Even though I could have done a better job at marketing, I don’t feel like there is enough pull from the market for it to grow substantially. At $251 MRR, two years after its launch, it’s hard to imagine it ever reaching $5k, $2k, or even $1k of MRR.

I guess blogging is not so popular these days. 

which might or might not have a blog in it. The market is much bigger. I’ve seen plenty of website builders launch and grow very quickly in the last couple of years. I can’t say the same about new blogging platforms (the few established blogging platforms are probably successful because they allow doing much more than just blogs).

And Bloggi is, in its essence, a website builder—just limited to building websites in the shape of blogs. But what if I remove that limitation?

My plan is to take everything I built and learned with Bloggi and apply it on a new product, that will let people build 

kind of website. From landing pages to portfolios, and yes, blogs too.

And this time I’m building it in public from the very beginning. 

* But will continue running and supporting it, I’m just stopping active development for the time being.

Pivoting

I can finally say that this site is powered by Bloggi (and I’m writing these words in it). More specifically, it is powered by 

Later, I’ll add more advanced features, like full HTML and CSS customization (which is my personal goal so it can power this very blog with its custom design) and maybe an API for it to work as a headless CMS.

was about implementing some kind of templating system, I decided to skip that step and go directly with the 

. An API is the most flexible option since it can be used with any stack, and provides complete freedom for how to display the content.

Now, whenever I publish something, Bloggi 

 (thanks to another cool new feature of Bloggi, webhooks), which triggers a new build of the site, calling the Bloggi API to fetch the latest content, and finally deploying the new version. All of this is done automatically and takes less than a minute.

I get the same ease of use of writing and publishing in Bloggi, while keeping the flexibility of a custom design. Hopefully that means I’ll be writing here more often.

This is powered by Bloggi

*Originally published on [the Bloggi Blog](https://blog.bloggi.co/the-making-of-bloggi)*.

[Bloggi](https://bloggi.co) turns three months today. To celebrate, here’s the full story of how I built it—from idea to launch to where it’s at today, including all the numbers, lessons learned, and what’s next.

## The idea

It started as a small idea, sometime in May, while I was planning to start [my personal blog](https://hernansartorio.com). I was very skeptical of it and initially dismissed it. Why make *yet another* blogging platform?

But the idea didn’t go away. After doing some casual research during the following weeks, it slowly started taking shape in my mind. I realized that none of the existing platforms did everything that I pictured and that, maybe, there could be space for a new one. One that could be as simple and easy to use as Medium *and* as flexible and powerful as Wordpress or Ghost.

So I decided to [build it](https://hernansartorio.com/im-building-a-new-blogging-platform).

I had recently [quit my job](https://hernansartorio.com/why-i-quit-my-job) so I had time. Even if it failed and nobody used it, I would be building it for myself, and it could be a good addition to my portfolio. Plus, it just seemed like a very fun project to work on.

## The plan

I’ve had my share of failed projects in the past—where I would spend hundreds of hours working on something only to launch to crickets and end up with a number of customers that tended to zero.

With that lesson learned, this time I would launch with only the absolute minimum set of features needed, to see if there was enough interest before investing more time on it. That meant that it only had to accomplish its core job: **allow people to build a blog, use their own domain, and pay me for it**. That last point was important since it would be the only real way to validate the idea.

This allowed me to ignore everything else that I wanted to do but was ultimately not essential at this point (like customization options, tags, image uploads, static pages, etc). I would build [a skateboard instead of a car](https://blog.crisp.se/2016/01/25/henrikkniberg/making-sense-of-mvp).

I officially started working on it in early June. I had a trip planned about a month after that, so I took it as a deadline: I would build it and launch it in one month (it took two, but close enough).

## The name

The first name I came up with (and domain I bought) was Blogrr. It made sense to me because it was a mix of [Carrd](https://carrd.co/) (I thought of Bloggi as Carrd but for blogs) and [Blogger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogger_(service)). But it wasn’t an easy name to pronounce, and it would probably get confused with *Blogger*, so I looked for alternatives.

I wanted something short, had "blog" in it, and had an available .co or .io domain (since a .com was unlikely to be available). After trying out all the combinations I could think of, I found that bloggi.co was free. "Bloggi" fitted all of the requirements and sounded like an easy and fun name, so I bought the domain and went with it.

## Design

I kept doing research on other blogging platforms, analyzing in more detail how they solved the same problems I would tackle, and getting a clearer picture of how I wanted things to work: **everything had to be as simple as possible, and require the least amount of effort from a user to get a nice-looking blog online**.

I started defining what the application screens would be and how the flows would work. I wish I had something more polished to show but this is the first and only (very crappy) sketch I made:

![Crappy photo of my crappy sketch with crappy handwriting](https://images.bloggi.co/09997495.jpg)

Around this time (or maybe before, I might have been too excited), I started messing around with how things would look, trying out typefaces for the logo and the application.

