👋 Hi, what are you building this week?
👋 Hi, I'm Nick. I'm a developer working on SaaS products and
doin the "build in public" thing on Twitter (@nickfrosty)
Share what you are building this week, either your todo/task list or describe your product.
I'll go first:
I'm building other.link, a url shortener service that combines a link shortener and those "link in bio" pages that people use. This week, my tasks are:
- finish the authentication portion of the app
- get the first working version of the link shortener
- make the landing page url shortener functional
- enable the waitlist signup
What are you working on? 👇
Share it below, shameless plugs are allowed 😊
Trending on Indie Hackers
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We are live on Product Hunt
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I've been building Acrobox, a PaaS for indie hackers. This week, I'm working on exploring marketing strategies and building courage to get the word out. Posts like these help, and I'm going to attempt my first cold outreach to someone I made note of early in development.
Seems like a away for devs to rapidly publish their apps? A full end to end solution! Very cool.
PS: Your phrasing of "PaaS for Indie Hackers", both here and on your site, seems very vague to be the best headline/motto. Have you tried other ones?
Yes, exactly. Also very valuable feedback regarding the vague headline. No, this is all I've had. I'll have to think more about it. Thanks.
Nice! I’m building something similar, but for development environments. Would love to hear more about Acrobox.
Awesome. Yeah I think dev work has accelerated so fast. Complexities build up and then eventually go through phases of breaking them down. We see this in many facets of life but I've been seeing a lot of this in tech recently. Look forward to seeing what you come up with.
What else do you want to hear about? The docs cover the present state. I cover some of the history on my blog and plan to write more about my vision and the solo indie hacker journey.
Bingo! That's what I was looking for - thanks!
I'm working on Listas with @ndelvalle
Listas is a way to manage your reading lists (or any digital content for that matter).
We are ready with the MVP (and some more) and gotta figure out the way to find users now.
EDIT: Hi btw 😅 other.link looks cool 🚀
I like it. That is sort of what I wanted with boomerang.link, but with more a focus on being able to send myself reminders
Thanks!
Nice! I like the idea of sending reminders
I'm working on Dynomantle, a knowledge management tool for busy people.
I used to struggle with stuff like note taking and emails. The problem was I kept trying to follow advice of productivity gurus who tout completely new habits. It's hard to build a new habit.
I built Dynomantle to work with the habits people already have. It's sustainable productivity.
I've been redesigning the landing page for https://renderchallenge.com/ . My goal is to get to 100 subscribers to my newsletter before the end of the the month. Went from 60 to 71 this week, so hoping that this gets more conversions
I'm building simplitix.co - simple tool for creating reports for social media managers and agencies
Cool. Big fan of data and reports. How have you been getting customers?
I'm working on a psychotherapy service for North-Americans with poor insurance coverage. Wish I had something to show off, but as of now it's just a patchwork of different apps. I got my first users last week though, which I'm super excited about.
This weekend I'm splitting my time between building our website and acquiring more users.
Congrats on your first user!
Mental health is super important. It seems like it is becoming more "main stream" to talk about mental health and the importance of it. Which is awesome! Less negative stigma around it, less people being afraid of trying to get help. Or just to find someone to talk to that can be unbiased is very important!
You keep up the good work!!!!!!!!
Working on finding my first 100 customers for Microbreak Boss as well as refining my copy before I can push a new version on the App Store 😇
I love the landing page of other.link 👌
P.S. I return the favour, https://other.link/features is not working 😆
🥂 hahaha my landing page is basically not functional at all! haha it is just a design concept. I plan to get that "marketing" site operational by the end of the month
How many customers are you at now? What are your plans/tactics for acquisition?
Ah got it 😆
Here's my full plan 😎
Btw just saw that you were a nuclear submarine engineer (or something like that), that's crazy bro 😂
I'll give it a read!
Yup yup. It's been a wild ride!
