Weekly Indie Log #2

Hirvesh Munogee

February 25, 2024

5 min read

Weekly Indie Log

Reaching $100+ MRR
Contingency planning for my trip
Going into action during the trip
Marketing week x coding week
Weekly 3x gym challenge
Product Updates
Stomod updates
AssistFlare updates
Show More

Welcome to my second edition of the Weekly Indie Log!

Let’s get the big news out of the way first: Stomod reached $120 MRR for the first time.

Reaching $100+ MRR

Stomod reached $120 MRR in February and I couldn’t be happier about it! It took way over a year to reach here but now that’s I’m here it feel unreal and makes me believe that I can kick on and increase on that number.

With this though in mind, I am doubling down on marketing, SEO and ads. I will be trying out various combos in the next few months with the idea of finding the best channels to acquire customers for Stomod. So far ads has been a good push toward moving beyond $100 MRR.

I will be trying out some influencer marketing as well and have set aside a monthly budget for these initiatives.

Since I am new to ads and using ads platforms as a channel, I will be giving each channel a spin and see what works best. I will be reporting back of course in the upcoming weekly indie log posts. The channels I’m looking at are: Google Ads, Bing Ads, Reddit Ads, Twitter Ads, TikTok Ads, Facebook Ads and LinkedIn Ads.

This is a long term plan and I only have so much money to throw at these platforms - but I intend to give each one a shot and re-invest earnings from Stomod into those.

Contingency planning for my trip

After the first edition of my weekly indie log, I went on vacation with my family to Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur for two weeks - which put a stopped on my updates during that period.

However, the life of an indie hacker is to be on alert all the time. During the time I was in Bangkok, I fortunately did not have any downtime for either of my products stomod.com or assistflare.com.

However, I did prepare for the trip in advance to make sure if shit hits the fan, I am ready.

Before the trip, I did some contingency planning for what I would do if stuff went awry during my time away from home.

I did pack my laptop to bring along for the trip. However it was not idea lug that around Bangkok in a backpack. I decided to take the lighter weight 12.1” iPad Pro I have along and setup essential software on both my iPad and iPhone.

These are the software I have on all my devices which allows me to be ready to intervene if anything goes bad:

Termius - app which allows me to SSH into my VPS to restart/diagnose problems if any.

Uptime Robot - monitors my products’ uptime and alerts me if there’s any issue.

Crisp - For users to reach out to me if there’s any problem via live chat.

Logsnag - To keep an eye on new sign ups and user flow on the apps.

Drizzle Studio - For making changes to the database if needed.

Airalo - For easy e-sims for data plans for internet access

Going into action during the trip

During my trip, I had to spring into action twice for two customers to help them setup their blogs on Stomod. Fortunately both times I was in the airport and had time to kill anyways and managed to help them out without any issues.

Coming out of those support sessions, it’s evident that I need to automate the ability to host a Stomod blog under a sub folder of another domain. Right now, there’s some manual intervention needed from my side which I plan to resolve in my next coding week.

Marketing week x coding week

This brings me nicely to my new initiative going forward into March. I came across Jon Yongfook’s blog post: 3 Reasons Why I Think 50% Coding 50% Marketing is the Best Framework for Solo Tech Founders.

This prompted to me consider trying this out as I felt mixing both coding and marketing was being counter productive. So last week, I decided to fully focus on coding. Previously, I would code a feature and then tweet about it with a video showcasing it.

This time around, I decided to forego any tweeting or talking about those features and fully focused on my todo list for the week and managed to knock out a record number of tasks off my todo!

Weekly 3x gym challenge

I saw a tweet from Pieter Levels (a.k.a levelsio on X) where he challenged anyone joining his “2024 PIETZ GYM CHALLENGE” to go to the gym 3x weekly or pay him $100. I’m not going to pay him $100.

I decided to join the challenge and I’m posting updates on Twitter to keep me accountable. So that’s two initiatives already I’m part of together with the alternating coding & marketing weeks 😅

Product Updates

Stomod updates

Using a fully focused coding week, I managed to ship a bunch of customer requested features, including numerous bug fixes. Below is a list of what’s going into the February product update email:

Table of contents upgrades - The table of contents which is displayed on blog posts how highlights which section you are currently on within the page. It also will display a default (adjustable in the settings page) number of links on mobile as not to overcrowd the top of the post.

Discord social link - Added the ability to add a link to your Discord server in the footer alongside the other social links like X, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

Zoomable images - Added a toggle in the settings to allow users to enable zoomable images - this will zoom any blog post image in a popup modal.

OG image for blog - Previously Stomod supported OG image only for blog posts but used the favicon as OG image for the landing page, but now you can upload a custom OG image for your blog.

datePublished/dateModified Meta Data - Each blog posts on Stomod now embed meta data within the <time> HTML tag to signal to search engines regarding when the post was published and updated.

Author bios - Stomod now supports author profile pictures and bios which are listed at the bottom of each post, on the author page and as a hover card when hovering on an author name.

JSON-LD support - Stomod finally supports JSON-LD for blog posts and will generate proper JSON-LD tags which helps search engines better understand your content.