Got Paper
A cheeky mobile app to calculate your toilet paper needs
Two weeks had passed since the site was first created, and it had been seen by nearly 200K people.
Not wanting to maintain a site that had served its purpose, proved a point, and even introduced me to Nuxt, I had to decide what to do next.
Open Sourcing the project seemed like the logical thing to do.
If you want a tightly configured project with:
- server side rendering
- translations
- pwa capability
- analytics
...then feel free to fork and hack on it.
You can find it at:
Good luck!
By this point, the site had been seen all over the world, and I had had requests for it to be translated.
What had started as a "joke" project had now gained some serious traction, so I thought "why not":
The final site was translated into 12 languages over 5 days:
- Chinese (Traditional)
- Czech
- English
- French
- German
- Greek
- Italian
- Russian
- Serbian (Cyrillic)
- Serbian (Latin)
- Spanish
- Swedish
Thanks to the Internet for reaching out and helping with the translation process!
It was great being online, but the site wasn't doing as well as it could do because it wasn't server-rendered.
Very kindly Alex Lichter from the Nuxt core team reached out to me and offered to help me migrate the app to Nuxt. Obviously I grabbed this opportunity with both hands, and Alex very kindly migrated it in about 6 hours.
Once done, he then added the bones of i18n, including the bones of a translation engine, to which I would add 9 languages over the coming week.
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Q: Have you considered doing partial SSR instead (which can be done at CDN edge locations using Cloudflare Workers) - just <head> section of the page required for sharing on social media, and injecting API response into the HTML page then dehydrating on the client in order to avoid API calls on front-end during the initial rendering.
Demo: https://goodparts.org/law-of-one -> right-click, view source
Monday morning we were on the phone to PR friend of a friend and launched to the British and online press.
This achieved articles in the Evening Standard, Daily Mail, Business Insider, TNW and various others.
The best bit were some of the quotes from Mail readers; I've highlighted some of the best ones on the press page!
I started work on the MVP the same evening and worked through the night to get it done.
It's built with Bootstrap and Vue, with the following noteworthy commits:
- 22:23 - initial commit
- 02:39 - initial calculations (alpha)
- 05:24 - finished app (layout, functionality, logo, etc)
- 08:00 - finished PWA (beta)
By 8am I was shattered and went to bed.
The next commit is 14:05, when work started again to flesh out the calculator component with:
- additional media, about and tips pages
- contact form
- social graph info
- bug fixes
- analytics
- etc
Additionally, there was all kinds of other work:
- design
- hosting
- domain / DNS
- marketing material
It all had to be ready for the press release on Monday morning 😬
But the app was live and working and was fun!
We were chatting in Weekend London Slack channel about the toilet roll hoarding craziness, and the subject came up "how much toilet paper does one actually need?".
Of course, it's pretty easy to calculate, you just stick the numbers in a spreadsheet and do the maths.
So what about simply sharing this online, and people could just adjust as required? Hmmm... good idea, but not sure if that marketable....
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