After three phases – frustration from marketing topicstotalkabout.com, fascination with the world of directories and DR and then a ten-hour trip through approximately 500 domains – I finally got to the less important part of every internet project.
To the product.
Working name for it is for now B****e and I will keep the URL hidden for now. I don’t have a need to send people to a half-empty page only so I can say that I launched something. When the base works, I will show it. If meanwhile I don’t throw away the whole idea, which with side projects can never be completely excluded.
From E***D****y** I kept the original idea of a directory, but I don’t see it anymore as the main product. A project simply needs its profile. Name, URL, description, logo, category, tags and a few other data. Directory is therefore more a database base over which the more interesting part can work.
Battles.
On the screen two projects and a simple question. For example: Which one would you rather try?
I choose one and continue further.
What I mainly like about it is that I don’t want too much thinking from a person. With classic rating I often don’t know if I should give a project three or four stars. What do three actually mean? Is five a perfect product or only a product which I like? With two possibilities the decision is much simpler.
Of course, behind this simplicity a list of problems is already slowly appearing.
I cannot put completely random projects against each other. I need categories and tags. With time I have to solve rating and strength of opponents. A project with ten votes I cannot completely simply compare with a project which has ten thousand of them. And if a maker finds out that he can win by sending a voting link to his community, I just invented another problem for myself.
But these are problems which I will be very happy to solve when I have ten thousand votes.
Now I have approximately zero.
So I try to resist my natural need to design a system for a million users before the first user.
I started with the database. PHP and MariaDB/MySQL, because I know this stack and for this type of application it is completely enough for me. I don’t have a need to prove technological maturity by connecting seven frameworks, three message queues and a Kubernetes cluster because of displaying two cards.
With the database, however, I think about performance from the beginning. If the project worked, exactly the number of battles and votes can grow fastest. Therefore I want reasonable indexes, simple queries and where it makes sense, pre-calculated counters. It is much more pleasant to think about it now than one day to find out why the database calculates an ordinary ranking for fourteen seconds.
The first practical function is importing a project through URL. I enter an address and the application tries to pull basic data from the page. Then I check and edit them. It is a small thing, but exactly such things in my opinion decide if adding a project takes one minute or if a person after the third text field closes the tab.
During development I leave the import open, because I need to quickly add test projects. In the public version it will be different. A project will be possible to add only by a registered user with verified email and one account will have a limit of ten projects.
Ten seems to me for now like a reasonable number. A normal maker fits there comfortably. A person who needs to add 8,400 projects probably has a different business model than the one for which I am building the website.
And I am still thinking also about that DR.
The original E***D****y** had DR 19, which was a pleasant head start. The new name can mean that I sacrifice part of this advantage in favour of a better brand. This is exactly one of the compromises which I solve with such a project.
Long term, however, I would like a backlink from a project profile to have some value by itself. Not in the sense of a cheap “DA 70 dofollow backlink guaranteed” SEO factory. More as another legitimate reason why it is worth it for a maker to add his project.
If over time it is possible to increase the authority of the domain, it is an advantage for both sides. The maker gets a relevant profile and backlink. The platform gets a quality project. If the maker gets involved in battles and shares the result, he brings visitors. If he sometime uses a badge or links back to his result, the platform again can get another backlink.
This is exactly the type of small flywheel which I would like to try.
Not “please, come to my directory because today I added another 300 projects”.
Rather: add a project, get a profile, compete, get into the ranking, share the result, come back and see what changed.
Maybe it will work. Maybe not.
Maybe I find out that makers are interested only in the backlink. Maybe everybody will cheat in voting. Maybe visitors click three times and leave. Or it turns out that exactly simple comparing of two projects is addictive enough that they continue clicking.
This is now what I want to find out.
Therefore I don’t want to sit over the concept for more weeks. I have projects, users, categories, battles, votes and the base of import. I need to build the smallest version on which the whole idea can really be tried.
It is quite ironic that the whole project was born from frustration with marketing https://topicstotalkabout.com.
Instead of solving marketing of topicstotalkabout.com, I spent a day studying startup directories, DR, backlinks and launch platforms, went through approximately 500 names, bought another domain and started programming another application.
So technically I did not solve the problem.
Rather I made for myself a second specimen of the same problem.
But this time promotion itself could be part of the product.
And if not, at least I will have something to write about in the fifth part.
I will publish the URL when under the hood there is at least something which can really be tried. For now I will keep it hidden. The internet really does not need another “Coming Soon” page and I don’t need another reason to check Analytics every ten minutes if by chance somebody already visited it.
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