I'm building Instagrumpy - The system for indie hackers (creators, makers, and founders) to grow their brand on Instagram while saving hours on research and execution.
instagrumpy.com
I'm not an Instagram user myself, but seems like a good niche.
Have you been getting any traction yet? Or are you still in the early phases?
I launched it on Producthunt and made 5 sales and 120 signups in a week. Since then I am working on getting success for early buyers, building an audience, and finishing the product too.
Awesome initial success! What do you plan on doing to market it? Direct outreach on instagram? Ads?
Working on a comprehensive audience-building strategy. Ads = last resort.
I'm building a product management newsletter loved by 365+ product managers so far that get one best PM article in their inbox along with a short summary & many interesting content sections that are fun to read!
Explore more at: https://itsrabbithole.substack.com
I am working on https://www.bucketscout.io. It will be a online tool to help DevOps and Sysadmins to track their cloud storage usage using visual tools and compare how usage changes over time.
Next steps will be to implement user registration and om ording aling with payments. I also need to figure out pricing 🙈. Any ideas?
I'm excited to be building products for my upcoming Gumroad store along with working on a newsletter (this one's been on the back burner for an insanely long time). You can find it here!
Congrats on building other.link! 👋
Hello...
I built a feature into my Lead generation SaaS.
It is a Google Places scraper, the website is: https://leadgen.tools
Willing to give free trial credits to whoever wants to try it.
Building auth pages with Devise :)
Hello 👋.
I am building an app- Brandeck. an IDEA 💡 that involves small businesses/owners advertise through a medium where their contents are showcased via a display device (iPad, or any digital device) through their phones.
The digital devices are going to be transported via hailing vehicles (uber, taxify, lyft etc)
The major catch for business owners is to get the attention of their contents to the numerous riders who hail these vehicles thereby converting them to leads/customers.
So this week I am fleshing out the idea using Strategyzer business model, and hope to be done before March 🙂
This is just in a skeletal frame right now but I see potential in this. I am looking for a mentor, investor & or one who can be involved in this 💡with me. LET’S HACK THIS TOGETHER 💪🏼.
Big market to be taking on! Best of luck to you!
Thanks 🙂. Yes the market is Big and not much competition here in my country.
Continuing to build Eurotripr.com - A trip planner and inspiration community for travelers wishing to go to Europe.
Very cool. I can't wait for the pandemic to be over so I can get some travel in, I am very excited to get to Europe. Especially Portugal!
I'm building Wirechunk, a platform for finding and organizing your code templates. I just wrote up my first post on IH about it—check it out: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/let-me-tell-you-about-my-journey-the-idea-pre-launch-f5f7f59f89
Cool concept, I am a big fan of productivity stuff. Especially things that help me be a more productive coder
Hey, I am building the auto-tweet functionality for my job boards Remote Frontend Jobs and Remote Backend Jobs
It's pretty much done, but I just got some limitation on the @remotebackends account on twitter and I am trying to resolve that with their support. Other than that - now a new job will be posted @ every 6 hours so more people get to find out about remote opportunities :)
That's cool. Have you been getting decent engagement with people on twitter viewing the automated tweets?
Hey, I've only started doing that yesterday and so far - I haven't had anything except a couple of visits from twitter. I had some followers though. Let's see if that improves in the next couple of days :)
Building Pallo.com! Really excited! it's launching tomorrow :D Been a long journey
Congrats on your Product Hunt launch!
Pallo seems super useful for small business owners. Good luck!
nice! what's your plan to build trust w/ consumers? With financial apps/sensitive data, that's got to be challenging
We're regulated by the IRS so we've had to keep our security to a high standard, at a certain stage I think we'll publish our ISO etc. We also have a bunch of features in the app, such as Face ID, and auto locking if you're inactive for a minute or longer (stops people seeing your data on your phone if you're not there), also using 2FA. It'll be a gradual process
Tough space to be in, its going to be an uphill battle for sure to get adoption. Do you have any current plans or strategies to help get users?
