Mar 23 – A real designer worked on my side project
Hello, and welcome to my monthly newsletter. I’m Nicolas, and each month I share updates about what I’m working on and where I’m at in my indie hacker journey.
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In March, I continued to polish my side project, a friend gave me a hand with the UI, and I continued to build my own desk top.
Let’s dive into it. 👇
💅 Type improvements
The main features of Type are now implemented. So I spent the month tweaking the app and improving the UX.
Initially I thought it would be pretty quick, but it turns out that the last 20% of the app takes 80% of the development time. We call this the Pareto principle (80/20 rule).
🎨 Type redesign
My friend Denis Moulin who designed the Type icon wrote a case study of the icon creation process. It's a short and interesting read.
He also kindly agreed to work on a redesign of Type's UI. When it comes to design, I'm very picky and know that a great design makes a big difference. Especially for a note-taking app. There are so many note taking apps out there, I need to stand out and I think I can do that with a great design.
Navigation in the app has been adjusted. The application now displays the default note picker with a preview of the last 2 notes per file. We think this gives instant context without having to show the entire note. This new design allowed us to get rid of the split view and declutter the UI.
It's going to be a challenge to recreate the animation, but it's already so much better! 🤩
🚀 Marketing
I finally started doing some marketing (outside of Twitter) by posting my very first Reddit post to r/shipit.
It didn't get a lot of traction, because the subreddit is quite small, and I didn't want to just copy/paste it into r/SideProject after that. Now that I have a nice redesign, I prefer to implement it before sharing my side project on Reddit again.
I know I need to spend more time on marketing, but I'm convinced I need to have at least one project out first, which will be my social proof. Otherwise, it's like just sharing thoughts. People don’t really stick. I need something tangible to make people start taking me more seriously.
📈 Stats
It's been a slow month on Twitter, despite tweeting everyday. I found less interesting tweets to interact with, and I don't want to post replies just to reply.
Twitter
Personal account: 318 followers (+13 / +4%)
Type account: 16 followers (+0 / +0%)
ConvertKit
Personal account: 18 subscribers (-3 / -14%)
Type account: 45 subscribers (+4 / +8.9%)
🔍 Recommendations
Each month I share a few findings.
Raycast – A blazingly fast, totally extendable launcher. It lets you complete tasks, calculate, share common links, and much more. I also switched from the macOS emoji picker to the Raycast emoji picker, much more reliable.
Shrink video – The best way I've found to shrink a video on macOS while keeping the quality really high is to use ffmpeg in the Terminal. A video becomes 10% the size of the original one with this tool!
Arc – A new browser offering a radically different experience for browsing the Web. They recently released their iOS app. Instant install. 📱
💫 Bonus
Building my own desk top – Part II.
This month, I continued to work on building my own desk top with the help of my friend Séraphin Hochart.
Here’s what we did… 👇
It's coming along nicely!
👋 That’s all for now…
I hope you enjoyed this issue. Let me know how I can improve this newsletter. I'm doing this mostly for myself to keep track of what I've accomplished this year, but if it helps some of you in the meantime, I would be very happy. 🙂
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Thank you for reading!
Until next time! ✌️
Nicolas