Building a business from scratch - day 3

Welcome to day three of the useaffiliates.com build log! This series covers my journey of building a business from scratch in public. If you missed day two, you could check it out here. I also uploaded today's Twitch stream to YouTube if you want to watch the replay.

Cross-posting; why I do it.

When looking at the numbers of my Indie Hackers post, I was bummed to see that it didn’t get all that many views. Now instead of flipping my desk over and calling it quits, it gave me an idea:

Why not cross-post this entire series to see where the traffic is at? Surely, there has to be an audience somewhere, right? At the very least, I know by the end of the series how each platform works 😅

So there I was this morning, copy and pasting my blog to Indiehackers, Medium, Dev.to, and my blog. Don’t worry; I applied a canonical link to the first three so that my SEO doesn’t suffer.

Updated thumbnails.

While publishing the post to all these platforms, I concluded that my thumbnail sucked. I wanted to give a sneak peek of what I am building and use the orange to stand out more from the other posts.

I don’t have a way of measuring the success of switching thumbnails, but I am pretty pleased with how it turned out! Maybe we’ll tweak it a bit more in the future to see if we can make a difference in clicks.

Finishing the designs.

I planned to spend the remainder of the week finishing the UI, but I completed 90% of the design after about two hours today. It didn’t need that many revisions, and the things that are still a little whacky in the design, I will fix while working on the front-end.

I mean, I love Figma, but I am not that much of an expert on it yet. Some changes are easier to make once I’ve got everything in React components. 🥰

As far as the design I finished:

• I updated the listing pages to include the “load more programs” button. This button will appear as long as the API has more results.
• I finished the blog detail page. I’ve updated the spacing and tweaked the layout a little bit. I also tweaked the social share buttons, although they are still a little big. I’ll tweak them in the front-end since I couldn’t get them quite the way I wanted to in Figma.
• Last but not least, we added the mandatory COPYRIGHT footer. Besides that, I added a small “by twankrui” 😏.

We are doing the tedious work.

Today I finally got started validating the old database and “migrating” (copy ‘n pasting) all the data over to Notion.

While working on the data, I was surprised that many of the links so far are still valid. Not much changed over four years, how!? On the other hand, I learned that MAXCDN doesn’t exist anymore (under that name).

The more you know, right?

Initially, I didn’t want to do this on stream because I think it’s boring to watch me manually migrate a database, but I got a record in concurrent viewers while doing this work (HOW THEN?). I think everyone likes to see me suffer while getting hand craps from hitting copy-n-paste so often. 😝

Getting feature suggestions and requests.

Jokes aside, working on the database allowed me to interact with you guys a bit more! The chat (Twitch followers) asked a lot of questions about the product and even suggested some features.

For example, Rezzich suggested the following feature:

A commission range may be a good idea; you can put 0% - X% or $0 - $X

Building in public rocks, keep the ideas coming. I love it!

Onwards! 🚶‍♂️

To set us up for a great next week, I will work hard on finishing the database. This way, we can start building the web application next week with the data already good to go!

When I work on Fridays, I am usually pretty chill. If you decide to hang out with me on Twitch, we’ll probably talk and laugh a lot. I am also available for any questions you have!

For now, have a great day!

With love,