I have been working on https://rocketgraph.io
It provides a complete backend setup with a graphql engine, authentication and SSL so you don't have to write code or worry about different APIs on your front-end. Everything is taken care of. During my early years of web development I wish I really had it this easier(or more). Do check it out. We want to finish beta testing soon and reach more audience so I'd be happy to give you a few free credits.
I have thought about building something similar myself, giving users a full API endpoint to manage their data and auth. Including creating custom routes and adding custom input validation for any route
How long have you been working on it?
You can see the in depth twitter threat at https://twitter.com/RGraphql
First of all it's really fulfilling to hear this @nickfrosty because sometimes I thought no one would use this. But I do believe it has a strong use case.
I have been (on-and-off) on this for over 5 months now. So how we do this is, once a user setups up a project on our platform:
Link to Hasura batteries: https://github.com/RocketsGraphQL/hasura-batteries
Link to docs: https://rocketgraph.io/docs/#/
Do let me know what you think and how I can make it better.
Seems like were are both on the same page on functionality 👍
Something to considered though is the scalability and the database backups. Being able to manage all the connections and pools will get tricky. Especially if someone is using serverless functions that are known to not be great for connection mongering
Have you hear of FaunaDB. They are a funded startup making a "serverless database" built on top of lambdas. I have not used them yet, but something for you to look into.
Hey @nickfrosty sorry for not getting back at this earlier. 2 reasons really.
So FaunaDB is sort of the super-set of Hasura. Initially I wanted to build something like that. But after talking to some succesful people on Twitter, their advice is to start small and grow and audience first. Fauna has even their own Query language and I guess they are ex-Twitter employees or something so they really are pros in the game. What I find missing is automatic schema generation and GraphQL explorer, but I think they are advanced enough that they can build that easily. Plus also learning a new language is just "meh" for me. So I definitely think it's a good idea but only if the developers agree and give it momentum. But right now I think it is not so likely as there is a huge learning curve. But yes the problem they are solving is real and I want to eventually get there. What do you think about this?
Everybody is doing something hhhh
A wise person once said: "people do be building" (Abraham Lincoln, probably)
I am open sourcing my VS Code theme and porting the theme other interfaces.
i neededa brake from my main products.
You can get it here:
or the marketplace:
This is how is going the official site that I am building.
One of my apps was a link sharing service with a social component :) If I ever finish my app, I'd definitely use this service.
https://rinkurisuto.azurewebsites.net/
I see more apps here that I can use, thanks for this thread!
No problem! I always get lots of value and find tons of new products to checkout from these types of threads
I'm pushing some new updates to Engine.so for Notion.so. Currently working on image & video caching so things can load instantaneously and be served over a CDN versus through Notion.
I'm currently working on a few projects. Playgroup, the only community platform you need (https://playgroup.community/), Submetrics, a modern metrics dashboard for creators (https://submetrics.co/), and Socialnaut, seriously simple social media scheduling (no landing page just yet).
I'm working on validating an idea: a beautiful, printed magazine of your Substack newsletters, delivered directly to you. If you think this is interesting, I'd love your feedback!
A Chrome extension that avoids creating filename(1).pdf in your download folder by prompting you a "save as" dialog when you try to download a file with the same file name.
Wrote more about it on IH: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/i-mightve-built-the-worst-possible-chrome-extension-in-history-c9534bef46
I'm chipping away at a site named nbayoungboymerch.net. It is a product of NBA young man a popular vocalist. To purchase garments of NBA youngboy style which is uniquely made for his fans so visit this site: https://nbayoungboymerch.net/category/38-baby/
I've been working on two projects, but the add-on project has had the most attention over the last month due to researching and setting up.
Hopefully over the rest of the weekend will do the final touches and proof reading for (Our Web Hosting)[https://ourwebhosting.co.uk] which will launch with lifetime wordpress Hosting for the UK based small business / new side hustle (billed in GBP and hosted in UK as well).
Once that is up and live will then refocus on the primary side project of the website crawler to speed up sites. This will have a strong tie-in to the Hosting offering to offer both or single as required. Landing page needs a rebuild after recent feedback to match Hosting.
