Bootstrapping (my first) micro SaaS - Highlightra
I’ve been using Twitter a bit more for the past year, but like most users, I’ve only been lurking around. By following users like @tdinh_me, @levelsio and @dagorenouf I’ve learned that you just need to take a leap of faith and be consistent and disciplaned. So I started to work on my very own micro SaaS - Highlightra.
Everything Started on Twitter
I’ve had my Twitter account since April 2015 and since I haven’t been active, I don’t have much followers and I’m not following many others, as you can see on the screenshot below.
Eventually I said to myself to just let go and just create something. And I did. Lo and behold, @Highlightra was born.
The Making of Highlightra
I spent quite some time on Highlightra as I wanted to learn everything on the road. I wanted to use the same stack we use in Turtl, so Node with Ekspress on BE and Angular on FE.
Highlightra was first meant tobe a browser extension, but I changed my mind and said I’ll create a (micro) SaaS instead.
In Turtl we’re just working on Self-serve and introduced some onboarding flows, so that’s where the idea came from. I thought that many indie hackers don’t think about onboarding. They just ship features and spend time writing documentation or filming tutorial videos.
But at one point a new user just feels to overwhelmed with all the content lying around.
I created Highlightra to “highlight” incremental steps to product value. This needs to be achieved with ease, so using Highlightra is as straightforward as possible.
Marketing
Of course I needed to do some marketing. It’s a bit harder to do on Twitter as I only had like 44 followers, which is close to nothing.
I know that with consistency and constant results/improvements, I’ll be able to grow my Twitter audience, but it’ll be quite a long road.
After some time of trying being active there were quite some cool results.
I’ve been active by:
- replying to tweets of 1k-5k big active accounts
- making my own posts
- taging 1-10k big active account in my posts or on other’s posts
It’s still a beginning, but slow and steady wins the race.
It’s a bit harder to do with a fulltime job, while others are hustling fulltime, but you can still do it if you’re consistent enough.
Content for Indie Hackers
Since Indie Hackers are my main audience for Highlightra and because it’s a community that cheers each other up, helps each other by buying a product and gives good feedback on some stuff, I have to educate them about:
- onboarding
- self-serve
- product-led growth
I created a Highlightra blog where I write about the upper three topics.
Hustling Forward
So that’s about it for the first, although well overdue, Highlightra progress update.
As of now, there are no users signed up yet, so I’m still doing marketing heavily by gaining Twitter audience, making HackerNews and Reddit posts.
We’ll see how it goes. Just need to get that one initial user, for a boost of motivation.
