What are you building this month? [August 2020]
August is usually vacations month, but well 2020 happened…
So what are your plans for this month? Taking time off from working or business as usual? Continuing building and growing your current projects or starting something new? Still deciding what to do?
Reply below 👇 (and don't be chintzy with the details 😉)
I am working on Goalsy, a goals tracking app. I launched Goalsy curated productivity content for people to start consuming the right online content to be productive.
The UI for Goalsy is gorgeous!
Having some testimonials on your landing page would seal the deal for a lot of people, I think.
What did you use to make the screenshots on your landing page? e.g. the image next to the section that says
Make Your Goals Personal, Enjoy Achieving Them
@gabriel4649 Thank you so much, I sure will have testimonials on the landing page. I made those images in Figma, I can send em to you if you want, for free of course, DM me on twitter @thechampsmoke. Thanks again.
@iamanas22 Seems pretty cool! Only thing I've tried to subscribe and get the error "Couldn't subscribe this email"
email: "dpashutskii@pm.me"
@dpashutskii Thank you for pointing that out, it's a bug in the backend, will fix it ASAP, I've subbed you up. Stay tuned for Goalsy launch 🙏🏻🎉
@heyitsolivier Thanks Olivier! currently I'm building the MVP of Goalsy so we can start getting feedback and improve based on what people want.
UI is amazing and looking really good. Congratulations!!
just one thing it's pointed out to http://localhost:4000
For me August is work as usual, building Visual Coffee — a project for [future] bloggers I soft-launched now.
I love the design. Nowadays all landing pages look pretty much the same. Yours has a lot of character :) Also, very good copy. Did you do the design yourself?
Landing page looks great, liking the product idea! However, the actual blog kits look pretty basic. Not trying to be rude, but since they're the actual products, I'd expect some more effort there
@n_mehlhorn Thanks :) I appreciate the honesty.
Just don't be so hasty in judging the effort based on the amount of decorating design items. I didn't slap on a framework and called it a day, I put ~2 weeks for each kit. I built custom elements/widgets for those themes and spent hours on matching the web fonts with the ones I used in the logos and writing documentation and brand guidelines. The kit is not just a theme, it also includes the custom branding for which I was just as generous with my time and effort as with my custom logo works + about 20 templates for social media + domain + 1 year of support + others.
What I made a very poor job of is highlighting what the kits include, and the product page in general is chaotic and incomplete and a bit shitty. I'm still working on it, site is only soft-launched.
The blog kits cannot be the same as the landing page at that price, though. The site itself is in another category of amount of work hours. :)
@alina Sorry, maybe effort wasn't the right word here. Didn't want to undermine your work in anyway. I think the landing page already conveys what the kits include pretty well. I guess I just expected something else when I previewed the two available kits. Again, I'm sorry if that came off as rude, just wanted to be direct. All the best for your business!
@n_mehlhorn No problem. :) I got a bit too defensive there, because I know how much work I put into them. I really did appreciate your honesty and directness.
As much as I would like to make the kits in the same style as the website, I thought that will shrink even more the potential buyers niche. Not everybody likes that vintage style (it's just one of my personal favorites), so I tried to made the kits both fit for their niche but also appealing for a broader audience.
@heyitsolivier The "Premade blog kits" above "don't get stuck at name pick" hints to a premade package of some sort. The blog kits include everything from the Blog Checklist below the title, meaning they include domain, logo, blog theme, social media assets etc.
I'm not helping them find a name, I'm selling them a complete package that already includes the name & domain.
August is going to be the month I finish the subscriptions feature for Nodewood. It's taken longer than expected, due to IRL stuff and well, making sure that the Stripe code is solid and tested, but the trickiest part (managing Stripe config & creating subscriptions) is nearly done. Change/cancel subscription are a fair amount simpler, and shouldn't take up another whole months, ideally.
Hey Dan,
Are you already making tons of sales? Why not handle the subscriptions manually so that you can ship faster? (Assuming you are not already making tons of sales)
Nice product idea, I hate reinventing the wheel! Maybe you could improve the clarity of your copy, I only understood what Nodewood actually is once I scrolled down to the feature cards. Pesonally, I also glimpsed over the first two paragraphs with the illustrations..
