If you follow me on Twitter…
Which I really don’t recommend as probably too much humor and memes about bootstrapping startups for a lot of you. 🤣
You might know that I had originally planned to put Notifier on maintenance mode for 2023 and go all in on my new side project to help you validate ideas before you build them, https://getvalidation.co/.
But then in the past week Notifier was shared by a couple of social media influencers and we have had a huge influx of new users! 🚀
I was actually in a Workshop last week that was taking up 90% of time and looking at my phone wondering why we were having SO many users register.
I thought maybe Elon had found out about us and perhaps tweeted something like, “I am killing Notifier.so because we are going to add this functionality ourselves and charge for it.”
So what’s the plan now?
We’re going to continue adding validated features and functionality to Notifier while also building getvalidation.co! 🚀
Luckily I am no longer the primary bottleneck for getting code out for Notifier as I no longer write any of the code. In fact, my devs may actually soon try to remove my ability to commit directly to master/dev if I keep not following process. 🤣
I will probably also get some help from my wife who is actually a much, much better Product Manager than I am.
Massive Full Text Matching Engine Improvements Coming Soon!
When building Notifier as a CLI application years ago I just wrote my own simple full text matching engine because I was the only one using it.
I have talked before about how I was using it to promote an affiliate marketing site on Reddit that I was working on at the time.
The matching then was quite simple so writing that code was easy. Later though I made a classic blunder and just improved upon that existing code rather than going with something tried and true.
Now, to be fair deploying a full text matching solution in Production is not an easy feat and I had no experience with them. So, maybe this was the right move.
Now though we are moving over to using a proper full text matching engine! The code for this is actually basically done. Just need to test it a little more.
The value this will add to you is that matching in Notifier will be more featured, more powerful and most importantly much more reliable!
We are also adding the capability in the UI for you to test the search query syntax you enter so you are sure it’s working as you expect:
Google Searchers are Coming Back and I need Beta Testers for that functionality
The Google Searchers are coming back!
One of our customers told us how important they are to him and you can see what he said below.
We need to beta test this functionality though before we roll it out to all users. So please let me know if you are interested in Beta Testing by responding to this email.
My primary use case is finding new and relevant articles to include in my weekly newsletter. I focus on B2B content marketing, for which I have 5-6 searchers running. Occasionally I find relevant stuff on LinkedIn but a majority is blog posts and news articles, which are identified primarily via the Google channel.
I also have Google Alerts set up for the same purpose, but Notifier has proven significantly more effective at spotting new and relevant content.
The “value” of these hits is difficult to quantify because it’s (currently) aimed at building brand awareness and establishing my brand as a valuable source of knowledge for people interested in B2B content marketing.
Matt Bell
Co-Founder | Strategic Piece & MessageUp
Some Users Want an API! 🚀
A couple of users have reached out to me and let me know that they want an API!
Now, this does make sense to me. However, I am tired of building things that people just kind of want and are not really interested in paying for.
So, with that in mind I am going to do the exact same thing I did to validate getvalidation.co!
I am going to sell Beta Access to the API! 🚀
Now, I wanted to simply use getvalidation.co to validate this feature but it’s not quite ready yet. So I am using gumroad still.
If the above button is not displaying because you are reading this on email, click here to Get Beta Access to the API!
Slack and Discord Searchers
Some users have also expressed interest in adding new Platforms like Slack and Discord. Please do let me know if this is something you interested in.
We will likely tackle this right after the API and/or after some of the changes above.
This time though I will be selling Beta Access via getvalidation.co! 🚀
(Well, that’s the plan) 🤣