Product and landing page improvements, meeting makers in Lisbon, and organizing a Hackathon ✨

Hey there, I’m André – tech entrepreneur and founder of LaunchFast. If you’re new here, LaunchFast is a stack designed to help web developers speed up their project development process, from launch to scale. I’m building in public, and I’ve been sharing daily updates on my journey. First of all, apologies for not having written as many updates as I used to. I was trying something out but I’ve gotten plenty of requests to keep sharing my progress and learning in public. So, experiment over, and here I am. So, here’s what’s on the docket for today: - Improved the landing page - Learned about and installed Microsoft Clarity, a free-forever alternative to HotJar/Crazy Egg - Partnered with Jim as an affiliate - (almost) Finished integrating subscription payments on LaunchFast - Meeting makers - Next steps Let’s go! ## Improved the landing page I’ve made a big jump from the original landing page to the current one. The flow is cleaner, the benefits are clearer, but it still has a long way to go. Also, documentation to educate my potential customers is going to be paramount. I’ve recently come across Daniel Hansson’s talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cEn_83zRFw&ab_channel=RubyonRails) about this marketing movement to exploit developers’ insecurities about touching servers (Vercel), databases (Supabase), and authentication (Auth0, Supabase, Firebase, etc). It’s gross, and it makes me sad and want to be an even more powerful force for developer empowerment. That’s why LaunchFast rolls its own auth and database - you don’t have to pay for this, and it’s not that scary. But I do understand I need to educate my users and help them distinguish salience from truth - just because everyone’s talking about it, doesn’t mean it’s true/useful/worth your time. ## Microsoft Clarity I’m blown away by MS Clarity. It’s a great product, you get to inspect what your users are doing and figure out what works and what doesn’t, it anonymizes all information and is GDPR compliant, and you get heatmaps to see how far down users scroll your page, so you can improve your copy. I haven’t fully explored its capabilities, because, for now, I only need user behavior and heatmaps to improve my landing page. But I’m happy that I have, once again, found a free alternative that is as good as paid solutions. ## Partnered with Jim as an affiliate Jim (https://x.com/jimleevi) contacted me about KeyMentions (KM) (https://keymentions.com/), a marketing SaaS Jim and his team are creating. I’ve been giving them feedback to improve the UI/UX and KM’s turning into a nice product. Not sure about buying upvotes on Reddit though 🤷‍♂️ But that’s up to them. Anyway, I asked Jim if they’d like to be my affiliate and they replied with an emphatic “YES”! Hopefully, that will drive some sales for LaunchFast. If you’d like to be my affiliate or know anyone who would enjoy it, please share this link (https://andre-casal.getrewardful.com/signup) with them. I’m offering a 50% commission. ## (almost) Finished integrating subscription payments on LaunchFast I’ve been working on integrating subscription payments into LaunchFast. The functionality is done. Check out my video about it: https://x.com/andrecasaldev/status/1840089971702509856 But before I release this to LaunchFast’s clients, I want to add some “quality of life” code so that enabling Stripe subscriptions is as easy as adding your STRIPE_SECRET_KEY to the .env file and everything is fully functional from that point onwards - no configuration required. I’m excited to see what my users say about it 💪😄 ## Meeting makers I’ve also met Janu (https://x.com/JanuBuilds/status/1837584468292289001) who came from Germany to Portugal specifically to meet makers like myself and that led to meeting Miguel and Bernardo (https://x.com/sir__fox/status/1838692888353358191) and planning HackathonLisbon which will launch on the last weekend of November 😄 This is what happens when you get builders and makers together: stuff happens 💪😄 ##Next steps I’ve decided to work on iteration cycles like this: - LaunchFast - Improve product - Improve landing page - Increase (qualified) traffic - Hackathon Lisboa I do the most important or anxiety-inducing (https://www.amazon.com/Eat-That-Frog-Great-Procrastinating/dp/162656941X) task from each of these queues and repeat. And that’s it for today folks, have a great rest of your weekend, and see you tomorrow 🙌😄