Probably a bit mad to try two things at once but nothing ventured etc etc.
Helping someone to learn how to code?
I think considering any kind of help would help everyone. The idea of all businesses is to help people, I believe any kind of help would be a great success in the end. I want to help even more people...
It is always great to help people, especially in ways that can help them help themselves. I have been helping teach people to code for something like 10 years now. Mostly from YouTube videos and how to tutorials. Its supper fun for me to do too!
I'm working on PropelAuth, we make it easy for devs to add authentication to their products.
This week is going to be fun - I'm creating a lot more guides which basically means building fun sample projects in different languages/frameworks. We just added Webflow support so I'm excited to test out different the dev experience of auth with a Webflow frontend and serverless backend.
Useful product. Does you auth go though other providers like Google or anything? Or is it only through your own service?
Thanks! You can also set up login with other providers like Google.
Gotcha. I can imagine that having those sorts of options for your customers will give them peace of mind and much more flexibility
Keep it up!
I built a chrome extension that lets you easily bookmark code examples across StackOverflow, etc and go back to them later!
https://kiktabcode.gumroad.com/l/zvqse
Seems useful. Have you though about turning it into a VS code extension too?
Save the code examples in the browser, then you can also immediately find them in VS code (and maybe other editors?), and use it right away?
Nick, great idea! I'm glad you mention that, what sort of features would you be looking for?
I guess some sort of auto complete, or templating system. Being able to easily "fork" a code snippet I found online to make it into my style, then use that as a snippet later too
Build apps for digital nomads and remote workers. I already support web app, want to build mobile apps to support Android and iOS. https://jorcus.com
What are you plans to create the mobile apps? Are you planning on creating them with their native languages? Or use other platforms like Ionic or Electron?
Java for Android, Swift for iOS.
Do you already know these languages? If so, very impressive. And good luck to you!
Yes, I learned that years ago.
Writing content and finding authors for Practice Probs (programming practice problems). ..and taxes :/
How long have you been working on it?
The platform itself - about three months. The numpy and pandas content I repurposed from courses I developed 1-2 years ago.
Nice! How long have you been working on it? A few years then? Or were those just repurposed for this platform you made?
The numpy course took me about three months to develop. The pnadas course took about six months. At the time I created those courses, I hadn't come up with Practice Probs. (They were actually video courses I posted to YouTube.) When I started working on Practice Probs ~3 months ago, I repurposed those video courses into written content.
Content you can repurpose is great. Multiple platforms, multiple formats for consumption. I do the same thing for the dev/tech videos I write. Turn them into videos too!
Sounds familiar to what I'm working on :)
T.LY Url Shortener with the ability to create OneLinks for link in bio. Feel free to reach out and let me know how it's going.
Hey thanks! I have seen you and your site around. Seems like you have quite the respectable business going on!
Thank you! Looks like you have a lot of neat projects as well. Following to see how things go!
Thanks, following you too :) you have an interesting combo of the url shortener and a weather app. Pretty different, but what ever works and you are passionate about!
Hey Nick,
I'm Ashish, also doing the build in public thing on Twitter @selvarajashish
Currently building the third iteration of my landing page for Introspekt (a journaling app written in SwiftUI). Planning to post on Landing Page Feedback once I'm finished.
Hi Ashish! Always good to see fellow "build in public" people 😊
Why a third iteration of the landing page? Have you gotten feedback from potential customers? Or is it from your own thoughts on it?
Hey Nick,
The first two were very quick - just to get something on there.
This one is more well thought out. I finished it and posted here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/my-first-landing-page-would-you-sign-up-5acb6b61e4
If you get a chance to take a look, let me know what you think :)
Ashish
Tough space to be in I think, lots of people like me set on their ways of using a notepad or text doc.
But I wish you the best of luck!
Thanks!
Maybe I'll be able to convert you :)
Hahaha good luck, I'm a developer. So I'm pretty stubborn 😁
Working on a Lead Management tool. It's a pivot from a CRM software I created.
