After a brief hiatus on my Weekly Indie Log series, I am back after completing a nice vacation in Chamonix, France and Italy. I have big things planned for both Stomod and AssistFlare and the future of my indie hacking endeavors.
Chamonix and Italy Trip
Last month, my wife, Dana, (an accountant) got a call from her boss asking her to jump on the next plane to Chamonix, France, for some in-person workshops. Immediately Dana and I decided that I was gonna join in and we were going to plan a trip to Italy as well since it’s just a train ride away from Chamonix.
We quickly planned everything and I put a bit of a stopper on working on Stomod and AssistFlare. As usual, leaving things and going on vacation is nerve-wracking in case something goes down.
Airport Stomod Downtime
As it would so happen, Stomod became non-responsive for some reason at the literal worst moment - as I was going through airport security when leaving Chamonix to Rome.
I use UptimeRobot for monitoring all my applications and immediately got an alarm when Stomod became non-responsive for a couple of minutes.
Thankfully I had setup Termius on my phone and I was able to log into my VPS quickly and restart the PM2 process for Stomod in 3 quick steps and the app went back up.
Still to this day I couldn’t diagnose what cause the process to hang at that point in time but thanks to proper CDN setup and caching, all client blogs stayed online and only the admin part of the app went down for a couple of minutes.
For me, having proper processes in case something like this happens is critical. I have all the tools I need to diagnose issues setup on my phone, iPad and of course my laptop and at any point in time, one of those devices are at hand.
Stomod Updates
With the trip ended, it was back to reality and my wife and I are itching to write about our experiences on our blog .
With my focus back on Stomod, the week I returned to normality, I was greeted with the following news from Notion:
https://x.com/NotionHQ/status/1805619535330132425
This felt like a kick to the stomach the moment I read it. I felt worried because this is the platform risk we indie makers all fear.
With my previous startup OutLater (a social media scheduler) killed due to the Twitter pricing increase by Elon Musk, I felt like Stomod was going the same way if Notion was providing this functionality to build sites natively.
Then I calmed down and took a few steps back and thought about it clearly. Looking at this announcement from a different perspective, this is how I see it now:
With more people learning they can host websites/blogs on Notion, they’ll quickly realize its inbuilt feature isn’t ideal for professional blogs.
As they search for better solutions, they’ll discover Stomod and other solutions.
Thanks to Notion, finding Stomod has become so much easier. This new feature from Notion is set to bring a lot of attention to Stomod, opening up a huge market for it because of the awareness it has just created!
Newsletters
With that in mind, my goal is to provide more value out of the platform for users. One of the things I have long been playing over in my mind has been to enable newsletters to be sent from Stomod.
If users are already writing product update blog posts, weekly indie logs and what not on Stomod blogs, it would be awesome if I could expand distribution of these content pieces to a newsletter subscription list.
With that in mind, I have been working to enable blog owners to setup their own newsletter on their blog. The idea is for them to:
-
Collect email addresses by providing:
- A CTA at the end of each blog post which allows readers to subscribe to the newsletter
- Provide a newsletter landing page built within your blog for e.g. hirve.sh/newsletter
Write content in Notion which gets published as blog posts and can also be automatically sent as newsletter to subscribers of the newsletter.
-
Have full visibility into who’s reading their newsletters and detailed stats around the newsletter:
- Deliveries
- Bounces
- Opens
- Clicks
- Spam Complaints
This is what I have been working on for the past couple of weeks and very excited about how it’s turning out to be.
I have a tentative pricing plan which I tweeted out a bit earlier today:
https://x.com/hirvesh/status/1810218233687060946
What’s Next?
My goal for this month and next month is to get Stomod to as near feature complete as I can, then move on to work on AssistFlare to bring it to level with other products on the market and then maybe launch another product which is not dependent on any platform (like Notion) to avoid platform risks.
I kinda of want to get back into developing a mobile app (with Expo ) and have a few ideas to toy around with: uptime monitor, events logger app - similar to Logsnag, a habit tracker or a gym app. Basically things I use on a day by day basis.
We’ll see what I decide but for now full focus and full steam ahead on Stomod Newsletter.
Catch you in the next one! 👋
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