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> Before this I tried creating paid web services but none took off. I realized I actually don’t use any indie web product after 8 years of professional coding.

> Before this I tried creating paid web services but none took off. I realized I actually don’t use any indie web product after 8 years of professional coding. I’m only using web products from big companies like Google, fly.io, Amazon etc. What kind of paid web services did you try, if you don’t mind me asking? I’m thinking about going this route myself, but I hear you - I’ve also pretty much bought exclusively from the big guys. Any other learnings from the web service route you could share? Like what tech stack / platform did you use? How did you try to market your service? Can you see other reason (than not being big / trustworthy enough) why it didn’t work?

alin23 4y ago
My most ambitious web project was https://noiseblend.com https://noiseblend.com which is a web app for discovering music on Spotify. It’s a next.js + React slow and memory hungry mess [1] which could have been static HTML with some JS for the dynamic bits. Experience taught me to keep it simple nowadays, but I had to go through the Noiseblend mistakes first. The stack is Python with Sanic for the backend, Postgres for db and Redis for cache. That’s what remained after removing all the unnecessary services I implemented because I thought they were paramount: high availability, data locality, time series databases, performance monitoring, alerts etc. Forget about those until you start making money on the product. The biggest disadvantage a web service has over a desktop app is that you have to keep it up. No matter what, you have a server to manage and make sure it keeps responding. That worry doesn’t exist on offline desktop apps. The other is finding the market for it. Noiseblend didn’t have a market, and it being dependent on Spotify didn’t allow me to ask for money unless I did something more. That’s another problem, avoid creating functionality that depends heavily on big companies. I thought about “pivoting” and turning it into a playlist building tool for DJs. I added filtering songs by key and mode (e.g. A minor) and asked a few people if they would use such a thing. Turns out that they use a semi-offline desktop app [2] that already does that and is much faster and powerful. Oh well, at least now I have a way to find songs to improvise on with my Kaval and guitar. From my observations, people are reluctant on paying for websites. I guess they don’t feel as “owned” as a desktop app. [1] https://github.com/Noiseblend/ui/blob/master/pages/artists.coffee https://github.com/Noiseblend/ui/blob/master/pages/artists.c... [2] https://mixedinkey.com/camelot-wheel/ https://mixedinkey.com/camelot-wheel/
- inorganik 4y ago
  Interesting! I actually made a web-based tool for harmonic mixing back in 2012. https://inorganik.net/mixtool/ https://inorganik.net/mixtool/

alin23 4y ago

My most ambitious web project was https://noiseblend.com https://noiseblend.com which is a web app for discovering music on Spotify. It’s a next.js + React slow and memory hungry mess [1] which could have been static HTML with some JS for the dynamic bits. Experience taught me to keep it simple nowadays, but I had to go through the Noiseblend mistakes first. The stack is Python with Sanic for the backend, Postgres for db and Redis for cache. That’s what remained after removing all the unnecessary services I implemented because I thought they were paramount: high availability, data locality, time series databases, performance monitoring, alerts etc. Forget about those until you start making money on the product. The biggest disadvantage a web service has over a desktop app is that you have to keep it up. No matter what, you have a server to manage and make sure it keeps responding. That worry doesn’t exist on offline desktop apps. The other is finding the market for it. Noiseblend didn’t have a market, and it being dependent on Spotify didn’t allow me to ask for money unless I did something more. That’s another problem, avoid creating functionality that depends heavily on big companies. I thought about “pivoting” and turning it into a playlist building tool for DJs. I added filtering songs by key and mode (e.g. A minor) and asked a few people if they would use such a thing. Turns out that they use a semi-offline desktop app [2] that already does that and is much faster and powerful. Oh well, at least now I have a way to find songs to improvise on with my Kaval and guitar. From my observations, people are reluctant on paying for websites. I guess they don’t feel as “owned” as a desktop app. [1] https://github.com/Noiseblend/ui/blob/master/pages/artists.coffee https://github.com/Noiseblend/ui/blob/master/pages/artists.c... [2] https://mixedinkey.com/camelot-wheel/ https://mixedinkey.com/camelot-wheel/

inorganik 4y ago
Interesting! I actually made a web-based tool for harmonic mixing back in 2012. https://inorganik.net/mixtool/ https://inorganik.net/mixtool/