Forem: David Solé

Getting Started with Rust

David Solé — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 14:03:11 +0000

Rust has consistently ranked as one of the most admired programming languages in recent years. According to the StackOverflow Developer Survey, Rust holds the top spot as the most loved programming language. With the stories of benefactors and detractors I read about it, I just wanted to have my own experience.

From my first steps, I found learning Rust to be an enjoyable experience. In this post, I want to share the journey, from learning Rust as a beginner to exploring its open-source ecosystem. If you're curious about Rust or want to start your journey, this guide will help you get on track.

Why Learn Rust?

Rust is a systems programming language that focuses on performance and memory safety. It’s often compared to languages like C++ due to its ability to handle low-level tasks, but it offers modern features like safe concurrency and great tooling. Rust is known for helping developers avoid common bugs like null pointer dereferencing and data races.

The language is used in a wide range of applications, from web development and game engines to systems programming and beyond. Companies like Mozilla, Dropbox, and Cloudflare use Rust in their tech stacks. Rust's unique combination of performance, safety, and versatility makes it a valuable skill to learn for modern development.

How to Start Learning Rust

When learning a new programming language, having good documentation and resources is essential. Rust shines in this part. Below, I’ll walk you through valuable resources to get started and deepen your understanding of Rust.

1. The Rust Book
The official Rust documentation, known as "The Rust Programming Language", is the first option you need to check to start learning Rust. It’s the best place to start if you already have experience with other programming languages.

The Rust Book explains Rust’s concepts in a clear and structured way. However, if you're new to programming, some later chapters (like chapter 15 and beyond) may be challenging. Focus on understanding the basics first, and don’t hesitate to revisit the more advanced topics once you feel more comfortable with the language.

2. Rust by Example
Once you get through the basics, Rust by Example is another fantastic resource to reinforce your learning. This website allows you to practice with small, hands-on examples. The interactive approach is especially helpful for visual learners who prefer to learn by doing rather than reading alone.

These small examples are ideal for studying while on the go—whether commuting, waiting in line, or just having a few minutes to spare.

3. 100 Exercises to Learn Rust
To solidify what you’ve learned, practicing with exercises is key. The 100 Rust Exercises resource offers exactly that. It's a collection of challenges designed to deepen your knowledge and strengthen your skills.

After completing these exercises, you’ll have a better grasp of Rust’s syntax, memory management, and error handling.

4. Rustlings
After completing the basic resources, you can challenge yourself with Rustlings. This is another set of small coding exercises in a terminal that focuses on teaching you how to read and write Rust effectively. These exercises will prepare you to handle typical errors shown by the compiler.

Other useful Repositories

Apart from the last repositories, there are other useful repositories that I haven’t got deeper into, but they could give you a hand in learning.

1. Comprehensive Rust
This repository offers a complete Rust course used by the Android team at Google. It’s packed with in-depth material and exercises. The course is expected to have a 4-day agenda.

2. Rust by Practice
Rust by Practice is another repository that helps you become skilled in Rust through various exercises. Some exercises are borrowed from Rust by Example, but this repository focuses on filling the gaps and making things work.

3. Rust Web Developer Roadmap
If you're interested in web development, Rust has a growing ecosystem for building web applications. The Rust Web Developer Roadmap is a schema for web development using Rust. It offers insights into the packages, frameworks, and libraries you’ll need to become proficient in this area.

Contributing to Rust’s Open-Source Ecosystem

Once you're familiar with Rust, contributing to open-source projects is a great way to continue learning and give back to the community. GitHub hosts a wide variety of Rust projects, there are around 970 repositories with more than 1k stars, and it certainly has its awesome Rust repository. Exploring these repositories will also give you practical insights into how Rust is used in different domains.

Here are some great open-source Rust projects that I’m planning to look at:

1. Deno
Deno is a modern runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript. While it's primarily focused on these languages, Rust is used under the hood for performance and safety.

2. Tauri
Tauri is a framework for building smaller, secure desktop and mobile applications with a web front-end. If you're interested in building cross-platform apps with a focus on security, this is an excellent project to explore.

