Table of Contents
- Tell us about your product and what inspired you to start it?
- How long did it take you to acquire your first 50 customers, and what was your growth strategy?
- Which technology stack are you using and what challenges and limitations does it pose?
- What are some of the most essential tools that you use for your business?
- What have been some of the biggest insights you've gained since starting your entrepreneurial journey?
- Your recommended books/podcasts/newsletters etc.:
Tell us about your product and what inspired you to start it?
LogSnag started as a solution to a problem I encountered while working on a previous product. We had built a two-sided market place and were bringing in over 10,000 monthly visitors at the time. As a result, we desperately needed a way to track what was happening on the site and how users were interacting with it all in real-time. This was for us to understand better user behavior for improving the product and to track users individually for better customer support. In addition, we wanted to track our internal tools, third-party integrations, and everything happening within the application. So, it was a pain point that we were facing, and we couldn't find a flexible solution to track things the way we wanted.
Therefore, I started designing a solution to track different products of mine, and once I started talking to other people, I realized there was a need for a tool like this. So, I decided to build it and make it available to everyone.
How long did it take you to acquire your first 50 customers, and what was your growth strategy?
Once I realized that this could turn into a product of its own, I decided to validate the idea before putting any effort into building an actual product. To be clear, I had a simple personal version of it at the time, but it was nowhere near a product. So, I started building a landing page and sharing it with friends on social media and Reddit. Via the landing page, I got tons of feedback, and I was able to build a product around what people wanted.
From the waitlist, I managed to get over a hundred early adopters interested in trying out LogSnag while I was building it to test the app in real-world settings and to provide me with feedback on how it was performing. The product continued to be under development for three months before I launched it to the public. During this time, the waitlist grew to over 900 people, and I converted a portion of them into free and paid customers.
Which technology stack are you using and what challenges and limitations does it pose?
LogSnag is a cross-platform tool that runs on mobile, desktop, and the web.
The client is built with ReactJS bundled with CapacitorJS and Electron for mobile and desktop. The backend is a collection of NodeJS and Go services running on DigitalOcean and Cloudflare.
The primary database is a MongoDB cluster, but I also have a Clickhouse cluster for analytics and Redis for caching.
The biggest challenge with LogSnag is the amount of data that is processed and stored daily and ensuring that the tool is always available and fast.
What are some of the most essential tools that you use for your business?
LogSnag heavily relies on itself for analytics and event-tracking purposes! Too meta, I know, but that is the primary reason I built it in the first place.
My other essential tools are the technologies listed above and Cloudflare, Google Search Console, Postmark, and Figma, which is arguably my favorite tool right now.
What have been some of the biggest insights you've gained since starting your entrepreneurial journey?
My biggest insight is that building a product takes time and effort. We all see other people building products and making them look easy, but the reality is that it is a lot of hard work, dedication, and persistence. Things don't happen overnight and don't always go as planned, but you will eventually get there if you keep at it.
It's also important to validate your idea before you start building. I've seen so many people start building a product without validating the idea first, and they end up wasting a lot of time and effort. It's better to spend a few weeks validating your idea and building a landing page to get feedback from people before you start building. Thanks to all the no-code website builders out there, it is extremely easy to put together a nice-looking landing page these days.
Your recommended books/podcasts/newsletters etc.:
I've recently been reading quite a lot about design and user experience. My two favorite books right now are "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug and "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman.
