Wunderbucket
Simple hosting for creative people
It's been two years working on this product. Crazy how time flies. I would not recommend the process I've followed with Wunderbucket: too long of a feedback cycle, too much fine-tuning, too much "just one more feature". All of this leads me to suspect that I overcooked this goose.
Still, there is a shot for the strategy I'm following to work. If the following things two happen, then this product should have a healthy shelf life:
- Support from Apple in the app store. The Mac App store is key leg of the distribution strategy. I've invested a lot to make sure that this is a top-tier app and follows all of the guidelines to get Apple's attention. We'll see if does the trick.
- Connecting with the designer audience. I know that these users are underserved but they're a bit tricky to reach effectively. This is one reason it took me so long to get out of beta. Finding free distribution channels is going to be so important.
All that blithering aside, Wunderbucket is live. Check it out and see what you think:
Well it's almost a year late but it's finally here: Wunderbucket is finally opening up to private beta users.
Why did this take so long?
When I left my last startup I thought hacking "nights & weekends" as a solo founder would be pretty easy. I'd done it before to success. But sometime in late summer I started feeling that my MVP for Wunderbucket was just... not quite where it needed to be in terms of customer alignment. It needed a pretty significant rewrite. And to top it off, I'd just started a new full-time job that was taking tons of my energy. The second half of 2019 was way less productive for my little side project than I'd hoped.
How did I finally ship this?
Towards the end of 2019, I recognized that if I didn’t get help, I would never ship Wunderbucket. I divided the work up into three different components: Backend, Front-end & Desktop, and Design. I would tackle desktop programming and overall product UX. I contracted with two excellent individuals to help with Backend and Design. Huge thanks to Konrad and Matthew for their awesome work. Konrad lives in Poland and Matthew lives in New Zealand so it forced me to be clear with communicating asynchronously. Every morning, I would get up around 6:00AM and check in with Konrad before heading off to my full-time job. Matthew and I only communicated over email and he absolutely nailed what I was looking for with the app design.
I couldn’t have done it without their help. If I hadn’t bit the bullet and contracted with them there’s no way I’d have made it to public beta.
Interested in trying Wunderbucket?
Wunderbucket is hosting for designers & creatives who know enough HTML and CSS to be dangerous. I wanted to build a static hosting service that threw out all the mind-numbing, tedious parts that slow down the creative process: no configs, no source-code repositories, no push, pull request, build workflows. Just simple HTML and CSS and a service that lets me to tinker with my site until it’s perfect. I hope it finds an audience.
If you want to try it, head over to https://wunderbucket.io and enter your info. I’ll be sending more invites out soon.
About a week ago I wrote an article on dev.to about how I'm architecting Wünderbucket to infinitely scale for $5/mo. My previous article on that site hadn't gotten much of a response so I wanted to try something a little different for this article. I opened up my business model and how I'm crunching the numbers on building a scalable cloud hosting service that's profitable from day one. I think this directness and transparency paid off because this article performed better than anything I've written on any other site.
- In less than a week it got 1,700 views and 65 upvotes.
- I also got a nice spike in referrals to my site.
I'll see if I can repeat it. Here's the article:
https://dev.to/levinunnink/building-an-infinitely-scalable-cloud-host-for-less-than-5-mo-1nkl
When I started programming for the web, most content was served by hacked together HTML and JS via a cheap webhost like GoDaddy or MediaTemple. But since the rise of mobile and social networks, most web content has been siloed into small list of massive websites. In 2019 it's immensely daunting for a designer to host a website the "right way". So most of them feed the behemoths, try to hack it with Squarespace or Wix, or don't build their own sites at all. This needs to change. I wanted to make it easier for creative people to make their own little place on the web, without having to be a hardcore developer, hack a CMS, or gulp use Cpanel.
So I started building Wünderbucket.
⚡️It's hosting for designers who can hack CSS and HTML but aren't comfortable in a command line.
⚡️It's for those picky creative types who want to tweak their website a lot and don't want to go through a complicated workflow to re-word a paragraph or change an image. (Pull, branch, commit, push, merge, build, repeat. 😖)
⚡️It's for people who want their site to be secure but are intimidated by the process of buying a SSL certificate.
⚡️It's for people who want a site to load fast around the world on any device but they don't know how a CDN works.
⚡️It's for people who hate writing config files.
If you're a hardcore developer that lives and breathes devops and workflow, we're probably not for you. But if your technical ability begins with HTML and ends with CSS (maybe a little JavaScript), then please check Wünderbucket out.
It's still in private beta but sign up for an invite and include a link to your IndieHackers profile and I'll put you to the front of the line.
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