start123

Thank you so much for your kinds words. Your comment made my day.

Regarding your story, I mean wow, that must have been a scary and stressful situation. I am glad you are in a better place now.

Interesting, I will check that out. Thanks a tonne.

Yes, 3 years is pretty much a good way to measure if you have made it or not. Anything beyond that is pretty much a waste of time. Also, surrounding yourself with people of similar interests will keep you going. Currently, I have some great indie hacker friends on Twitter who keep me motivated.

I guess so. Besides tech, I did not have any other skills to market my product. Since then, I have learnt a bit of Sales, cold out reach, marketing channels, distribution and a lot more. In my 20s my primary focus was to look and do something cool than think about selling the product.

I agree, I focused too much on technology side and completely sidelined marketing and sales. It took some time but I have learnt my lesson now. I spend a week marketing/sales and a week on building features. I wish I could have known this much before.

I was naive back then and had very little understanding of how things work. I jumped into things because I felt they were cool and not really worrying about solving a problem.

And I wish I could share some pics of my failed ones, I did try my best to differentiate.

Yes, this is so true. B2B and targeted niche product is what I did after successive failures. Yesterday a business bought a premium $50pm plan after a quick discussion with the founder. There is so much money lying around with businesses that they don't mind spending on a tool that solves their problems.

I agree with your observation that none were original ideas but I would blame more on poor execution and lack of patience.

By the way, if I were you and if its making some money, I would give myself 1 more year to see where it goes.

Thanks, perseverance and patience were the only things going well for me. My key takeaway would definitely to give products at least 2-3 years before shutting them down. Most apps take a long time to get noticed and SEO works only after a year of effort.

OP here: Due to HN limit on the length of post, I had to cut down the details to about 4000 characters. I skipped tech used, a lot more details about the applications and the timeline.

Now I am 36 year old and as stated in the post, I am giving yet another shot with https://blanq.io with a hope of succeeding this time.

Hi,

I have been a solo-dev working on Blanq[1] for more than a year now. It is a powerful link shortening platform that supports custom domains, SSL and traffic routing. I released the API to simply link management for you. The plans are cost-effective and the service is extremely reliable(99.99% uptime).

The backend is Java Spring based with Mysql as DB. To generate docs, I have used Redoc open source tool that relies on Open API spec. I will soon release Zapier integration as well.

For graphs, I have used apex charts that are a pleasure to use. The UI is built on Vue and uses some third party plugins.

Here's an example of analytics https://blanq.io/analytics.html

I am an advocate of privacy and have tried to incorporate as many best practices as possible to avoid identifying users.

I am open to feedback and would love to hear your experience.

[1] https://blanq.io

As a solo-founder/developer of [1], this is what I have been doing for the past year or so.

1. I searched for basic monitoring solutions for actively monitoring the backend and finalized New-Relic. They provide a free plan that is good enough for most startups. I have added a bunch of graphs for system, infrastructure and application monitoring. It keeps me sane and well-informed before things go wrong.

2. On my Digital ocean droplets and database, I have set up Slack alerts that page me in case there is a spike. I have created a free slack workspace just for this and added a different alert ringtone so as to not get confused with other workspaces.

3.I use Freshping to monitor Uptime and again, if things go down, I get email and slack alerts within couple of minutes.

4.I have Rollbar agent running for log monitoring. I get an email alert when there is an exception or error.

5. If I am out for more than half a day, I take my laptop with me.

6. I keep my phone on. Always.

In the last one year, rarely things have gone down. I mean maybe a couple of times.

Things I do so I can sleep properly,

1. I do not deploy before heading out, or on Fridays or at bedtime.

2. My infrastructure has a lot of redundancy meaning, a larger instance than required to handle a spike in case I am unavailable.

3. Database usually breakdown, so have recently migrated to Digitalocean managed database.

Things I am planning to do,

1.Try out Monit to automate some of the tasks.

2. Write down a list of steps or a runbook in case things go wrong. It is easy to forget steps when the production system is down.

[1] https://blanq.io

Here's my improved answer from previous - "Don't offer free plan" post.

I recently shut down my free plan and instead introduced Trial on paid plans for my SAAS [1]. Brought in a new entry-level plan that is significantly cheaper to make the transition easier.

As an indiehacker, the free plan allowed me to iron out bugs and improve the overall experience of the platform. But the amount of effort it took to maintain the free plan was enormous so, I shut it down. I informed users about the decision and, I am glad few converted to being paid customers.

The most difficult part was to convert free users into paid ones. I tried everything - Coupons, discounts, emailing customers, lowering the limits, limited offers etc. Nothing really worked.