3. Rustdesk
Rustdesk is an open-source remote desktop application designed as an alternative to TeamViewer. It’s designed to be self-hosted, giving you full control over your remote desktop environment.

4. Bevy
Bevy is a data-driven game engine built in Rust. If you’re curious about game development, Bevy is a great way to explore how Rust can be used for building games. It’s still in the early stages of development.

5. Sniffnet
Sniffnet is an application to monitor your internet traffic. It’s a practical tool that highlights Rust’s strengths in handling real-time data and network performance.

6. OpenObserve
OpenObserve is an observability platform built for logs, metrics, traces, and analytics. It’s an alternative to Elasticsearch and provides a scalable solution for handling large volumes of data.

7. Burn
Burn is a dynamic deep-learning framework built with flexibility and efficiency in mind. If you're into AI or machine learning, this framework offers the ability to explore how Rust can power complex neural networks.

8. Mullvad VPN App
Mullvad is a privacy-focused VPN client with both desktop and mobile versions.

9. Hickory DNS
Hickory is a DNS client, server, and resolver. This project allows you to see how Rust can be used to handle low-level networking tasks.

10. Vpncloud
Vpncloud is a peer-to-peer VPN. It introduces peer-to-peer communications and is an excellent opportunity to learn about it.

Conclusion

Learning Rust can be a rewarding experience, whether you're new to programming or a seasoned developer looking to explore a new language. With its focus on safety, performance, and concurrency, Rust is well-suited for a wide range of applications, from web development to systems programming.

My first thought while learning was: “Why I didn’t start earlier?” and discovering all these great and open-source projects pushed my motivation further. We’ll see where this motivation reaches.

Navigating Google's Developer Jungle

David Solé — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 09:29:49 +0000

In the vast app development world, encountering hurdles is par for the course. Two big players make the rules and it’s easy to fall into their traps. After my first encounter with Google written on “Exposing myself live and DMCA takedowns”, there was another assault.

Google second assault

Picture this: it’s 2019, and I’m building Tintodo, an events App with scrapped events from Facebook and Eventbrite. But just as I launch the app into the wild, fate intervenes in the form of COVID-19. I innocuously reference the pandemic in Tintodo’s description, just to give a warning about the situation. COVID-19 Apps with misinformation appear in the App Store and Google decides to remove all Apps referencing COVID-19. Et voilà! Another App removed from Google Play Store.

I decided to post what happened to Hacker News, to see if shouting about Google's bad decisions led to suspension removal.

While I can’t say for certain if it was my outcry that spurred action, a few days later, Tintodo was republished. Thankfully I didn’t lose this assault.

Google knockout

Fast forward to the present day, and Bonetflix finds itself thrust into the eye of the storm. I lost access to my Google Play Console. This means Bonetflix Android App is no longer available on Google Play Store.

Google's stringent policies have become increasingly unforgiving, particularly for developers who fail to engage with their accounts regularly. Despite receiving email warnings (to an unused email), the absence of any recent activity left me vulnerable to account deletion. I don’t even remember the last time I accessed my developer account.

Play Store's new deletion policy

This policy was introduced on 5th April 2023 in Giving Users More Transparency and Control Over Account Data where they claim that developers will need to provide an option to initiate account and data deletion from within the app and online.

It’s funny that my account is marked as inactive, and I can’t access it nor delete my information. I don’t have a background in legal, but I have read GDPR rights, and we, EU citizens have the right to access and erase our data. I tried to complain to DPOs before complaining to the European Data Protection Supervisor but didn’t receive help.

SEO Impact

Bonetflix Android App barely had users, but it had backlinks to Bonetflix's website. Even though the linking text was not relevant, the rankings suffered a lot. The average Google Ranking position increased by approximately three positions.

When I first published Bonetflix App, there were no significant changes in SEO statistics but this fact means they have a relevant impact on its rankings. If I ever publish an App again, I will publish it on several App stores to maximize backlinks and minimize Google dependency.

Future steps

This incident allowed me to forget about an App that was getting a spot in my mind and didn’t generate much revenue.

Although I hadn’t updated the App in more than a year, I was updating Bonetflix database. I will try other small bets with this database and see how things work.

