Typo CI

Last month GitHub allowed me to add a paid plans to Typo CI, which was really awesome! I was finally able to validate my product through the user path I had initially intended.

I immediately tweaked my free plan to only process commits on Open Source repositories, then politely request people using the add-on with private repositories upgrade to the paid plan. I feel like I didn't aggressively push the paid plan, but I did have a few convert to paid which is awesome!

I'm now in the spot where I'm making a profit each month, which I'm super happy about.

My plan for the next few weeks is to work on my marketing & signup flow. I want to push a few more users though the process & make sure they feel like they can contact me if they need.

In January GitHub informed be the wait to verification (Which would have allowed me to handle billing via their Marketplace) would be about two months.

7 months on, I'm still waiting for verification with an application which is integrated with GitHub in a way which it expects all the billing to be handled by GitHub.

It's a frustrating position to be in. I currently have about 450 installs, submitting about 2000 commits a day for analysis. I'm not 100% certain on the way forward.
I've been considering handing billing myself, but the main appeal of the GitHub Marketplace was that was taken care of.

I'm currently experimenting with selling a GitHub Action Version of Typo CI ( https://github.com/TypoCI/spellcheck-action ) with licenses being handled by Gumroad. So far I've had no sales, but I'm kind of excited to see what happens with it.

About 20 days ago I submitted Typo CI to GitHub for verification, which is their processes to confirm apps aren't doing anything nasty & allows customers to purchase via their platform.

I didn't hear anything back after waiting a week so on the 17th I decided to check in with their Developer Support to check in on the status. I received a a reply on the 27th of January:

I'm so sorry for the delayed response here! I do see the Typo CI GitHub Marketplace application. However, we have currently paused the approvals for verified Marketplace apps while the team makes improvements to the overall process.

I don't have an exact timeline for how much longer the verified app approval process will be paused, but it sounds like it may be for at least 1-2 months.

Not great news. Assuming the estimated timeline is correct, I won't be able to start earning money from my product via GitHub until at least April.

I'm not to deterred though! I'm exploring how much work it will be to handle billing on my end & also adding some extra bits of functionality which should help improve the product.

Over Christmas I crossed 100 users, so I was able to submit for Verification from GitHub. This means they'll go through my app & decide if it's of a reasonable enough quality to be feature more prominently in the GitHub Marketplace.

It's pretty exciting! I had to reach to security requirements (and write out a bunch of policies), but I'm pretty confident I've not missed anything to major. For the most part it's obvious stuff like "When a user requests you delete their data, you actually do it" & "you're not sharing users private data".

🤞

I've been monitoring my users for when they successfully have the app run on a PR with a little Heroku Dataclip (Like an SQL query, where you can pull up the results on my phone in the morning).

For a few users, I've added small comments on their PR introducing myself & thanking them for the install, then inviting them to mention me if they need any assistance.

It has worked really well! I'm getting really actionable feedback from people using the product & they're super lovely!

It was a really good soft launch! My main aim for this week was to get a few users signed up, see how people like the product & iron out any rubbish bits. I was only expecting 3-4 people to actually sign up, so I'm really happy.

To get my first users, I asked a couple of friends via Whatsapp to give me some initial feedback. I wrote down all their feedback in my README.md file & then moved the most common actionable items into a todo list within the same file. The main change I needed to make was adjusting copy to explain the benefits of the product more clearly.

Once I sorted the big UX issues, I moved onto promoting to a bigger group of people. I posted a link to the Github Marketplace link ( https://github.com/marketplace/typo-ci ) into a slack group I'm fairly active in. For this group of users, I listened to their feedback like before & made sure for every user who gave me feedback got an awesome Easter egg added to the code for their efforts.

One thing I did to keep myself motivated during this week, is I setup my app to post a few stats daily to Slack. Waking up and seeing I had 2-3 new signups over night was really awesome!

My plan for the next week is to post to 2-3 slack groups which have a "show and tell" channel & keep tweaking the product based on feedback / usage.

I opened my email inbox to the best email subject to read "Typo CI has been approved for the GitHub Marketplace"! It arrived about 5pm GMT on the 31st of October. I was hyped!

Users could finally find me via the GitHub marketplace, this meant I could finally start promoting my app.
During my lunch break at work the next day I sent the link to a few friends on Slack. A few hours later I had some 300 repositories using my app!

All in all, I was pretty happy with my first day. For the next week I'm going to monitor the "false positive" spelling errors and help improve my apps dictionary, then start figuring out the best way to share it to Hacker News.

https://github.com/marketplace/typo-ci/ - The marketplace link if you're curious ;)

I had some experience working with the GitHub API from https://www.indiehackers.com/product/pigci so I got cracking. I had learnt a lot while building PigCI & could also reuse a lot of the code.

I decided to focused on the bare minimum to analyse a commit and send the conclusion back to GitHub. This had the happy side effect of I didn't worry to much about my app other then an API & a landing page. Ideally I want people to experience Typo CI entirely on GitHub & for my app to just get the API Calls.

I set out to build a single script that could spell check a bunch of files I had locally. I didn't want to go to far down a rabbit hole to find out this was actually a super hard task.

I got coding, I made a 100 line ruby file which would just read a file, then output what spelling errors it found. It took me about 2 hours to build, but after running it against some Ruby, Go & PHP code it was accurately returning the mistakes.

I was on the right path!

I opened a PR that had a spelling error at work. My colleague picked up on it & I fixed it. My local spellchecker had noticed it, but totally forgot to update it.

It annoyed me a little that I had wasted my colleagues time & I kind of wish there was something to give me a friendly heads up that my PR wasn't ready for review, a bit like how our test suite worked.

I got searching and found the current options on the market. Most the products out there appeared to either required a lot of fiddly setup, only worked locally or didn't work very well when given code.

I decided to get experimenting!