2 startups, 12 months

Why

I was inspired by levels and yongfook to make a 12 startups in 12 months project, starting from around July 2023 to July 2024.

However, I want to put my own spin on it and make it 2 startups in 12 months so I can have a longer time frame to build and market the apps.

The reasons to do this, as levels says:

Problem one: finishing We creatives have one common problem: finishing things.

Problem two: launching Fear of failure.


S1: Bookkss (🪦 12/23)

The first startup was Bookkss (July 2023 – September 2023).

What went well:

  1. The relatively fast iteration speed using Vite (next time we’ll use Next).
  2. It was fun to build. 😃

What I learned from this startup:

  1. Use a styling library for faster development, like Material UI.
  2. Target B2B niches (AI, etc.) for indie hackers, see source here.
  3. Manage feature creep (lock down features of MVP) – build that out, and get feedback from users.
  4. Switching from Next to Vite to then back to Next (this was my bad as I enabled the beta App router and had really slow site speeds for some reason, I wasn’t able to diagnose it so I switched to Vite which solved the slow speeds, but I lost SSR (for SEO) which I wanted so I’m in the process of switching back to Next. This is due to each review being kind of like a blog post so we need web crawlers like Google to show these information pieces up on SERPs).
  5. Practice marketing, i.e., any kind of activity aligned to growth that does not involve building features, as explained here.

S2: HelloRemote (🪦 12/23)

HelloRemote @ helloremote.dev is a job board for remote jobs.


S3 and S4: XTrack and SubsTrackr (🪦 )

XTrack and SubsTrackr help users track tasks and subscriptions, respectively.

  • The first one is deployed onto Vercel and uses Serverless technology with Supabase.
  • The second one used the t3 stack (Next.js, TypeScript, tRPC, Prisma, NextAuth) and is deployed on Vercel.

Marketing Plan

Once the apps are done-ish, marketing should consist of:

  • Posting on HackerNews
  • Posting on ProductHunt
  • Posting on Reddit
  • Engaging on Quora
  • Being more active on Twitter/X
  • Building in public, as suggested here
  • Considering paid ads
  • Exploring TikTok
  • Using Instagram
  • Creating content on YouTube

edit June 2024 – currently the surviving startup is xtrack.ing. Hope it’s subject to the Lindy effect.

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