Dry goods | How to become an independent developer as a front-end developer

Independent developers refer to developers who do not rely on external resources to maintain project operations, and only use their existing resources to ensure their own project development.
Although in real life, "independent developers" often do not really appear alone, the small team size of independent developers is often the key to better "quality control" of their own works: both There is no need to deal with various parties or marketing needs, so you can create your own app according to your own ideals with less interruption.

As a front-end developer, if you have been in the industry for a long time, I believe that the products you have handled will no longer be few and far between. As an Internet practitioner, I have more or less my own opinions and ideas about various products on the market. At least that’s how I am. When I see a good product, I will think about how it does it, how to tap demand, do a good job in user experience, solve user pain points, etc. When encountering a product with a bad experience, I will think that the product has its own experience. How can it keep users so difficult to use?

The text is suitable for beginners who have not yet stepped into independent developers. If you are already an experienced independent developer, this article may not be of much use to you. This article will explain in several directions, how to move towards an independent developer. Of course, this is just some personal experience and opinions. If you are also a classmate in this direction, or you are already an independent developer, I hope you can communicate more. If there are any shortcomings in this article, please point out more.

source of inspiration

If you are completely independent development for a living, then you need your product revenue to be able to support your expenses and progress. You need to make one or more products that can generate certain income to support you. This is easy to say, but difficult to achieve. In fact, most of the product code logic development is relatively good. After all, they are all brick movers who have been in the industry for many years. The focus is on how to find good ideas and how to discover the needs of users. Below are some of the ways I find inspiration for your reference.

• Calm down and think about it. You can set aside a certain time every day. For example, you can brainstorm with yourself from all aspects on the way to and from get off work or before going to bed at night. You can learn from the news you have seen recently, the new function of a product, or a certain product. A word of a person can do. To discover the demand point from it, this is from oneself, if there is no idea at all, then you can visit the following platforms more.
• The w2solo domestic independent developer community, started in 2018.10, is maintained by many independent developers, and is committed to building and maintaining the domestic independent developer circle and atmosphere. There are a lot of new ideas being exchanged here, and you can find a lot of good products and independent developers here.
• ProductHunt's foreign platform has now become the best place for users to discover new products, entrepreneurs to get inspiration, investors to find new opportunities, and founders to promote their products, which is a community. The content is very good. As long as I can spare time every day, I will go shopping to discover some new ideas and see what kind of products developers around the world are making.
• Creator Daily Creator creative community, independent developer community. Similar to the domestic products of ProductHunt, the products on the website are mainly domestic products, and there are also many good domestic developers' products.
• Xinquji Xinquji is a product discovery community that discovers the latest websites, mobile apps and technology products, and translates products in ProductHunt and some domestic products.
• Ruan Yifeng's blog This blog believes that many front-end developers know about various tutorial articles. Now a must-see every Friday is its weekly magazine for technology enthusiasts, which will include program and product-related content.
• [36 krypton-8:1 krypton] () WeChat public account 36 krypton pushes the information breakfast of Internet people at 8:00 every morning, bringing together big news, big company events, cool products and other recommendations.

market situation

The next step with inspiration is not to start immediately, because there may be countless similar products on the market, such as image watermarking tools, too many people are doing it. We need to decide whether to start this project through some platforms, just like whether the various meetings in the early stage of the company's new product features are enough to approve the project.

We can analyze data through inspiration keywords through platforms such as WeChat Index, Toutiao Huanjuan, and Baidu Index. Based on keyword search trends, gain insight into the interests and needs of netizens, monitor public opinion trends, and locate audience characteristics. If there is no data for the search keywords, or the amount of data is too small, it means that there is no relevant demand at the moment, so you need to consider carefully if you want to take the next step. Of course, these platforms can only represent a part of the population and are only a reference indicator.

The following is the search "front-end" keyword data display diagram:

If the amount of search result data is considerable, go to the next step. Check the entire network to see if there are similar products in operation, and compare the amount of data monitored by the index with the number of products searched.

