I’ll be building onecal.io in public starting today.

I’ll be building https://www.onecal.io in public starting today. The amount of knowledge I’ve consumed by bootstrapping SneekPeek and OneCal is huge, the same goes for the number of mistakes I’ve done. I’m sure fellow Engineers have goals of building their idea at some point, so I want to help them by sharing what’s worked for me, hopefully, you don’t commit the number of mistakes I did. #buildinginpublic #day1 #entrepreneurship Day one of building https://www.onecal.io in public: A brief summary of what we have done at OneCal: Started building OneCal on June 2022 🛠 We had a goal of reaching the market as soon as possible, so we had to pick the tech we were most efficient at: Next.js, PostgreSQL, and AWS. In fact, we also use Next.js as our API service. We have a different queue-based service for handling the synchronizations (using SQS), I’ll discuss this in another post. We also use Prisma as our ORM of choice, and tRPC to communicate with our API, and it’s been a joy to work with. We use next-auth for authentication, and it’s proven to be very flexible and easy to work with so far, we even added the option to Sign In with Google by spending 1h of dev time 🤯 And of course, Vercel has tremendously helped us with its PR previews and blazing-fast deployments. Focused on what mattered 🕹 As Software Engineers, we tend to overthink and try to build perfect products. We knew that this was not a mistake we could afford, so we were very pragmatic about this, and cut the scope to the very essential MVP: The user could connect his calendars, create a synchronization, and that’s it. Playing the ‘Building the perfect product’ is a dangerous game, one that we didn’t like playing. Over time we have gotten even more pragmatic and efficient, as at the level of our expertise, it’s very easy to build features, but pointless if no one uses them. This is a topic that I want to educate Engineers on more, as I’ve done it before, and learned it the hard way. Released the beta version on September 2, 2022, 🚀 Upon releasing the beta version, we got around 500 requests to join the beta, and 310 beta users actually signed up after we sent an invite. Released the live version on December 22, 2022, and released on Product hunt on the same day 😻 https://www.producthunt.com/products/onecal#onecal We reached the #3 product of the day on Product Hunt and got our first paying users. During that week, we got at around $150 MRR. The support and feedback were overwhelming and helped us reach a wider audience than we thought we could. Added advanced synchronization options ⚙️ We listened to the feedback we had from our users and added some of the most advanced calendar synchronization options in the market. Check our last product update here: https://www.onecal.io/blog/winter-2022-product-update Created a public roadmap 🚴 We had a goal of being transparent with our users and listening to their feedback at the same time, so we create a public roadmap where users could vote or suggest features. Check our Public Roadmap here: https://trello.com/b/hF2d7AQi/%F0%9F%9A%80-onecal-public-roadmap Reached $200 MRR by the end of January 2023 💸 We have been reaching out to companies for partnership 💌 As Software Engineers, sales is one of our biggest challenges. We have tried reaching out to companies and explaining the benefits of using OneCal, but so far it hasn’t been successful. We are working on creating a better value proposition and being more creative about the way we approach the whole proposition. This will be an interesting topic to discuss, as it’s generally a major pain point for Engineers turning into entrepreneurs. Started some ads on LinkedIn and Google… 🌠 We have started running some ads on LinkedIn and Google. This is an interesting topic, as it’s hard to nail and it takes iterations of testing and making changes in order to make it work. I’ll keep you posted about our progress. Announced an affiliate program 😉 We had some requests to get featured in some large channels of professionals, in a form of an affiliate. We did the opposite thing that an engineer would do, by not coding the solution, but using a third-party app to handle our affiliates. Timing is very important, and the urge to code everything has gotten better over time. Switched to Freemium model 🆓 We noticed that users were hesitant to enter the Credit Card when signing up, so we switched to a freemium model, where users can sign up, and use the full limits of OneCal for 2 weeks, no Credit Card required. This has raised a couple of other challenges, such as nailing down the conversion from a free user to a paid one. We have done a lot of progress in that regard, I’ll be sharing the exact strategy we are using to convert the free users to use the paid version of OneCal after the free trial ends. Improved the landing page, adding features pages, comparison pages, etc 🌄 Constantly improving the landing page is crucial, so we have done our best to create the most intuitive value proposition for our customers. We made sure we highlighted how OneCal works by creating intuitive videos of how a personal and work calendar would synchronize. Those videos on https://www.onecal.io are built using React (thanks to https://www.remotion.dev Furthermore, we have added a couple of testimonials, and a Data Privacy page highlighting what we store in our database, as Calendar Events are quite sensitive (we don’t store anything btw 😁) This is just a brief overview so you can catch up on what we’ve been cooking lately, I’ll be posting about our journey, mistakes, and what works and what does not, daily. 😁