April 2024 updates, new product!

Traveled to Bali and Sydney, some updates on Typing Mind, and a new product.

Hi everyone! It’s Tony here 👋

Here are some quick updates from me in March-April 2024.

Life updates

I traveled a lot during the last month. Most noticeably, I visited Hackagu, the legendary group in Bali where a lot of famous indie hackers are from.

I joined a typical Thursday at Hackagu and shipped a new product (more on this later!)

The Hackagu team in Bali!

The first thing I noticed when I arrived at Canggu was that there were a lot of ripped dudes walking/riding bikes on the streets. Tourists crowded place, I like it.

Then, at every coffee shop I visited in Canggu, I saw people with their laptops, working (like me). I remember overheard people talking about AI, ChatGPT, SaaS, and a bunch of other tech/business things. I immediately feel “belongs to”!

Most of my time spent in Canggu was working (half day), surfing or workout (~2 hours), and walking around the place. The vibe here gives me a lot of motivation to work and stay healthy. It’s a magical place. Well, if only the streets and the overall infra could be a bit better.

I also spent some time in Australia, visiting some friends in Sydney and visiting some legendary surf spots in Gold Coast (and surfed a lot too!)

Visiting Sydney and Gold Coast

Sydney/Gold Coast is a beautiful, modern place, but not great for nomads and remote workers alikes. There are not many coffee places that are designed for me to sit down and work for 4 hours. Most coffee places don’t have power outlets, not even wifi, and they close at 3pm. I ended up working a lot less and going around a lot more, the freedom of being my own boss allowed me to do that without asking anyone for permission.

Other than that, Sydney is a beautiful, modern place, with a blessing of nature beauty (mountains, river, beaches). You couldn’t get this vibe anywhere near the SEA region, the closest thing I could compare is the combination of morden Singapore city life and the beautiful beaches of Thailand/Vietnam.

Work updates

I don’t want to bore you with the everyday tasks I do with Typing Mind, so here is a quick recap of things I worked on:

LinkedIn Ads Experiment

I spent ~$2,000 running a LinkedIn Ads experiment. The result was not good, $0 revenue. I expected this. My conclusion with the ads:

• It’s difficult to target my desired audience using LinkedIn Ads. For example, if I want to show ads only to business owners who are using a Desktop on macOS or iOS, which is the highest converting audience, I can’t.

• My target audience is pro users who are experienced in building AI agents or working with LLM. Maybe I’ll need to change the way I approach this audience, or I’ll have to accept the cost of targeting the general audience until some percentage of the audience matches my desired one.

I’ll continue to try Ads again next time with Facebook Ads.

YouTube channel

My wife helped me start a YouTube channel for Typing Mind:

youtube.com/@TypingMind

This channel will mostly post guides, tips, tutorials, and other stuff to help promote Typing Mind. We hope this will become another channel to acquire new customers.

Moved to Stripe

I started to move subscription revenue to Stripe (from Lemon Squeezy).

Lemon Squeezy is good to get started and it seems that it works very well with one-time purchase products, but when it comes to subscription revenue, many things fell short.

The one thing that made me make the switch is that the subscription analytics of Lemon Squeezy is very basic, the MMR/churn calculation is often wrong, and it’s almost impossible to get metrics like LTV, retention, etc.

So, I have moved all new subscriptions to Stripe. Even with a bit more on the coding part, I think it’s safe to assume Stripe will support almost every customization or analytics I’d want to do and not have to contact support.

New product!

The last thing, I created a new product: image.social (yes I’m not using dot com this time!)

I plan to make this a micro SaaS that will run on its own.

I have had the idea for a long time, it came from the pain of setting up open-graph images for every page when creating new products.

So I created this to automate that. I’m already using this on production for Typing Mind and DevUtils!

As of now, the product is still in beta, I plan to finish some small but important tasks for it and launch in the next weeks when I have the free time.

I’ll share more on the details of this product soon! (probably in the next newsletter issue).

That’s all for now!

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next month!