Indie Maker Journey

Recorded on March 22, 2022.Legos are fun and timeless. Mario’s business entity is finally formed and a business bank account is in place. Alan wants to play around a bit with the pricing model for DotPlan. We talk about the original idea for DotPlan, creating a short video pitch, dealing with landing pages, content, and UI for Japanese audience, and more.

Recorded on March 8, 2022.New Fusioncast features, plus other minor improvements and bug fixes. Mario will start working on things to prepare for launching, filed for a legal business entity, and is working on terms of use and privacy policy using iUbenda.com. We talk about pricing and figuring out possible ways to do a trial period with Fusioncast. Alan deployed his React Native w

Recorded on February 23, 2022.Alan got the booster covid vaccine. React is good but more verbose than Vue. Playing around with Alpine.js. Mario’s continued working on refining how Fusioncast.fm handles some edge cases. Upgrading to TailwindCSS 3. Dealing with challenges building with Elixir. Alan created a React Native wrapper app for DotPlan.io, plus refactoring and cleaning thi

Recorded on February 1, 2022.Fixing some challenging issues in Fusioncast recording workflow, dealing with a participant’s sudden loss of network connection. Alan talks about adding a time-card feature to DotPlan for a specific customer, the reasons behind it, and dealing with Japanese time-card business culture, and time zones. We’re grateful for our early customers who have g

Recorded on January 18, 2022.Happy New Year! Back after a long break. Alan had some nice time off for the holidays. Alan also shares that he launched DotPlan and has a paying customer. Also added a timer feature to DotPlan, and pitched his app to a Japanese audience. Finding ways to work on product and on marketing. Mario reworked parts of the Fusioncast recording engine to make it

Recorded on September 21, 2021.Alan continues integrating Paddle to handle billing for his SaaS. Update on Alan’s participation in Kobe mentorship program. Thoughts on pricing options for DotPlan. To require credit card up front or not, and handling the transition from trial to paid subscription -the nature of the product and target audience matters, no one size fits all.

Recorded on August 31, 2021.Alan was accepted to a startup mentorship program with Kobe city for early stage founders. Alan is integrating Paddle using another service called Kanuu.io. Mario started a new day job, working remotely. Fusioncast backup recordings are now started/stopped at the same time as primary recordings. Alan has been using Linear for issue tracking and is very i

Recorded on August 17, 2021.Taking time off to disconnect and go camping. Climate change. Design work and learning design principles. Tailwind UI has been very helpful to Alan. Working with TailwindCSS. UI design challenges. Marketing and onboarding for Japanese market. Alan was advised to narrow down his target audience for DotPlan.

Why we do what we do. Plus some updates on mentorship events, new features, fixing issues, onboarding, and overall work being done on DotPlan and Fusioncast.

Mario and Alan are joined by Justin Jackson, co-founder of Transistor.fm, to talk about the state of indie SaaS and the importance of choosing the right market for your product.