I built an open-source project in 6 days and I am going to make it profitable
Hey, the best community in the world!
I just created an open source project in 6 days (40 hours) and want to share details.
Problem
I appreciate simple and affordable solutions, especially the idea that you shouldn't have to pay full price when you only need a fraction of the tools. This is precisely why I'm not a fan of Typeform. While the service is good, paying $29 per month for 100 submissions, a single user account, and still having Typeform branding seems excessive. I acknowledge their wide range of integrations and additional features, but do I really need all of them?
Idea
What if there was an ultra-efficient, lightweight, open-source solution that could be installed on any affordable hosting service or even a free cloud tier? That's exactly what I've created: a headless form server with an admin panel. This can be installed on any hosting/cloud instance and used without any limitations.
Current Features
- Unlimited users with either full admin access or access limited to specific forms.
- Unlimited form creation.
- Unlimited submissions.
- A variety of field types for your forms.
- An efficient and fast admin panel.
- ReCaptcha integration.
- Exporting submissions in CSV and XLS formats.
- A REST API for retrieving form configuration and submitting.
Future Plans
- Addition of many new, exciting backend features.
- Development of frontend components compatible with any framework, similar to Typeform's step-by-step approach.
- Creation of a simple HTML page for universal use, mimicking Typeform's step-by-step style.
Development Time
The project took a total of six days to develop, with 80% of the code written using GPT and Copilot.
Tech Stack
I chose the simplest possible tech stack to ensure compatibility with various hosting platforms. The stack includes:
- PHP 8.2 + Symfony
- SQLite for the database by default or any other Relation DB you like
- Bulma CSS + AlpineJs for the frontend
- PHPUnit for unit testing (Not fully covered with tests yet but will be soon)
Monetization
The backend is open-source and free to use. You can install it and create your own frontend component. However, I plan to develop premium components for popular frontend frameworks and offer them for $29 each. These can be purchased once and used on an unlimited number of websites.
I would love to hear your feedback and what I need to add before launching the project on Product Hunt. I plan to release it in a few weeks when the landing page and frontend components are finished.
Here is a repository: https://github.com/phpform-dev/phpform-server
I would appreciate if you could give few stars š
Don't take it the wrong way.
It looks like you are a technical person, and as a technical indie hacker you suffer from the "build it, and they will come" syndrome. Just like I was a few months ago.
Your post is well written, and it covers a lot. Your features, your tech stack, your plan. It's a 2670 characters long post, with only one sentence of 179 characters that talks a bit about pricing and strategy.
This is a recipe for failure. Remember this if you want to succeed as indie-hacker/solopreneur: Nobody cares about your tech stack or how long it took you to build your product.
People want solutions. If you are doing it for fun, the good luck. You can stop reading here.
If you want to make money from it, you need to shift your focus away from technology and start to think (and talk) about marketing and distribution. Your PH launch will probably fail. How do I know? I made the same mistake as you, thinking that by building a product that is cheaper but with cool tech, will magically allow me to capture market share. And in fact, every product I built with the "technical indie-hacker" mindset, had 37 Google impressions on average, and 2.5 clicks on average.
If you want to turn in into business, you need to start to think in business terms.
Don't take it as an offensive post. I'm just bored, and opened your post randomly after an extremely long and tiring day. And I saw myself in it, me about 3ā4 months ago. And I wish someone would tell me that, so I'd learn my lesson faster.
Anyway, whether you decide that I'm an internet prick, or a guy that just wanted to help youāGood luck!
Feel free to check out my story, and my lessons https://www.yieldcode.blog/post/6-lessons-6-months-6-projects/
And consider following me on Twitter (same handle as here) as I tweet a lot about solopreneurshup and indie-hacking (and some shit-posting, like all of us).
Hey,
I wouldnāt take this feedback too seriously.
Things like the tech stack do matter in this case. Itās an open source project. People cafe what language the code is in. Iām not interested in it because itās written in PHP. But others will be interested because of that. You donāt need to please everyone. Thatās okay.
