On July 1st, I got to point the domain mysoci.al to the production site and did an early beta launch to my Facebook profile.

Screenshot: Sharing about mysocial in Bangla in that post.

My Facebook post garnered a hopping 500+ visitors to the site in the early hours and in the next full day it got another 2k visits to the site, as I was tracking the visits with Plausible, I couldn’t believe the current active users to the site (93 active visitors at one point):

As of writing this article, a total of 3k visitors checked out the site. All of them came from my Facebook profile.

I posted a bunch of FB stories, all linking to the site. This first story got 2.9k views:

These fb stories combined also drove 534 visitors to the site:

Here’s my profile page I shared (mysoci.al/tamal):

And here’s the homepage at the time of the early beta launch (mysoci.al):

Over the course of 3 days the site generated 100+ new users and close to 80 fully completed sites.

Stats from the Kinde dashboard:

Here’s a few screenshot of the site in the beta launch:

Builder page (not signed in):

Avatar upload tab:

Links:

Themes:

Builder page (signed in):

Onboarding flow:

Dashboard page:

The “Go Pro” version hasn’t been implemented yet.

As you can see the design is very crappy. I wanted to quickly put together something and launch early. That’s why I didn’t spend much time making everything perfect.

Here are some of the sites from the registered users who signed up for the early beta:

I was anxious to share this site to the public so early.

At one side, I wanted to make it perfect, and on the other side I wanted to quickly get feedback.

MySocial will never be perfect if I don’t publish and get early user feedback.

To me, done is better than perfect.

After launching this site, I quickly realized so many tweaks and improvements that I can do for this site.

My next steps with MySocial:

I want to implement the pro version through user roles and add more features for the pro users.

Add payment mechanism to the app, and get paying users.

Once I get a few paying users after launching to various product sites, then I will fully invest in this product to delight my users.

While I do this, I will keep pushing new features and fix bugs to delight the free users.

Now you may remember MySocial from the past, here’s an insight on that:

MySocial’s original version (2022)

I originally started developing MySocial in May 2022 as part of the 30 day startup challenge. It took me 2 months to build the MVP. I built it out with a React frontend and NodeJS Express backend. I hosted the site on Digital Ocean $5/mo app engine. I also got a CDN for $5/mo.

I quit working on the product soon after the launch. So the app was the same as it was launched. I paid for the server for a year and then pulled the plug.

MySocial’s first version was a failure because I kinda lost interest in the project. I also let the domain expire after 2 years. Luckily I still got a hold on that domain on the second time.

For this new version, I rebuilt everything from scratch. I couldn’t get the old codebase to work, that’s why I decided to build from zero again. This time I coded this app with fullstack nextjs. It was a delight to work with it. My dev time was cut short to roughly 12 days (2-3 hours a day).

Here are some screenshots from the old version:

Till then.