DevCheats DevLog #1 - A Successful Pre-Launch and Marketing Lessons
Welcome to the first Devlog of DevCheats, a social platform and personal knowledge management system for developers. This week was the first time I talked about DevCheats in public, and it was a hell of a week! I've got over 60 people on the DevCheats newsletter list, and I'll be sending the first newsletter issue out this Friday.
Development Updates
This week was heavier on the marketing and planning than it was on development. That said, I did get a bit done.
- I tweaked a bit of the wording on the front page to add some clarity on what DevCheatSheets is all about
- I've started on authentication. I'm going to be using NextAuth (because Clerk's pricing model seems insane) with Google, Discord and email/pass.
- I'm starting to plan out what the UI is going to look like and how the data model is going to work. More on this in a second
Marketing Updates
This week I pre-launched DevCheatSheets on Reddit, HackerNews and in a couple of Discord servers I'm in. I followed Marc Lou's strategy for my pre-launch and was pretty shocked at how well it went.
I got over 600 page views in a couple days, most of which came from HackerNews. I got some great feedback on Reddit (which is a sentence I never thought I'd write) and have integrated the suggestions into my long term feature planning.
Speaking of which...
Fighting off Scope Creep
My goal for the 10 SaaS apps in 1 year is to launch frequently and launch fast. There are dozens of features I've cooked up for DevCheats, but I really need to cut those features down to a manageable size, and then cut that down further into an MVP that folks can sign up for and pay for.
I think my big focuses are going to be:
- Saving, sharing and discovering code snippets
- Saving, sharing and discovering ChatGPT prompts
- Saving, sharing and discovering links to blogs and external resources
That's going to be a huge part of the next week or two of development, aside from the auth and marketing I'm going to do.
Until next week, that's about it! Go sign up for the DevCheatSheets newsletter and watch this blog for more info!