textfinder.io

textfinder.io is my second app that I created from scratch. The idea for it came out of the first app. On the other hand, how did I manage to release an MVP in 30 days?

Every application I create for myself, I try to do as quickly as possible and only the most important things that give value to users.

My plan for creating this application was simple:

• Create a login and the ability for the user to create an account
• Transferring OCR functionality from the previous application to the new one
• Release the app to people to test
• Add a simple landing page
• Add stripe payment
• Add terms of services or private policy
• Improve the landing page
• Correct bugs :)
• Create admin panel for preview
• Go out with application to people indiehackers, producthunt etc

The whole thing took me about ~50h, all work after normal working hours.

How did I be able to create an app so quickly?
All credit goes to ruby on rails. Since version 7.0 came out the speed of putting up simple applications has increased dramatically.

I think, working full time and rails 7.0 with stimulus.js, turbo-rails we can create a simple application with one feature every month. (Another application is already under development :) )

We also need to remember that after writing one application, we already have a lot of components that we can use in the next application, so we can create new applications faster.

My technology stack that I use to create is:

• Ruby on Rails 7.0
• Stimulus.js
• Turbo-rails
• Sentry for monitoring
• Sendgrid for email delivery
• AWS lightsail with AWS Activate Founders for free 1000$
• Paid tailwind components from tailwindui
• Stripe for payments

All on free plans and a free $1,000 from AWS for development. I already owned Tailwindui to create the previous application so the cost is $0. All created after hours of regular work. The total cost of creating the application $0.

https://textfinder.io

Hi everyone! I come today with a new app that I wrote in about ~50 hours in January.

https://textfinder.io/

This is an application for OCR of text from documents and photos. Where did I get the idea for such an app when there's a whole bunch of it on the internet after typing OCR into google?

• while developing testly (my first app with $200 MRR), there was a problem with files that contained PDF images instead of text. I tried probably 20 different OCR applications after a google search and none of these applications could handle it.

• I started using, free OCR libraries from github, but the quality was the same as from the apps I was using. It occurred to me that these applications simply used free libraries.

• and the most popular way of applications for OCR and pdf files was to simply extract the text from the file but not from images in pdf, so frustration only grew

• I finally came across OCR from google from the Cloud::Vision library, but it didn't have any form or UI for that. So I started to see how it worked and created in the admin panel the ability to OCR, format text and autofill forms which sped things up :)

• I spent some time to check how it works, what are the pros and cons etc. I decided that it's so complicated overall and why not make it a separate application just as an overlay to the google service. I already had the functionality, I had just create separate application and so I made textfinder.io . So far the web version, I plan to make an API for developers for this yet.

Do you know of an app like textbelt.com? I would like to create something similar but for OCR. Textbelt earns $3,000/mo and is a wrapper for twilio, so why not try to create an OCR app.

I am just starting to look for customers. Why now? I decided that it's better to "do something" and write an application if it makes me happy, rather than forever searching for the perfect idea.

The application is quite small. If it fails, at least I will have for a portfolio :)