The best indie launch I've seen was the initial launch of Balsamiq. It was played off as "meh" by Peldi but it was masterful. I had launched a product 2 years before and until then, I couldn't understand what I did wrong. I obsessed over what he did. Every single thing. Trying to find where he got "lucky". There was no luck.
Geez @cheez ;) thanks for the kind words. I do still believe there was a fair amount of luck involved, but I'm glad my writing was useful to you.
You're welcome. I still use Mockups :-)
As for luck, you made your own luck. Congrats on your success!
The main things to keep in mind are that: There are far less creators than there are people that merely consume/enjoy/use that kind of content/art/product/service and that Most people who are creators aren't going to be in your target audience, and hence won't buy/use it. Hence by marketing to other creators, you end up marketing to a subset of a subset of your product/game's total audience. As for how you should mar…
Great post! This perfectly complements my reply and expands on how to get your “widget” out there. Wish you could save posts on HN because this is a gem!
You can! Click the link for the post(X hours ago), and hit favorite.
Toward that... >Go for B2B if you can. Freelancers aren't rich. You might not love the b2b sales cycle either. Even if you get a whale of a client, you're gonna negotiate hard, probably fork your product for it, and get paid in 180 days if you're lucky.
OP here -- feeling that hard right now. I have another side gig (maybe I'll write about it soon).
Working with a company that does ~300mm in revenue and date from contract sent to signed was around 45 days. I was blown away. still haven't been paid either. Hoping I'm embedded after this.
Yep! Php ain't all that bad. I'm migrating earlybrd to laravel soon and enjoy it a lot. just poking a bit of fun because nerds like to hate on php.
I have never used Laravel, but I am an avid user of Flask. In fact my current project is built in it. Do you mind expanding on why you're transitioning? I hope you don't mind me saying, but it sounds like you didn't have the best setup (i.e.: > raw SQL queries with psycopg2). With a couple of packages your environment and dev process would be a lot smoother.
Flask is great and could work fine. I just found that Laravel was easy enough to scaffold things out a lot easier (like user auth). I'm new to web app dev as well and have found MVC and other framework concepts making more since as I develop more in Laravel. SQL queries worked fine for me but a lot of people disagree with doing things that way. In contrast, though, eloquent is much simpler once you learn.
1 - maybe you’re right, I don’t know. Freelancers can find success on Upwork but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a garbage website 2 - I don’t think I ever said RSS was hard to make work. My app is essentially a feed reader. I am also a shit developer, covered that one already Thank you for reading and your feedback, though!
That garbage site is providing opportunities for millions of developers and clients, and personally feeding my family for over a decade. I tried freelancer.com, rentacoder.com, elance.com (before merging with odesk and the 2 of them becoming what is today's upwork), fiverr, peopleperhour and toptal. Of them all upwork is the best. Maybe you can make a better one, huh? where is dang when you need him, eh?
I don't know who dang is.
The site is fine but their ToS is atrocious. Have you read it? Freelancers are expected to pay $3000 USD to take a client off of Upwork. This doesn't refer to initial work being done on the platform. If you do work for a client and get a call back, Upwork expects you to work through Upwork. I'm sure that few do this but WHAT. They recently changed ToS so maybe it is different now...
I'm also not a big fan of the dog-eat-dog nature of the site, which my tool ironically encourages. I'm glad it works for you. I don't want to be a freelancer, I want to make tools/SaaS products.
Can I get some insight into this? What did Balsamiq do? I'm not familiar.
It was an early wire framing tool for prototyping UIs. The clever bit (that seems obvious now) was that it looked intentionally rough so that clients would focus on the overall UI layout instead of the minor details. It was a great app.
Ehm...why all the past tense? We still ARE very much around...we just had our best year yet [1], and are on track to do even better. Don't count us out just yet! :)
It was an early wire framing tool for prototyping UIs. The clever bit (that seems obvious now) was that it looked intentionally rough so that clients would focus on the overall UI layout instead of the minor details. It was a great app.
Ehm...why all the past tense? We still ARE very much around...we just had our best year yet [1], and are on track to do even better. Don't count us out just yet! :) [1] https://blog.balsamiq.com/looking-back-2019/
Ok Peldi, now don't make me a liar. It wasn't luck. Double it in 3 years :-)
I thought this was a pretty good article that didn't over-sensationalize SaaS products, while still explaining how they can lead to success. It sucks that the OP's website didn't "blow up", but then again, most micro-SaaS's are not meant to go viral like that. One point I would add is that there should be more promotion other than just posting on HN + PH. If that's where your launch stops, you may not be realizing yo…
Thanks for your comments. I am OP :-) My site went down for a bit while this is front-paged, but is back up now. Definitely I think it could be more of a success if I put more effort in (duh?). Definitely there is a need to promote across multiple channels and ideally own your audience/create your own content because then you have traffic generation on demand. The name is weird, I shipped anyways. earlybird.com and e…
I actually thought it was sort of a pun playing with the fact it could be understood as Early Bird or Early Board. And that sounds pretty neat to my non native English :D
Great post! This perfectly complements my reply and expands on how to get your “widget” out there. Wish you could save posts on HN because this is a gem!
You can! Click the link for the post(X hours ago), and hit favorite.
Whoa nice, thanks for the heads up! I thought it was only available for threads.
I know there’s a lot of this, but what is the angle? Who is running the bot farms to click on Facebook ads and sign up for random services? And what are they hoping to achieve?
My wild assumption is that bot farms need to look like regular users, and therefore keep clicking on things even when they're off the clock. If Facebook has caught up on click farms that click on links but do nothing afterwards, I would assume that filling in some random data goes a long way to make bots harder to spot once your actual clients show up.
That has to be it! That's the only explanation I've heard that really makes sense.