DEV Community: Mubashar Iqbal

Building 4 Websites in 35 Days

Mubashar Iqbal — Tue, 19 Dec 2017 04:14:16 +0000

Originally published in Make Side Project.

Late October thru the end of November was a busy time for me, thanks Product Hunt (with help from Indie Hackers and others) for organizing a great hackathon.

October 26th: Day 1

Before the hackathon started, I was thinking about if I would go it alone or find a team to be a part off.

As I read about the hackathon, and saw the tweets and posts from people saying they would be participating. It occurred to me that there wasn't a place that listed all the people who wanted to participate or those that might be looking for additional team members to join their project.

So I decided to build something. A pre-hackathon hackathon.

Since I wanted to build something for people to use to organization for the hackathon, which was starting in less than a week, I had to get something launched very quickly.

This would mean keeping things very simple, but still being a useful tool.

October 26th: Day 2

I launched Hackathon Match the next day after some late night hacking. I wrote about the process: Making something for a Hackathon

Naturally the site was posted on Product Hunt, where it did quite well. It currently has over 320 votes.

Over 200 people posted their profiles on the site, and I believe it lead to a few matches for people looking for partners in the hackathon.

Over the next few days I refined the website and updated it so that it could be used for other hackathons in the future. A few organizers have expressed an interest so I look forward to seeing it used for other hackathons and even future Product Hunt hackathons.

November 1st: Day 7

Finally the start of the hackathon was here!

I had decided to build something in the cryptocurrency space with Seth Louey. We are both interested in the cryptocurrency space, and seeing what is happening with Bitcoin who isn't.

We noticed that it's a painful process sending cryptocurrency to other people, even the process of asking people their wallets so we know we're sending funds to the correct destination, so we decided to solve that part.

WalletList allows you to easily build and maintain a list of wallets you prefer to receive cryptocurrencies into. For the sake of security it generally recommended to not keep funds in these wallets and transfer them to a more secure private wallet.

Once you've built you're list, you can easily share your page with people and they know just where you'd like to receive Bitcoin, or other cryptocurrencies.

That morning Seth did a live stream as he designed our product, Wallet List. Unfortunately the stream is not available anymore, but it was cool to watch Seth design our product, and take live feedback from viewers.

I was working that for most of the days, but as the evening rolled around I jumped into the build and integrated what Seth had designed.

Seth and I treated the hackathon as a regular high octane hackathon, not the 30 day long one that Product Hunt has planned for us. We worked late into the night and had everything ready to go for the next day.

November 2nd: Day 8

On day 2 of the hackathon Wallet List was ready to be launched.

You can find out more: Or where should I send you that cryptocurrency?

Over 200 people have created wallets, I've personally used the website when someone asked me for my Bitcoin wallet address, and I hope many others have too.

November 3rd-13th Day 9-19

I turned my attention to my other hackathon project. I had decided to build "one more" big project before the end of the year, and to document my process. I wasn't even sure what I was going to build, but I had some ideas. I shared those with readers on Medium and my followers on Twitter and asked them to help me decide what to build.

Over the next days I went thru the process of validating the idea of building an application that would help to track startup expenses, deciding the features, planning the website, designing the website and starting the build.

I created a Medium publication to keep all the posts easy to find.

November 14th: Day 20

Daniel Kempe had reached out a week or so earlier about the possibility of building something for the hackathon, but we hadn't decided what to work on. I had previously built Quuu with Daniel so I knew we just need to wait for inspiration to strike, and we could make something very cool.

Inspiration struck on day 20. We'd built Quuu largely in public, and I'd been building Deaton entirely in public. I knew a few other people like, Pieter Levels, Fred Rivett and Seth Louey were building their companies in public. We all shared our progress in different ways. Some tweeted, posted shots on Dribbble, or videos on YouTube, posts on Medium. It was difficult to keep up with what everyone was doing.

I wondered if we needed a dedicated site to help people publish, and for people to follow people as they built their companies in public. Since we were in the middle of a hackathon where other people were sharing their progress, it seemed liked a great time to test the idea.

November 16th: Day 22

I had a built a solid foundation for the features of what was now called Publicly, and in the spirit of building in the open, shared my plans in a post on Medium: Building in Public

November 26th: Day 32

I'd been working on both Deaton and Publicly the past few 10 days, but felt that Publicly was now ready to be officially launched.

