DEV Community

Fayaz Ahmed
Fayaz Ahmed

Posted on

Got my 10th sponsor today, for a side project which was inspired by my dev.to article

So one my post here called "These free tools for developers are 🔥🔥🔥" was getting a lot of views and it gave me a idea to make a website our of it & a few days later I launched Appydev

I put it up on Product Hunt and it was voted ~700 times & is the top voted product of the day (19th July 2020).

Alt Text

It was also backlinked by many popular design blogs & mentioned by some really awesome people on twitter.

How I built it?

When I finally started building this, I had a huge list of bookmarks of great tools and resources which helped me a lot for my work.

All I had was links and I had been saving them with the notion web clipper. Now the issue was getting the data, descriptions, images, author, pricing & open source links for these projects.

Doing this manually for ~300 links was a huge task, so I wrote a scraper in node js which did all of the heavy lifting. I just uploaded a csv file with the links and it pulled the title, description, og:images, icons etc.

I tried pulling pricing links & github links, but it didn't work well (worked for a few links), I just ended up find this data manually along with a little help.

This site was made with vue, nuxt, nuxt content module & tailwindcss.

A month later, I have sold this template to two 2 clients for a good amount of money. They wanted something similar, but a little customised to their preference.

The best part is I got sponsored by 10 awesome people, who just liked the website and they were not even trying to get something in return & it was all because of a dev.to article.

You can find these supporters here https://appydev.co/coffee/

Top comments (6)

Collapse
 
rahuldkjain profile image
Rahul Jain

Loved the UI. Looks very polished♥️

Collapse
 
tanishqxyz profile image
Tanishq Sharma

Beautiful design Fayaz 👌 Loved the overall balance and look

Collapse
 
fayaz profile image
Fayaz Ahmed

Glad you liked it

Collapse
 
kokaneka profile image
kapeel kokane

Awesome work there Fayaz! Looks great.
So how did you get a word out about the new site when it was ready? Did you post a link for it in your article that was getting those views?

Collapse
 
fayaz profile image
Fayaz Ahmed

Posting on PH, announcing on Twitter, telegram groups etc, the rest was just backlinks and stuff.

Collapse
 
arnaudcortisse profile image
Arnaud Cortisse

Very inspiring!