Hey fellow creators.
I have been a professional software developer for 14 years now and have worked on various client projects ranging from social networks, payment processors to full blown eCommerce software. In parallel I've also been contributing to open source projects as I get time and creating products that could solve real problems for our clients. But I have always been building things in close. I have never build anything in public.
However seeing so many awesome creators here building great products in public and growing them from nothing to something, it really gave me an inspiration to start my next project in public.
TLDR;
It's a platform where creators will be able to record their build in public journey in a linear timeline.
How this idea came? ⚡
It has been fascinating seeing so many independent creators building something in public and achieving growth with their hard work. People have literally started from 0 to reach a point where they converted their side hustles into full blown startups. Follower counts have increased from 0 to 25K in a year for these people. The best part is they have been documenting it all in twitter threads or blogs. Their knowledge and learnings were open for everybody.
However when somebody like me wants to see the growth graph starting from the day it started, I didn't find Twitter posts to be so useful. IndieHackers does have milestones for that, but that doesn't seem to cover the various business metric to track the growth.
That's when this idea came to my mind. However a quick search on IndieHackers showed madepublic, a similar tool in the making. Though after going through it, I found that it's a bit different from what I envision my product to be. So it seemed worthwhile to proceed with this idea.
Therefore I finally decided to create a tool so that creators can document their journey of learning and growing, in a linear timeline, which can be an inspiration for anybody seeking to achieve the growth.
I thought it would be best to build this tool in public as this will be the best test for its use case, as the people who will be using this tool are the ones who would be willing it see how it's being built.
Name Selection 🔬
I had my doubts about naming the product. As with any other product, it all starts with a domain name search. So I started searching domains with bip (build in public) prefix. Many domains were available, but none of them seemed brandable.
After spending some time, the word 'Pottery' stuck in my head.
Pottery means the process of making clay articles by heating them at high temperature. The meaning seemed synonymous to what great creators do by putting their hard work and sweat into making something of huge scale.
Luckily profiley.me was available for purchase and was a no brainer for me to purchase the domain.
(Though TBH, I still took 2 days to think if I should indeed proceed with the idea)
Tech Stack ⚒️
Though in my previous projects, I've been keen to use latest tech, be it for backend jobs or front end UI, this time the priority was clear.
Ship the product as soon as possible.
Therefore it was important to stick with a stack that
- I love to work on.
- I have expertise on.
- I can quickly produce with.
Therefore I have decided to use the following tech stack for @ProductPottery
Server Code - .NET Core with custom view engine
Client - Liquid Views, Javascript and CSS
Relational Database - MySql (though my O/RM will easily allow me to switch between MySql, PostgreSql or Sql Server without much effort but that is for later).
To speed up development, I'll be customizing my very own written eCommerce software EvenCart as that will help me to quickly iterate through changes and cover most of the stuff I need to do.
Where am I right now? 💁♂️
I've set up the twitter account and website landing page with a basic logo to get things rolling. I have started to build the core feature set.
Next
For now I'll be sharing my build in public journey on my twitter account, so follow me if you want to live the journey along. And of-course when I implement the basic product and post features on ProductPottery, I'll be posting the stuff there first.
Whether the product succeeds or fail, is a story for the future. But I am pretty excited and nervous to start this new "build in public journey" for the first time.
Wish me luck 😀
