📅 02/01/2019
🔥 31 day streak
💰 $4.99 price
🤑 $18.60 revenue
📈 7 sales
🚀 168 upvotes
⌚️ 57 hours spent
😭 1 Rewrite
🛬 1 Lander with Source
💻 114 files changed, 250127 insertions(+), 559 deletions(-)
🏁 Today's goal: Reflection
What went right
Honestly, I couldn't have asked for a better launch. I know some solo devs out there make a bigger splash, but that's just not me. I don't plan on quitting my job and I don't plan on moving to Bali. I'm a regular guy who has a house, a wife, a dog and a life outside of software development. I would love for this to be a much bigger source of income for me, but the truth is I'm not about to make any crazy sacrifices to switch bosses from a real human who is amazing to product hunt and twitter's algorithms. Anyway, the things that went right were 168 upvotes on product hunt, and 7 sales! That's six more sales than my last project I actually launched got! Amazing!
What went wrong
So many things, I started to spend a lot of time on it towards the end there instead of trying to keep it to max 1.5 hours a day for the whole month, which is why I spent 57 hours making it instead of the 30-40 I wanted to spend on it. That's the thing with life outside of school or even outside of a company as a full time employee. Effort is not rewarded, the final product is. So that's why companies skirt around things and make them cheap for scale and only a few companies make quality things for sky high prices, because the faster you can get things out into the world and charge money for them, the more money you can potentially make. Alright, the list of things that went wrong:
- The lander never had the mini-game I wanted to put in there with the clouds and +1's and getting a discount.
- The mac app store version wasn't approved until halfway through the launch day 😅
- Lots of other little things
In the end
I could have done quite a few things better, but that's the point of this whole process of shipping apps quickly instead of perfectly.
One thing that did happen to me, was quite a few of you started following me on here. That's pretty cool. One thing I've learned recently is that consistency is the best thing you can do for anything in your life. When you let other people in on that consistency? It makes for at least a little success.
What's next
So, after the whole month of January, my most productive month, EVER. I thought I was going to take a break, I'm not.
I think I'll give the dev.to servers a break and not post every day, but I will be posting every day on my own blog and I'll be attempting to livestream for 30 minutes every day.
Making small changes every day instead of striving and making a lot of changes sporadically has worked out much better for me. Version 2 and the iOS app are on their way!
Top comments (10)
I recently launched a side project which I spent 3 months working on from paper idea through to alpha and now public.
It's a great feeling getting it out there even though there's lots of competition just having a foundation you can then adjust and build on top of is such a milestone!
Oh that's cool, what was the side project?
It is amazing to finally launch the thing!
Ive been in the crypto scene for a while now and most of the communities run on telegram messenger. I built a platform that allows you to register your own telegram bot that can help to manage the community. Delete messages, stop spammers, analytics etc.
modr8.net (Whitelabel telegram community management bot platform...)
Aimed to be something different as current services out there don't let you register your own bot which you can personalize to your brand, you have to add their bot which can make you look a bit cheap. With mine you control all your bot profile so avatar, profile description etc. This means people see the bot as something the community built itself and not one they got from my platform.
Very nieche! but I learnt so much new stuff I hadn't used before:
Stripe integration
Crypto payments
Docker
Message queue/work queues
Mixing JSON in postgres
Dashboard frontend frameworks
Telegram login widget
It's endless...
Whoa this looks amazing! I'm actually really impressed that you could put all of that together in 3 months as a side project! Wow. Nice work!!
Really cool that you did this! This journey definitely shows that working on something in iterations and not letting your own ideas of perfection block the process will allow you to actually put something out there. Loads of respect 😄✨
Thank you!!
Yeah there were some moments of doubt towards the end there, but I launched it with the bare minimum features and people seem to like it so far, of course now it's just the beginning
There will be a feature explosion this month, so yeah if you're ever bored, check in to see where I am at the end of February 😬
Congrats on getting the app launched! That’s awesome. It’s good to see you take the time to celebrate the things that went well while finding areas to improve. Celebrating the victories is just as important as working towards the next iteration.
Congrats Sean!!
Thanks! The unicorns kept me going
Hey I liked this before it was cool ❄️
Always great to see a project making it from start to launch.