Highlightra
I’ve started Highlightra in September 2022 when I said I’m gonna build a simple SaaS for making onboarding flows easy as pie.
Technicalities
The technical part consists of Angular for Frontend, NodeJs with Express on Backend with MongoDB as a database.
I’m currently using:
- a Digital ocean droplet for 20$/month
- a free tier of MongoDB Atlas cluster
- Google Analytics (need to change to SimpleAnalytics)
- Auth0 from Okta for authentication
and that’s about it. Went from Digital ocean 5$/month Droplet to 20$/month for the upcoming traffic when I finally released in March 2023. But of course premature optimisation is the root of all evil, so I’m just wasting money.
How It Started
In Turtl we started to pivot into the Product-Led development and started implementing Self-Serve to penetrate mid-market.
While implementing Intercom, I’ve noticed that not many Indie Hacker founders know about Self-Serve and the importance of onboarding.
Most Indie Hackers just complain about churn, but don’t think how they could get rid of it. Highlightra is just for that, it “highlights” the important parts of your application.
Marketing
I’m mostly trying to gain Twitter following by penetrating into the Indie Hacker community, which are such wholesome people. They are authentic, honest and cheer eachother up. They really can be you true friends, with the difference that they’re online.
The Twitter approach is hard since I don’t have any following to begin with, but I can still succeed through authenticity and consistency.
I’ve also tried some HackerNews and Reddit posts which are basically copy/paste from the Highlightra Blog. No traction there yet, but I’ll post some updates.
This was the first update for Highlightra and some others will follow, since it’s a live project.