Source Compare

I received a suggestion that I just wrapped up implementing. The suggestion was that people wanted an easier way to add their team members to a project. The whole flow of needing to get someone to create an account, inviting them as a friend, and then adding them as a follower on the project had too many steps for someone who is a new user.

I implemented a feature where people can invite someone by email and once they register an account and confirm their email, they will receive a pending friend request from the person who invited them. Once they confirm the friend request, the project shows up automatically.

I thought others might find this interesting because despite how much time goes into developing an MVP in the first place, it's amazing how much insight a fresh set of eyes from an actual user can provide.

I'm super excited that the MVP for Source Compare has been launched. Check it out and create a free account to get started.

https://www.sourcecompare.com/

Source Compare allows teams to version control their images just like they do their code to bring order to their design process.

My goal was to create an MVP that had a set of crucial features that would make the tool useful, without getting bogged down in all the bells and whistles that aren't critical for productivity.

The set of features I decided on was a way to create projects that can have many items. Each item represents an asset that someone wants to version control. As people create new versions of their images, for a given round people can vote on their favorite for that round. This will make it easy to see at a glance what the favorite iteration is for that round which designers can use for shaping the next set of assets that they create.

The goal of the MVP was to create a set of features that would be available on the free plan so that when it launched people could get started right away with no barrier to entry. I plan to use feedback that I get from this to evolve the app and help shape features I focus on for paid plans that I'll offer in the future.

If you haven't already, go check out Source Compare and let me know what you think!

I've been kicking around this idea for the past few months about creating a tool that would allow people to version control their images. This idea mostly came out of a need I had when working on some consulting projects where I'd be creating figures that keeping track of what the latest one was actually a non-trivial task. I'd be sending jpgs back and forth over email or copying them into a shared google doc and it was utter pandemonium. I'd sometimes get feedback on figures that were old versions and it just didn't work that well.

I decided that I wanted to make a tool to address this problem but I was wary because in the past I've fallen into the trap of spending way too much time developing a product that didn't fit a customers need that I wanted to be smarter about it this time. That's when I read I read this really great piece by Joel Gascoigne who is the CEO and co-founder of Buffer about how to turn an idea into a paying customer in 7 weeks:
https://buffer.com/resources/idea-to-paying-customers-in-7-weeks-how-we-did-it/

Joel focuses on creating a splash page before you create any product and seeing what kind of response that you get from it. I decided to give this idea a shot, so I developed a splash page and put it out into the universe on Indie Hackers and Reddit:

https://www.sourcecompare.com

The response that I got back was pretty positive! I heard from people that they've wanted this kind of image version tracking but haven't found any tools that really do what they wanted. Although there were tools that designers can use to track differences in figma files or jpegs, there wasn't a collaboration tool that allowed them to work with designers and non-designers alike to vote on their favorites and create a nice workflow.

Nice! So it seems like I learned that this idea had some sort of legs but next I'll spend some time building an MVP that's as simple as I can make it to see if people will like it. Stay tuned!