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I’m running into these challenges right now. After my last job, I’m finally trying to turn a 10yr+ project into a product. I’m currently serving a bit over 2 m

by geuis 7y ago

I’m running into these challenges right now. After my last job, I’m finally trying to turn a 10yr+ project into a product. I’m currently serving a bit over 2 million requests per day for the free service I’ve run for years. Now that I’m focusing on turning it into something more I’m realizing how slow it is to build a product by yourself. For example, I’ve been working on transitioning to a much more scalable k8s architecture for the last few weeks. While I’ve had some experience over last few years as a developer, I’ve never had to set the whole thing up from scratch. It’s been tedious and draining but I am making progress. The biggest issue is not having anyone to talk to on a peer basis. In January I completely revamped the product website from being a crap page running on Launchrock to a self-hosted site with a new design and incorporating Mailgun to handle email. The issue with that is I get people every day submitting their email addresses to sign up, but to date no one has clicked the confirmation link in the emails being sent to them to confirm the signup. I researched this heavily before writing code and the consensus is that double opt-in is the correct way to go. So I did that, but no one is following up with the confirmation part. Last week I found a minor bug that was preventing confirmation signups and I fixed it asap and manually sent emails to the 3 people that I would manually add them to the confirm list and remove them if they wanted. But I’ve had more signups after that who also did not complete the signup process. I’ve tested the flow heavily and it works. But since I don’t really have a coworker environment anymore, I don’t have anyone to do peer review right now. Very frustrating. I guess overall I’m used to building services very rapidly but being responsible for the entire thing is someone time consuming. I’m still adjusting to the process.

bavell 7y ago
I can definitely relate to this. No colleagues for peer review is tough. I'd recommend sticking with the managed k8s services unless you have a team. In my experience as a solo dev k8s has been a huge help and very hands-off once setup. It was a bit of a struggle at first but IMO worth it.
dankohn1 7y ago
I would encourage you to try to find a low-cost developer in the developing world (perhaps via Fiverr) who could serve a QA function for you. It might take you 4 or 5 tries, but you might be able to find someone very low cost who would be able to work with you on QA and debugging.
lukevdp 7y ago
Check your email deliverability that your emails aren’t going to spam. Also is it worth trying higher touch engagements? Book a demo type thing where you ask for a phone number and get to speak to some of these people that are signing up. Lastly, are you sure the signups legitimate signups and not spam bots?

by geuis 7y ago

bavell 7y ago

I can definitely relate to this. No colleagues for peer review is tough. I'd recommend sticking with the managed k8s services unless you have a team. In my experience as a solo dev k8s has been a huge help and very hands-off once setup. It was a bit of a struggle at first but IMO worth it.

dankohn1 7y ago

I would encourage you to try to find a low-cost developer in the developing world (perhaps via Fiverr) who could serve a QA function for you. It might take you 4 or 5 tries, but you might be able to find someone very low cost who would be able to work with you on QA and debugging.

lukevdp 7y ago

Check your email deliverability that your emails aren’t going to spam. Also is it worth trying higher touch engagements? Book a demo type thing where you ask for a phone number and get to speak to some of these people that are signing up. Lastly, are you sure the signups legitimate signups and not spam bots?