Weekly Indie Log #19

Hirvesh Munogee

October 21, 2024

5 min read

What Have I Been Up To?
Content Reusability via Notion Synced Blocks
Newsletters Directly from Notion
Cross-Publishing Made Easy
Other Features Shipped ️
Built-in Commenting
Dark Mode Support
Related Posts Widget
Custom Fonts
Newsletter API
A Failed Experiment ‍️
What's Next?
A Different Marketing Approach
Show More

Welcome back to my Weekly Indie Log, edition #19! 💫

For those who regularly read my logs, you might have noticed I took a month-long pause. My day job took precedence, leaving me with little time to work on updates for my products—Stomod (a blogging platform) and AssistFlare (a documentation tool).

But guess what? I'm back, and I've got some exciting updates to share!

What Have I Been Up To? 👀

Over the past couple of weeks, I carved out some time to ship several outstanding features for Stomod. This brings it closer to what I consider "feature-complete"—meaning I've finally built in all the features I've been dreaming about. Stomod is now a comprehensive blogging platform that caters to all my needs, including:

Content Reusability via Notion Synced Blocks

One of my biggest frustrations with other blogging tools was the endless duplication of content across platforms. As a SaaS founder, launching a new feature meant:

Writing a blog post about it on the product blog

Creating documentation on how to use the feature (often overlapping with the blog post)

Drafting a feature update email for those who don't read the blog

Cross-posting to other platforms if relevant (Medium, Hashnode, Dev.to)

This repetitive process was time-consuming and inefficient.

But with Notion Synced Blocks, I can write one reusable piece of content that's shared across my launch blog post, documentation site (powered by AssistFlare), and product updates newsletter (powered by Stomod Newsletters). I can then add medium-specific content around it as part of a seamless writing flow.

This approach has streamlined my content creation process, making it much easier as a solopreneur to engage my users without it eating up a huge chunk of my time.

Newsletters Directly from Notion

When I launch something new for Stomod or any of my products, I aim to spread the news far and wide. This usually involves publishing a blog post, updating documentation, and sending out an email.

Previously, I used Loops.so to send out newsletters. However, it involved the tedious task of reformatting the blog post within their campaign editor and re-uploading all media.

With Stomod Newsletters, I can send emails directly from within Notion using the same content formatted for the blog post. It's a game-changer!

Cross-Publishing Made Easy

The final part of my content pipeline is distributing content to other publishing networks like Medium, Hashnode, or Dev.to. I used to manually copy and paste my blog posts, reformat them for each platform, and ensure I included a canonical link back to the original post.

With Stomod Cross Publish, this is all handled automatically! You write once, and your content gets distributed across all those channels, providing additional visibility and SEO benefits.

Other Features Shipped 🛠️

Built-in Commenting

Stomod now supports a native built-in commenting feature, allowing fully threaded conversations on your blog posts. Plus, it includes support for Akismet spam detection to keep those pesky spammers at bay.

Dark Mode Support 🌙

Your Stomod blog can now shine (or dim) in dark mode! You can set the default to light, dark, or system preference, and it will remember each reader's choice individually.

Custom Fonts 🎨

Personalize your blog's look with over 1,800 Google Fonts! Customize your headings and body fonts separately to match your brand or website aesthetics seamlessly.

Newsletter API

We've introduced a public-facing API for programmatically adding subscribers to your newsletter list. This is especially handy if you want to add users during your SaaS signup flow—Stomod uses this feature itself!

These are the main features I've launched, among others. I'll be diving deeper into each one in upcoming posts on the Stomod blog and documentation site, so stay tuned!

A Failed Experiment 🤷‍♂️

Not everything went according to plan. I attempted to build a visual editor for Stomod—a WYSIWYG interface for customization. Unfortunately, the available libraries lacked the necessary functionalities to make it fully viable.

I might revisit this in the future, but for now, I'm shelving it. If you're interested in building visual editors, check out Puck Editor. It's pretty cool, albeit a bit limited.

What's Next? 🎯

I have a bunch of stretch goals for Stomod that I aim to complete by the end of this week. After that, I'll update the marketing site and prepare for a Product Hunt launch.

Once that's done, I'll split my focus between AssistFlare and a new mobile app called HabitPixel (habitpixel.com)—a domain I've already snagged!

I've been itching to dive into the mobile app space and experiment with building apps using Expo. I wanted to create something relatively simple with broad appeal.