Product Hunt Survivor Bias

David Solé — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 09:09:24 +0000

After months of hard work, feedback, and learning, I launched Curl2Url on Product Hunt. Three months ago, on March 19, 2024, I eagerly submitted Curl2Url to Product Hunt, only to find it missing from the spotlight. Perplexed, I delved deeper, stumbling upon a tab housing all products posted that day, there was Curl2Url, lost at the bottom of the page.

Even so, I would like to thank all the launch supporters.

As a novice to the Product Hunt realm, this marked my inaugural product launch. I diligently absorbed insights from guides like "The Product Hunt Launch Guide" and Marc Lou's "How to Launch a Startup" (Jan. 24th, 2024), the latter securing the accolade of Maker of the Year at the Golden Kitty Awards. However, my immersion in success narratives inadvertently overshadowed other realities. That’s how I fall into the survivor bias.

Guided by the belief that Monday to Thursday are good days if you want to get more traction, I chose Tuesday for Curl2Url's debut. Conversely, Friday to Sunday are your day targets if you want to launch the product just to get the Product Hunt badge. But if you don’t get featured, you barely have traction.

Yet, amidst my immersion in triumph tales, I overlooked reads such as How Product Hunt really works ( Dec. 15th, 2015), How do you get featured on Product Hunt? (Sep. 19th, 2019) alongside insightful Hacker News comments on this post.

Digging deeper into the purported algorithmic nuances dictating featured eligibility, I analyzed featured and non-featured products from April 2024.

Checking out outlier days featured chances, I didn’t see a variable related to being featured or not.

From my point of view, I saw products that needed improvements being featured and good products not being featured. Consequently, while intrigued by the inner workings of the algorithm I don’t want to spend more time checking how it works when the conclusion I extract from it is that it needs to improve.

Conclusions and future

Last week I took fresh holidays that helped me to think about the experience and my future steps.

While the experience thus far has been enriching, my focus moving forward lies in achieving sustainability. Having left my conventional job in January 2023, I have been living from savings. My goal is to find a job that gives me time for my projects, where I can learn from subjects I would like to delve into, with difficult challenges that keep me motivated and give me a good income.

In light of this, I am committed to diversifying my approach and not relying solely on the prospects of a single platform. While Product Hunt holds promise, it is imperative to acknowledge the inherent unpredictability of such endeavors.

I will continue working with Curl2Url at least until August, it’s useful for me, there are several features I would like to add and I always can relaunch it on Product Hunt.

Exposing myself live and DMCA takedowns

David Solé — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 23:31:53 +0000

Some months ago I took the next step in sharing my experiences with a wider audience. I began live-streaming my activities on platforms like Twitch and Kick. The motivation behind this decision stemmed from the presentation by Charlie Coppinger (Twitch), who emphasized the concept of "Building in Public on Twitch" inside the Small Bets community. Intrigued by his approach and after exploring his channel, I felt inspired to give it a try.

Setting up my Twitch stream proved to be a more intricate process than anticipated, involving considerations such as microphone setup, choosing the right streaming application and application setup. I plan to get deeper into these technical aspects in upcoming posts, sharing insights and tips for those interested.

For my inaugural stream, I opted to play the video game Palworld, reminiscent of Pokemon but with a unique twist involving guns. While there were initial nerves, once immersed in the flow, the awareness of being live on camera faded away. A highlight from my first day of streaming was receiving a sudden "raid" on my channel, with around 20 people joining and engaging in lively chat to promote my content.

On the second day, I decided to share a different aspect of my life by streaming myself as a student. I like to learn, and this was a perfect occasion to use streaming as a tool. I undertook the "ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers" course on the deeplearning.ai website. Given the course's content and my admiration for Andrew Ng's teachings from past experiences, I wanted to document my learning journey. Adhering to the website's Terms of Use, which discouraged streaming without prior written consent, I took a calculated risk. I blurred the screen and added ambient music to maintain compliance while sharing my educational experience.

Although the audience for this stream was limited, I found joy in combining my educational pursuits with the unique experience of live streaming. Even though there are always chances to get to a DMCA takedown when you use other’s content, I was lucky to not get into it.

