Siterack

After reading "Product Led Growth" by @wesbush I decided to adjust my pricing options and add a free plan (no credit card required).

My hopeful assumption is that by adding a "low friction" option to get users in the door, I'll be able to get some feedback about the product and learn what customer actually want from the service.

We'll see how this goes 🤷🏼‍♂️.

Today, siterack got its first paying customer! I know it's only 5 dollars, but this is a huge win for the project. Honestly ,I was about to put it down, but this has given me a boost of motivation to keep searching for the right customers and to keep refining the product.

Obviously I know this customer could cancel at any point and I'd be back to $0 but at least I was able to break the ice 🎉.

This is the first time I've ever launched a product on ProductHunt. I'm sure I did a million and a half things wrong, but it been a big learning curve.

If you have a minute to give us an UPVOTE I'd really appreciate it🙏

These past 4 months I've been neck deep in code. Essentially, I received a lot of valuable feedback from the early users and choose to "rebuild" the app to better fit their needs.

Now, Siterack is bigger, better, cooler, and hopefully more sellable 😬.

The last several weeks have been full of testing, debugging and tweaking siterack.io to get it ready for actually users. (BTW your product will never be ready, so at some point you just have to send it.)

Once most of my testing was complete, I began sending out cold emails to find some beta testers. I sent out approximately 50 emails and have procured 3, maybe 4 testers.

I have no idea how long this next phase will take, but hopefully I will be ready to do a Betalist launch within the next three of weeks 🤞.

For those of you familiar with Apache and Wordpress, this will probably make sense. If not - Mod_security is an open source firewall that is typically coupled with Apache.

Shared Hosting companies like Bluehost, Godaddy, and Hostgator all run this software to protect the hosted Wordpress sites from brute force, csrf, and other types of attacks. It's good, sometime too good. Naturally, my software relies on being able to remotely access customers' WP sites and manage them. Which of course requires that siterack "play nice" with Mod_Sec.

Shortly after deployment, I began receiving errors from siterack. "401 ACCESS FORBIDDEN". It's as scary as it sounds.

Long story short, I debugged this issue for days and finally hired a freelancer to help me out.

Two days and $100 later, siterack is back in the green! 💪

This may seem trivial to many of you, but after 4 attempts and failures I finally got Siterack on it's Digitalocean server 🥳. This included all the Django files, Postgres, Redis, and Celery Workers.

All in all, it was an absolute nightmare (not because of Digitalocean.. just me)

I also finally figured out how to point a DNS to the server! Little wins 🙏

So I've spent about 20 days learning and building an initial "buggy" version of siterack. But hey, it works - on localhost at least!

Now for deployment 😬.. yet another aspect of Software Engineering I've yet to experience.

I have a simple domain -> siterack.io ready to put to use, so here goes nothing. Time to deploy it to Digitalocean. 🥳🤞

This should have been easier than it was, but after reading many outdated tutorials.. I finally integrated stripe to accept payments and create subscriptions.

If anyone out there is an expert at integrating stripe, I would love to make my payment process better. I'm very teachable 😂

Today I officially broke ground on siterack. This included opening up youtube and learning django (not very exciting...) Cooler updates to follow!!

Big shoutout to Corey at https://coreyms.com/ , super helpful tutorial for learning all things django!