What do 🍔 and build in public have in common?
Nothing at all. But this blog post talks about both...kinda. 🤷♂️
Welcome to That Dude Denis, a newsletter about a dude who left the Bay Area, moved to Paris, and is now trying to build no-code businesses in public. The idea is to share my experiences as openly and transparently as possible in the hopes that something may help you in some way. I write mostly about entrepreneurship and no-code projects I’m working on.
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150+ people are now getting this in their email! For those of you who actually opened it…hi, I’m finally back. 👋 Hope you weren’t holding your breath or anything.
I thought this post would be short, but it’s actually not. Sorry, Ma, looks like your first reaction will be “Interesting, but still too long!” yet again…
Exciting news! This marks the beginning of a new chapter of That Dude Denis. It’s officially now a build-in-public newsletter, where I’ll share my experiences, learnings, and mistakes as I work on the 3 active projects I’ll introduce to you today. These are the projects that take up the majority of my free time outside of work, so I’m happy to finally share with you a bit about each one to set the scene for my future posts.
WTF is build in public?!
“Building in public is exactly what it sounds like. It means building a company, a product, or anything and sharing a lot of the transparent "behind the scenes" with its public audience.” - Kevon Cheung, author of Building in Public Definitive Guide
Kevon and I will actually be chatting about building in public this Friday, April 9th on Zoom, so if you want to learn more about the subject or you’re just curious what That Dude Denis is like in real life, please sign-up here and join us! 😁
Untitled Twitter Project
Elevator pitch (for a problem)
Twitter plays a major role in the distribution strategy of many indie-hackers. It’s the first step of a conversion funnel that’s designed to get someone’s email address, which is hugely important in any marketing or customer acquisition strategy.
The process usually goes something like this:
You share valuable learnings and insights with community via tweets
Someone sees your tweets
They visit your Twitter profile to see more
They click on a link to your portfolio page
They subscribe to your newsletter, giving you their ever so precious email address
However, as far as conversion goes, Twitter is a leaky bucket with lots of holes. 🧀 Very little of the value in your tweets is captured, because of how few people actually see your tweets and how hard it is for people to find them. Think about this: tweets have an average half-life of only 20 minutes. 🤯
We want to build something that tackles this problem.
Origins
Richard and I met on Twitter (sounds like a dating app lol 😝), and then ended up doing a maker sprint together, a 2 week thing with some other indie-hackers where you work on your own projects while holding each other accountable via short daily calls.
In the midst of those 2 weeks, we had a couple of key observations:
There’s not a great way to follow other people’s projects. People like me build in public and share updates on Twitter, but people see a limited selection of my tweets based on when I post, when they’re on the app, and other weird algorithm stuff.
Despite all of my Twitter activity, my Twitter profile gives a very limited glimpse into who I am and what I tweet about. With only a single pinned tweet allowed
These were great conversation starters, and by chatting about these subjects with fellow indie-hackers actively trying to build their audience on Twitter, we discovered that the real pain point for them is their inability to drive more email signups with their tweets.
Status
We had a number of different product ideas initially, but have since taken a step back to focus on the problem first. We’ve been refining this problem through conversations with a bunch of indie-hackers.
We don’t have regular meetings, but use Twitter and Discord to share our thoughts and Coda for our project wiki (all our documentation is in there!)
Immediate next steps
We definitely don’t want to get overly excited and build something that no one wants. So, our next step is to validate the problem (not solution!) with a simple landing page to collect sign-ups - we’ll be able to gauge interest but also set up conversations with our target users to help us understand their needs.
That Dude Denis passion level : 🍔 🍔 🍔 🍔 🍔
This is my proprietary burger passion scale. I made it up.
🍔 : super meh, is this even edible? I’d only eat one of these, if I was stuck in the desert.
🍔 🍔 🍔 🍔 🍔 : wow, does this burger have 3 Michelin stars? I’d eat 5 in one sitting.
5 juicy burgers. I’m pretty stoked about this one - from the conversations we’ve had so far, I’m pretty convinced that there’s something to be done here. I’ve been super tempted to just start building the solution that I think people want…luckily I have people like Richard and Natalie (below) who remind me constantly to validate, validate, validate at every step of the way! 😏
MVS (Minimum Viable Stack)
Elevator pitch
A platform to help makers and businesses find the right tools and professionals to build their MVP (minimum viable product).
Origins
It’s February 2021. Natalie launches the nocode tool challenge on Twitter (above). I join in the fun, and that’s how she and I start chatting.