Reflecting on a Past DMCA Takedown

In July 2016, six months after completing my master's degree in Computer Vision and venturing into my first indie hacker journey, the popular game app Pokemon Go made its debut. There was a lot of hype around the release, and the first web apps that gathered information about Pokemon locations started to appear. Those were my first steps in reverse engineering APIs on web apps but I wasn’t able to reverse engineer the Pokemon GO game. One of those web apps became the basis for my Android App, "Live PokeMap for Pokemon Go."

To prevent a potential DMCA takedown, I removed the content inside Pokemon images from the App.

I also incorporated Google AdMob ads to generate revenue, and the app gained traction quickly. The initial excitement culminated in a revenue of $43.03 on the first full day. That day I remember I couldn’t sleep from excitement, my brain was thinking about improvements and new features. I even fantasized about living off the app. However, my elation was short-lived as, on the fifth day, Google removed all Android apps revealing Pokemon locations from the Play Store.

Despite reaching over 20K downloads in the first days, the app's removal from the Play Store meant AdMob stopped displaying ads, resulting in no income. Nowadays, the app is still present on app crawlers like APKCombo, even though the app is not working.

This experience heightened my determination to continue building innovative projects while considering alternatives to relying solely on major platforms like Google or Apple.

Unleashing the Hacker Spirit

David Solé — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 11:12:57 +0000

Growing up in Catalonia, Spain, during the 1990s and 2000s, my experience with school was quite traditional. Private school meant attending classes, sitting in your chair, listening to the teacher, doing exercises, and answering questions. The routine continued with homework once classes ended, intensifying as exams entered the picture. If you flunked a subject meant repeating the course the following year. I repeated two years at ages 16 and 18, stuck in a system that didn't resonate with me.

During my educational journey, I realized the disconnect between this traditional approach and real-world application. Memorizing historical events or philosophical concepts seemed disconnected from reality. This rote memorization without interest, didn’t last beyond exams. At some point, I adopted the law of least effort, doing the minimum to pass while spending the least amount of time. This attitude channeled my interest in video games—an engaging realm where you can enjoy, face challenges, discover, and explore exciting worlds. Unfortunately, this approach, combined with a lack of motivation, led to my first significant failure.

Education, as a societal tool, aims to create a stable society by equipping individuals with basic skills. However, this scalable process focuses more on control than on increasing children’s motivation or curiosity, hoping to shape a workforce that sustains the economic environment. Public education gained importance only 200 years ago, yet in 2023, only 87% of children complete primary education, indicating we are still in the early stages of educational evolution.

The Internet, a significant catalyst for change, has connected over 5.3 billion people globally as of October 2023, 65% of the global population. While this marks substantial progress, there is much work ahead to ensure universal connectivity and the ability to learn online. We are still in the early stages of the internet's potential.

Change of attitude
My perspective changed when I entered university to study Network Engineering. The freedom to choose my path fueled my motivation, and there I discovered that I like programming—it opens a whole world of possibilities to create.

I consider myself lucky to have found something that motivates and impassions me. I know people who haven’t found their passion yet, and this is something education should focus on.

About halfway through my university life, I shifted my attitude from the law of least effort to “learn as much as you can.” I got rid of the lazy attitude by looking at my life as if I were an external observer. If an effort doesn’t kill you and you are doing what you want, it doesn’t matter how big is this effort because you will be enjoying the path.

This “learn as much as you can” attitude makes sense when you desire to build something yourself. The learnings you do today will be the tools you will use in your future. I also got inspired by Robert T. Kiyosaki and his book “Rich Dad Poor Dad”. It wasn’t easy at first, but when you’re in the dynamic, things start to fall into place.

Remember, your mind is your greatest asset, so be careful what you put into it.
—Robert T. Kiyosaki

In my uni days, I found alignment with the hacker attitude outlined by Eric S. Raymond in 1997. The five principles he shared continue to resonate:

The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.
Nobody should ever have to solve a problem twice.
Boredom and drudgery are evil.
Freedom is good.
Attitude is no substitute for competence.

These principles guide my journey and remain relevant in today's context. The hacker mindset, rooted in curiosity, problem-solving, and the desire to learn more, inspires a lifelong learning journey—one that transcends traditional educational boundaries.

