Hello World
Photo by Brandon Lopez on Unsplash
Hi everyone! Last week we made Listas available to the world, we published the MVP milestone on IndieHackers.
Here are a few things I want to share about why we are working on Listas.
Hacking with a friend and learning new languages
Nico is one of my closest friends. He's probably the first one that got me into JavaScript. I remember the late nights hacking together some PHP and Angular 1.x to do a Twitter clone he helped me build, a "VIP messaging app" for my girlfriend–wife now 😉. That was 2014, we’ve come a long way since then. But some things remain the same: We like to write code and learn new things.
Learning new programming languages
Nico has been learning Rust for a while already. And I’ve been into functional programming, jumping between Elm, Haskell, and Reason/ReScript. One item in my “bucket” list was to learn PureScript so I could build web applications with a strongly typed purely functional language instead of JavaScript.
This might not be the traditional indie hacker approach of sticking to the tools you know and validate your idea as fast as possible. But if the idea turns out to be something only the two of us in the entire world care about, we still built a real world application with the languages we want to be proficient with.
Solving your own problem(s)
Every indie hacker, indie maker and entrepreneur will tell you this. Solve your own problem, work on something you care about. And that’s what I did.
Well actually with Listas I’m solving two of my problems. Kill two birds with one stone Solve two problems with one app, even better!
Maintaining a reading list
In the digital world we live we are exposed to a constant stream of information. Newsletters, Twitter, Slack. There's always a new article to read, a podcast to listen to or a video to watch. And from that we chose what to consume (or actually the algorithms chose for us but that’s for another conversation).
Over the years the way I keep a reading list was always a problem. Here are some of the approaches I tried. (Spoiler alert, none of them worked for me).
- A Trello board, with different columns per topic or domain
- Pinboard
- Links on a Google Keep note
- OneTab
- Browser tabs (we’ve all been there)
I kept switching between these approaches, sometimes using a few of them at once.
As I said, none of them worked for me.
¿The reasons?
With Pocket, I don’t want an app to read on. Reading on the original source works fine. The links you save are all together in one list so it’s not clear what to read next. Besides that, it never felt intuitive to me how to access the content I already consumed. More on that later.
Notes on Google Keep. Not bad as it sounds, it works well when you have a few links but it becomes hard to manage. Keeping track of a reading list isn’t the purpose of a note taking app afterall.
The Trello board. It was amazing, all my links organized by topic in cards and columns, I could drag and drop when I was done with something. But it was so much effort to add new items, to search links, to keep it organized. It felt like work, literally. I must’ve spent more time getting the board setup and organized than actually using it.
Pinboard is the one that worked best for me. It has a Mark as Read functionality, you can easily find unread content and the UI is very lean. However I still never became used to it, probably because the focus is more on bookmarking.
So what I needed was something that allowed me to easily, with as little friction as possible, add new items to my reading lists (Pocket does that really well with its browser extension) and to have a clear distinction between what I already read and what is still pending. And also a good UX.
Why the focus on what I read already?, you ask. That’s the second problem.
Keeping track of the content I consume
I like to keep a record of the content I consume. Articles, papers, podcasts, YouTube videos.
An example. My friend Martin wanted to learn about React Hooks a few months after they came out. I remembered I had read a really good article about it and wanted to share with him. I was only able to find it because I had saved it.
The system I had in place was pretty simple but it required quite some effort. I would save the link to every article, video or podcast I consumed during the week on a Google Keep note. This worked well as it was easy to do from the phone or tablet. And then, on Sundays, I would transfer that to a GitHub repository where I had Markdown files with the links I read on every week. I did this for at least three years.
Consuming content is a social activity
When I shared Lista’s idea with Nico. He came up with some of his ideas.
In my experience, ideas are always improved when shared with other people that are willing to contribute to them.
For Nico, the thing he wanted to solve was the social aspect of a reading list.
Let’s say you are learning a new programming language, or you are trying to understand what is the socioeconomic impact of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. You come up with a list of articles and interesting podcasts about the topic. How do you share that? Do you send a WhatsApp Telegram message to your friends with all the links? Do you create a Twitter thread with one article per tweet to share it to the world? And what happens when your friends want to contribute to that list as well but still each of you, separately, keep track of what you read?
Where we are now
After around two months of hacking on the weekends, the Listas Public MVP version is ready. We are using it already and, even though there are still many rough edges, it already solves to some extent those problems for us.
What’s next?
There’s quite a long road ahead. We’ll keep our focus into making Listas the solution for those who want to have control over their reading lists, to never lose reference to the content they consumed, and to share that content with others.
We want that experience to be as smooth as possible. So it doesn’t get in your way and you can keep consuming the content you love.
If you want to see some of the things we are working on check out the roadmap.
Disclaimer: it’s our internal board, the order is always changing and doesn’t fully reflect our priorities, but I'll give you an idea of what's coming.
And if you like Listas, the best you can do to support us now is give feedback, share your thoughts on it, and share it with friends who might also like it 🙏