Are you building in public? Drop what you are working on and one lesson learned from your journey!
Sharath Kuruganty
82 replies
Replies
Rosie Sherry@rosiesherry
Orbit
I'm working on https://rosie.land - mostly it's writing, sharing, researching and education on community building.
Mostly I share stuff randomly on Twitter or Indie Hackers.
I also have a small private indie community where I share stuff in semi-public, I'm much more transparent there.
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Working on https://vero.fm
Learned that copywriting for SEO is not an effective strategy for validating an idea.
Saastic
Hey folks. I am building CrowdPower (https://crowdpower.io) in public - a user engagement tool for SaaS products. You can follow me on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/@scottinpublic
One lesson I have learned is I've been able to get hundreds of people to buy a lifetime deal, but it is difficult to find the customers willing to pay monthly. I blame that on distribution. LTD platforms can get the word out to thousands of users for you quickly. As a result, I feel like it is possible to make more money selling a micro-SaaS that is easy to build and cheap to run as an LTD vs. going after MRR. I did end all my LTDs as I look to the next phase of growth, but I may dabble with a different product one day.
Working on a tool to connect blogging and tweeting. It's called Blotter, and the first functionality β blog comments powered by Twitter β is launching in a couple of weeks! π±
What I've learned: niche audience + specific pain point + marketing channel is way more important than tech stack.
Starting building our Daily Crypto chrome extension after I found crypto watchlists too cumbersome to use!
Been adding features and shipping and it's been so much fun: https://bit.ly/trydailycrypto
Lesson: Being the first customer for the problem you're solving may or may not be rewarding - but it surely is fun π
ContentBees
I will be focusing on SEO traffic for ActiveMan.com and nygal.com this month
We're building a big-picture-focused project management tool in public. So far, we've mainly been discussing our philosophy choices. The actual design and development stuff will be coming soon: https://www.expectedbehavior.com...
The #1 takeaway so far is that sometimes you just get crickets. People don't normally take the time to email or have a conversation with you.
Hey @5harath π - we're building a Twitter game called twiDAQ. Launching on here in a few hours ( https://www.producthunt.com/post... π ) so I'll be sure to come back and let you know what we learn!!
Mind Body Tab
Working on Paperless.io & StartupBrand.io - Number one lesson: Don't overthink, just ship.
Usermaven
Building my 3rd SaaS (https://usermaven.com) in public. It's a product analytics tool for SaaS businesses.
We managed to get 200+ companies on the waiting list. One thing I've learned is that you have to post consistently on Twitter and other channels to keep the community engaged.
Hi. This is Vishakha. I am building Unlearning Labs - Itβs a blog today and hopefully in the near future, a community of people who want to learn about learning and apply it in their contexts. As an educator, this blog will help me launch resource pages for educators, parents and learners globally.
One lesson: Take actions every day. It's easy to get into the rut of impostor syndrome and question the process but just get to doing one thing a day.
This is the link - https://unlearninglabs.com/. I am still in the early stages so feedback and suggestions will help a long way :)
Manipulist for MacOS
Working on https://wordsfromimage.com - asked a friend a quick feedback and ended up having to do a quite serious UI/UX restyle! great to have early feedbacks!
We're building https://tally.so (the simplest way to create forms for free).
Biggest lesson: learning how to say no. As a bootstrapped team of 2 we need to make hard decisions all the time in order to be able to focus on growing our product and secure time for creation.
Get Intro
We are building a handoff tool for designers and developers to transform any figma component into fullcode.
A learning? Developers takes the majority of their time building pixel perfect interfaces but almost never get right to it.
Proposal: Give the power to the designer to ship production-ready components and avoid work duplication, developer will focus 100% in functionality instead of UI
this is our upcoming page here in product hunt : https://www.producthunt.com/upco...
Landing page: https://frontdrop.io
Happy to hear advices and feedback
Building https://thymer.com in public - an editor/IDE for tasks & planning.
The biggest lesson is rather meta: it's that _not_ building in public is really playing the startup game in hard mode. We've built our first product in the proverbial basement, never really sharing much about the process itself. It all worked out in the end, but it feels like everything goes much faster taking the public route. When we launched our first product, we didn't have any audience. We also launched on PH and managed to rank pretty well, but with 0 followers at the time, there is nobody to ask for feedback, nobody who will spread the word for you. Everything grew organically or through SEO, which worked for us but takes a long time. This time around we're sharing all our lessons and in return already have people following the project and giving feedback, which is a lot more fun too ;)
Working on a distributed, offline first wiki platform: https://oneplaybook.app. We've learned a lot about SEO while building it. Easier AND harder than you think π
Currently building Notion Invoice, an invoicing solution for business users of Notion. (See https://notioninvoice.com).
Most recent lesson: Your MVP needs fewer features than you think, but your UX needs to be more polished than you think.
@farez_rahman we spent a large portion of our funds on a chat functionality which neither works nor is necessary for our platform.
@farez_rahman true, and a hard pill to swallow at the end of ones budget :)
PropelAuth
We are working on PropelAuth (https://www.propelauth.com) - an end-to-end auth service which includes first-class support for onboarding your customer's teams.
We used to have a broader focus (you can even see it in our PH launch where we were auth for anyone), but we focused more on a specific segment, B2B customers, and people respond way better on sales calls.
@andrew_israel I'm going to recommend your business to the marketing staff at my job I like the product so far wish you all the best of luck.
Business News for Kids
Building https://ultrainbox.io - one inbox for all your chats, DMs, emails.
No.1 Lesson: Be really sure WHO you are building for. And find them :) As early, as many. Zeroing in on that "first user" is critical.
Summer Bod 2020
I am building https://thisappwillgiveyouabs.co...
One lesson learned: Make something useful, and make it findable, and they will find it.
I have done minimal marketing and monthly users keeps climbing.
This is not 'build it and they will come'. More like 'make it useful and make it findable via SEO'.