🧠 Startup Wisdom

This week’s piece of wisdom is about the tech. Although I think I have said this in the past, it is worth repeating because it’s a valuable piece of information: when choosing your tech stack, it’s crucial to pick something you are familiar with, that is boring and has a lot of resources available.

A mistake a lot of new tech entrepreneurs do is to look at the shiny new toys, be that some cloud services, new databases, languages or frameworks that have no adoption. Avoid that at all costs, as it is just the “shiny object syndrome” talking.

I have fallen, again, in this trap, with my new project (about which I will talk later in this newsletter) when I went for some Serverless fancy thing instead of the “classic” monolith. After a few deploys, I ended up stock in an “error” state, with no logs, no error message and unable to update my app anymore. The only solution would have been to recreate the whole deployment from scratch, but that would have required me to redo the DNS settings, which comes with another set of problems (propagation, etc).

Instead, I reverted to the way things were done “in the good ol’ days”: a plain VPC, the code transferred via Git, and running the web service behind a proxy. It’s simple, it works, I have the logs right in my face when I need them, and I have full control over the lifecycle of my app.

🏆 Indie Highlights

• SageMarketer - I always wondered how AI will make its way through in the content generation space, and  now I have my answer. This indie business uses generative AI to create ready-to-be-used graphical resources for social media.
• ReplyHub - the most important thing when building a business isn’t the product, it’s sales and marketing. You can have the perfect product, but if people don’t know about it, it’s doomed to fail. This indie business offers you insights about Reddit and how they are talking about your product (so you can intervene and interact with your audience) or about topics where mentions of your product fit into the conversation.

✈️ My Journey

• Quest of the Hero: my indie game is progressing and is getting a new face! The first batch of art is here, and I started integrating it, and it starts to look like a real game! I will release a new demo on Itch.io this week, so keep an eye on it to see what’s new. Here is a peak sneak:

• Photozilla: “what the heck is Photoziila” you ask? Well, let me respond: it’s my new side project I launched this weekend. There are still a lot of things to be done (such as payments), but the “pre-alpha” is there. I rushed to release it because I want to give time to the Google indexing to pick it up and let it get some SEO ranking as soon as possible.
  But what is it? It’s a stock photo website with AI generated images. I get images from different generative AI sources, I process them to make them available in various sources and index them based on their content, and then enable searching them properly without waiting.

  

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