Usually, even during busy weeks, I find a way to be still productive. But not this time. 😅 

I had a nasty food intoxication that KO-ed me for a few days with fever and nausea 🤢, a small planned surgery on the lower back (nothing serious, just a lipoma removal), and it was also my wife’s bday ❤️.

Nonetheless, I still have a few interesting updates. 🥁 

Testing the boilerplate

First of all, hold on to your enthusiasm! 😂 

Last week I mentioned that I was aiming to have a polished MVP by now, but having worked only 5 hours would have been quite an astonishing achievement. 😅 

But I had the time to start and assess how much time the boilerplate would have saved me. I started tracking the time from having nothing to having the skeleton of a new product that has:

• a webapp, a BFF, an API, and a database up and running live on production hosted on Render,

• autodeploy on GitHub merge for all services,

• a custom domain with a corresponding Google Workspace,

• authentication through Clerk with LinkedIn social connection,

• error reporting with Sentry for all pieces of the stack,

• automatic collection of users’ emails on MailerLite for marketing campaigns,

• billing integration with Stripe including webhook integration for handling subscription and customers’ changes,

• a new palette and a new logo.

As you see, many of these also require some manual operations and this is how it looks like right now:

All this took me 3 hours and 45 minutes. 🎉 

I think it’s quite good! I remember that for NextCommit it took me quite some time to get here.

Once I finish writing this issue, I’ll get back to working on it to have it ready by next week. 🤞 

NextCommit SEO updates

In the last issue, I shared how having added company pages seemed to help as the latest data point on Google Search Console was a spike. This is the screen that I shared:

Look at how it looks now:

It was not a one-day spike! 🥳 

There seems to be a descending trend, and the number of clicks is mostly unchanged, but let’s see how it will behave in the next weeks.

The number of indexed pages also spiked as the crawler is catching up with the company pages.

The fact that the company pages are the main cause of this, is highlighted by checking what are the queries that brought the most impression in the last 7 days.

Conclusion

As expected, this was shorter than usual, but I hope you still enjoyed it! 👋 

If you’re interested in following my journey, make sure to subscribe or follow me on X/Twitter and LinkedIn!

Appendix

Overview of current status

Here are some snapshots of different stats.

NextCommit

Users

In the last 7 days, I got:

• +9 signups, now at 171 (+5.6%)

• 16 active users (sum of daily active users, not weekly unique active users) (it was 18, -11%)

Stripe

Plausible Analytics

Google Search Console

Personal branding

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