Just released: trident.firestore
I’m pleased to announce the public release of my new library, trident.firestore. It’s the ClojureScript wrapper for Firestore that I mentioned I was working on last week. Take a look at the Github page linked above for code examples. If you’ve never used Firestore but are familiar with Clojure, it should be a good introduction to what you can do with Firestore.
Other than that, I have only a few quick updates:
There were about 20 signups when it launched two weeks ago. Since then, there’ve been 4 or 5 weekly active users and a small trickle of additional signups. I’m thinking a lot about the marketing/growth strategy. I’ve hired a friend who does marketing consulting to help me figure it out. So far I’m going to try at least three things to get it kickstarted:
I’ve made a custom signup form for my newsletter that includes an opt-out checkbox for joining Findka as well. It works since Findka is a newsletter too, so it’s easy to bundle them together. Now, I can put more time into posting content (like the Clojure guide) and hopefully have a decent conversion rate for Findka signups.
I’d like to get out and recruit users manually, but I don’t really know how to go about it. So to start out, I’m trying to simply attend 2 or 3 events per week that could result in conversations with new people. I’m sourcing events from meetup.com mainly.
Paid ads. We’re going to try putting $30 into social media and see what happens.
We’re also thinking about how to encourage user referrals. That’s the main strategy long-term. I’m glad that Findka is so simple now. It makes user acquisition a lot easier than it’s been for me in the past.
And if you’ve got any suggestions, let me know. :slightly_smiling_face:
Now that the Firestore lib is released, I’m excited to start using it for the Clojure guide. I’m planning to post a new article next week. It’ll (probably) demonstrate how to build a lobby (with chat) using ShadowCLJS, Rum and Firestore.
Misc
All the work on Firestore has sparked another thing that I’m really excited about. A couple months ago I described how I had been using Airtable as an independent data store for the then-current iteration of Findka. The idea is that instead of having each website/app manage its own database, you have each user manage their own database. I won’t go into all the implications of that here, but there are big implications. I’ve now realized that Firestore would be an excellent general-purpose DB to use for this kind of thing (at least for the early adopters). Each person would set up their own Firebase instance, and then there’d be a plugin system so you could easily add apps to it (kind of like setting up your own Wordpress instance and then installing plugins for that). Each app could then be given permission to access (parts of) the same database.
Anyway. I don’t want to write too much about that idea since it’s still formulating, but I expect I’ll post an article about it within several weeks.
Published 10 Mar 2020