Open source projects do very well on product hunt. I did a video recently about my own open source product Inbox Zero hitting #1 on PH btw: https://youtube.com/elie2222. And there have been many open source success stories on PH this year. Many taking product of the day.
Thinking about monetisation is worth doing. Youāre likely to give up early if you canāt monetise it.
Many hackers overvalue distribution. Itās important. But more important is solving peopleās needs. Build a product people want and yes, it will grow. Technical indie hackers think marketing is their problem when their real problem is building something people want. Good products market themselves. And good products are far easier to market.
And Iām not saying that marketing isnāt important. You should think about it. But thereās way too much bad advice from people with 6 months of experience and no success that marketing is all the technical founder needs to succeed.
Lastly if youāre interested in commercial open source thereās a COSS discord you can join with a lot of open source founders.
Hey Elie.
There is another fallacy in the indie-hacking community, that people who "made it" do retrospective and try to justify their success. This usually comes down to "I solved people's needs". It's sort of an ego thing, thinking and assuming that everyone else did not solve that need.
What they do forget are two things: they probably were consistent and didn't quit, and they had some sort of luck.
Don't get it wrong, but you have 2K subscribers in your YT channel, and almost 7K followers on Twitter. This means you have naturallyāwhether intentionally or as a side effect of talking about your project/journeyābuilt yourself an audience. An audience will come and upvote your PH launch simply because they are your audience.
I'm not saying your product is bad or doesn't solve people's needs. I'm just saying that this is not what makes a product successful. What makes a product successful are:
Everything else dies in the void of countless to do apps, habit trackers, and GitHub repos.
Also, it's disrespectful to disregard a comment with the reasons "people who build for 6 months don't know shit".
Both points are true. I actually don't think people forget that. Maybe those looking in from the outside don't realise it.
As disrespectful as your post to the original poster. I quote you:
Your opinion is valuable. But need to realise where you are before telling others they're going to fail. That was the point of my post.
This is where you're wrong. Those things are important. But to really make something successful it has to be a good product. People churn immediately if the product sucks. They won't recommend it to their friends either.
When you talk about mistaken beliefs that devs have, this is one of them that loads of people on IH believe. You think your technical so if you fail it's because you don't have what the distribution. So you swing to the opposite side and think it's all distribution. It isn't. Distribution is important. But an amazing product is too.
There are so many products in the wild you can look at. They became popular because they were great products that helped people. This is true for huge companies and for IH hackers making $1m ARR.
Inbox Zero is still very much a journey. It hasn't "made it" yet. It's achieved some nice early milestones but it's got a long way to go.
Good product is important. But you don't win the market with good product and cool tech alone.
Look at Salesforce for example. It's a horrible product, yet they dominate the CRM market. Google Ads and Meta Ads has terrible UI/UX - yet they dominate the advertising industry. Most B2B products are awful in functionality and design, yet hundreds, if not thousands, of companies use them.
Why? Because they figured distribution. Not cool tech. And not polished UI. But distribution.
There are, of course, examples of successful products that are good, as you define them. But I doubt their success comes from being just good. Good products die without proper marketing and distribution (and some luck).
OP shared his story and told us that he is going to make his product profitable, and yet he didn't share a single strategy of how he is going to do it.
Lastly, I believe that one of the most important traits of becoming successful, no matter if it's indie hacking or your career, is the ability to tolerate and accept negative, but constructive, feedback. It's way more helpful when people point out on flaws in your product/strategy rather than commenting "Good Luck". But it seems like most people don't really want that.
Google Search is an awesome product. That's why people use it over Bing and other search platforms.
If you want to place search ads, obviously you'd start with Google Search for that reason.
Also you confuse UI/UX with the value a product provides. A good product solves users' problems / provides them with value. Whatever form that takes.
