Weekly Indie Log #1

Hirvesh Munogee

January 15, 2024

· Updated October 17, 2024

4 min read

Weekly Indie Log

Stomod
AssistFlare
Retreat
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👋

Check out my apps: Stomod and AssistFlare

Last week, I announced on X that I was going to be starting a weekly indie log to document my indie hacking journey; following in the steps of Sebatian Roehl who blogs at roehl.dev.

This is the first edition of my version of the weekly indie log. I’m not sure yet on which day I’m going to be sending this out and what the format will be, but I’ll figure it out as we go along.

I’m writing this piece from the Turkish Lounge in Jomo Kenyatta airport in Kenya. This week I’m going to be on a retreat with my current employer: SandTech.

For those of you who do not know about SandTech, it’s an upcoming technology services company based out of the US, with resources from around the globe, especially African talent.

Stomod

Stomod is the first SaaS I launched last year and it is a Notion docs to blogging platform which allows you to create really neat blogs which are blazing fast ⚡️ and SEO-optimized 🔎 out of the box!

Stomod started the year off with a bang. It started gathering a lot of interest and I started getting more people signing up and trying it out and some people converting to paid subscribers.

While I was planning to focus a bit more on AssistFlare at the start of the year, this uptick in interest on Stomod has changed my plans a bit as I am focusing on capitalising on this and stepping up marketing efforts.

I shared my plans for Stomod on Twitter this week, and to be honest, with the flight to Rwanda for my retreat and a cyclone bearing down on Mauritius, things got very hectic and I could not deliver all of those.

Plans for the week of 8th Jan to 14th Jan

Out of the above, I only managed to work on adding some additional pages for the Stomod documentation around Menu Management and that’s about it.

I wanted to deliver JSON-LD support as well for improving the SEO capabilities of blogs created on Stomod but couldn’t get around doing that either. I will probably deliver this once I’m back from Rwanda.

Luca Restagno, who has been a big support of Stomod since day 1, published a great blog post on his Next.js boilerpate Shipped’s blog: How to add Schema.org to a Next.js 13+ website.

On the marketing side, the idea was to refresh the landing page for Stomod to more succinctly display the value prop, companies using Stomod and adding some showcases - I’ll have to get this done next week once I’m back from the retreat.

Finally, I also wanted to reach out to existing users about why they are not activated; i.e. did not link the Notion template to their blog.

For this particular task, I wanted to do something different than sending just an email. After watching Cam Houser’s presentation on Extremely Minimum Viable Video on Small Bets, where he went about explaining how using a short video is still seen as something “wow” when interacting with a person online similar to how receiving an email some years back from someone felt special.

For this task, I am going to be sending out an email and record a video asking the user personally to let me know why he’s not using Stomod and offer a nice incentive discount code if he gets back to me, but the discount code is only be present in the video. I want to see how this goes! I’ll probably split the list of users into two for control - one with the video and one without the video! Let me know if you want me to publish these results!

AssistFlare

For AssistFlare, there was nothing much planned for the week - the plan is to dog-food the app while building out the documentation for both Stomod and AssistFlare itself.

So far, I am loving the experience building out the documentation for Stomod using AssistFlare. I have got some ideas as I was writing the docs, which I will be implementing down the line.

The priority feature for AssistFlare currently is a help widget which you can embed in your site for users to use to search for help articles.

Retreat

My work retreat is currently happening in Rwanda - it’s a 3-day retreat from Wednesday 17th of Jan to Friday 19th of Jan. We are going to discuss company strategy, goals for 2024 and more!

For this week, I will have no weekly todo posted since I will not be having time to work on either Stomod or AssistFlare, see you next week once I’m back!

Hirvesh Munogee

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Hirvesh is an indie hacker from the beautiful island of Mauritius currently working on his two SaaS products: stomod.com and assistflare.com

He’s passionate about solopreneurship and blogs at hirve.sh about his learnings on setting up a business!