Build in public: Our first month of building and maintaining TinySnap
TinySnap released the MVP (minimum viable product) version on August 15th, so it's just been a whole month until today. We decided to build in public from the very beginning. This blog post is about the TinySnap indie hackers' journey of building, releasing, marketing, and planning in the past month.
Read this blog entry in Chinese: https://dearroy.com/tinysnap-first-month-breakdown-report/
1. The origin, beta, and release.
The idea of TinySnap was conceived and envisioned by me & Mufeng. I lead the product design and operations while Mufeng squashed the bugs left and right. We two quickly came up with the closed beta version of TinySnap in early August.
After a few days of work prepping content and developing the landing page, we launched the 1st public version on August 15th. 116 commits in total were made for the extension, and we've released 4 versions since the first public version (v0.0.1 to v0.0.4).
Getting listed on browser web stores was relatively straightforward. We submitted our extension to major web stores and got listed within a few days. Here are the juicy links up for grabs:
PS: Chrome rejected our first submission, it was a permission issue, which we patched, and resubmitted for review. And they approved our listing within a few hours.
2. The 500 installs milestone
On September 10th, TinySnap achieved 500 installs in total. Much thanks to organic marketing and community engagements.
3. Website Traffic
To give privacy and web performance the upper hand, we switched from Google Analytics to Plausible on September 5th. Gotta love that analytics script under 1kb.
3.1 Top sources
Google remains the top source of our website traffic. We are actively working on SEO, and it is certainly kicking in. The second best source is v2ex.com, a community of start-ups, designers, developers, and creative people in China. We are grateful to other community sites also.
3.2 Top devices
It's good to see that our device-based visits keep in contrast with the global usage share of operating systems. Windows users contribute 46% of our website engagements.
3.3 Top countries
We got more unique users from the United States of America. Followed by India, China, and Brazil. It's great to see a diverse set of the user-base. To ensure a better user experience in Brazil, we have pushed the Brazilian Portuguese locale to TinySnap.app recently.
4. User engagement in extension
Right after installing Plausible analytics, we started tracking the extension events of the users who've upgraded to TinySnap v0.0.4. A total of 829 captures were made through TinySnap from September, of which 243 are unique. It's good to see that our users are sharing the snaps actively. The code editor is a relatively new feature we expect to be popular among developers.
5. Blog posts we made
We chose Ghost CMS for our blog since we already used it for HeyForm, we are accustomed to using it in production with a dead simple interface. It's such a solid platform! A total of five blog posts were published in the last month, and they are:
- How we built TinySnap: the anatomy of a browser extension
- TinySnap Launch Timeline
- How We Implement CD (Continuous Deployment) for TinySnap
- How We Use TinySnap for In-house Marketing
- Why We Use Plausible (Google Analytics Alternative)
This is just the beginning. We will keep posting our way of building TinySnap, hoping it might help and inspire newbie indie hackers to develop their products.
6. Languages we support
Apart from en-US, We've added support for a few more languages in September. We implemented Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese locales in the early stages. And recently, we added the following locales to production.
- Portuguese
- French
- Germany
7. Twitter Analytics
@TinySnapApp reached 2,867 people since its inception. 8,568 profile visits don't look bad either. The Twitter game is a bit slow, but hopefully, we will catch up in the next quarter.
Conclusion
TinySnap only sounds tiny in its name. We have worked a lot to reach where we are now. And we sincerely hope our blog posts and monthly breakdown reports will inspire upcoming indie hackers and makers. Please tune in to the TinySnap blog to read our next monthly report in October. Until then, Ciao!
👋 We are available to chat on Telegram. Write to us, maybe.
Originally posted on TinySnap blog:
https://tinysnap.app/blog/tinysnap-first-month-breakdown-report/
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After 19,314 lines of code, i'm shutting down my project
Need feedback for my product.
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We are live on Product Hunt
Hey Everyone
We recently built https://ansy.ai/
it is a Discord bot that will answer community questions based on chat history of public channels. Cool way to save time of mods.
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/ansy-ai
Do check us out and let us know what you think. Your feedback will be super helpful.
Nice report, what makes you decide to build in public?
Hey Jasjit,
It's all about transparency, we want to build in front of our users and get imperative feedback so we can pivot according to the demand.
TinySnap is a tiny software that we build as a side hustle, being transparent doesn't really hurt at all if things don't go right.
--
Luo
I see you started from 0, didn't you fear that people will laugh at you if the performance in first month is not good?
I have nothing to fear, as a nobody.
Can you please expand on how you are getting Google traffic
Also I would love a tool that it made it easy to save recording for doing a product demo
When we wrote the blogs, we included some long-tailed keywords in the post, and we market with those blog posts we made. It didn't take effect at the beginning but from the 3rd and 4th weeks we began to see some traffic.
So the principle is to write for search engines yet keep helpful, time will tell the truth.
As to the recording feature, it's already planned, we will get down to it soon.
--
Luo
I would also like to see the recording feature!
👏 Nice work
I have a few quick questions
I see that you have 7 blogs in total on your site. Which blog is bringing the most traffic? (Trying to understand what's working)
Are the blogs working or is it the website page that are bring in the traffic?
Is having multiple languages helping you in SEO? (are you seeing queries in different languages)
Hey Abhishek,
Thanks for your support!
Yes, we have 7 in total, 5 were made during the last 30 days. "How We Implement CD (Continuous Deployment) for TinySnap" brought the most traffic to our website, we posted it on several communities and looks like this technical article inspired developers a lot.
The website itself gets some direct traffic from startup listing platforms like BetaList, StartupBase, etc. And we reposted our blog posts to communities like IndieHackers, HackerNews, and Reddit which also generated some traffic.
Other than that social media platforms are also a source of traffic.
We just added it a few days ago, the primary goal was to provide a better browsing experience to local visitors, we didn't benefit from it for SEO yet, but time will tell.
--
Luo