#BuildInPublic, number 1

#BuildInPublic, number 1

So there's a "new" trend in indie hacker land: building in public.

At first I thought it was just creators working in a public space: a coffee bar, the park or at a library. It turns out it isn't that.

It's about creators sharing their progress in public, let it be by tweeting a weekly update, sharing a daily update on indiehackers.com or by livestreaming their coding sessions. It helps them to be more accountable towards people who are following their progress, and in the meantime they might meet potential new customers.

I thought it would be a good way to bring some new fresh content to this blog, so lets try it out and see how long I will persevere posting weekly updated.

Here's what I did this week on my projects:

Prijzenvolger (B2C)

I'm working on migrating the data to a new database in Google Cloud. The normal postgres dumps and restores didn't work for some reason, so I had to find ways around that. The reason I have to migrate was because I daily dump the CSVs in the database and with the autogrowing storage the database grew to around 3 terabytes. Turns out I was indexing waayyyyyy too much data, so the actual data was around 60Gb.

Normally I only fetch the prices of products once a day: in the morning at 3am. I wrote a bunch of functions that are running in a cron during the day that fetches prices of products that are being followed or are popular on Bol.com multiple times a day. This way I can ensure the data you see on the website is more up-to-date.

I fixed a bug that made the recommended products not show up on some product pages.

I implemented some fancy CI/CD stuff with Github actions and Google Cloudbuilds. That was pretty fun to do. Nightly builds with freshly generated product sitemaps. Booya!

Prijzenvolger (B2B)

With the B2C version of the Prijzenvolger, you can only see the "best offer" price of the product. But sometimes a product is offered by multiple sellers, which you can't see there. It would just make it too messy and complicated for normal users.

However some 3rd party sellers on Bol.com asked me if there would be a B2B version so they can monitor the prices of all their competitors for certain products. So I set out to building that.

It will monitor all the product data on an hourly schedule. Did a competitor change their price? Did the best offer seller change? Did someone change the product description? Is an image added to the product? You will be able to subscribe to any product meta data changes.

Development goes at a decent speed. I've been working on implementing Stripe, as I think that the pricing should be based on your usage, so how many products you track, rather than a fixed monthly price. That makes it a little bit harder to implement, but I think it's a much fairer pricing model. Compare it to per seat pricing with Gsuite or Slack, where you pay for the amount of users added to your workspace.

Waltracker

There are a lot of tools for Amazon marketplace sellers, however there are not a lot of tools for Walmart marketplace sellers. This is of course a huge opportunity, so the first tool I'm going to create is a Prijzenvolger for Walmart.

I submitted my application for the Walmart affiliate program ages ago, but haven't yet received a response. Without that, I can't start building, but I wanted to let you know about this project, as I'm really looking forward to launching it!

That was my #BuildInPublic numero uno. I expect the B2B version of the Prijzenvolger to be launched in 3 weeks or so, maybe just in time for the holidays. The B2C version will get bug fixes etc on a weekly basis of course, but user growth is going at a good rate.

See you next week for #BuildInPublic no. 2

J