Indie Year #4: Superlinear, Porto and What's Next
Hello people,
Haven’t talked to you in a while. It has been busy and honestly I have been fairly uninspired, but now the kick is back I want to tell you all about the past few months.
This seems like old news already, but my company now has a website and logo. You can check out Superlinear on the official site and read about its origins on the blog post Fab, my co-founder, wrote.
This rebranding has been more important than it may seem at face value, naming things materializes them and brings with it a sense of belonging and mission. Never underestimate its power.
Consulting
With this rebranding we also decided to start experimenting with consulting, taking on projects from third parties to finance our ongoing projects.
This has been an interesting experience, but we won’t be doing any more of it in the near future, as it took too much of our attention away from our products, delaying the work on projects like Unreadit Pro, which we still believe old tons of potential.
Trip to Porto
We took another trip, this time to 🇵🇹 Porto for 2 weeks. It has been surprising to say the least.
It’s the perfect city for working, with a mild weather also in the summer. We left a major heatwave in Milan (40°/C / 104°F) so we were particularly appreciative of this.
But we didn’t just work: we explored nearby towns, beaches and tried some of the world famous wines produced in the region.
Long story short, I can’t recommend Portugal enough. It’s a lovely place, with lovely people, great food and the cost of life is very low (I gained a couple of kgs with all the pastel de natas, selling for as low as €0.40, that’s criminal).
New Dashboard
The outcome of this retreat has been a refined and clearer roadmap of what we will work on next and a new dashboard that we will use to monitor all our current and future projects.
It has been incredibly fun to work on this. I built the backend with Postgres (so good that I will use it for all future projects instead of MongoDB) and NodeJS, while Fab wrote the frontend in React.
We were even thinking of productizing it, offering it as a service for other teams. Still not sure about it. The rationale is that we built this because there wasn’t a comprehensive, affordable solutions to show graphs and events in a customizable interface. Maybe other indies are having the same problem, who knows.
What’s next
We have a lot planned, but most likely our next big project will be Unreadit Pro. We will kickstart work now, but the launch will be after the summer, as in August we will be traveling and taking some well-deserved time off.
Starting from the next issue of this newsletter I want to start focusing on more specific topics to keep things interesting, getting into the details of some of the tools we use to work and the decision process of some of our business choice. Hell, I may even start a podcast.
As always, feel free to hit reply and start a conversation. Can’t wait to talk with you.
Until then 👋