Discover Top Spots for Your Startup

David Solé — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 12:56:40 +0000

From X to the Online World

As I landed on X December last year, I encountered a dynamic community of entrepreneurs sharing content, exchanging insights, narrating their experiences, and marketing their products. The sheer volume of activities made it challenging to stay abreast of everyone's endeavors and the content they shared.

Unlocking X’s Potential

Viewed through the lens of an independent entrepreneur, the platform offers the distinct advantage of a rich learning environment. Despite the varying degrees of relevance in the shared content, a noteworthy aspect is the "Give vs. Ask" ethos, expounded upon in the insightful piece titled "Promoting on Reddit (or Anywhere) By Giving Before Asking" penned by Bill Prin. Here, the act of entrepreneurs sharing their learnings, data, or product statistics represents a 'Give', while the promotion of their product is an 'Ask'. The true value of time spent on X hinges on the prevalence of 'Give' content. But, the reality is that the recurrence of similar ideas dilutes the impact of the platform.

The Double-Edged Sword of X

If this is the benefit of X, the downside is that you become one among many entrepreneurs. If you want people to notice your stuff, you have to do a lot of giving and always be honest. I don't mind being honest and giving, but the thing is, it takes up a lot of time.

Marc Louvion said in one of the promotional videos that he spends 5 hours a day on X.

I’m pretty sure this can be a valid approximation and I don’t want to spend that much time on X. I decided to add Webtime tracker extension on Google Chrome and Firefox. This tool aims to provide insights into my time spent on browsers, helping me make informed decisions to maximize my productivity.

Strategic Spots for Startup Promotion

In this X journey, I stumbled upon this tweet:

Guess what? Some entrepreneurs out there are selling lists of places to promote your startup. I did some detective work on Google and found a bunch of websites sharing these lists. Check out the ones I looked into:

500+ Places to Promote Your Startup

75+ Places to Promote Your Startup for Free

Top 20 Sites to Submit Your Startup to Promote It in 2024

Top 14 Sites to Promote Your Startup

89 Places to Promote Your Startup

My goal throughout this journey was to amplify the reach of my projects without breaking the bank. While paid promotion options exist, I decided to steer clear, considering my budget constraints. These lists I found have a mix of everything—some duplicates, some websites that aren't around anymore, and some with dark patterns like making you fill out a bunch of info and then springing a surprise payment on you.

I spent quite a few hours sorting through all of this to figure out which websites let you submit your startup. I hope that I can save some time for folks who want to get their app out there. I've even included the ones that want you to pay for a speedy listing or make you wait for months before they showcase your startup. Here's the list:

Those lists also include Reddits, but heads up, all links posted on Reddit are "no follow" (here is a perfect article on why is this important). But since Bill Prin had a good experience starting to promote on Reddit, I'm thinking of giving it a shot sometime soon. Here's the list of reddits:

r/advancedentrepreneur
r/advertising
r/alphaandbetausers
r/announcements
r/AskMarketing
r/Business_Ideas
r/Businessideas
r/coupons
r/CrazyIdeas
r/digitalnomad
r/Emailmarketing
r/Entrepreneur
r/EntrepreneurRideAlong
r/growinpublic
r/growmybusiness
r/GrowthHacking
r/ideas
r/indiebiz
r/indiehackers
r/InternetIsBeautiful
r/Lightbulb
r/MadeThis
r/marketing
r/microsaas
r/NicheWebsites
r/Plugyourproduct
r/ProductHunters
r/programming
r/projects
r/roastmystartup
r/SaaS
r/sales
r/SideProject
r/smallbusiness
r/socialmedia
r/startup
r/startups
r/startups_promotion
r/sweatystartup
r/webmarketing

There are also Facebook groups and communities, but for now, as I decided to stay away from Facebook, there's no plan to check those out, for now.

Tracking Success with Bonetflix

Implementing this strategy, I've promoted my project Bonetflix on all these platforms. In a past issue, I shared some metrics about it, and I expect these numbers to evolve in the following weeks. Stay tuned to witness positive transformations in this journey.

