Why did I open my product/startup roadmap publicly?
If you follow me on social media, you already know that I'm working on the Site2Static project - a web application that makes it easy for you to change your website to static, of course, with a huge bandwidth and custom domains that can be installed. Okay so let's discuss why I opened the product/startup roadmap, and why it is an important thing to do.
On Site2Static’s landing page, at the very top, you will see a menu with the words "Roadmap" which when you click it will go to the Trello website. There I made boards write starting from the idea, what was going to be done, what was being done, and what was done.
So what are the benefits?
One of the reasons I made it that way was to be accountable because as an indie maker, I didn't have a manager or boss who ordered me to do this and that. And another advantage is that customers can also provide feedback directly to me, so it is a validation of ideas that require little effort but the impact is quite large.
Are you not afraid to be imitated?
Honestly, in the beginning, I was also scared, but come to think of it, the idea is worthless, everything depends on the execution. Even though there are people who copy from the beginning to the end, they also can't get the motivation to continue to develop the application. In contrast to me, the goal from the start was to solve my problems, and also those who want to imitate it would not be the same for the approach used when they were in the marketing area. It's useless to make a product but don't know how to sell it 🙂
What is next?
I plan to open all statistical data, starting from how many visitors each day, how many are listed, operational costs (server) that I spend, and the profits obtained per month.
Maybe you are wondering why? So we live now where all the companies have completely closed statistical data, then one way to "stand-out" or different is to open the statistical data. Moreover as an indie maker / solo founder. If you do not do something different if you just follow the usual path, then to achieve success I feel it is also quite difficult.
That's a little story why I opened the roadmap publicly, hopefully, it can broaden our horizons. Previously I also wrote about why I gave up on my first startup which was almost complete, you can read it if interested, and don't forget to follow me on Twitter to get some insights about indie maker/solo founder, programming, and business.
(Psst ... maybe soon I will publish a free book about Git - that I learned hard way at work)
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