It’s been a great week. Currently, our main focus is on releasing Hellokea to the public. As with most startups, it’s been a rollercoaster ride. We’ve made several improvements to ensure the product creation flow works flawlessly. The flow has been affected as the product plans have changed significantly.

Changes in payment plans

When Hellokea was launched about a year ago, the initial idea was to offer a decent trial period and let users choose their plan based on their requirements for the product. It was a great way to convert users to paying customers. However, it seems that many users were not satisfied with this approach. There are many small business owners who want to use the system only occasionally. Most people believe it’s not worth paying just for access to future emails. We agree with this sentiment.

In general, there are scenarios where people want to use email accounts just to check for new messages. For most people, it’s not important to retain old information, especially for support or inquiry emails. This happened in our case as well. We have some email accounts, e.g., [email protected], where we receive one-time queries that are rarely followed up on. Most of the time, we end up deleting these emails as they serve no further purpose.

For these reasons, we’ve decided to offer a free plan for all new products created on Hellokea. New plans will automatically be set to the free tier by default. The free plan is designed mainly for accounts used primarily for quick replies and follow-up threads. Any emails older than 120 days are automatically purged for the Product. To retain emails and access additional features, we recommend upgrading your plan.

Purging old data

With the release of these new changes, we’ve made numerous backend adjustments to accommodate the plan. First and foremost is the deletion of emails older than 120 days. We’ve also added options to delete created products. For some people, this might be crucial for managing their brand and domain. Deleting a product will remove all user permissions and domain entries. This will also deactivate the email generated by Hellokea and remove it from our database.

We don’t remove the product entry, name, and description for billing and accounting purposes. The bills and subscription plan history are still maintained. All email accounts, including attachments and emails, are completely removed from our servers.

Domain Hijacking prevention

Recently, one of our users found a way to hijack their domain by creating a new product. This is not a security vulnerability per se, but rather a product decision related to communication within the same account. As our users are not happy with this feature and Hellokea is evolving rapidly, we are removing it.

From now on, all new products created for domain verification will be given a separate key to validate domain ownership. Without the domain ownership verification key, emails from the accounts will not be sent from custom domains.

Resources on Domains

We have recently added a new section to our website about the importance of owning a domain and establishing an online identity. This is still a work in progress. We plan to write several sections on domain usage and how small businesses can leverage their domain by using Hellokea to simplify their day-to-day communication.

A New Shiny Logo

As you might have noticed, we have updated our logo to mark this new beginning. The logo represents the significance of communication and the depth of relationships through colors. We had plans to write a complete article about the new logo. However, our current priority is to release Hellokea to the general public beyond our closed user base.

Documentation for Hellokea

Documentation is challenging (at least for us). Our initial plan for documentation was to create numerous videos about each individual feature in Hellokea. However, we have decided to adopt a more traditional format of writing about the importance of each feature with screenshots and videos. This might take some time, as we will need to update all our screenshots and videos to incorporate the new logo.

These are our updates for now. Feel free to email us if you have any feedback.

Staying motivated when building an application or any work can be quite hard. I stopped building Hellokea for more than a year after losing my interest. People always say choose something you love. I would say, make something when you have a lot of users – that will give you great motivation. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. When I started, I believed there is a market for everything. People will buy your product when they think it’s different and worth their penny. I do have users who use our product for their day-to-day tasks. There was some good feedbacks, and the best part is they are still using it. The issue is the revenue. Building an application with sustainable revenue is hard and expecting that in the very early stage of any business is impossible.

The initial spark

My first product idea was to build a tool for communication and marketing. This is the core part of starting Hellokea as a project. During the time I started, I wanted to start with the hardest problem which is a helpdesk software. My plan was to build a tool that includes a helpdesk, growth tool (for posting content to social networks), and a newsletter. I even completed building changelog as a start tool which for some reason I decided to bury it after receiving feedbacks from my friends. What I have managed to complete was Helpdesk system. I always wanted to do something different with the helpdesk software. When I tried 3 different popular software of the same kind, I felt it was quite hard for me to even navigate. This led me to write helpdesk from scratch.

It was a fun start. Every single day was challenging and hard. Email parsing is not easy, and making it work like a client was a great challenge. So that kept me going until I completed the whole helpdesk module. Sure, there are still a few features that need polishing, but the real icing on the cake was my first few users. They were really kind and kept me going. My interest faded after my impossible task was over—the helpdesk. Though I kept using the app for my custom domains and my helpdesk needs, I started focusing more on my day job and got distracted by machine learning. I got into the FOMO cycle to learn about AI and totally dropped my interest in the project.