I don't have a tonne of experience with Salesforce but I agree it's clunky. But that doesn't mean the product doesn't do what it needs to. And it doesn't mean there was a better alternative when it built up its huge customer base. Newer startups will look at products like Hubspot, Pipedrive, Notion and Airtable for their CRMs.
Take a look at the products you use daily and tell me how many you use because they marketed well, and how many because it's just the best product out there.
Some apps I use often:
VS Code - great product
Figma - great product
Todoist - great product
ChatGPT/Perplexity - great product
Chromium browser - great product (I use Brave. Others use Arc. Most use Chrome). Yes, some people default to their operating system browser. It helped distribution but most don't.
Notion - great product
Airtable - great product
Apps like Notion, Figma, Stripe, and ChatGPT won because they were great. Not because they had an influencer founder or spent a lot on marketing. The product was so good it sold itself and people told their friends and colleagues about it.
Obviously distribution matters. A product being so good it sells itself is one form of distribution. Probably the best one. But most won't achieve that and have to find other avenues. Like how I started a YouTube channel. Or tweet. I agree those are important. But just having an audience is not enough to create a great business. And the same is true of indie businesses.
The people making $1m ARR do that because they provide real value to their users. Not because of marketing gimics. People churn if a product isn't valuable.
Glad to have helped you.
People use Google Ads because, like you said, there is no other alternative. Google monopolized the search industry, and built an awful ad product on top of it. It has nothing to do with greatness.
The same goes to Salesforce and other product that were simply the first and monopolized the market. Jira is another great example. I never heard a developer say how great Jira is, and yet most of the tech industry uses Jira.
I don't use any of the products you mentioned, because I value my privacy over free plans. Airtable, Notion and the likes are VC funded companies that raised north of $1B, I doubt you need that much to pay for development. Most of it goes towards marketing and taking the hit of the free plans. By the way, free plan is marketing as well.
Chrome is a great example. People use it not because it's good (it's actually pretty bad with memory management), people use it because of Google's monopoly over search, so every time you go to Google, you are prompted to download Chrome for "better support", which most non-tech savvy people do. This starts a chain reaction where developers now to have to support Chrome better, which elevates Chrome even more. It's all distribution. Firefox is a better browser (in my opinion). But it sucks at distribution because it tries to appeal to a moral compass of people who care about freedom and privacy.
Notion is another good example. It has a massive influencer backing. Go on YouTube and see all the "productivity gurus" talk about how they use Notion to automate their entire life. I think Ali Abdaal is one of the first people to talk about Notion, which gave Notion a huge popularity boost.
You could argue that people talk naturally about good products, but we can't know that for sure. Some might, others are paid to do so.
So yeah, bad product will cause churn, but good products don't naturally distribute themselves. That's why most startups have at least two co-founders, a technical one and a one that does marketing.
People use Google Ads because Google Search is a great product! It wasn't the first search. It was the best search engine.
"were simply the first" - lol... if only that's what it took to build a good company. Not that their product actually fulfilled a need or something.
"You could argue that people talk naturally about good products, but we can't know that for sure. Some might, others are paid to do so."
Yes. We can know that. You're just unaware of the history of these companies. The reason productivity gurus speak about Notion is because it's great. Not because they paid for ads.
I have friends that are part of the early team. You can google their history too. They didn't make it because they raised $100m and paid for ads. They made it because the product was great, got a lot of users, and then raised a lot as a result.
This link shows you how long it took companies to find PMF btw:
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/finding-product-market-fit
Also about technical + non-technical founders see this article (#13):
https://alitamaseb.medium.com/land-of-the-super-founders-a-data-driven-approach-to-uncover-the-secrets-of-billion-dollar-a69ebe3f0f45
Anyway, good luck thinking that product isn't of importance. It's some terrible advice. But doesn't seem like I can change your mind. If you think Google won because they were marketing geniuses I can't really help you.
This comment was deleted a year ago.
sent an email
Thank you! This is super valuable and inspiring comment. I chose PHP for a reason to allow it to be installed even on old fashion shared hosting.