Are your integrating Stripe's new billing portal? That'd be in the spirit of your new product and hopefully save you some effort
@alina Thanks! Though I have to confess, I need to get the logo redone at some point, since right now it's just an SVG licensed from a set. But it's very close to what I'm looking for, so I don't mind using it for a little longer.
@gabriel4649 No sales yet, I'm just finishing it up first, and then looking for some beta testers before general release!
@n_mehlhorn Thanks for the suggestions, I definitely want to revisit the sales copy, and I'll take your feedback into account when I do. I'm actually writing an integrated subscription feature for Nodewood. I considered using Stripe's billing portal instead, but a) it came out in the middle of when I was working on the feature and I already had a bunch of work done, and b) I want to include PayPal at some point as well, since a lot of customers will just bounce if they can't pay with PayPal. Stripe's portal is going to be 100% incompatable with that, so I'm just going to finish this up so I can build on it later.
I'm still on the way to launching MVP of the "Public learning community". I launched a very simple website to collect the emails for the launch: getlearningstory.com. I am planning to launch it somewhere in September - October.
I have to switch my focus a bit to my thesis because the deadline is in November.
I started to be more active on my travel Instagram and the travel blog is almost ready. I'm gonna launch it this month along with an email newsletter.
Hey Dmitrii, some feedback on Learning Story.
We're building the platform for people who love learning.
This IMHO is too broad. It wasn't until I read further down the line that I got a better idea for who is this meant for.
you are learning to code, a new language, how to draw or anything
If I were you, I would concentrate on of these niches and then as you grow expand to other fields.
@gabriel4649 Thank you so much for the feedback! I'm gonna remove the vague sentence and your point about the niche is great. It's actually I concluded myself as well but forget to fix the text.
I'm still working, house painting during the day and side projects the rest of the time, working on these things in August…
- Updates to https://www.nerdfeedr.com/
- Starting phase 1 of rebuilding design / dev company
- Growing my #MakerMillion idea: https://twitter.com/MicahIverson/status/1289030351365369856
- Updates to https://www.homepropartners.com/
- Lots of minor refinements to other projects.
- Putting new railing and stairs on backyard deck
I might consider nerdfeedr the next time I need a freelancer. Looks really cool :) Do you curate the developers?
@gabriel4649 Thanks for the nice comments, we originally debated on doing curation on members and ultimately decided against it. Since we do not hide any information about the freelancers and since they can reach out directly to discuss prior to starting a project, we felt that people could do their own research and vetting before hiring someone.
If we were a true middleman and controlled access to the freelancers that would be a different story, we didn't want that closed wall approach though.
Working on few things: SkillHQ - tool for organizing your learning resources and keeping motivated about learning every day, finishing up the MVP, and preparing to launch it in a couple of days. Learning Swift and SwiftUI to build a cross-platform breathing guide app. Also starting to build a new website for my freelancing business.
@gabriel4649 hi this is my first launch so i don’t have anything special planned. Just scheduled a launch on product hunt and plan to post on some subreddits and twitter.
I'm building Pingr :)
It looks great! How far along are you? It looks like its ready from your landing page.
This is a fairly crowded market. What are your plans to compete and come in front of customers?
@gabriel4649 I'm in the stage "Wait, a bit more polishing and I'm almost ready"
Regarding competition, I really got no idea. I'm preparing for PH launch, hopefully will get something out of it. Plus HN. But overall I don't have any plans.
Thank you :)
Working on worktunes.co while I use worktunes.co to listen to tunes while I work 😎
This month I'd like to:
- Make it work on iPhones correctly (Safari is giving me a hard time)
- Add 10 more Stations
- Get to 100 users (35 this far)
- Fix bugs
I have a few vacation days ahead and will probably get it done the next week. Then I will write a post about it!
Hi Makers,
This month you will find me working on caproni.fm, my podcast publishing platform.
To promote the service, I'm working on a free tool I will be giving away.
The tool lets you make short video clips from your podcast episodes so that you can promote your episodes on Twitter.
It will be similar to headliner.app, but completely free and without any registration required. It will also be simpler, just focused on the fundamentals.
For marketing, I will also be contacting some podcasters to offer them my platform for free in exchange for some help with promotion.
Publishing on all major platforms!