Thanks for reading David's Indie Hacker Journey! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Big bet

David Solé — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 16:33:03 +0000

Three years ago I started Bonetflix, the acronym for Best on Netflix, a website with information about movies available on Netflix ( in US, UK, ES) with IMDB and Filmaffinity rankings.

This is how the website looks on December 2023 on Google Search Console in the last 12 months.

I’m thrilled to share my journey on this project from inception to future.

Start

Everything originated from a confluence of compelling reasons. As a dedicated enthusiast of movies and series, I embarked on this venture prompted by the challenge of finding a ranking for the available Netflix titles in Spain.

I researched keywords related to Netflix on Keyword Planner. I identified a substantial volume of searches incorporating the query "$movie_name Netflix". At that juncture, Netflix lacked the public movie pages that characterize its user experience.

This is the first project I did targeting web as the main platform, a departure from my usual terrain of Android Apps. Despite the existence of competitors in the field, I decided to embark on this project with a focused objective: to establish a robust online presence.

Build

In developing the website, I opted to utilize HTML, CSS, and minimal Javascript to ensure optimal speed and performance. Everything is static content following some of the principles of “Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web”. The current Lighthouse score for the website is as follows:

In the data phase, information was sourced from various outlets such as Netflix, Filmaffinity, and IMDB. Addressing website modifications and circumventing captchas were integral aspects of this endeavor. I also had to match these data between those different data sources, converting text to a vector, clustering, and identifying the most proximate vectors. A challenging aspect was discerning movies with identical names in the same or different years, as well as identifying similar actors in distinct films.

With the amassed data, I decided not to make a copy-paste about the text extracted from different sources. So I used the pre-ChatGPT trick to generate data, translated English movie overviews to Spanish to get Spanish overviews and vice versa. Subsequently, I also read and reviewed the translations, recognizing that they were not consistently accurate and might also include errors today.

Marketing / SEO

The first year was hard, I felt like Google didn’t trust my website and didn’t rank the keywords. However, as time progressed, there was a discernible shift, indicating a gradual gain in trust. I don’t have data from the start as Google Search Console doesn’t allow me to get data older than 16 months ( with this newsletter, things won’t be lost).

The top linking sites contributing to website visibility are the following:

Furthermore, I built Bonetflix App to explore the potential impact on results through website referencing ( I will not delve into the Android app, maybe in another issue). That’s why I have Google as a top linking site. This initiative faced initial setbacks, as Google penalized the behavior in the early weeks, resulting in diminished site visits. Subsequently, however, normalcy was restored.

Another experimentation involved referencing select movies from Wikipedia, even with the inclusion of a "no follow" backlink. While there was a transient surge in website ranking, this effect did not endure over the long term.

As the website continues to mature and solidify its standing, I focused on effective monetization strategies. The following paragraphs are my experience.

Monetization

Seeking the viability of the project, I decided to add ads. I chose to add Google Adsense Auto ads and Amazon Prime Video Affiliate Program.

Adsense Auto ads choose the best place on a webpage to place ads based on different elements such as the page layout and the amount of content on the page. Everything to increase your revenue, and Google’s revenue, for sure. However, the ad experience was not very pleasant and hurt the user experience. I ran the experiment in March and these are the results:

I was far away from sustainability with Auto ads, but Amazon Prime Video didn’t go better. I placed an Amazon Prime Video subscription banner near the “Watch on Netflix” button, here is The Godfather example. But it resulted in 0 Prime Video subscriptions.

With these results and the harm to user experience. I decided to remove Google Ads and set up Prime Video ads seeking any conversion (€3 per subscribed user). But I saw that with this traffic I wouldn’t be able to achieve sustainability as I’d need x500 more traffic.

Costs

I used Route 53, S3, and Cloudfront services from AWS for website infrastructure. These are the costs of this last year:

I’m gathering available movie and show data from Netflix. To gather this data I need to be a Netflix user and Netflix’s Standard plan is €12,99/month in Spain.

A total of $197.01 a year.

Future

I devoted a substantial timeframe, specifically three years, to the development of this project, with two of those years being concurrently managed alongside my full-time employment. What began as a small bet evolved into a considerable bet in terms of time. My ambitions for the project extend to the integration of a movie search function, enhanced movie rankings, and the inclusion of trailers to augment the overall user experience. However, achieving these objectives necessitates a more dedicated allocation of time on my part.