I have a lot of free time now and I can focus on delivering value to my customers. The server load has also reduced due to the reduction of free requests and database writes/reads.

For a large SAAS company like Slack, Trello etc, it makes sense to have a free plan since you have a lot of resources at your disposal but, if you are a small team or worse alone, then hell no.

[1] http://blanq.io/

I recently shut down my free plan and instead introduced Trial on paid plans. Brought in a new entry level plan that is far cheaper https://blanq.io/pricing.html to make the transition easier.

As an indiehacker, the free plan allowed me to iron out bugs and improve the overall experience of the platform. But the amount of effort it took to maintain the free plan was enormous so, I shut it down. I informed users about the decision and, I am glad few converted to being paid customers.

I have a lot of free time now and I can focus on delivering value to my customers. The server load also reduced due to reduction of free requests and database writes/reads.

For a large SAAS company like Slack, Trello etc, it makes sense to have a free plan since you have a lot of resources at your disposal but, if you are a small team or worse alone, then no.

https://blanq.io - A url shortening platform. I have been working on this app for a year now. With just one paying customer, I sometimes question its worth and existence. Yet, I slog everyday fixing bugs and adding new features.

What keeps me motivated is how much fun I have working on it. When I wake up every day, I look forward to hearing from my users. It gives me great pleasure knowing a handful of users love my product and use it on a daily basis.

While daily office grind bores me to death, working on my app is exciting.

The other factor is that it costs me $36 per month to run it - so cost-wise I don't mind since its low. I just need another customer to break even.

I don't think anything will change if it grows to a million users. I have not really thought about it.

Yes. As of now have a few paying customers and it covers the expenses of my servers.

I will need to double down on marketing efforts in coming days. But I do see there is a need.

I would add Bitly in Marketing as well. They have more than $100 million revenue per year. Link shortening has got a bad rap but there is plenty of demand for branded links.

I have spent last few months talking to unsatisfied customers of Bitly and following this space and I see a general disappointment with UX, lack of flexibility and high costs associated with the platform.

My service https://blanq.io has tried to address these but I feel there is plenty of space left for more players to enter in. It is relatively easy to get started and scale the service. The barrier of entry is quite low.

But you would need to differentiate your platform - there are like a 1000 clones of Bitly that pretty much do the same.

TinyURL and a several free alternatives have been known to do it for a while now. But, not everybody does this to be clear.

Running a free URL shortener costs time and money which is why they do it. For my URL shortening service https://blanq.io, I am planning to remove this feature and only support custom domains. Free shortening is highly abused by spam and its a daily battle to be one step ahead of them.

Last week, a single bad user created a phishing link and brought down the entire site for an hour until I was able to restore it.

Lesson learned.

Without account, shortening invited spammers and lead to security concerns and it was difficult to deal with that.

Businesses that I target have set up custom domains and reap more benefit from it.

I eventually plan to retire default shortening domain(blanq.io) and only offer custom domains.

Wow! Thanks. That's way better.

Also on PH by the way https://www.producthunt.com/posts/blanq/. Will bump you up as paid account for free if you are interested :)

Thanks. I started this since it had a low-entry barrier but, going from basic to a mature product was quite challenging and a great learning experience personally.

1. Nothing wrong. But there are plenty of things to consider if you need a mature product.

2. Businesses like to pay.

3. Github has been bad lately https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/13/github_takes_some_dow...

I launched this a few months ago so getting to the first page of google search results is a bit challenging.

Since I am running a URL shortener service https://blanq.io, my two cents:

1. I looked at https://github.com/nelsontky/gh-pages-url-shortener/blob/mai... and it is a basic script that does nothing more than redirection. A lot of URL shorteners on the web do a lot more. Premium ones can track users and route links based on client.

2. Most of URL shortening audience is non-technical and they usually like to pay and forget about it. Hosting and running your own service is an overhead.

3. Handling traffic at scale is challenging. So, if you have a lot of hits, I would not advise spending time maintaining the service.

4. Github can kill this anytime.

That said, this is neat solution for basic needs.

The registration is buggy - The form is misaligned - at least on Firefox, and why does Google sign up say "continue to amazoncognito.com"?

I spent last few months building this platform as a service and currently have a few users(large organisations also) using the service on a daily basis.

Would love to hear what you think of it?

Thank you so much for this. It makes me so happy that I can be in different country and yet listen to my favorite station back home.

Also, I have been thinking to launch with a basic plan and then, any new additional feature will go into a new pro-plan. So, people that had signed up will not witness a price rise but will have enough incentive to upgrade.