Share content related to independent development and product monetization, published every Friday.
Table of contents
1、Twikit: 与 twitter 的非官方 API 进行交互2、Soju: 毫不费力地管理你的书签3、Quill: 免费开源的网页富文本编辑器4、Reader: 用一个简单的前缀将任何URL转换为LLMs友好的输入5、建立一个月收入8000美元的在线计时器
1. Twikit: Interact with twitter’s unofficial API
This is a simple API wrapper for interacting with Twitter's unofficial API. Implemented using Python.
- No API key required: No API key is required to use this library as it uses the unofficial Twitter API.
- completely free: This library is free to use.
- Synchronous and asynchronous support: Twikit supports synchronous and asynchronous programming, providing flexibility for different use cases.
- Function: This library allows performing a variety of Twitter-related operations, including creating tweets, searching for tweets, retrieving trending topics, etc.
- Installation and use: Provides a quick example showing how to define a client, log into an account, upload media files, create tweets with media, and search for the latest tweets based on keywords.
twikit open source code address
2. Soju: Effortlessly manage your bookmarks
Soju is a modern bookmark manager designed to simplify things for users. Users need a centralized place to save and organize important links and reliably retrieve these resources when needed.
It has the following characteristics:
- Single-click saving via Chrome extension.
- Take advantage of the AI auto-tagging feature.
- Easy and simple sharing
3. Quill: Free and open source web rich text editor
Quill is a free and open source web rich text editor. I believe many people have used products developed based on Quill, such as Slack, Zoom, Grammarly, Figma, Font, and Airtable.
- Open Source: Quill is an open source project.
- Modularity: Quill is designed to be modular, allowing developers to selectively include or exclude certain features as needed.
- Customizability: It provides a high degree of customization to customize toolbars, formatting, and editor behavior.
- Cross-browser compatibility: Quill is designed to be compatible with all modern browsers, including desktop and mobile devices.
- Rich functions: supports various text formats, such as bold, italics, underline, lists, links, pictures, videos, etc.
- Real-time collaboration: Quill supports real-time collaborative editing of documents by multiple people.
- API: Provides a series of APIs that allow developers to interact with the editor, such as getting or setting content, and listening to editor events.
4. Reader: Convert any URL into LLMs-friendly input with a simple prefix
Reader converts any URL to have a simple prefix https://r.jina.ai/ Friendly input for LLMs. Get improved output for your agents and RAG systems for free.
Reader now supports image reading! Captions all images at the specified URL and adds Image (idx): (caption) as an alt tag if they don't have one initially. This enables downstream LLMs to interact with images in terms of reasoning, summarization, etc.
reader open source code address
5. Create an online timer that earns $8,000 a month
Hi everyone, my name is Liz and I co-founded Stagetimer with my husband Lukas Hermann. Stagetimer is an online countdown timer that you can share with others via link or QR code. This means you can create multiple timers to control the length of a meeting or presentation and share them with anyone around the world.
Every time I tell friends and family about this, most of them wonder how this can make money. Those who host events immediately see its value. For example, when you watch a TED talk, there is a TV in front of the speaker showing a timer so they don't go on and on.
That's exactly what Stagetimer does: it times anything you want to control the time of. And this simple tool generates an average of $8,000 in monthly revenue.
How did you come up with this idea?
Lukas and I have always been interested in trying new things and working on some side projects while working full-time. I work in education and he works as a developer at a startup. One day in November 2021, when I was visiting an NGO abroad for work, he went to a recording studio where his friend worked.
Something was wrong: His friend would start a timer on an iPad in front of the stage, then run to the control area and start recording. This makes no sense! Why couldn't he start the timer remotely?
Out of curiosity, Lukas returned home and looked for such a timer tool that could be controlled remotely: No, there is no such thing. That's when he decided to test his skills by writing one over the weekend.
He posted the tool on Reddit and got some good feedback on what such a tool should look like. New users from the Reddit post were very excited. After six months of iterations, completed in the evenings or on weekends, Lukas launched a paid version in June 2022. Not being a marketer, he just posted on Reddit again and surprisingly got his first paying customer.
Less than four months later, Lukas had no more time to respond to customer emails because he still had a full-time job. I, on the other end, had ended my job after experiencing burnout twice and wanting to switch careers. In September 2022, during a long phone call, I shared with Lukas that I no longer saw the possibility of myself working in the education field and he mentioned that he wanted a partner to help Stagetimer grow and asked if I would be interested . I jumped at the opportunity and left my job without looking back.
I had done some marketing and business growth stuff in the past, but nothing in depth. So this was my opportunity to switch careers and become good at something new. Being the nerd that I am, I dove in and learned everything I could about marketing, business growth, and customer development. I'm learning something new every week, but I already feel confident that I can scale Stagetimer well.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product
The first version of Stagetimer is as simple as it gets. The layout is simple and there isn’t even a landing page. Once you enter stagetimer.io, you'll see a simple timer that allows you to display a message, a timer, or a combination of both. Of course, the key element is this: you can share the timer with others, rather than hoping your speaker remembers to set a timer while speaking from the other side of the world.
