This website seems to be quite well known in privacy-concerned community and a lot of open source software are listed on it.

When receiving the email from alternativeto confirming SimpleLogin is approved, I’m quite happy even this is a “tiny” accomplishment. Posting on this website is actually an advice from a user who happens to be a veteran in privacy-concerned community and who likes SimpleLogin a lot. As I’m pretty new to this community, advices like this are more than welcoming!

https://alternativeto.net/software/simplelogin/

After about a month of waiting, SimpleLogin is finally featured on BetaList!

A lot of things have changed since then and the screenshots back then are of old versions (there's no way to update them directly in BetaList) , featuring in BetaList has boosted up quite nicely the number of visitors 🚀.

The conversion rate is still not as high as I want and the landing page is still too abstract and technical according to some users. I guess it's time for me to take a design course.

https://betalist.com/startups/simplelogin

After days and nights working on the extension, I finally finished the v1 of the browser extension. This feature has been asked by a lot of users who find going to the webapp to create an alias is just cumbersome and I must agree with them ...

The V1 is far from pretty and the UX can still improve a lot but at some point I need to decide where the v1 should stop.

If you guys are interested, the Firefox extension is on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/simplelogin/ and the Chrome one is https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/simplelogin-extension/dphilobhebphkdjbpfohgikllaljmgbn

The extension code is public btw at https://github.com/simple-login/browser-extension. If someone is interested in making a quick Chrome/Firefox extension, ping me, I could maybe give a hand as this is still fresh :).

Our next step is to make the Safari extension (my default browser). Stay tuned!

My article on Facebook SDK get featured on HackerNews and I suddenly got +4K (number keeps increasing) visiting my website since this morning 😅.

In case you guys are interested, this article is about how using Facebook SDK can be a bad thing for user privacy 🙅‍♂️.

I joined indiehackers recently and really enjoyed reading other founders progresses and achievements. I decided it's time for me to submit my product too :).

So here it is: SimpleLogin, the product that I have been working on since last year. Its goal is to protect our privacy, starting with our email inbox.

I like the idea of giving alias instead of our real email address when signing up but found that the existing alias technology is quite limited. I decided to create one with 2 goals:

• Allow me to receive email AND send email. So my personal email is never revealed even when I reply.
• Simple: the experiences must be as transparent as possible.

Fast forward a couple of month, I finished the first version and start using it almost everyday since then. As the product gets more and more stable, I decided to quit my full-time job to focus on SimpleLogin.

And that's how the adventure started :).