Unzip.dev

Today is a special day. I've been preparing for this day for over 2 months. I started by contacting Ben Lang a dear friend and top PH hunter.

He helped me understand what I needed to do, which was basically following these steps:
https://www.producthunt.com/launch

I posted on an issue before the launch for people to prepare for the launch (mainly register on PH).

Then, I continued by contacting all my friends online checking who had an account, made a quick CRM on notion to track it. Then I started creating all the materials for the launch. With the help of dear friends such as Tom Granot to proofread and help my shitty copy.

I then created a new issue to be posted on the day of the launch.
And the mayhem begun, I copied and pasted this text (because I didn't have the capacity to write it in real-time) and posted it here.

Let's see how it goes... 🤞

Yesterday was an awesome day! Unzip.dev got its first sponsor!

We had several sponsors inquire about it, but more were not serious or weren't up to par for what I would consider a legitimate sponsor.

Check it out:

I'm starting to work on a product hunt launch for unzip.dev.
I heard some problems people had with the design.

The new landing page:

• Added direct links to posts.
• Flexbox design
• Clean fonts
• Added logo
• Simplified the subscribe flow
  

Notice the social proof:

The code is editable and will output an error if there is a syntax error (!)

Under the hood, I've completely refactored the code to be less hacky (although it is still vanila js) - ghost is a pain if you want to use React.

Made the posts look nicer (spacing and fonts):

Added a search and light/dark mode toggle:

New OG images:

Now related posts have an image:

I'll continue to update here before the launch :)

This is such an amazing feat! I started unzip only 4 months, which is crazy.
Just to visualize it, if we had 2,048 readers in a conference room, then we'd have 48 people more than this:

(Taken from flicker by 350.org)

PS. yeah, it's 2^11.

Having a high-quality newsletter was always my first goal. So I decided not to think about monetization until later. I do believe that I need to monetize unzip.dev, I just want to be sure that it is done in a way that doesn't hinder the reading experience - and I feel comfortable doing so.

Having a way to sustain this project is important, I put 20-30 hours for each issue + infra + other expenses. So I need to make sure this can be a long-term project that I can continue to grow healthily.

Anyway, someone reached me and asked if I could give him rates for advertising. I decided to hold advertising in the newsletter until I find the right recipe for it. Nonetheless, getting asked this was really nice, knowing that this is something that is worth money for people, without me actively reaching out.

If you are a reader, and you have an idea for me on monetization, I'd love to hear it :)

I just finished upgrading to a Ghost MySQL deployment. Which was a hassle, Ghost wasn't super friendly about it - had to SSH tunnel ssh -L... to export data from my SQLite db as Ghost doesn't export open rates in the default export 🤦‍♂️.

Today I also managed to put some time into making the landing page more accessible, it highlights the email box after 5 seconds of inactivity - the idea is that inactivity means that the visitor is confused, as the UI is not something usual.

I also made a subtle animation for the footer "Latest posts" link, so people reach it (another problem I've heard from people).

The biggest impact I think would be the addition of a subscribe CTA in the article pages.

Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30983517#30985793

I had a flight back home, which I was kind of stressed about. I was about to miss it. Then, I noticed something weird. I started to get emails from new subscribers. So I went to check the subscriber count, lo and behold, I had 400 subscribers! (275 a day before) I was quite shocked, which didn't help me get to my flight in time (I did eventually after some running). It just kept growing. Then I saw the hackernews referrer in my analytics. To be honest, I wasn't supper happy about it, because I didn't plan it (my server needs an upgrade and I had more things I want to fix in my landing page). But, life doesn't ask you for approval on things :)

Anyway, today we've passed the 1k subscriber count 🥳
I'll do my best to keep the quality high and enjoyable.

P.S. the interesting thing was that the trigger for this was that people liked the landing page. I need to give this some extra thought.

First of all, this is a great boot to hear that the landing page is appreciated! But secondly I got:

• 24 twitter followers!
• 55 new subscribers!

Wow, that's crazy!

Note: the said IndieHackers post got (22 votes, 39 comments, and 693 views). Last update was 6.4.2022.

• Posting second messaging content via LinkedIn, Dev.to and here.
• Adding tweets each time I post.
• Showing the newsletter IRL to relevant people and getting their thoughts on the work + implementing suggestions.
• Continuing to post content in the newsletter over time.

I decided to pull the trigger after I left my job at Palo Alto Networks as a Sr software engineer. I love reading about new trends and how to use them in my daily work, so creating this newsletter was a no-brainer. Nowadays, it also helps me grow my consulting business - win-win!