Submit JSON

Hello fellow indie hackers. This is how I launched Submit JSON in 44 days, thanks for reading :)

All feelings no facts

44 days ago I didn’t even have an idea. But I was deeply uncomfortable, mostly from running my solo web agency of 7 years. At my “day job” I generally build things I do not care about and work with people I hardly connect with, but it pays the bills.

It turns out that consulting isn’t as liberating as I previously thought, and freedom was the whole reason I started a business in the first place. Clients replace bosses, workdays are longer, and nothing you create is truly yours. Here I am again.

In an attempt to escape the culture of deadlines and weekly stand-ups, I decided to build a product of my own.

Coming up with the idea

I’ve made the mistake of building behemoth all-in-one products for industries I know nothing about in the past. So, I entered this idea generation process with the intention of creating something simple and useful for an audience that I know and care about: developers.

I reviewed my past projects for common functionality and pain points, and one thing stood out. Every site needed to handle some sort of form submission or send a notification for an event like a new user signup.

This is especially relevant to static sites because they often have contact forms. However, contact forms need servers, and servers are tricky.

I usually end up spaghetti-stitching a form submission together with serverless functions and transactional email services, but every implementation ends up different. Products like FormSpree and Web3Forms simply did not cut it for me.

Why Submit JSON?

If your experience building forms is anything like mine, you get 90% of the way there and realize the form needs a server to handle the submission. In reality, you're only halfway there.

Submit JSON is an easy solution for the "last 10%" of the process. It stays out of your way, making zero assumptions about your markup, validation logic, or user experience.

This means that you can (and should!) leverage Submit JSON for other things than form submissions 😎

POST your data to an endpoint, get real-time notifications via email and webhooks, and move on with your life.

The solution

I built a simple REST API and JavaScript SDK that makes the whole process a breeze. It is written in TypeScript, and works in modern browsers as well as runtimes like Node.js, Deno, Bun, and Edge Runtime.

Execution

I truly had no life during the development of the MVP, putting in at least 10 hours every day for 44 days straight. But it was worth it. My intangible idea has now materialized into a real thing in only 1.5 months. I’m proud of this little tool and will be using it for all of my future form submissions, and I hope you will too.

For those curious about the tech stack, Submit JSON’s front end is built with Nuxt and styled with Tailwind (don’t hate). The back end is an Express (Node.js) server with a Postgres database.

👇 Check it out

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✨ www.submitjson.com ✨
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More links

📖 Docs + Examples
📦 npm package
🌐 API docs
👾 Discord

What’s next?

I am actively and rapidly developing Submit JSON and will be releasing new features on a weekly basis until further notice. Join the Discord for help and product announcements, or pop in if you’d just like to say hi.

Thanks for coming along for the ride 💚