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 your full potential.
Another little nitpick; The domain they used (EarlyBrd.io) was kinda weird due to the unconventional spelling. Yes, you don't need a dot com, but it should still be something you can mention in conversation and have the other party instantly understand & be able to spell, without you spelling it out for them.
Lastly, why does everyone here seem to care more about post titles than actual posts nowadays?
I've come to the conclusion that if you want to be a successful indie SaaS developer nowadays, it's better to start off as a marketing/sales person than as a developer. So many small SaaS products suffer from the same problem: no traffic, no customers, no market mindshare. The dev is definitely not the problem. The marketing is.
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 earlybrd.com were not free. I have spelled it out many times. It's annoying and sucks.
Love the commitment to shipment, an inspiration to us all. I also liked the post title and thought it was fun but also made it clear what to expect.
Have you thought about whether you could expand the service to provide more value (and get paid more) by freelancers or considered other avenues where you could turn "RSS + notifications" into another business with a minimum of effort (other job sites, auction listings, it seems like there could be a lot)?
Thank you! Inspired that I inspired you because I used to read this type of thing and thought I'd never do anything like it.
I've thought about expanding to additional freelancing sites but have not thought about the RSS+notifications thing. I still have something eating away at me that it's just an "RSS feed reader" but maybe I'm wrong about that entirely.
Just do this but for other job sites and aggregate. You seem to know Pieter Levels from your Make book reference, and I'm not sure if Remote Ok has an RSS feed or Slack notifications but this could be a pretty useful feature for that.
Also add categories and keywords to filter by for Upwork jobs if you haven't already. Contact Upwork users directly and message them about your product. Do things that don't scale as they say. I'd say contact maybe 500 people and see the response and subsequent sales. You could also contact marketers so they can post their jobs on your platform perhaps. There are many ways for future development it seems to me.
You can email me if you want more advice, I run a SaaS as well (https://getartemis.app) and I do some of these marketing tips I talk about.
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
> Lastly, why does everyone here seem to care more about post titles than actual posts nowadays?
The point of a title is to provide some kind of summary or teasing of what the posts talks about. If you try to guess the content of the article from the title you will fail here.
I don't want to criticize the content of this post, but we have this kind of content very often on the homepage, so it is not like we would have missed a super interesting thing
Would've been helpful if they mentioned what kind of smart contracts they support at the very top of the article. I had to dive in to find out they're talking about Solidity
I would look into getting a head start by leveraging one of the existing blockchain companies that's looking for developers to build on their platform. Usually they are very happy to promote your project(s) on their social media, and/or offer you seed/bridge funding if you can create a compelling MVP. I would also urge you to look for the blockchain companies that are hosting hackathons, since that means they have money to blow on attracting developers. I know all this since I'm in the same boat as you :) Good luck!
This is an amusing truth in the industry. The VC's have given much of their money to "layer 1" blockchain projects that are supposed to have lots of application projects building on them.
But VC's aren't investing as much in application projects, since there often isn't a clear path to profitability with a decentralized application. A big reason for this is that the layer 1 blockchain will capture most of the value of the applications running on it (for a real life example of this, see Uniswap on Ethereum).
At the same time, the success of a layer 1 blockchain is judged by how many applications it has. So maybe one could argue that applications are valued more highly by VCs for enhancing the appearance of success of layer 1 blockchains than for their own sake.
This leads to the situation you portray, where it's sometimes easiest for a founder to get investment money from VCs that has first passed through the hands of a layer 1 project.
Blockchain isn't required for an MVP, so I am fortunate in that regard.
You know, it's funny to watch Silicon Valley years ago and laugh at the "new internet" part. Then realize shit, I've actually become this person now. :)
Appreciate the advice and kind words, best of luck to you as well!
No, because "crypto" is only a subset of "blockchain."
Blockchain can be used for a lot more than just digital cash. It can be used for storing immutable logs of any data/content. That implies endless use-cases.
Yes, transactions can be viewed as contracts, but the mediation is already accounted for by that specific blockchain's consensus algorithm & proposal/dispute resolution system. Most of the good smart contract blockchains already have systems in place for all this.
You've got it backwards, "crypto" is cryptography which is where all of this comes from. "Blockchain" is just a clever combination of ECDSA, Merkle trees and partial hash inversion that has proven useful to implement decentralized digital cash. I think we would be better served by looking at existing real-world problems with fresh eyes to see if cryptography can provide unique solutions, rather than taking one particular protocol template and assuming it can be used for almost anything.
It ought to be, and it used to be, but unfortunately it's been hijacked by the cryptocurrency community to such an extent that it's become increasingly ambiguous.
Bare in mind that these exact same MIDI notes can be fed into better sounding instruments (such as lush pads, sharp lead synths, acoustic guitars, etc...), thus improving the overall end product.
Yeah. I think a lot of people are ignoring that the output target, MIDI, is pretty limited. A skilled producer could pretty easily take these exact notes and make a track that sounds great. Sound design makes a huge difference.
And the constant velocity doesn’t help either. Almost any MIDI score could be made sounding twice as good with a little variation in velocity and slight timing errors. Speaking of which, some friends who had a video production company were picking an audio track from a commercial DVD package and there were song choice in around few dozen different styles to pick from: country, progressive rock, etc. At some point I realized that the same score that was played within different style and textures and different cadence made it sound like different songs altogehter.
You might have to run on a frame by frame basis, e.g. using `ffmpeg -i file.mpg $filename%03d.bmp` [1] and stitching the results back together [2].
I haven't tried it, though, and there might be better alternatives.
I had the opposite experience. There was no context or description provided by the author, and the website is confusing and has stuff flying all over it. Furthermore, their Soundcloud API access is already revoked, so there is no music playing, thus making it even more confusing. I'm all for novelty websites, but this is a mess.
Without passing comment on the contributors in this comment string, I think we will find more often either a jarring or nostalgic reaction to design elements depending on if your formative technology experiences were on Apple II’s, DOS, and Win3.1 or iPhones, iPads, and Alexa.