Fully featured podcast website and blog, under your own domain
Advanced analytics
Create as many podcasts as you wish
Collaborate with others on your podcasts
Comes with a founder eager to help
That's an impressive list. Exhaustive, but without BS features put there just for quantity.
This month, I'm still working on clinicnearme.sg. I spent a fair bit of time last month on the filtering functionality and also researches on SEO.
This month, I'm gonna work on adding user login, comment/review, and bookmark features. Gonna try to make it to a good-enough-to-launch MVP state.
I share updates on my twitter thread: https://twitter.com/swSalim/status/1279010908409196546.
Look forward to any feedback/ideas.
Well, it's going to be an interesting month!
I'm mainly going to be focusing on shipping Makerlog Gold, increasing test coverage, and marketing the platform further. Hella hype about it :)
Working on improved texts and background features for SceneLab - an online graphics editor for mockup & branding designs.
Though, our main focus is currently on getting exposure and growing the product with feedback from users and designers. We're also planning to do a ProductHunt launch and hooking up some YouTubers with free subscriptions.
oh and I'm squeezing in a short vacation this month :)
August is the month I'm taking my customer research hat back on again and have conversations about Chartbrew with people. I already got a few people to use the platform and give me useful feedback. Time to iterate on those! Beta 10 is also planned for this month and it will come with an improved onboarding experience and guides.
And by the way, something for the makerlog fam 😉 https://chartbrew.com/signup?ref=makerlogfam
Hey, I’am working on my blog.
And now I create first episode for NodeJS developers who love trading.
http://gaserd.xyz/?go=all/how-create-stock-screener-on-node-js-ep1/
My plans create small lesson for NodeJS developer and create service for stock alarm in all platforms/devices and others.
After successfully launching Forward after building in 24 hours, August I’m going to continue building on my privacy-focused product build. This month, I’m working on Chum: simple customer messaging widget, focused on privacy.
Drift, Intercom, tawk.to and even Crisp all track your users - it’s quite scary! Chum is going to be a privacy-focused alternative.
I’ll be building in open and as usual on Makerlog 🙌
I was building MagicPattern during June.
Now it's the time to get exposed and publicly launch it.
I want to launch the beta version this week and then iterate over the feedback💪
I have two products in pipeline out of which I am working on 1st product which is a resume builder web app. Will unleash soon, as I am struggling to hunt a full stack job completing the interview coding tasks and then developing the resume app once free. So just some inevitable delays from interviewing process. But I have set the goal to release it asap with some useful features atleast. I face some anxiety and fear before releasing product and in the past that fear has lead to not releasing the product at all for almost 1.5 year and fail but now I will do the opposite: build fast, release and monetize :D :D
I am going to work on single sign on app for my personal projects.I feel adding authentication is the most boring job and dont want to do it again and again for every project. So I will use my authentication for every project. Its still in development but can be accessed from here.
https://identity.anatolia.io/login?clientId=E3ZNljkRD9lPPaWH86YL&callbackUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fidentity.anatolia.io%2Fcallback
This month my main aim is to work on Downtime Monkey.
The main aim is to scale up monitoring capacity - currently there are 2800 Free monitors and just under 900 Pro monitors. The monitors need to complete in under 3 minutes and 1 minute respectively and although there is some time to spare at the minute it's growing each week.
There are a few issues at play here - running the monitoring daemons faster is easy but it uses more server resources which are expensive so I need to aim to do it in the most efficient manner and find the balance between speed and efficiency.
There is nothing new to show users for this scaling work so I also want to work on a new feature too - a dedicated downtime logs page.
Currently you can view downtime logs for each monitor individually but I aim to put in place a page where you can view all downtime logs together, including the start time, end time, site that went down, http code and the reason for the downtime.
The aim will be for good UX, including filters so you can view logs for each site, for specific durations (e.g. 24 hours, last week, last month etc), downloadable reports to CSV files so you can export the logs to a spreadsheet.
Getting this done somewhat depends on my paid client work remaining clear :) I managed to clear the client joblist last month and things are still fairly quiet on that front.
I launched Barebackups last week. It is a super-simple service for automated MySQL backups.
For this month, my goal is to focus on marketing. I have 3 scheduled ads in developer-focused newsletters over the next 3 weeks. Depending on the response from these ads, I want to also focus on how I can market into the WordPress community with this tool. There is no simple solution for WordPress database backups. There are few Facebook groups and newsletters that I have identified where I might run some ads in September. My total advertising budget for 2020 is $5000.
