My experience switching BetaList from Heroku to Render
My experience and some practical advice.
Marc Köhlbrugge
Maker of BetaList, Startup Jobs, WIP, and other products.
Latest posts
Embrace the chaos
Starting something new is messy. You don’t know exactly where you’re going. You try one direction and hit a dead-end. Try another. You’ll get fully immersed in a new piece of technology, only to hit an insurmountable roadblock and be back at square one. Your code will be a mess. Your UI lacks structure. Your UX is full of glaring problems. When you fix one bug, three new ones pop up. But only…
Measure once, cut twice
The old adage “measure twice, cut once” suggests you spend some extra time planning your work before taking action, saving you from having to do the work again, wasting time and material.
#buildinpublic
I’ve always been fascinated by seeing creative people work their craft. I don’t just want to see the finished product. I’d like to see the progress that got them there. That’s why I make products like BetaList (discover startups in their early stages) and WIP (community of makers sharing their work in progress). Over the last couple of years, the concept of “building in public” has become…
Tweet Photo got acquired
It started out as a Medium post, turned into a software product, and eventually got acquired for…
My rule for memorable domain names
My rule for a memorable domain name: it can only have two parts that need to be remembered. So either a dictionary word plus a non-standard TLD, or a dictionary word plus a prefix or suffix on .com.
Makers, don’t try to reverse-engineer success
I often get questions like “How did you get your first customers for WIP? How did you grow BetaList’s traffic?” Makers are looking to reverse-engineer success, and I see it everywhere. But I don’t think it works that way, and the answers to those questions are mostly useless.
Book review: Creative Selection
Just finished listening to Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda. It’s a rare look behind the scenes at Apple — how they design products and the amount of work that goes into software we now take for granted, like the iOS keyboard. I normally take weeks or months to finish a book; I got through this one in a few days.
The history of WIP
WIP is a social network for makers — a place to share your daily progress and keep each other accountable. It launched publicly in September 2017, but I’d been circling the same idea in different forms for much longer than that. Here’s the timeline of prototypes, mockups, and half-built products that eventually turned into WIP.
Traveling tips
Some of my favorite traveling tips.