I want to share with you how this little tool I built five! years ago gained me my first 200 followers and is the reason I started Indiehacking. It had quite an impact on my life, in retrospect. So it all started in 2019 when I began teaching myself how to code.
It had quite an impact on my life, in retrospect.So it all started in 2019 when I began teaching myself how to code.I was looking for a simple project to practice. At that time, I was reading Pieter Level's book "MAKE" and became absolutely hooked on his approach to startups. In the book, there is a section where he discusses the profitability of niches 👇
It's a table that shows you how to make $X based on various numbers of users and prices.I loved this concept, so I thought, why not make it interactive and apply some of the launch lessons I learned from the book? I built the tool as a single HTML file with VueJS and launched it.
You can see the Product Hunt launch here:
The launch received... 14 upvotes.
Needless to say, I was hoping for much more. I don't know what I expected, but I certainly wanted more than just 14 upvotes (SAD).
Feeling a little down, I decided to tweet the launch to my 20 followers on Twitter and then go to bed. I woke up the next day with a sense of disappointment.That changed when I checked my phone and saw my Twitter notifications page blowing up.
I noticed dozens of new followers and realized that somehow my tweet had been picked up by a few larger accounts who liked it.
Overnight, I gained over 200 new followers, and people were thanking me for building this neat little tool in my DMs 😊Looking back, it might seem a bit ridiculous, but this incident was enough to fuel my passion for building startups and sharing them with the world.I couldn't stop chasing the feeling of knowing that people out there like (some even love) using the tools I create.
Why am I sharing this story now?
Well, I haven't really touched the project in years, except a couple of months ago when I had to fix a UI bug.Somehow, while fixing this bug, I managed to crash the entire site, and users would only see a white page 🤦♂️
I did notice it but thought that nobody was using the site anymore, so I didn't want to spend time fixing it.Today, I woke up to an email from a guy called Ben, telling me that he loves the site but it's broken.
Somehow, this email made really happy for a moment...
I can't believe this thing I built five years ago is still being used and loved by people.So, I decided to quickly fix it, add a little HelpKit ad, and let Ben know the site is live again! ツ
👉 Here's the site btw: https://hmcte.info/