Fear of competition

Losing interest is one part. I believe subconsciously, the reason could be my competition. Yes! As you know, the market is flooded with lots of helpdesk and customer support software. These are run by huge companies with great funding and talented teams. How can you survive? Survival is the second challenge. The main aim is to convince a few users to use your product when polished and mature software is available in plenty. This made me lose confidence in my grand ambition. Mine is a rare scenario. I did have users using my product. Wasn’t that enough to jump-start any project?

Not sure what happened there. I just couldn’t start. When I keep looking and trying different products in the market, the confidence level plunged even deeper. I badly wanted to abandon my existing small user base to try something new. Something that should keep me going for the next idea. At one point, I even thought it could be because of the depth of the project that I am working on. Hellokea is never about Helpdesk. It’s a toolbox with different tools that would help you to establish your product.

Dusting off the cobwebs

Everything needs a triggering point. The same thing happened again with this project. One of my users wanted to change a behavior of certain feature when emailing their customers. They politely asked me whether it’s on our roadmap since they haven’t noticed any new posts on our changelog or blog for quite some time. As I manage my customer support using Hellokea, I felt the pain. It was a subtle change, and I thought it would be better to spend 3-4 hours to make things work. This was the exact moment that made me realize the work that had been put into building this project. The codebase is massive. There are many modules which I had no clue about. I thought would be better to clean the mess and finish off the feature.

It was certainly not a 3-4 hours job. At that point the frontend was written on Vue2 for Inbox UI. One of the things I learned from touching an old javascript code base is the dependency hell. It’s literally like dusting off the cobwebs. As I was learning Vue when building the UI, I didn’t pin dependencies of packages and the software (node) version. I was at a stage where I didn’t want to change anything and couldn’t push anything back to production. This made me change the whole Inbox code to htmx. Initially, it was scary. I believe no one in their right mind would do that. I was also scared about the smoothness of the page and the interaction between components. I kept digging the code, documentation and hyperscript. It was simply the best thing happened to web. Now the entire frontend is pure html with a bit of javascript. Once I rolled out the release to my users, they were quite happy. Sure there are a few glitches that need to be addressed, but it’s the code which doesn’t need a babysitter every 3 months to update the packages.

Ironing out & Polishing

It’s kind of refreshing to see how much has been accomplished. For a developer, it was a proud moment to see it work without any hiccups. Currently I have decided to focus more on onboarding and documentation. Hellokea badly needs a logo. To make myself answerable, there’s a roadmap page now. The ongoing development is going to be based on that. All our users will have a clear visibility of the progress and changes happening around this project. This website you are currently reading right now is rewritten in hugo and hosted using cloudflare pages. The list goes on and on. But this time I am committed to this project.

The future

This toolbox currently has only one tool – Helpdesk. My next focus is going to be on growth marketing – a tool which helps product marketers to post their status on various social media and get insights. And, of course, there are products out there for this specific task. I want it to be different, uncluttered and ease of use. It’s going to be difficult and could take some time to build this feature and release it in a stable form. When done, this is going to be a jewel on the crown.

I really want to thank open-source software community. With the current state of the open-source movement, I believe, the only thing that stops people from building a beautiful piece of software is a bit of motivation.

It’s been a while without a post. When you are the only developer building a fort, things could take some time and you might get too involved in things that need attention. The best part is that things are getting so pretty well in the shared inbox. And, of course, totally lost my time writing posts and marketing. Most indie hackers would argue that one needs to spend a lot more time on marketing content than building a product. I am currently in the stage where getting the product with basic functionality. Development in software is a never-ending process and I do agree that splitting time wisely over content marketing, which I totally depend on, and programming is crucial from the beginning.

For the current stage, It’s better to have someone nearby to work solely on the content for building this brand. The current trend and the best way to handle is through ChatGPT. ChatGPT could write you a post with all the requirements. It’s truly a leap ahead without a doubt. But, should I use that for my posts? It would eliminate half of my hassle handling the marketing. Do I really need to push my product in that direction?

Customer Interaction

Hellokea’s main objective is to have better communication with all your followers and customers. Having said that integrating tools like ChatGPT will completely remove the human touch in engaging with your patrons. Think about a scenario where a customer asks a genuine question about the product and gets an automated reply from a robot. Yes, it answers his/her queries but will he/she feel connected to the company or the product? This exactly is what I would like to handle correctly. From my previous experiences, I can assure you, people buy products from small businesses not just for their features or rapid development cycle. It’s for human interaction.

As I mentioned in this post, writing could be fun and creative when done by humans. Though I am still not great with humour in blog posts, I believe, someday I would be able to achieve that 😜. Of course, this blog might not have a plethora of textual content, but surely it will grow over a period of time to a worthy readable one.

And, before you go, check out the changelog. We have added cool new features and it’s almost there for a silent launch.