I took the designacademy email course and redesigned the roadvote homepage as I went along. I took a bunch of inspiration from multiple sites(avocode homepage and the todoist boards landing page). 

The illustrations were modified based on some stock images from adobe by yours truly. I think they turned out semi-decent. 

Now I feel more comfortable showing the site off. It looks a lot less amateur but still kinda indie and fun. The next question though is...how to promote it?!?

Hotwire is the evolution of Turbolinks and is finally the default in Jumpstart Pro! 🎉

We've previously hacked together a similar solution with Turbolinks, Rails UJS, and TurbolinksRender. This worked well, but Turbo in Hotwire provides all this functionality plus a lot more. It only makes sense to upgrade to using it.

In fact, I've updated 12in12.io to use Hotwire already since it's based on Jumpstart Pro! You're using Hotwire right now. 😎

During last week I dove deep into audio quality and Media Stream Recording API, there is some cool stuff happening in your browser surrounding this! We're able to get better than CD quality audio out of our browsers including that tiny one in your pocket. I was able to push these updates out and get more feedback from my users (weird I can say that!). The feedback has been good so far! (it's working, phew) 

I pushed to market quick once I had written the widget with StimulusJS and then rewrote it entirely with Svelte, without a lot of additional account-level features fully developed out. I'm about to push a simple notifications menu where users can finally clear their notification bell and get a real time notification if they're logged in. (Thanks to the noticed gem [I still read it as notic3d], Chris and team made this easy) I have some ideas for integrating this better to the inbox interface.

Tacked on my first international user, unfortunately, I don't have internationalization in mind, possibly a future feature. But, interesting to see the use-cases come in. I believe it was a user who is a "consultant" of sorts wanting to use in on their contact page.

Pressing on with trying to find the motivation to finish up the Ghost theme, named Caster, a separate paid product, to hopefully kick start the new year. It's about 80% complete. So, I sit here, procrastinating, writing an update into the 12in12 void.

The 12in12 concept is easy:

Try building 12 products in 12 months. 

The goal is to grease the wheels and get you to try new things and see if they stick. 

When people start asking you to add features to a project, you know it's something they want more of. That's what you're looking for. If you get overwhelmed with requests and users wanting new things, you might have struck gold.

https://cln.sh/HwZ3JJ

As I have been finish up projects at the day job I haven't been able to devote much time to this. I have configured a slack client, with an introduction message explaining how to use the bot, and some tweaks to the oauth flow.

I don't know how other indie-style single dev projects deal with a "hit" of product launch, my anxiety level would be through the roof. May be why I opted for a slow roll out, to fix any underlying bugs and to try to incorporate any feedback from initial paying users.

Over the past few days I've been able to tack on a couple paid accounts to the ol' indie developer success belt. They've helped identify a few new features that I feel would improve the value significantly for our niche.

This has led me down the rabbit hole of focusing on the understanding of digital audio, differences between browsers (ugh), transcoding and what really is available in the browser today with regards to the MediaRecorder API. I have a much greater understanding of the capabilities and may post some analysis in the dusty personal blog. 

I feel we're on the cusp of more configuration of browser audio across the variants of browsers. Fingers crossed Safari keeps moving the needle.

Some pipeline features coming to the widget will be:

Allow for HQ audio input (set frame rate, sample rate, bits per second)
Degrade to standard if not supported by browser
Notify user of potential for degraded audio when using a browser not supporting HQ audio (this can be enabled/disabled)

I do plan to finish first ancillary product by Dec 31 that showcases Soundbite to niche audience. It's a podcast theme for Ghost publishing platform.

Registered the website and started the process at Facebook.

Set up app, added landing page, started configuring the slack app oauth flow.

I scraped several websites to get a list of 1200 hunting outfitters.  Next I created a form on Qualtrics to get some more information about the outfitter's needs and also get their feedback on my initial MVP scope.

I've been toiling over ways to build paths to showcasing Soundbite as well as selling an additional product. What I've been hacking on lately has been outside of Soundbite but will ultimately be a way to grow what I'll call on ramps to new users of Soundbite.

I'm building out a few themes for Ghost CMS that have a "question" submission component that will showcase Soundbite's capabilities of capturing those recordings to be used in their niche (podcasting, video show, training course, etc).

Roadvote is at a good place product-wise. I feel like users can get value out of it in it's current state, so it's time to start promoting it. 

I was researching a few marketing courses to sharpen my skills. I was thinking about joining DemandCurve but it was expensive and relied mostly on paid ads. Instead I've started the conversionXL trial and am taking a course on product analytics. Branding is up next so I have something that is more appealing than a generic black, white, and blue tailwind site.

I'll still be spending some time on the product and updating it, but a majority will now be spent on marketing & promotion. Bleh!

Latest updates:

Coming soon:

Small short update:

I disabled ads and am re-thinking how I want to package this overall solution. Ads seem to bring a non-engaged user. I attempted AdWords targeting users looking for "website voicemail" and "web audio recording." Also attempted to run a quick campaign to target the podcast niche on Reddit. (Going to research further into Twitter ads)

Got first account that added a site, since ads were not running, not sure how they found the site. I think since I'm offering a free tier I'll need to have a metric show when a user adds the widget to their site. 

Got listed on AlternativeTo and approved.

Tiny wins. 

made a lot of updates today!

To-Do
* Marketing site copy
* Will I charge people for this? How? How much?
* Finish JS widget

Done:
* Visitors can submit and vote on feature requests
* Users can submit their own internal feature requests
* Users can choose which requests to hide & show on their roadmap
* Submitted feature requests have prioritization scores calculated for them

YouTube recently updated their terms of service and is requiring all videos to show ads (even if creators don't want them). This prompted us to drop a comment on this thread. 

https://twitter.com/jonhainstock/status/1329821608433823744

Creators are upset about this and a lot of sites who are hosting with YouTube will be looking for alternatives. 

Erik here. :wave:

I've been working on the problem area of an asset having multiple attachments assigned to it on a per-account level basis. 

Currently, the basic idea of attachments and assets is wired up and semi-reusable with StimulusJS and Shrine. Our development setup is just like what our production environment will be, we have an upload endpoint, we receive a file object upon successful upload. We'll just have a separate endpoint which our StimulusJS will consume.

I've been wanting to do a deep dive into Shrine on the 'ol blog to help formulate my thoughts and understanding of this setup. It utilizes quite a bit of non-standard plugins that are offered via Shrine but not widely covered on the internet.

We were faced with making a decision around whether or not to have a Digital Ocean Space per account or to have one DO Space. Our infrastructure whiz Ahad felt we could benefit longer term if there was way to keep account attachments as separate DO Spaces. This would be made possible by Shrine's default_storage and dynamic_storage plugins.

Tomorrow begins the playing in default_storage and dynamic_storage land. Wish me luck.

Shouldn't be by me. I'm just testing out the 12in12 platform for Chris and the ToolHero account for Tabish ;-) 

In any case, I'm Ahad and I'll be focused on architecture, infrastructure, ops and tooling, as well as getting ToolHero shipped out the door, otherwise known as delivery. Tabish is driving development and vision, and Erik is driving user experience and integrations. Hassan is focused on marketing, SEO and growth.

The goal for now is to get the current version of the product in customers hands as soon as possible. As we work towards that and have meaningful updates to share, we'll of course convene and communicate that accordingly, but hopefully we'll be able to leverage this as a sort of guidepost around our progress.

Reddit podcasting communities, while early, seem more interested

Still < 10 accounts and none have gone through with the full setup process of adding the embed to their website as of yet.

I think I'm going to use 12in12 in conjunction with my #buildinpublic posts on Twitter.