Recently, my friend decided to embark on the path of indie developer and made a temporary email site: tempmail100.com. As a bystander, I witnessed him starting from scratch, figuring it out step by step, and finally achieving $300 monthly ad revenue. Today, I'd like to share his experience and hope to give some inspiration to those who want to step into the indie developer industry.
1. From idea to realization
My friend's initial intention is very simple: to make a practical temporary mailbox tool to help users quickly sign up for some temporary services without exposing their real mailboxes. He chose the direction of
temporary mailbox mainly because of the clear market demand and relatively low technical threshold.
He spent a few weeks from design to development, and finally launched tempmail100.com. The page design of the website is very simple, and the user experience is also very smooth, especially the function of “generate mailbox with one click”, which is simply too convenient.
2. Technology stack and SEO optimization
As an independent developer, my friend was very pragmatic in his technology selection. He chose a lightweight tech stack to ensure that the site would be responsive and easy to maintain. At the same time, he did the following things in order to improve the site's SEO performance:
Outbound link building: he took the initiative to share his project on some technical forums (e.g. V2EX, X, etc.), which attracted a lot of developers to click and discuss. These external links not only brought traffic, but also improved the weight of the website.
Keyword Optimization: He cleverly incorporated keywords such as “temporary email” and “free email generation” in the title, description and content of his website to ensure that search engines can better crawl and index it.
Social media promotion: He also shared some development tips and tricks on Twitter (X), attracting many users to try it out.
3. Payments
In order to keep the site running, a friend decided to bring in Stripe as a payment collection tool. In order to access Stripe, he even registered a US company! Although the process was a bit complicated, he eventually succeeded in accessing Stripe, and users can pay to unlock some advanced features, such as longer mailbox expiration dates, customized mailbox prefixes, and so on. Although there aren't many paying users yet, this provides him with a steady source of income.
In addition, he also places ads on his website through Google AdSense. With the increase in traffic, the ad revenue has gradually increased, and recently even reached the achievement of $10 per day. Although this number may seem small, it's a good start for an indie developer who is just starting out.
4. Challenges and the future
Of course, the road for indie developers isn't always smooth. My friend also encountered some challenges, such as how to continuously attract new users and how to deal with competitors. However, he always stays optimistic and keeps optimizing the product to improve the user experience.
In the future, he plans to continue to improve the site's features, such as adding multi-language support and improving the stability of the mailbox. At the same time, he also hopes to further enhance the website's popularity and traffic through more SEO optimization and social media promotion.
Conclusion
My friend experience made me realize that indie developers are full of challenges but also full of possibilities. If you have a similar idea, you might as well try it boldly, maybe the next successful indie developer is you!
linktree: https://linktr.ee/dearjohnwilson
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