Not only had we finished the design and development, we'd some how managed to convince 20 people to post their projects and start sharing their progress.

I wrote more about Publicly: Build in the Open

We launched to a great response on Product Hunt. We were the number 1 hunt of the day and got over 500 votes.

November 29th: Day 35

With just one day left in the hackathon I was able to get the last changes I wanted done on Deaton.

Deaton is a very easy way to track the expenses you incur when starting or running your company. It support one-time or recurring expenses.

I decided to delay the official launch of Deaton until after the announcement of the results, and now that we're close to the holidays, will probably wait until the New Year.

Looking forward

I now have 4 projects that I'm very excited about for 2018. Over the next couple of weeks I'll be making my plans for next year, deciding which (or perhaps all) I'll be focusing on.

I like have multiple projects simmering, if I don't feel like working on one particular project, I have the option to spend a little time on something else, but still feel like I'm being productive.

Finally I'll just mention, that the hackathon gave me the building bug. Since the end of the hackathon, I've built a collection of much smaller sites that require little or no maintenance. I'm very excited about the cryptocurrency space and so had a lot of fun building: How Much is a Bitcoin Worth - A site I built while watching a soccer match, this also lead me to build How much is a Ethereum Worth? and How many Bitcoins are there?

After that I decided it might be a good idea to compare the market cap of cryptocurrencies with other financial assets so Cap Compare was born.

Unofficially I make that 8 sites in 49 days, but who's counting?

Originally published in Make Side Project.

From Idea to 4M Page Views in 4 Weeks

Mubashar Iqbal — Tue, 06 Jun 2017 14:05:32 +0000

Originally published on Hacker Noon.

Last Tuesday saw the official launch of Will Robots Take My Job? and 5 days later we have passed 500K visitors and 4M page views.

To say this surpassed any expectations we had would be a major understatement. This is a recap of how the project got started and the first 5 days after launch.

The Back Story

Just over a month ago Dann Petty launched Freelance TV. I’ve freelanced on and off for over 10 years, so I was happy to back the documentary, and joined the Slack community.

Dimitar Raykov has also joined and messaged me, and we started talking about the possibility of working together on a project. We decided to start with something small and quick to see how we might like working together.

Dimitar mentioned his idea of building a website around a report published in 2013 about the probability that jobs would be automated thru Machine Learning and Mobile Robotics.

I’ve been interested in the AI/ML space for a while, even co-founding BotList.

We’ve already seen many chatbots assist people in their jobs, even replacing them in some instances, the HR and Travel categories are good examples of this.

We decided to move forward with the project.

Just showing the percentage automation risk, would not make for a very interesting user experience, so we looked for additional data that would help. We found additional information about the jobs in the report via the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics website. We were able to download salary data and estimates for number of people employed.

The Build

Dimitar would handle the design & front end and I would handle the backend and hosting duties.

We wanted to make it easy for people to find jobs, since the report only covered 702 jobs, finding similar jobs would be an important feature. We decided to go with Algolia to achieve this. Their search matching is great (even with misspelled words) and the synonym feature would make it easy to find related jobs. We signed up for the trial and thought the free tier would mean we’d get able to run the site with no costâ€Š–â€Šmore on that later!

We started working and I built a quick prototype on LaravelPHP using Bootstrap, while Dimitar worked on the design.

Once the design was complete, Dimitar built the pages out in static html pages, and passed them over to me to integrate.

Some fun features we added as we worked:

Algolia Instantsearch to power the job search autocomplete, why reinvent the wheel.
Easy job page link copying and sharing to Twitter and Facebook.
Custom open graph share images for each job.
Random color palette for each visit. Go ahead and try it! Each visit you’ll be assigned one of ten palettes.

All in the build took about 3 weeks, of us working on evenings and weekends.

I setup the website on a Digital Ocean droplet I had for other projects, and the site was live, just nobody knew it. We share the site with a few friends and got some early feedback.

The Launch

Given my affinity for Product Hunt that seemed to be the obvious place to launch our project. I reached out to Ben Tossell and discussed the project with him. He agreed to hunt it for us. Dimitar created the thumbnail image we wanted to use for the product on the site, and prepared some images to show some of the features, and we passed those on to Ben.

The site appeared on Product Hunt about 3:15am (et) on Tuesday (May 30th). I like to be around when something is first hunted, to add a comment and respond to any immediate questions. Since I was up, I decided to also post the site to Hacker News, and Dimitar posted it to Designer News.

