Indie Maker Journey

Recorded on March 22, 2022.

Legos are fun and timeless. Mario’s business entity is finally formed and a business bank account is in place. Alan wants to play around a bit with the pricing model for DotPlan. We talk about the original idea for DotPlan, creating a short video pitch, dealing with landing pages, content, and UI for Japanese audience, and more.

Recorded on March 8, 2022.

New Fusioncast features, plus other minor improvements and bug fixes. Mario will start working on things to prepare for launching, filed for a legal business entity, and is working on terms of use and privacy policy using iUbenda.com. We talk about pricing and figuring out possible ways to do a trial period with Fusioncast. Alan deployed his React Native wrapper app for DotPlan on Google Play. Building  with Elixir keeps Alan learning new things and enjoying writing code. Alan will record a 10 min pitch for DotPlan.

Recorded on February 23, 2022.

Alan got the booster covid vaccine. React is good but more verbose than Vue. Playing around with Alpine.js. Mario’s continued working on refining how Fusioncast.fm handles some edge cases. Upgrading to TailwindCSS 3. Dealing with challenges building with Elixir. Alan created a React Native wrapper app for DotPlan.io, plus refactoring and cleaning things up. Dealing with multiple projects and context switching. Mario is considering using Paddle for billing management. Quick plans and goals for immediate future.

Recorded on February 1, 2022.

Fixing some challenging issues in Fusioncast recording workflow, dealing with a participant’s sudden loss of network connection. Alan talks about adding a time-card feature to DotPlan for a specific customer, the reasons behind it, and dealing with Japanese time-card business culture, and time zones. We’re grateful for our early customers who have given us their vote of trust. Alan is using a tool called Tango.us to easily create screenshots for a knowledge base with Eager.app. Using Umso vs Statamic for the marketing website.

Recorded on January 18, 2022.

Happy New Year! Back after a long break. Alan had some nice time off for the holidays. Alan also shares that he launched DotPlan and has a paying customer. Also added a timer feature to DotPlan, and pitched his app to a Japanese audience. Finding ways to work on product and on marketing. Mario reworked parts of the Fusioncast recording engine to make it even more reliable. Alan’s side-side project LinkSpeed.io is gaining traction. A simple idea with a great little product requires minimum resources and maintenance, and can go a long way. Fusioncast's infrastructure needs to be improved before launching to accommodate larger usage. A few more people were onboarded to Fusioncast private beta. Thoughts on pricing plans, models, dealing with customers price-related questions, and reducing storage costs.

Recorded on September 21, 2021.

Alan continues integrating Paddle to handle billing for his SaaS. Update on Alan’s participation in Kobe mentorship program. Thoughts on pricing options for DotPlan. To require credit card up front or not, and handling the transition from trial to paid subscription -the nature of the product and target audience matters, no one size fits all.

Recorded on August 31, 2021.

Alan was accepted to a startup mentorship program with Kobe city for early stage founders. Alan is integrating Paddle using another service called Kanuu.io. Mario started a new day job, working remotely. Fusioncast backup recordings are now started/stopped  at the same time as primary recordings. Alan has been using Linear for issue tracking and is very impressed by it. Getting feedback, improving DotPlan, and experimenting with features. Cleaning up the Fusioncast studio UI and fixing some bugs.

Recorded on August 17, 2021.

Taking time off to disconnect and go camping. Climate change. Design work and learning design principles. Tailwind UI has been very helpful to Alan. Working with TailwindCSS. UI design challenges. Marketing and onboarding for Japanese market. Alan was advised to narrow down his target audience for DotPlan.

Recorded on July 28, 2021

In this episode we talk about starting a new full time job (Mario), problems with editing the podcast in Garage Band, which lead to trying Descript, and Alan participating in two business/founder mentorship events, and pitching DotPlan in Japanese instead of English.

We also talk about our reasons behind why we're working on our products, and overall goals for our businesses. We talk about where we stand with regards to the idea of taking investment, and the hard-work/reward experience of being on this solo founder journey tackling different kinds of challenges.

Alan shares about new features added to DotPlan. Mario's been trying to work on fixing an issue with recording, onboarding users, and spending a lot of time thinking and strategizing ways to fix a critical issue with the Fusioncast recording engine.

Mario and Alan are joined by a very special guest!

Justin Jackson, co-host of Build Your SaaS, co-founder of Transistor.fm and founder of the MegaMaker community talks about the state of the Indie SaaS world and the importance of choosing the right market.

We talk about the growth of Transistor.fm and dealing with a growing team, not being afraid of building products that you think might already be 'done', and ideas for connecting with your market quickly.

You can try out dotplan for free at dotplan.io
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