This is a major step forward for event producers as now you can open the link on a monitor in front of the stage and control it from the control room. No more cables needed to run across the entire site.
Sharing the news about the timer on the ComercialAV subreddit ended up being a genius move, exposing the tool to the right crowd: high-tech producers eager to use tools that make their jobs easier. The feedback from these early users is always very accurate and the technical descriptions are spot on.
I will never forget an email we received from a customer who had just purchased an annual subscription. He started by saying he loved the tool, then made a list of nearly 10 feature requests, concluding the email with this sentence: “If there isn't much progress on these requested features, then I guess we'll reconsider in a year's time whether Renewal, but now it meets some of our needs.”
Describe the process of starting a business
We didn't do a proper launch for Stagetimer until 1 year and 6 months after the tool was created. The Reddit post brought in the first users, who started recommending the tool to anyone who would listen. Word of mouth has been a strong driver of our growth from the beginning. That’s the magic of niche selection: video and event producers are so happy with Stagetimer that they recommend it to colleagues in the industry and write us emails to tell us.
Several YouTube creators from the events and audiovisual industries have either mentioned Stagetimer in their product reviews or even made videos explaining how to use Stagetimer.
The final icing on the cake is that the services are named in a very practical way. You may have heard it said, when trying to sell a horse, to simply advertise “horse for sale”. By naming the tool Stagetimer, it is exactly what it is – a stage timer, SEO ranking is also helpful.
In May 2022, we decided to launch Stagetimer on ProductHunt, and with the support of our indie developer friends on Twitter, it became the #1 product of the day. We didn't get any sales from it because our main customer base didn't use the platform. Regardless, we already considered the product validated at the time and viewed it as a great learning experience.
What are some ways to attract and retain customers?
Since the base version of Stagetimer was created in November 2021, Stagetimer has grown primarily through search and word-of-mouth. On the search side, we've been focused on creating content on our site that ranks well on Google and supplementing it with ads. What we can’t achieve in natural rankings, we use Google ads to target.
As for word of mouth, we haven't done much so far other than continue to iterate on the product and always provide the best customer service we can. We've noticed that our users genuinely love Stagetimer and happily recommend it without any form of incentive or compensation. Knowing that you shouldn't interfere with something that's already working, we decided not to introduce a referral incentive form. That may change in the future, but for now, organic word-of-mouth has been working well.
We also noticed that many people would subscribe and then cancel after using it for less than a month. This worried me at first, so I would send them a message saying that if they didn't like Stagetimer or it didn't live up to their expectations, I would refund their money (I meant it). Ultimately, no one accepted a refund, instead they sent me rave reviews of the tool and mentioned that they just needed it for an event. That's when we decided to create a one-time event license that you can buy, use for 10 days, and don't need to cancel after that. This has since increased our revenue and most customers end up purchasing 2-6 licenses per year.
Stagetimer is now our full-time job and has been able to cover all of our expenses, including a trip around the world that we are currently on – December 2022 as I write this. We call it a full-time job because we have quit our previous jobs and don’t do freelance work to supplement our income. But in reality, we work on Stagetimer for 2 to 6 hours a day, and the rest of the time is used for side projects, study, health, and entertainment.
Did you learn anything that was particularly useful or advantageous?
Projects started based on market needs or gaps have proven to be more attractive and scalable. Seeing our first users and customers use the tool and receiving feedback from them has been a very successful way to build a business.
One of the early lessons learned from building Stagetimer was the value of evaluating feedback. Feedback from free users can be very deceiving. When free users say they would buy if you added this or that feature, always make sure to compare the information to requests made by actual customers. They've made it clear with money what the tool is worth and what should be added. Be very careful when adding features thinking that free users will convert once the feature is provided, but this is often not the case.
Another lesson for us was the benefits of adopting a freemium model. When users have permanent access to limited functionality, a relationship of trust and goodwill is established. Once they need access to all features, the decision to purchase your service or product will be much easier because there is already a foundation of trust.
Any advice for other entrepreneurs who want to start or are just starting out?
I truly believe that starting a business based on a real need will give you more fun than just trying to build something that might make you money. And, the process of finding these business ideas can be a lot of fun. Lukas and I often play a game where we challenge each other to see how things around us could be done better. We try to look for inefficiencies and problems in our daily activities and then come up with ideas for solutions and improvements.
This game gives us a lot of great ideas for potential businesses.
I've always had business ideas because I think about and get interested in different topics. However, ideas can be deceiving. They may sound very interesting in your head, but others may not find them as interesting or useful as you think. For every idea that comes to my mind, I first try to understand if anyone else has the same pain point or desire, and then make sure it's painful enough that people are willing to pay for it.
As a final piece of advice: If you currently have a job, start a side project first, then once you've validated your product or service, quit your job and go full-time into your own business. This way, you can build your business without the added stress of not having to make money right away or going bankrupt.
“Projects started based on market need or gap have proven to be more attractive”
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