I started working on a side project to automate trading cryptocurrency through the Coinbase Pro API. I might write a blog post or something when I'm all done, but we'll see where things end up!
Working on Glitterly - a tool for creating and sharing videos of your app. Still in early beta but already got hunted - without me realizing it - on product hunt and also got featured on the Hacker News frontpage
working on mastermind.vision
mastermind compiles the most visionary and passionate design, coding, art and productivity contents for you among hundreds of platforms on the internet.
remember to apply for early access
Hey, its Olivier! I have been working on shareableURL.com as a side project alongside my studies at university. ShareableURL.com used to be focused entirely on group chat invite links, especially WhatsApp links and it used to be called joingroupchat.com. It started to become widely used in the United Kingdom during the coronavirus pandemic because people started making local neighborhood WhatsApp groups and they would hang up posters with the joingroupchat.com links and post them on facebook, which were more convenient because the WhatsApp group chat invite links are quite long (https://chat.whatsapp.com/I0i6iAFCMrq26RtqZK8q10) and they are unprotected. Joingroupchat.com allowed group admins to shorten and customize the link, while also protecting it from spammers and bots using reCAPTCHA. I noticed that people were also sharing other links like google docs and presentations, and zoom meeting links, so I created shareableURL.com which allows them to shorten URLs using several descriptive domains, including meetingURL.com, webinarURL.com, documentURL.com, songURL.com, and more. I have recently finished building up the minimum viable product so it is ready to have early adopters try it out to get more feedback. I'd like to hear what you think of this project. Cheers, @heyitsolivier
This month I am going all in on content marketing for Mocki.
The plan is to:
- Write content that is laser focused towards a specific keyword
- Include my product with screenshots and use cases in each article
- Post the article on a list of sites such as Reddit and Hacker News
- Re-publish the article with a canonical link pointing to my product website on sites such as Dev.to and Medium
My first attempt at this more structured approach: https://mocki.io/how-we-used-mock-apis-to-save-on-our-cloud-bill
Do you have feedback on this approach?
Hey!
August has been an exciting month for my team at Product School. We recently published our new Podcast season, where I interviewed CEOs who came from a PM background. And today, we are launching our Top LatinX campaign, where we're honoring some of the most influential South American Product Leaders who help create digital products loved by millions.
I would love to get some feedback and support from this community.
Happy to see you all creating ⚙️
Migrated my blog from WordPress to Gatsby. Now it's the time to get back into writing.
https://edvins.io
I’m working on launching Logtivity. Dedicated Event Monitoring for WordPress. Still very MVP and I really need a proper logo 😅 but have been focussing on finishing off a few functional bits first. I have a few beta testers and one paid user so far 🥳
Biggest challenge is finding the time between full time job, freelance work and family!
A little late to this thread since Aug is ending a week or so from now but I've been working on a custom icon set for iOS Shortcuts.
Twitter thread documenting the progress is here: https://twitter.com/andyngo/status/1294923423894839297
Going to start with icons for iOS Shortcuts and eventually expanding this to cover more use-cases (general web development, slides, marketing, etc).
I'm working on Remotely.rocks - Remote Job board and Community for Remote Workers
I've been working on wheresmystuff.co. It's like TripIt, but to help track all your package deliveries in one easy place.
Because of shelter in place, I’ve been shopping and getting a lot more deliveries at home. Recently, I had multiple packages out for delivery. But, with all the shipping delays in the US and around the world, I was overwhelmed trying to keep track of them all. I hated having to search for tracking numbers in my emails, and then going to multiple apps and websites to check the latest delivery status.
Then, I got a package stolen from my front porch because it had arrived but I didn't get a notice about it till hours after. It was then that I decided "no more!" and set out to solve this problem and created WheresMyStuff :)
Hi guys,
I am a longtime lurker and I felt that there were a lot of questions popping up about if what I was doing was my passion in my career.
I noticed that that was a huge problem for a lot of people that I talked to in person too, so I decided to make this community to help answer those in the way that I noticed help me.
Would you be able to take a look at it and tell me what you think? We finished this week.
You can also email feedback. hello@theheracollective.com
https://www.theheracollective.com
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