We immediately got traction on all three sites. We quickly moved to the 2nd spot on Product Hunt, and my post moved to the front page of Designer News and Hacker News. As I was going to head to sleep, I noticed the visitors start to tick up. Google Analytics showed we have 48 people on the site, that jumped to 88, and then to 327. No going to bed now.

It wasn’t until about 5am when I finally got to bed, the visitors peaked out at around 440 users.

After my short nap, had to get up and get the kids ready for school, I saw that we’d been written about in The Next Web. That had pushed our visitors higher, we had over 500 visitors on the website.

We quickly passed the Agolia free tier limit and upgraded to their Starter package. 1M operations a month, we should be good with that.

Dimitar started to reach out to journalist to help spread the word about the website. Having the initial success, helped frame the outreach, which would lead to further success.

Visitors continued to rise through the day, the article from TNW was syndicated to a number of sites, including MSN and AOL. We jumped to 822 visitors and then peaked out during the day at over 1400.

Day 2

We continued to get have articles written on all sorts of website, most interestingly not just in the tech space. General news sites in Arizona, Texas and Washington state wrote about us, and a post on BarStoolSports lead to a massive jump in visitors.

We peaked out with about 2000 visitors on the site!

We were rapidly approaching the Starter tier limit on Aloglia. I couldn’t justify the $300 to upgrade to the next tier, and started investigating alternatives. I tweeted about the situation, and Algolia responded and offered to help us out by raising our usage limit. That saved us a bunch of time and worry, the support from Algolia is much appreciated!

The full search alternatives to Algolia wouldn’t have been much cheaper and a lot more work. Running our own server with Lucene or Elasticsearch would have been one option, but the cost of hosting and the time sunken to get that operational wouldn’t have been a good use of my time.

Our best alternative would have been to switch to TNTSearch for Laravel Scout, no additional server would be required and writing a JSON API around the search would have been relatively straight forward in Laravel. Thankfully none of this ended up being required.

Day 3

We had a very steady stream of visitors all day, ended by topping the InternetIsBeautiful sub-reddit.

Although we finished the day with over 5000 votes, we unfortunately didn’t make the Reddit popular page, perhaps next time!

Day 4

I decided it was best to upgrade the server, we were getting pretty steady visitors and although the server was handling the load pretty well, I wanted to have some spare capacity, and ensure the pages loaded very quickly for our visitors.

Laravel Forge makes it ridiculously easy to setup servers, my only concern was adding SSL to the new server. I used LetsEncrypt on the original server, but you can’t do this until you’ve pointed your DNS to the server. Luckily I remembered that I had some unused SSL certificates in my Namecheap account. I ordered a SSL cert, and in a few minutes the new server was up and running.

I crossed my fingers as I updated the DNS to the new server. Luckily we managed to get things migrated with zero downtime.

The extra capacity came in handy. Although we didn’t get another big surge in visitors, the average was higher thru the day. We did end the day with a peak of 1600 visitors which appeared to be coming from Google search. We’re still unsure what caused that surge in visitors.

Day 5

Finally some time to breath. The weekend lead to lower visitors levels, but with about 300–400 visitors on the site through the day, we’re still pretty happy!

The Results

Although we topped the Product Hunt homepage for a while on launch day, we ultimately ended up in the 2nd spot. Falling behind Andy Rubin’s Essential phone.

We have close to 950 votes, I’m hoping to reach the 1000 vote club for the 4th time before soon :)

We stayed on the Hacker News homepage for a few hours, we topped a popular sub-reddit for 3 days, and appeared in many popular sites, including: TheNextWeb, LifeHacker, Mashable, MSN, FoxNews, AOL, BarStoolSports, BusinessInsider, Geek.com, Vice, Gizmodo, BoingBoing, and Fortune.

By the end of Saturday, just 5 days, over 500K people have visited the website and generated over 4.2M page views, an average of over 6 pageviews per session. We expect the visitors to slow down, even a significant drop will leave us with a lot more traffic than we expected.

The Lessons

Just because you build something small and quick, doesn’t mean it won’t have a big impact. Will Robots Take My Job? is easily the most successful personal product launch I’ve been involved with.

Yes I’ve been involved more high profile, high traffic launches, but those involved big marketing teams and big budgets. We are a developer from Upstate New York, a designer from Bulgaria, with no budget.

