whena.re

I just finished the core feature, in my opinion, to make whena.re a paid product.

I just finished implementing a Slack integration. My goal now is to make the app grow, have a few users test the integration, and come up with a pricing model.

I encountered a bunch of technical hurdles along the way, and it made me realize why "nocode" will make sense to a lot of people. I don't think the issue is about learning to code. Any app will be as complex as a coding app. I think the issue is with dealing with the complexity of having many different pieces of code interacting together.

I had issues with most of the tools I used, they were not reliable enough or had latency problem (nextjs on Vercel). I was constantly wondering if I should switch tools or keep on implementing more and more complex solutions.

Today I published the application on producthunt at:
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/whenare

It's part of my plan to make my app and code more visible.

I followed advice from Levels' Make book to make the page more producthunt-ish.

It's challenging:

• I try to use emotional/solution wording, which sort of clashes with my /engineer brain/. It's all features and technologies in my mind. The rest is "obvious deductions," which is hard to put into words.
• It feels fake when I write these markety-parts.

I think writing a "first comment" is essential: It's under my name, Laurent-the-human being, and it's easier to take time to describe concrete use-cases and people.

The experience is interesting, and I might reuse this approach of "writing a first comment" to get the tone and info I really want to share.

Today I create this page to let people know about this product. I will spend some time in the next few weeks to fill in more information and get more users interested in this app.

What I've seen is that everyone I would link this too would start using it immediately.

I'm still looking for ways to get more users.