In literally our very first video call (I had no idea what was coming, I thought it was just to get to know one another 🤣), Natalie pitches me the concept, and then asks “So what do you think? You want to build this together?”
Something to help people and businesses identify the right no-code tools for their use cases? That also helps no-code makers like myself get paid for their experience? When do we start?!
Status
We’ve made a bunch of progress so far - our strategy is to take small steps and constantly get feedback from our users at every step of the way. We’ve done a bunch of preparation (primed our users with a tweet thread, created a sign-up landing page, created the database structure that’s linked to the onboarding forms, etc) and are now ready to execute on our launch plan! 😜
We hold a weekly sync every Thursday to see each other’s faces, and use Slack and Coda to communicate and document our work.
The tool stack (the tools we’re using to build the product) so far includes Mailerlite, Softr, and Airtable.
Immediate next steps
We’re launching our sign-up page on Tuesday!! We’ll be sharing this directly with everyone who engaged with our tweet thread - this is a clever trick Natalie’s used before (she is a marketing wiz), so we’re thinking that we should get a decent number of sign-ups from this! 🤞 And then starting Thursday, we’ll be sharing the onboarding form that they can use to apply for early listing on our site. Building momentum! 🎳
That Dude Denis passion level : 🍔 🍔 🍔 🍔 🍔
Another perfect burger score. I believe in this project 100% because both the conversations I’ve had with no-code experts and my own experience at Possible Future confirm the growing trend of businesses turning to no-code to develop their prototypes. Today, companies like Possible Future are ahead of the curve because the adoption of no-code by businesses is still in its infancy, but very soon, as more businesses become aware of the advantages of building with no-code, they’ll need help to figure out how to actually go about it. And we’ll be right there to hook them up with the right experts and the right tool stacks. 💪
Charttt
Elevator pitch
Create and embed charts anywhere, with just a URL
Origins
To set the mood, it’s November 2020. I haven’t yet discovered no-code, but I’m on the prowl, actively looking for a side project to put my time and energy into.
An unassuming post on Indiehackers.com titled “Giving away (free) charttt - image charts api and builder” floats by and catches my eye.
It’s a super simple, easy to understand product concept
The product is already more or less built, and already has a few customers and users ($3/month is not nothing…)
The dude is giving it away for free! FOR FREE! 🤯
I jump at the opportunity, because for me it’s a chance to skip the “building the product” part of things and try my hand at the marketing / distribution / sales part of a business.
The only issue: I don’t actually code, and Charttt is built with code. Yes, the thing is more or less built, but I’m still gonna need to make improvements as I start talking to users, so I’m in a bit of a pickle. Luckily, I have a couple of brothers on hand who happen to know a thing or two about code stuffs (they are both developers). I pitch them the concept, they both shrug and say why not, and just like that, we’re in business.
Status
After months of slow progress, we’ve finally started to find a good rhythm and are starting to make progress on improving the product - the major areas of focus are 1) adding essential chart features, and 2) improving the chart editor user experience.
We decided to remake the website in no-code so that we can 1) easily maintain and update it going forward, and 2) track website traffic and button clicks. Check it out here if you’re curious to see what’s possible with no-code these days.
Immediate next steps
Continue banging out product improvements and try to get our first customers at the new very reasonable $10/month price point. This will mostly consist of launching on various platforms and trying to generate product awareness.
That Dude Denis passion level: 🍔 🍔 ◯ ◯ ◯
2 burgers. My situation has evolved quite a bit since I took on this project, so now it feels more like a burden rather than an exciting opportunity, especially when compared to my other projects. At least for the moment, though, I’m pretty set on giving it a proper shot and seeing how far we can take it. If we get a few new customers, don’t be surprised if that burger rating gets another 🍔. 😏
Thanks to the beautiful French city of Marseille for hosting me during this new confinement.
Great job finishing this post.
You’re now more or less caught up on what I’m up to. I’m sure I’ll have plenty of juicy updates for you next time. And remember, there’s a rare opportunity for you to see me, That Dude Denis, in person coming up on Friday, so sign-up and come hear me talk build in public with Kevon Cheung.
As usual, if there’s something you want to learn more about, please leave a comment or write me via email or Twitter. I promise I’ll respond.
Thanks for reading! 🙏 If you enjoyed this, please subscribe below if you haven’t already and take a look at some of my other posts as well.
Talk soon,
That Dude Denis
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Thanks for the updates. Interesting reading. Love the burger score!