I continued by designing the core screens—the editor and the posts page—and defining a design system that would work for it. From there, I continued mocking up the rest of the screens and writing all the necessary copy for them.

After I had a general idea of how everything should work and look, I started development and kept iterating on the design details in the
code.

![How my Sketch file looked at this point](https://images.bloggi.co/f93d5cdb.png)

## Building an audience

I probably should’ve done it earlier, but while I was in the middle of the development phase, I realized that it would be better if I started building an audience of people who could be interested in what I was building.

I wrote [a post](https://hernansartorio.com/im-building-a-new-blogging-platform) describing what Bloggi would be and why I was building it, and linked to a quick landing page I made that included an email subscription form:

![Pre-launch landing page](https://images.bloggi.co/73007adc.png)

I shared the post on IndieHackers, DesignerNews, and HackerNews. It didn’t get much traction except for [DesignerNews](https://www.designernews.co/stories/103732-im-building-a-new-blogging-platform), which brought a decent (but not huge) amount of traffic and signups.

## Development

I built Bloggi using Ruby on Rails. I started by creating all the models and defining the business logic, as well as writing a minimal amount of tests to ensure that the core of the application worked as expected and that any change I made later wouldn’t break existing functionality (I learned the value of this the hard way).

After most of that was done, I started implementing the front-end components and design system. Then I continued by creating the controllers and implementing the templates for each screen. And then just a lot of groundwork to get everything running.

Besides the fact that Rails is a very productive framework for a solo developer, I was able to move relatively fast because most of the challenges I faced while building Bloggi I had already solved on previous projects.

### Accepting payments

I would’ve loved to use Stripe but I’m based in Uruguay and it’s not available here. I had previously integrated PayPal to accept payments on another project so I just went with that for now. Luckily the integration was relatively quick and not so painful this second time.

PayPal doesn’t allow me to charge subscriptions though—only one-time payments—but since I only offer annual plans for now, I would have at least a year to not worry about that (*if* it does get to that point).

## The launch

On August 20th, after about two months and close to 140 hours of work, I launched Bloggi.

I submitted it to [ProductHunt](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/bloggi), sent an email to around 110 people who had subscribed on the pre-launch landing page, and also shared it again on IndieHackers, DesignerNews, HackerNews, and Reddit.

By far the biggest response and traffic came from ProductHunt. The launch started slowly but ended the day in the top 10, with many positive comments.

I got around **700 visitors and 70 signups on launch day**, 400 and 30 the second, and slowing down afterwards.

I was very happy with the response, but on the second day I was a bit discouraged since there were no paying customers yet. I even lowered the price temporarily, thinking that maybe it was too expensive for lacking so many features (it wasn’t).

Then, three days after the launch, I woke up to a payment notification email from PayPal. **I cannot describe the grin on my face when I saw it**—and which stayed with me for the rest of the day. It was only $19 but it meant much more than that. A stranger on the internet (thanks Sergio!) had sent me money for something I built, that was only an idea two months before.

Making something out of nothing—and having people using it and finding it valuable enough to give me money for—gives me an amazing satisfaction and it’s one of the main reasons why I like doing what I do so much.

On the fifth day, I got my second paying customer, and another one the following day, ending the **first week with three paying customers**, from a total of around 1500 visitors and 220 signups.

This was more than enough validation and motivation to keep working on the idea.

## Today

Since launching, I’ve been mostly catching up and shipping some [much-needed features](https://blog.bloggi.co/all-the-new-features) and many other improvements.

I also started writing again recently—and launched [the Bloggi Blog](https://blogi.bloggi.co)—as a way to focus more on marketing.

These are all the numbers up to this day:

- 📈 **3600+** visits
- 🙂 **660+** signups
- 😎 **17** paying customers
- 💵 **$493** ARR
- ⏰ **330+** hours worked
- 👨‍💻 **217** commits

Here’s the traffic for these first three months, where you can appreciate the ProductHunt effect:

![Visits](https://images.bloggi.co/e54a50d6.png)

I also [increased prices](https://blog.bloggi.co/plans-and-pricing-update) recently. I announced it a few days beforehand, to give existing users a chance to upgrade at the original price. That led to a record week of upgrades:

![Upgrades](https://images.bloggi.co/48ddd856.png)

## Lessons learned

### Launching early is good

While most of the features I shipped after launch were already on my to-do list, the early feedback and requests from customers played a big part in how I prioritized them, and in adding new ones that I hadn’t thought before.

The feedback helps me realize what people really care about and how I should be spending my time, instead of being guided only by my own assumptions. Building it in the open also gives me much more motivation to keep working on it. Getting real-time, cheerful responses from paying customers whenever I ship a new feature is great.