Make it fun

Dimitar and I had fun building the website, and working together for the first time, but that’s not the only thing what I’m referring too. We made the website fun for our visitors. Instead of being dry and just displaying numbers, we injected some fun into the website. Any job highly likely to be automated was presented with a “Your are doomed message”.

Make it Shareable

Although it wasn’t easy we made it so that every job had a custom share image, so when people shared their job on social media it presented their specific automation likelihood rather than a generic image. Facebook and Twitter accounted for over 100K visitors, which we think is large part due to our custom share images.

Be Available

Via email, via social media, via comments. We tried to respond to anyone and everyone who had a question or comment. We believe this lead to more articles, more shares and more votes. It takes time, but if you don’t dedicate your time to your project why should any one else.

Be Grateful

Both Dimitar and I are very grateful to everyone who wrote about, shared or just visited the site. None of this would have been possible without you.

We’re especially grateful to Algolia for the support, we may need to discuss raising operations limit again ðŸ˜.

If you haven’t had a chance to visit Will Robots Take My Job? yet, go ahead and try it out now. Come back and leave a comment with what you think.

Originally published on Hacker Noon.

Don't wait for perfect

Mubashar Iqbal — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 16:04:16 +0000

Originally published on the 1ppm blog.

People often ask me how I'm able to launch products so quickly.

Don't wait for the perfect moment, take the moment and make it perfect.

I think that quote about sums it up, I don't wait for perfect. I take what I have and make it work perfectly for right now.

“Perfect is the enemy ofÂ good”

Variations of this phrase have existed for hundreds of years, but still today we become snared by the search for perfection.

Perhaps this comes from the fear of launching something and being criticized, or perhaps we really are trying to build the perfect product.

Without the normal deadlines that constrain us, side projects tend to take a life of their own with our targeted launch keeps getting pushed further and further out. We have just one more thing to fix, or one more small feature to add.

Self Imposed Deadlines

When I'm flying solo on a project, I try and impose a 2 week limit for working on a side project. If I can't get the project launch ready in 2 weeks, then I usually let the project slip.

When working with others on a project I modify my limit a little: Get the project launch ready with 2 weeks worth of work.

Working on side projects with other people means that you don't know when you or the other team members will have time to get to work. If you require meeting with the other team members, this can really hold things up. I try and keep the same 2 week limit on the project, but this is based on the amount of work I would normally do in 2 weeks, spread out over a longer time.

But it's notÂ Perfect

Yes. That's ok!

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.â€Š–â€ŠReidÂ Hoffman

But is it goodÂ enough?

The best thing you can do for your project, is to get it into the hands of real users. They are the ultimate judge of if what you've created is good enough, and even if it's perfect.

Yes you have your thoughts and opinion, but you're not building just for yourself (if you are then don't launch it, just use it!) You hope to have many users, and you need to know what they think.

But I reallyÂ can't

I love hackathons as a way of training your brain to launch. Forget two weeks, you typically have a day or two, but sometimes less to make something. You might not publicly launch it, but you have to be able to get it working and in the hands of others. Sharing your work to others is usually a big stumbling block, that hackathons can help you overcome.

Can't make it to a hackathon, you could try building something open source. Rather than waiting until you're finished to share the code, make it public right from the start.

I merged these two ideas during the last Super Bowl. As I watched Super Bowl LI, I also hacked on an idea. I had about 4 hours to make something. I made the source code available on github right from the first commit. I also deployed the app to a public server as soon as it worked.

Since I'm pretty sure I don't get thing right, let alone perfect, the first time, making in public removes any chance of wimping out and not launching.

No such thing asÂ perfect

I know it's hard to accept, but really there is no such thing as perfect. Just do your best and accept the feedback you'll get.

Some people will be mean, or just unpleasant, but for the most part the feedback will be constructive and will help you get better, and make your work better.

The community on ProductHunt is one of the best I've been a part off. Dominated by makers, their feedback is usually constructive, and the time they take to review products to give feedback is amazing. If you have a fear of launching give ProductHunt a try.

Originally published on the 1ppm blog.

Hi, I'm Mubashar Iqbal

Mubashar Iqbal — Tue, 03 Jan 2017 13:53:40 +0000

I have been coding for 20+ years.

You can find me on Twitter as @mubashariqbal

I live in Clifton Park, NY.

I work for myself!

I mostly program in these languages: PHP, NodeJS, Rails.

Nice to meet you.