TempStore.dev

Yesterday was a big day for the TempStore project. A simple post to Show HN.

I was slightly nervous but pushed ahead an launched anyway. Needless to say there's been no major shift in traffic since doing so.

Next up for marketing I'll be recording a video demo of the product on Zoom an posting to a few places on X.

I'm confident that by the end of next week, I'll have at least 1 user signed up - even if it is one of my friends or family.

Wish me luck!

I've made a lot of progress today, I've got the basic workflow working for the core use-case. Template Creation + API Rendering. I've been using Elixir as the core language and, to be honest, it was a bit of a blocker to me building in the first place.

Why Elixir?

One of the core reasons I like Elixir (at least the idea of it) is that it's a language that helps you build extremely robust applications. One thing that causes too much headache as a solo indie is having to recover servers that crash.

My hope is that using it will allow me to build more resilient code that performs well without me necessarily having to always keep an eye on it.

Niggles

One particular niggle today was not realising that EEx was a little bit insecure. I did manage to find another blog that pointed to a better library. So I've managed to get something working quite nicely.

Next Steps

Last things I need to do is build a better UI to view and play around with the templates that people build. Should I name it "Editor" or "Playground"?

After a few intense 2 hour work blocks over the last few weeks, I'm getting to a point where I can start to see the final product emerge. I've got a dashboard live with most of the functionality for the MVP.

I've been listening to the Founders Podcast recently and was re-acquainted with Elon Musk's process of eliminating everything that wasn't necessary. I've been applying this successfully to this project.

Features such as descriptions on the template, adding fancy offline functionality have all be removed and now I'm focusing just on the initial use-case.

Development Flow

I've also spent a good deal of time ironing out my deployment processes so that both the development environment is setup properly for me to work on without much thought; and I can push changes and they roll out automatically.

I've also taken a much more care-free approach to code quality. Although I'm maintaining good best-practices for security, I've fought my urge to pre-maturely optimise and instead have focused just on getting things done.

Marketing

I've started thinking about the marketing channels already. I've thrown up a landing page with an email subscription and setup some Google Ads to see if I can generate any interest pre-launch.

I'm hoping to get everything up and running by the end of this month.

With the fantastic help of a number of AI tools, I've been able to bootstrap the bare-bones of my idea for a new way to think about patterns and templates.

As a developer, there are many places where templates are needed as a way to effectively combine static and dynamic content.

Having spend the last 4 - 5 months building marketing funnels, email outreach, linkedin campaigns, e-commerce products and more; I've realised that many of these tools rely on templates.

Also when working at AWS in the sales teams, having the right combination of wording to help drive new customer conversations was a constant struggle.

In the AI world, there's an interesting intersection between tech and business that often means that one is dependent on the other. More on this in later posts!

Most of the templates in marketing tools are there as a side, not really core to the application, so you spend time to try adapt them using APIs and extensions.

I wanted to try build a template tool that is both fast, and powerful to the extent that it allows for customisation without compromising scalability and performance.

Last Mile

The final touches are connecting the backend (a fast, robust, scalable api) - to the frontend (built with AI tools and deployed to vercel).

Stay tuned!