• The index data is considerable, and there are currently no online products, which can be used to sort out specific needs.
• Index keywords are not included, or the search volume is very small. If you want to proceed with the next step, you must be careful
• The index data is considerable, and there are many products on the line at the moment. If you want to proceed with the next step, you must be cautious.
• Another situation is that this product is available on the PC side, but no mobile terminal or H5 applet has been developed. It can be comprehensively considered whether there is a non-PC side scenario, and if so, you can proceed to the next step.

I think this step is very important. If there are omissions or the consideration is not comprehensive enough, it may lead to failure after entering the next link. Therefore, when we want to really start the creation of a new product, we need to have enough time and space to investigate. Whether the analysis can really continue.

Product Form & Development

When the preliminary research and analysis determines that it needs to enter the development stage, it is necessary to consider what kind of product form has entered the market in the early stage. Whether it is an app, a small program, or a PC website, etc., this has a corresponding relationship with the product positioning and audience determined in the early stage. If your product is in the maternal and child industry, then the first recommended recommendation must be the WeChat applet, such as Your product is a tool-type product based on Douyin, so the first choice must be the Douyin applet. In short, the previous platform must be matched.

The initial consideration must be to quickly verify the feasibility of the product, then it is necessary to launch a small version at the fastest speed. Considering the efficiency of development, the front-end can use the multi-end development framework of the uniapp class, and the development efficiency and start-up are very fast. Considerable growth can be replaced by other frameworks with better performance.

The back-end development is recommended in the early stage Serverless to interact with the front-end. Currently, the platforms that I have used are LeanCloud , Alibaba Cloud Serverless, Tencent Cloud Serverless, Tencent Cloud has now begun to charge, and used the most It is LeanCloud, the experience is very good, students who have ideas can try it. It is recommended that these platforms are developed based on Nodejs. For front-end students, it is very fast to get started, and there is no great learning cost.

Operation

How to bring in the first wave of users after the development is completed, as an independent developer, you must be able to save money in the early stage, and you can invest a certain amount of advertising costs when the number of users grows steadily in the later stage. In the early stage, you can submit new products such as w2solo ProductHunt 创造者日报 and other new products to focus on the community. .

In addition to the above product gathering places, you can continue to publish articles to major blog sites, such as Nuggets, Zhihu, Sifu, 51CTO, CSDN, Blog Park, etc. It is best for these platforms to save and publish articles at ordinary times to accumulate some fans for yourself and influence. In this way, when you have a new product release, I think it will definitely bring a certain user growth.

The above is a list of some free exposure platforms, which have a certain effect on the accumulation of seed users in the early stage. This is just some of my understanding, there must be many other channels and methods, such as posting to group chat promotion, etc., it depends on which method is more suitable.

Then it is about monetization, which can generally be divided into two categories, namely advertising revenue and membership or in-app purchase revenue. This also depends on different industries. For example, tool-type products are suitable for access to advertising. For example, a certain solution-type product is suitable for in-app purchases. It is recommended to be non-advertising products. The premise of advertising products is that the number of users is large enough to generate income. considerable. If it is an advertising product, you can directly access the traffic master in the WeChat applet. The App can be connected to platforms such as Pangolin and Youlianghui. There are many such platforms, and you can choose to use them for comparison.

at last

This article describes how to act in each step from the perspective of how to find inspiration at the beginning to the launch of new products. It is a personal practical point of view, which is not necessarily normal or appropriate. If you are also in this On the way, welcome to correct and exchange. This is a long and difficult road, but the road is coming. As long as we persist and make constant corrections, we believe that the future can be expected. If you find it useful after reading it, remember to give it a thumbs up and go, you may use it someday if you save it.

Focus on front-end development, share dry goods related to front-end technology, public account: Nancheng Front-end (ID: nanchengfe)