Also thanks for the video. Subscribed to your channel.
FWIW, I am interested in the tech stack.
Me too, as a technical person. But none of my customers care how it's written. They care whether it works or not.
Thank you for reply. I understand many points and I agree with some of them. Right now the project is more technical I agree as well because it is open source project and my main focus is developers or indie hackers who need affordable solution or businesses who care too much about GDPR and other stuff.
It is the first version and I am sure it doesn't have most of valuable features but I am going to add most of them soon before even launching on product hunt.
Sure thing, you do what you think is right.
My point was that you need to choose what is important for you: a fun technical side project, or business.
Because if it's the latter, your post should have been talking and asking feedback about your marketing strategy, payment options, and how to reach the right audience.
My goal is to make some money but I don't see this project as a big business or something. I would consider it successful if it brings me 2K MRR so it covers 3-4 days of development but if at some point I realise it may be something bigger it would be even better.
Right now I want to proof the idea without spending too much time. The goal is to make product, landing and frontend components in max two months (mostly working by weekends only) launch it on PH and try different marketing channels.
2K MMR is a big business, and many people, myself included, would be happy to have that kind of income from a side project.
Anyway, seems like you have a plan. I tried to share my perspective, hope something of what I said was useful.
Good Luck!
Hi. I hope you are doing well. I really enjoyed your comment. I'm just starting out and this is my first article and first comment. Thank you so much for me seeing it.
I'm great, thanks! Good luck in your beginnings!
I'm a simple man: I see "open source," I hit like.
Seriously though, I love your thinking behind why Flexform should exist. I'm not sure about the "build it and they will come" trap (fallen into that myself a few times), but your drive and initiative is great.
Hey Aleks, congrats for building so quickly. Can I borrow some of your productivity superpowers? It's a joke. It's time to validate the idea. It sounds good, but customers have to say it.
I gave you a star. All the best on that!
Thank you for supporting GermƔn!
Feels good to see someone sure about his project !
Continue to be positive and it'll bring success to what you do !
Probably one of the most common questions people will ask you during your Product Hunt launch will be: Why this and not Tallyform? They're very good and very reasonably priced (free if you don't care about a bit of branding). There's definitely people who are more interested in open source, so it's a nice angle to take, just make sure you've prepared a case/some answers to the questions of 'why you?' instead of some of the other indieprojects (rather than just Typeform) š
Agree, good point, thanks. TallyForm is a nice project with generous free price plan. Right now there is no benefits apart from being open source but I am not going to publish it on PH soon because I understand it will not get many upvotes. The main goal for now is to collect some feedback and find the direction to move with this project.
Nice, I think you might get more feedback from a slightly more relevant audience on hackernews. Post it as a Show HN, around mid to late afternoon European time, and there's a decent chance it might grab the attention of a handful of people. It's still a bit of a lottery of course, and a chance it falls flat or only get a few votes like an early PH launch, but worth a go. At least in your case because it's a github page you don't have to worry about a traffic spike wiping out your website haha.
Thank you for a great advice! I will give it a try.
Impressive work! Your open-source approach and thoughtful monetisation strategy set the stage for a game-changing solution.
Thanks!
Good luck on your journey. Gave it a star and I'll be following the repo.
Good luck
Thanks!
Oh my goodness what a crazy turn of eventsā¦ Context?
I accidentally pressed on a Google ad and I thought my phone is being hacked. Then I saw the title was about open source and accomplishing something that is impressive in terms of how long it took to do this. ( in other words I am absolutely clueless and honestly not nearly as interested in technology as I should be) ā¦
Okay, whatās your point Ms clueless?
I must say this discussion has been quite interesting as a person not in technology, it was interesting to the extent that I spend for
the last 15 minutes trying to navigate this website and almost gave trying to figure out how to post a commentā¦but I digress.