Nowadays, there are movie rankings platforms with their filter of movies available on Netflix, even Google shows its results in the first search position. Sometimes I have thoughts of forgetting the project and dedicating my time to something else. While the work brings me joy, its financial returns have yet to reach a limit that can provide a sustainable livelihood, and I doubt they will be able to in the future.

I have other projects in mind and that would benefit from my time dedicated to Bonetflix. However, I find value in maintaining this project. It serves as a valuable instrument for the exploration of new concepts and ideas, building an audience and enhancing search engine optimization (SEO). In essence, the project holds the potential to significantly contribute to my ongoing learning curve and overall skill development.

Everything I Learned From Reading Tony Dinh

David Solé — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 02:28:28 +0000

Every day I read Hacker News and on 23rd September, 2023, this post reached #1 on Hacker News: My Solopreneur Story.

It talks about Tony Dinh’s story where he went from zero to $45K/mo in 2 years in his journey as a full-time indie hacker. He created four small but successful products, failed on six, built an audience of 97K followers on Twitter, and created a newsletter with 6K subscribers, all with his ups and downs.

First contact with marketing failure

As an indie hacker, I faced challenges with my developed products, I attribute the setbacks to a lack of audience. I always depended on SEO and ASO, and even though I’m no expert, I researched and applied the principles I came across. I also reached out to my family and friends to promote my products but their reach was insufficient. I emphasise the crucial role distribution plays in the success of any venture, at least from my perspective of failure.

In 2017, two years after ending university, I developed an Android App named Behnow, a geolocation social network. To promote it, I designed promotional materials such as flyers and T-shirts. I distributed flyers at my university, although it's worth noting that this practice is illegal in Spain without proper authorization—resulting in the removal of all flyers shortly afterward. Despite facing this challenge, the marketing effort yielded only two downloads without any registered accounts, a resounding success. Reflecting on the situation now, I realise that I should have approached the marketing strategy differently.

Failure Pack, T-shirt, and flyers 😂

Learns from Tony Dinh
Returning to the present and immersing myself in Tony Dinh’s narrative, I delved into his entire newsletter, Twitter feed, and many interviews. Through this exploration, I documented insights on audience-building strategies.

His discourse encapsulates updates on applications, recounting his experiences, app statistics, and the valuable lessons acquired along the way. Summarised in four pivotal points, he advocates:

Engage with people
Do cool/creative stuff, make noise
Build products in public and fail in public
Be genuine, be nice to people, and spread positivity.

In his product launch strategy, he relies on Product Hunt and imparts several key recommendations for a successful launch:

Read the Product Hunt Launch Guide: Equip yourself with the essential insights provided in the Product Hunt Launch Guide.
Prepare Launch Materials: Craft tailored materials designed for the launch to captivate the audience.
Inform Your Audience in Advance: Notify your audience 24-48 hours before the launch, creating anticipation and ensuring engagement.
Re-launch with Major Features: Don't hesitate to relaunch with significant updates or new features for the same product.
Engage with Feedback: Respond to every comment and feedback on the launch post, fostering a dialogue with the audience.

He attributes part of his learning to Daniel Vassallo, a source worth exploring further.

I also noticed the Gumroad platform, a marketplace where you can sell digital products, which can be useful to test if a product has potential.

Furthermore, he sold a side project on acquire.com, an online marketplace dedicated to buying and selling startups. I wasn't familiar with this site before, and it seems like a viable avenue to conclude specific projects and ease marketing.

Conclusion
Establishing a robust online presence and promoting your products requires a strategic approach. This is why I've embarked on a journey to cultivate my audience on platforms like Twitter and Substack. This initiative aims to navigate new opportunities, breaking away from past setbacks. I'm excited to delve further into the invaluable insights I've acquired from Tony. The marketing journey holds plenty of untapped potential, and I am dedicated to the ongoing process of growth and exploration. Over the next few weeks, my focus will be on acquiring expertise in Twitter and Substack platforms, initiating audience growth, and formulating a well-defined marketing strategy.