What is the crowd's opinion of
Makerlog?
From 3.5 billion comments
5 reviews of this app found across the web:
Have you launched on Producthunt?
Have you launched on other subreddits?
Have you launched on Facebook + Twitter?
Can you send a link to the post on r/shopify?
Do you know about the maker community (getmakerlog.com)
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I think you can get easily at least 5 customers if you relaunch.
I can only speak from my limited personal experience here (3 years actively freelancing) and starting to do more than coding-for-cash for around a year. My advice:
- Put yourself out there: Make a website for yourself, sign up and maintain a decent Linkedin. Sign up for job boards and create profiles. All of these give you the chance to be found on the web.
- Join Twitter: I can't say it enough. Most of the IT people I know are there. Sharing interesting stuff, talking. This is where the life happens. Join in, follow, engage, talk. Don't forget to set your homepage in the profile. I've made a number of business connections there, which still are really important for my company.
- Start little side projects: Use your downtimes to focus on making & market little side projects. These probably won't get you more than a few $. Use the change to learn new stuff and share your progress on a supportive community like indiehackers.com or getmakerlog.com . The better you learn to market (which is what almost everyone in IT struggles with in some way) the more success you will have. It's also a lot of fun :)
- Go to meetups: Meeting in person always gives it more a touch. Meetups and conferences are great for this. People I've met on meetups years ago still help me solving issues on Github today 😍️
- Join Upwork and build up a "profile" there. Take easy little jobs to get "hire-able" for bigger jobs. Regularly raise your rates there. This can become one of your income streams.
This is kinda my process, which slowly starts to build momentum with each iteration :D
I love #3, and I'll tell a bit of a story about why I do.
I run an online community. In this community, we have a feature that is essentially an activity feed -- where you'd see what everyone was doing on site.
I coded it and based it off Stream Framework, a popular open source project (that was long abandoned). Being the cheap fuck that I am, I decided to restore the project, get it into working order in a private fork. Took a couple of days.
What I didn't predict was the amount of engineering overhead this feature would cause me -- eventually I would spend weeks debugging simple things that failed miserably at scale.
The truth is, I swallowed my pride and ended up going for getstream, a hosted alternative. Why? Because I am not in the business of building activity feeds - I am in the business of nurturing a community.
Focus on what matters most. Allocate resources accordingly, so your main activity is what matters most to your venture. And don't be a cheap fuck - spending a little bit monthly might save you thousands of hours of development time, which is money in the bank for you if you focus in the right things.
I found links in your comment that were not hyperlinked:
I did the honors for you.
^delete ^| ^information ^| ^<3
Appreciate it!
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I'm going to add this once the list grows, but in the meantime, ad spaces are deployed on.
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amongst others!