Last week I felt like I was ready to share the beta version of Plausible online. Contrary to all advice I didn’t build an audience before releasing my product. Instead, I did what many first-time indie founders do: build a product and hope that people will come. I now know that this is a mistake, and you should start marketing before you have an actual product.
In general I don’t think that the tech stack matters too much for software projects. Especially if you’re a solo maker, almost all of the risk is on the sales and marketing side as opposed to the tech side. The best approach is normally to just pick some boring tools and start solving your customers’ problems.
However I’m also very passionate about developer tooling and I thoroughly enjoy nerding out about programming languages and different databases. In this post I’ll go over the main technology choices I’ve had to make so far for Plausible.
I think most programmers have a default language or ecosystem they like and are used to. For me that would be Elixir. The first time I tried it was when I saw Dave Thomas speak about it in 2013. Since then I started the Elixir Koans project and used Elixir on a number of commercial projects.
The meteoric rise of front-end frameworks like React, Angular, Vue.js, Elm, etc. has made single-page applications ubiquitous on the web. For many developers, these have become part of their ‘default’ toolset. When they start a new project, they grab the tools they know already: a REST API on the backend, and a React/Angular/Vue/Elm frontend.
Working on plausible.io I often find myself doing things I have no clue how to do. I struggle massively with marketing, copywriting, and most of all, UX/UI design. Here are some tips I’ve found helpful when trying to design for the web as an unimaginative developer who hasn’t designed a single thing in his life.
This book basically lays out the common sense foundations for web design. It’s not a new book but it’s a classic for a reason. The principles laid out here are immediately applicable to anything you might be designing for the web.
Recommended for any developer who is looking to get into design.
Ugh. Can we just use something other than Google Analytics?
Complexity: I find GA overwhelming and difficult to learn. The UX could be a lot better, especially for new users.
Privacy: I don’t want Google, or anyone, to track my end users. Have you thought about why GA can be free to use? Because Google is happy to sell their analytics data to advertisers.