The idea was initially to build it for my agency clients to manage leads from their different marketing sources, but I will keep it as a SaaS or public use.
Fancy meeting you here 😁
Are you talking about pivoting KatLinks? Or is this a different product?
Hey! No, it's a totally different product. A couple of years ago I created KatLeads, a CRM software (in Spanish), but it never took off, so I'm doing a pivot to a Lead Management software (in English).
KatLinks will always be my main SaaS. We actually released new features last week, and we are announcing 3 new features next week 🤩
Ahh gotcha! Making money moves! Have you considered offering it in both languages? Maybe not now, but at least in the future?
Yes, that's the plan from the initial release. I need it in Spanish for my agency clients.
Cool! I am curious, how difficult is it to make your app function in both languages? Do you have a tool/package that helps to do the language switching for your users
Not sure of the mechanics behind it, but we add the language selector in the user profile settings, then create a file with the word/phrases translations. Then the words/phrases in the front end are replaced with functions that call the translations based on the users' selected language.
If there's a more streamlined way to do it, I would love to know.
I'm building https://chromeextensionideas.substack.com/ - It's a newsletter for indie hackers where we share pre-validated chrome extension ideas.
Heyyy I have seen your site before. I think a few months ago? I got some good reads from it, especially since I was thinking about building a browser extension (I still plan on it, for both other.link and boomerang.link)
Keep up the good work!
Let me know if you turn any of our ideas into an extension and we will feature it in the newsletter.
Cool, what if I turn other ideas into extensions?? 😅
Interestingly, you are using the .link extension as I am. I am doing some finishing touches to https://hipe.link which is an Instant scan to win saas for brick and mortar stores ;)
🚀 Gotta love the .link domains! So many quality ones available, single word domains are so wonderful!
Solid idea! I wish more stores in my area used something like this. I am surrounded by several smaller towns, most filled with local family run businesses. I think brick and mortar using tools like hipe would help bring them into the modern age, helping to boost their relationships with their customers.
Yea .link is awesome. Yea the idea is to help stores attract new customers knowing that they could get something in return instantly instead of adding points which is good but has a longer gratification period. I would love to show up at KFC and win my enter meal free LOL
That would be so awesome to see your app in the wild, especially if you did not do a direct sale with a company. Like they just found it organically
I know right. It would take a good amount of work to get there but I plan to do more direct sales pitches at the start.
Gotta start small to grow big!
Indeed
Customer success platform for my SaaS
Are you making a custom platform only for use by your product? Or is that part of the product?
Happy to share, but my goal was for our SaaS. It is on a separate VM.
Gotcha! What's your SaaS?
sharpedgedata.com
Your product sounds super cool - working on something with some similarities actually!
I'm building Askit, which creates a page (can be used as a link-in-bio) where you can engage with others through Q&A and give yourself a self-updating FAQ page.
The idea is that it creates a knowledge base that your audience/potential customers can refer to, helping you save time and share content online.
Currently trying to find my first few users, get feedback, and iterate!
This can work also for businesses to have an FAQ page. You can integrate custom domains for that part
Yes that’s definitely something I’ve thought about! I’m just afraid that the competition is much stronger in the space for businesses (tons of help center saas out there), so I thought individuals might be a better starting place.
Had facebook, lyft, grab, etc thought about competition they won't exist today. It is not about competition. Just do what they do better ;)
That’s true - hopefully I can do it better then!
Hi Nick, other.link looks good, I like the style and I see that you are using tailwindcss (good choice).
This week I'm starting the MVP for my product, etenaldi, I just finished the landing page. It will be a desktop app, and now I have to decide which technology to use, I don't want to learn a new programming language so I will probably choose between Java or Javascript. I still need to do a little research for some stuff like auto updates and a good looking framework for styling desktop apps.