### And you can always launch earlier

Even though my goal was to launch as soon as possible with only the most essential features, I was still guilty of not following my own advice.

I won’t bore you with the details, but I could’ve launched at least a week before I did (and coincidentally saved a couple of hours of stressful downtime on launch day) if I had gone from the beginning with the approach of doing some manual setup each time a custom domain is added, instead of trying to automate everything before it was needed. I thought that it would be good to have that in place in case I got a huge number of paying customers at launch. But that, of course, didn’t happen. And even if it did I could’ve still done fine doing things manually.

### Marketing matters

While I needed to work a lot on the core of the product after the launch—and I still do—it’s clear now that I can’t keep focusing solely on building and neglecting marketing. Even if I build the greatest product of all time, it’s worthless if people can’t find it.

I need to build a sustainable and scalable way to get people to discover Bloggi.

I’ll be taking the approach of creating and sharing work that I think might be valuable to people. If people do find it valuable, I might earn their trust, and they might share it around—indirectly generating awareness of Bloggi’s existence. Yes, I could have just said *content marketing*, but I don’t like [that term](https://om.co/2019/06/16/the-problem-with-content/). And yes, this post is an example of it.

Since this is a solo effort, I’ll need to split the focus. I’m now trying to spend at least 25% of my working day writing, and the rest on product work.

### Do it for the right reasons

This is a long-term game. There were many times where I doubted myself and wondered if all the work I was doing was worth the effort. And it’s not the first time I’ve had the same feeling.

Unlike some failed past projects, this time I’m scratching my own itch. Wanting something to exist for myself is the best way I found to clear all the doubts and push through the tough times. At projects where my primary goal was to make money, my motivation ended up fading very quickly after I encountered the first obstacles.

At some points in the beginning I’ve even felt like I had no choice—I just *had* to make the idea come true and see what happens. And that’s what I try to remember when the doubts come back.

## What’s next

I’ll keep working on getting my vision for the *1.0* version of Bloggi out. I have a long list of things to work on, and it grows every day. My next big focus is on adding more customization options and improving the editor.

As I mentioned, I’ll also be writing more regularly, being as open as possible about the development and the future of Bloggi.

The making of Bloggi

I had a small idea when I started to build this blog.

I built it using [Jekyll](https://jekyllrb.com)—a static site generator. I write my posts in [iA Writer](https://ia.net/writer), using [Markdown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown) for formatting. Then Jekyll takes care of converting them into HTML pages, which I push to the site’s [GitHub repository](https://github.com/hernansartorio/hernansartorio.github.io), which is then served to this domain by [GitHub Pages](https://pages.github.com). It’s a relatively simple process—at least for people who know how to make websites. There are many more modern and similar solutions too. But what options do people who-do-not-make-websites-for-a-living have? Well, *a lot*, I know. But bear with me for a bit.

There’s [WordPress](https://wordpress.com). It powers 30% of the internet. It’s powerful and flexible. You can do a lot with it. But as a side-effect of that, it’s a bit bloated. It’s packed with features that people who just want to put their writing on the internet don’t need. It can be confusing for people who are not tech-savvy.

There’s [Medium](https://medium.com). It’s perfect for people who just want to put their writing on the internet. It’s beautifully simple. But it’s too restrictive. You can’t publish on your own domain and you have few customization options. You’re writing on someone else’s terms. And they still don’t have a profitable business model so you can’t know how long your writing is going to remain online.

There’s [Ghost](https://ghost.org), which is like a simpler version of WordPress, but still a bit complicated. And too expensive. There’s [Squarespace](https://www.squarespace.com). It’s nice but it’s more focused on building general websites and not so much on the writing part. Same with other website builders.

There are many other solutions but similar things can be said of them.

This got me thinking. There could be a new blogging platform that sits somewhere in between. Where you can write in Markdown, with an experience as simple as using iA Writer. With a publishing and a reading experience as simple as using Medium. And with the flexibility and power of Wordpress. Where you can publish your writing on your own domain—and have your own little corner of the internet where you can share your ideas in whatever way you want. Where you can integrate your favorite newsletter software and own your relationship with your readers. Where you’re not tied to the platform and can download your content at any time. And where what you publish can stay online forever, if you want to, since you would be paying for a service to a profitable company that does not depend on venture capital to survive.

I’m calling it **[Bloggi](https://bloggi.co)**.

I’m targeting to launch a *very* minimal version in the next few weeks. It will, at least, allow you to blog on your own domain with a simple, content-focused theme. If there’s enough interest—and that’s a big *if*—I’ll add more customization options (for layout, typography and color schemes, for example), static pages, as well as common blogging features like tags and multiple authors. Later, I’ll add more advanced features, like full HTML and CSS customization (which is my personal goal so it can power this very blog with its custom design) and maybe an API for it to work as a headless CMS.

