> From building to selling - EP.12

Welcome to day twelve of the Crossroad build journey! This series follows my journey of indie hacking a product from building to selling. If you missed day eleven, you could check it out here. I also uploaded today's Twitch stream to YouTube if you want to watch the replay.

Finished the landing page! 🚢

There was not much left to do for the landing page. All that remained was creating the assets and applying a couple of minor updates here and there. I can write a whole section about all the changes I made, but since you are following along with this journey, here is the staging version of the site:

*Not all the buttons work yet. No early access to the crossroad template just yet! 😁

I will probably make a couple more tweaks before I go live, especially the mobile version can use a little bit more love and the assets and copy on the page. However, I am pretty happy with how the landing page turned out. In particular, I am pretty fond of the header!

Refactored and tested all the blocks for release. 🧪

After finishing the landing page, I had some time left for Crossroad today. I decided to test and refactor all the blocks. Last week I updated the names and class names of the block, and as it turned out, there were a couple of breaking bugs that I needed to fix.

While getting rid of these bugs, I also decided to split out the required.css from the style.css. This way, users don’t have to look at the required CSS and know that they can customize everything inside of style.css to their liking.

I am thrilled with how the template turned out. If you can copy and paste inside an editor, you can pretty much set up your own link in bio page with Crossroad. Now it’s up to me to bring that feeling across inside the introduction video. I am working on the script!

Preparing the marketing stuff. 🧭

You can’t launch a product without thinking about marketing. Launching isn’t as simple as hitting “submit” on product hunt and waiting for the people to spend their money.

Since I will be the user of my own product, I plan to do a tutorial series on the popular development & indie hacking blogs. After all, those are the people I am making this product for (people who can code, even a little bit).

Now I won’t be writing “how to setup Crossroad” blogs. No soul will click on that. I am thinking of creating blogs around hooking up the template to data sources, for example, fetching your featured/most recent blog posts from WordPress and Ghost CMS with NextJS (and other frameworks).

I will be using Crossroad for the front-end since I am focused on explaining how the data fetching works. Of course, I will write a paragraph about Crossroads to tickle the readers' interest. Still, I am focused on providing value to the people looking for a tutorial on how to work with specific APIs.

See you tomorrow! 👋

Tomorrow I will build my own link in bio page, on stream, with Crossroad. This way, we can battle test Crossroad and provide an example for the landing page.

I am also planning on building a script so I can create the lite, pro, and free versions with a single command. Exciting stuff, exciting times!

Thanks again for reading this build log. Have a great day, and I’ll see you tomorrow!

If you want to stay updated in the meantime, give me a follow on Twitter.

With love,

Twankrui