Thanks @frandevme! It certainly is tailwind, I love me some tailwind! :)
I like the idea of your app. It good to take personal breaks, good for mental health. All to often founders / creators get in the zone and caught up in the moment. Taking those mental health breaks does wonders for your brain!
You could always use electron to make the desktop app. Then you could write the entire app in javascript, and have a mobile, desktop, and browser version. All from the same codebase
I have also heard about the ionic framework, but I think they are only for mobile apps?
Working on https://ddyor.xyz, which basically means "Don't do your own research".
It's basically a Crypto and NFT gaming guide that reviews upcoming profitable blockchain projects.
I launched the landing page last week, now I'm working on the CRUD for reviews :)
Yess!! More web3 and crypto! I am so excited for the space, as an investor and a creator. I'm super excited for the NFT gaming potential that this year is going to have!
From the outside looking in, I would be a bit concerned about the name. Specifically, it being an acronym. Are you super set on the name and the domain?
If you are, then I wish you the best of luck!
If you are not, I would be more than happy to help you brainstorm different names or domains (I love looking for awesome domains, some people scroll their social feeds to kill time, I browse several lists of domain names. I bought like 75 domains last year. I might have a problem.....)
Hi Nick, interesting tool. Just want to mention there are a few 404 in your navbar.
I will keep an eye on the project, because I think this can be a very helpful tool sometimes.
I am actually working on Dynamic QR. It combines a QR code generator with a form builder and as a little special we add some functionality like webhooks and other actions to the forms.
I'm also building something similar for physical stores to post qr codes asking customers for feedback and ratings and then push the data to anywhere via api
Smells like competition :P
Just kidding, I think there are so many possible uses that a few more people could dedicate themselves to the task.
Indeed there are many possible uses and the fact that QR is becoming mainstream now is even more encouraging. Pretty soon you will have to scan a qr to flush the toilet haha
See, this is why this community is awesome! People can be building similar products, and still get along. A true "abundance" mindset!
haha thanks for the heads up. The public site is really just the shell of a design right now. So really none of the pages actually work. I plan to get them working by the end of the month
So you could link directly to a form from the QR code? Cool idea. I can see many uses for it.
It looked quite professional. So I thought something broke :D
Jep, the QR code directly links to a from and after the form all added actions are executed.
yeah....nahhh...I'm glad you think it looks professional though!
We’re building crop.guide, a No-Code tool help optimize image uploads.
We soft-launched last week.
We’re now in the process of creating SEO content and looking for opportunities to get feedback on the product / landing page.
It’s kinda tricky, because it works with all kinds of other no code tools it’s difficult to target specific audiences. We basically target everyone that either can’t code or can’t change the code on the platform they’re using.
Solid domain name, and a very useful app. Can it only be used by adding your Javascript snippet onto the page? Or could users "pre crop" images and upload them to their website/hosting?
I like you website design too, not a lot of people use purple :)
Just checked other.link, was about to report a broken link but I think it’s still a work in progress right? The design looks nice!
Maybe I’m a dinosaur but I don’t know what “link in bio” means. :)
What broken link were you going to try?? haha
Yeah, the whole site is still a work in progress. It is basically the design/layout I am going with now. I still need to create all the needed pages, and wire up the forms :)
Ever heard of "bio[.]link" or "linktree"? Those are both "link in bio" services. It is basically a simple landing page with a single url that creators can put into their bios/descriptions for social profiles. Since some platforms like Instagram only allow a single link to be in your profile. And some people like to only have a single link, because it looks cleaner
Aha! Thanks for explaining :)
Thanks for the feedback Nick 🙏
Not sure what you mean with pre-crop. The editor sits in between the original image and the normal upload field, so our service only edits the image data, the image is uploaded to the location it would normally also be uploaded to.
You can configure the editor to stay hidden and automatically apply crop and resize instructions.
I mean, can users upload their image ahead of time to do the cropping, or does it happen only when someone visits the page?
But your description here clarified that for me :)
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Lots of users so quickly! How long have you been working on setapp?
How are did you get so many users so quickly?
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