I would like to share some observations as your potential end user and also an outsiders perspective in terms of this interesting community I have stumbled upon.
So this is what Iāve gathered so far, feel free to educate me please, a āindie hackerā is basically an independent teach entrepreneur, and not flower power hippie who leverages their technical abilities to fight the big oil companies? (I know I can hear it. I watch too much TV.) great!
And a āindie hackerā is a independent entrepreneur by choice and not because they are a startup and just waiting to get the BAG and scale up?
OK let me get serious quickly. And Iām hoping my choice in words in my introduction landed as intended. I see most of the comments refer to focusing on marketing, focusing on distribution focusing on your monetization strategy, how do you reach your target market etc, which is probably all true and accurate and valid feedback, but here is where hackers lose us, end users:
Language
Yes, it is literally that simple.
OK, so letās break it down.
The reason why I would most likely not used flexform free or not.
So hereās the interesting part, I like the name flexform because it is descriptive. It tells me that flexform empowers and caters to me as a single user, in other words, no Iām not starting small, and for as long as I am a single user, I will remain small, so how awkward is it when flexform suddenly now announces, all these cool, new features ( This part was really poorly worded I have to say. ) that is literally a complete 180Ā° turn because I am now right back where I started a chunky software
I acknowledge wide range of integration and
additional featuresā¦.??
OK Iām gonna wrap this up, but I cannot emphasize how much language plays a huge part of your consumers thinking, for example, putting words lightweight in front of the words open source is problematic because as layman like myself will internalize that as āoh so security risk? No wonder itās so cheap.ā
Suggestions?
*Flexform, your personalized (not customized) experience optimized for You.
Not a trend! Flexform offers innovative pricing, a pay is you use service
Anyway, I hope I have helped in some little late. I will be looking out for flexform pay as you use option though. š
It took a while to read a comment. Thank you for all your suggestions. Right now FlexForm (will be PHPForm soon) is MVP I have a huge amount of plans and features to add and long road to go. Right now it is going to be open source and self-hosted solution. Maybe in the future I will consider other options for it but right now it is too earlier to sell it in any way.
Hey @ashelestov , I am a recent graduate on the lookout for some product management experience. I loved the product and would love to work with it in detail. If you would love to add me on your journey, without payment of course, it would help me a lot. Drop me a mail if you would love to have me together with you on your journey. Dropping my email here govindplal@gmailcom
As others have said "Build and they will come" doesn't work. So try sharing thoughtfully in relevant channels of the tech stack you used and also look for customers. who will benefit you. First and foremost make a landing page and build a blog. Keep updating blog with relevant or irrelevant but useful to your target audience.
I wish you all the best. I'm working on something similar as well which I plan to open source and offer a paid service too. So I would love to see you succeed.
I think that you might want to be careful with how much you lean into it being fully headless. You said that you have an admin panel, and I'm not sure exactly what that encompasses. But, as a developer, in order for me to want to buy something like this I'd be looking for a setup similar plausible.io -- I'd want it to be very easy to setup and then I'd want to be able to filter, aggregate, and graph submissions easily. It's not that difficult for me to write a form and integrate it with my own back-end which gives me unlimited dynamic access to the data. It's also not that difficult for me to go out and grab a nice template for a form and drop that into my site. So, the value proposition for me here is mostly what I can do with the data after I've got it and that might be sufficient to get me to jump through the hoops of self-hosting if it was compelling. Also, I don't mean to say that selling your own components can't work. More that I'd be inclined to buy the components separately if I didn't actually care about the functionality provided by the back-end.
Another thing that you might consider: Let people pay you to set it up and host it for them. Even though it's open source, a lot of people will pay for you to set it up and host it anyway just so they don't have to mess with it (this is how ghost.org works).
Thanks for ideas!
It is the first MVP version I have many cool features to add in my mind.
I also thinking about cloud solution but right now it is too early to do so. The product just is not ready for that and too simple.
Thanks for good examples as well!