Lesson learned: Keep MVP super simple!

Before launch added lots of features that ppl aren't using. Not only did this slow time to market, but created high complexity + tech debt. 🤦‍♂️

Refactoring backend atm -> made much harder because of barely used features. #buildinpublic

Recently came across saasemailtemplates.io

Has over 200 SAAS email templates from the biggest SAAS companies available for free. 🤩

Can just download the HTML, and adapt to your needs.

Makes it very easy to create fully responsive emails for your SAAS. 💪

#buildinpublic

⭐ Our Content Approach Is The Barbell Strategy

🔹 Invest in Blockbuster Content to build brand & audience, on platforms that reward quality

🔹 Use fast & easy to produce quanity content to lead gen, engage, split test

❌ Avoid the Valley of Death.

#buildinpublic

Ranking on Google with a new domain is HARD!

You have 0 domain rank & 0 backlinks.

❌ Bad Solution: Buy dodgy backlinks from Upwork.

✅ Best Solution: Focus on viral content that builds backlinks for you.

EX: Article going to Top 10 on HN = 1,000 backlinks. #buildinpublic

So many Indie startups get stuck in the "feature trap".

Focusing all their time on new features + bug fixing, instead of doing the marketing that makes 💵

Spent 99% of my time this month on product ❌

Plan now is to ring-fence Mondays & Tuesdays for marketing. #buildinpublic

The end is in sight... 🎉

Basically rewrote our entire backend over the last 2 weeks to cope with our DB being overloaded.

- Rewrote inefficient SQL queries
- New flow for high freq scraping jobs
- Integrated Redis to take load off the DB

Hope for the best 🤞
#buildinpublic

For months, I've been stalking indie hackers building their startup in public to learn from their journeys.

Last week, I decided to give it a go myself and I'm really liking it so far. Not only is it a great way to promote @ScrapeOps, I'm making friends too! 🙂

#buildinpublic

#openstartup stats for @ScrapeOps in January 🎉

👥117 users (⬆️64)
🕷️ 326,811 jobs monitored (⬆️9X)
📄 44 million requests (⬆️8M)

February Plan:

📈 2X users & requests monitored
🐍 Launch Python Requests SDK
🛑 Launch Errors Dashboard
📢 Scale-up marketing

#buildinpublic

When you launch a product, inevitably you are making tons of assumptions about your users & market. Some are ✅ most are totally✖️.

We assumed that BIG users might do ~100 scraping jobs/day. We found out they can do +100,000/day, which nearly broke our servers 😅#buildinpublic

📈We had our 1st scaling issue last night (FIXED)! The load on our server increased over 100X in 8 hours, highlighting some bottlenecks in our backend. Which is both a:

🎉 Good problem to have. [Getting Traction ✅]
😬 But scary when you are in the middle of it.

#buildinpublic

Made solid progress on the Python Requests SDK for @ScrapeOps this week. This SDK will allow you to easily monitor your Python Request scrapers with just 3 lines of code. 🕷️

Will have an Alpha version ready for our waiting list next week. 🎉

#buildinpublic #Python #webscraping

Left my job to work on indie SAAS projects. Currently, my main focus is on building @ScrapeOps, a monitoring tool for web scraping.

Follow me to share the journey (good/bad) along the way:

📢 marketing lessons
🖥️ tech problems & solutions
✅ #buildinpublic to stay accountable