You can subscribe to be notified when it launches at [bloggi.co](https://bloggi.co).

I’m building a new blogging platform

I had an ideal job. I worked remotely and on my own hours. I had a good salary. I had friendly and smart teammates. And I learned a ton about building software and working on a team—especially coming from working on my own for most of my career.

Still—after more than three years at [the company](https://theorem.co/)—I was [bored](https://randsinrepose.com/archives/bored-people-quit/).

I could name a few reasons for why I quit. Like not enjoying the big, enterprisey project I was working on. Or feeling that I had little room left to grow professionally. But the deeper reason is that I don't want to be an employee for the rest of my life.

Even with all the flexibility I had, it was still a regular job. On a regular job your pay is directly proportional to the amount of time you work. You deliver value to your company and they, usually, compensate you with a fixed salary. You exchange time for money.

I don't like that equation. I haven’t liked it since realizing that it's possible to build systems that can deliver value—and generate an income—even while you're not actively working on them. That can make money while you sleep.

My goal, eventually, is to live off such systems. Not to be rich, but to have the freedom to do what I want, when I want it. Not to not work anymore, but to only work on things that I enjoy working on.

I’m using this time to do exactly that—at least temporarily. I saved enough money to cover my expenses for well over a year. My plan, for now, is to do work I enjoy and that can serve as a way to update my portfolio for when I start looking for a job in a few months. If some of it becomes a real business that can support my lifestyle, even better.

That work includes a small product idea I had recently (I’ll be sharing more about it soon), open-sourcing some code from previous side-projects and writing on this blog.

I'm also treating this time a mini-retirement, as Tim Ferris defines in [The 4-Hour Workweek](https://www.amazon.com/4-Hour-Workweek-Escape-Live-Anywhere/dp/0307465357). The idea of taking extended periods of time off throughout your life—while you're still young—rather than saving it all for the end. It's been almost three months since I quit and so far I'm enjoying it.

Why I quit my job

I’ve been thinking about starting a personal blog for years now, but I always doubted myself. Why would anyone want to read what I write? Why write at all?

Over time I’ve seen [enough][1] [evidence][2] [to][3] [convince][4] [myself][5] [that][6] [the][7] [benefits][8] [of][9] [writing][10] far outweigh any doubts I might have.

## Writing can be good for my career

This is the main and more practical reason for why I’m starting to write now. I recently quit my job and I’m taking some time off for a few months. Whatever I do next—launching a product or looking for a new remote job—it’s important that people can find me online, get a sense of who I am, what I know and what I can do. Ultimately, to trust me. What better way to do that than to put my thoughts into words that they can read? Writing is a window [inside the mind of another person][11].

## Writing can be helpful to other people

A common thought I had was that I don’t know enough to be qualified to write about any subject. People with more experience than me have already written about the same things I know or I’m learning. What could *I* contribute?

Eventually, I realized that [there’s no magic amount of experience that would make me worthy of sharing my ideas][12]. In fact, it’s irrelevant. [People who have just learned something][13] [are the most qualified to teach it][14]. Sharing what I know—even if it’s something new to me—can be helpful to people who are on the same learning path. And I know this because I sure as hell have learned a lot from people who have been generous enough to write about what they’ve learned and shared it with the world.

## Writing for myself

Even if none of the above hold true, I’m writing for myself. To organize and keep a record of my thoughts that I can reference in the future. To clarify and refine my ideas.

I’m not sure what will come out of this, but I’m betting that it’s a good enough thing to invest my time on.

[1]: https://tomcritchlow.com/2018/02/23/small-b-blogging/
[2]: https://ownyourcontent.wordpress.com/2019/05/14/khoi-vinh-on-how-his-blog-amplified-his-work-and-career/
[3]: http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/write-on-your-own-website/
[4]: https://seths.blog/2019/06/writing-not-plastics-not-wall-street/
[5]: https://ryanhoover.me/post/70793631386/blogging-is-the-new-resume
[6]: https://stevecheney.com/on-how-to-be-discovered/
[7]: https://twitter.com/tomcritchlow/status/893132703364763648
[8]: https://twitter.com/david_perell/status/1124002449646395392
[9]: https://twitter.com/david_perell/status/1139012915397369856
[10]: https://twitter.com/austinkleon/status/1085644216259264514
[11]: https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/05/08/carl-sagan-on-books/
[12]: https://medium.com/@sara_ann_marie/dont-feel-like-an-expert-share-anyway-661f2f8cd038
[13]: https://austinkleon.com/2015/06/14/to-be-a-teacher-and-remain-a-student/
[14]: https://m.signalvnoise.com/giving-less-advice/

Writing

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