March 31, 2024
Building Sales Popup
31/03/2024 (Sunday)
08:00
Going to have a little challenge this week. I will try to ship a micro app in the minimum amount of time possible, and I will document the process here. Goal is to show you can make an app in a week as a side project if you focus on the essentials. Since I dont have lot of time, I will use a UI kit to speed up the process.
I started by doing some research about the keyword and domain names. I usually do it last but I wanted the name directly to save time on placeholders. I'm going to do with salespopup.io
First goal: Making a technical MVP. I need to see if I can do what I want asap. In this case, I need to see if I can display a sales popup on a website from my Nuxt app.
So the goal of those first hour will be to setup the app, fetch Stripe transactions into a dummy popup and display it on an external website.
08:40
Enbedding a Nuxt/Vue component is way too complicated, so I'm going to just use standard HTML for the popup. It limits the features but it will be good enough for a MVP.
09:40
Got my "proof of concept" working. I managed to get the popup working. Now I need to:
- Make a proper back-end for it
- Find a way to integrate with Stripe to get the API keys
- Cache the transactions to avoid hitting the API too much
- Add multiple popup styles
- Customize the popup content
11:49
Done:
- Back-end to send the script
- Stripe integration (using restricted API keys)
- Basic popup content customization
Going to eat and get back to it later. 4h of work so far.
02/04/2024
Didn't do much yesterday, was super tired. Will work on the app a bit this morning. I will try to make a dashboard for the app to generate the projects URls and customize the popups from a proper UI.
08:00
First goal is to make an app skeleton, then list all the features the app need, and organiuze that into the dashboard, with multiple pages if needed.
08:30
Skeleton done, I listed the core features, now making the actual app. There will be 2 main pages, the project list and the project details.
Project list page:
- Create project
- Delete project
Project page:
- Change name
- Change domain(s)
- Change style
- Position on screen
- Dark / Light design
- Wording
- Get script
11:00
I finished the option to load the projects from the database, create new one and delete them. Will continue later. I like to work on my apps by "layers".
Example:
- Layer 1 = Super basic prototype (Can I display a popup on another website from a script?)
- Layer 2 = Load the popup info from a databse and not static
- Layer 3 = Add a dashboard to manage the popups (but still no auth, I hard-code the user ID, etc)
- Layer 4 = Add the page to customize the popup content (vs manually edited in the database)
- Layer 5 = Add authentication, security, etc.
I mainly used ideas from TailwindUI and previous apps to speed up the process. This is one of the top benefit of making lots of apps, you can reuse a lot of code and ideas so every future project is faster.
TailwindUI is a good starting point so it still does look decent:
To do:
- Project details page with customization options
- Auth system/middleware
- Secure the API endpoints
Total: 7h of work so far
16:00
Starting again.
17:20
Got something that kinda looks like a dashboard! It's linked to the back-end,just need to make a few tweaks and the product part will be done.
Total: 8h20 of work so far
03/04/2024
10:30
Back to it
12:20
Added a live preview + a colour editor so people can create ugly popups if they want to. I'm pretty much done now, need to add auth and payments then make the landing page.
04/04/2024
14:45
I wasted the whole day yesterday and this morning fixing stupid bugs for my blog and other apps, but finally back at it
I didn't log every hour but I published the app, probably took me 2 hours to fix all the bugs and make adjustments.
App is live and working well. Now need to make the landing page + emails + payments
16:35
Payments and checkout done! Only need to do the landing page and few minor tweaks. Total time: At least 12h (hard to count when I was fixing bugs for multiple apps at the same time)
06/04/2024
07:00
Made the landing page yesterday, I only need the "verified" page and I think I'll be done. I need to prepare the launch assets too to schedule the launch on PH, otherwise it might not be features if I do it at the last minute.
07:40
Page is ready!
15:40
Launch is scheduled on ProductHunt, and since I had extra time I added a LemonSqeezie integration and tweaked the landing page even more. Really happy with how it turns out. I recorded myself doing the landing page from 0, if I end up Product of the Day, I will publish it on Youtube!
08/04/24
Launch is live on PH, tough competition today, I'm not sure I will be able to keep the #1 spot
Taking my plane to Korea in 1h
10/04/24
Crazy weekend! I ended up getting #1 of the day thanks to the massive support.
I published the video on Youtube: