Hey Indiehackers ✌️!

My name is Marcin, and I’m designer and graduated architect. I specialize in Branding and UI/UX design and I would call myself Visual Designer unless I’ve recently become a developer. Yes, I've built a fully functional product, from scratch!

So, there was this idea.

For a quite long time, I was reading a lot on the internet about growth-hacking and marketing, so I was browsing thousands of blogs, apps, portals, groups, etc. While discovering more and more interesting content, it turned out, it's impossible to read everything at once. So I’ve started to save the links in my Chrome bookmarks – as I always did with other materials, tools or design resources. The problem was, I kept forgetting about my saved bookmarks and the content I wanted to read.

That’s why I started to look for a tool which would allow me to save the links but somehow remind me of them after some time. I tried Pocket, but it was still another app I would have had to visit to browse things I'd saved there.

So the Idea came in – let’s build the app. I thought the product through, and I was thinking about my developer friends and whom I am going to ask for help. But as some of you might have already know that (non-developers 😉), developers are either very expensive or not available for such small projects. After talking about the idea with some of my close friends – validating it at the same time – I got so excited about it, I decided I was going to build it on my own. I've had some little experience with Rails before - did some tutorials in the past, therefore I decided I can get back to it. The frontend part was not that scary for me, so I decided to jump into deep water and try myself with building the whole product.

It took me over a week to build fully functional MVP.

Equipped with the internet knowledge (so-called „Stack Overflow Development” 😂), Youtube videos from Mackenzie Child and little help from my developer friends, I’ve managed to launch the product live! 

For the backend part, I used Ruby on Rails, integrated with Mailgun. App’s layout is written with pure HTML + CSS (and some JS), and landing-page was designed and developed in Webflow (I love it, seriously!).

That’s how I've brought this product alive – Meet Mailist.app!

What’s Mailist?

Mailist allows you to save any links from the internet easily and store them for later, to read whenever you have time. Every week (on Saturdays) you receive an email with the list of the links you saved for later. Think about your personal, carefully tailored weekly newsletter, with the content you add on your own. It’s that simple, isn’t it? And the best part - it’s free, without any limitations forever!

Add a website with Chrome extension to your Mailist and receive a weekly newsletter with things you have not read yet!
 

More than that

My Dear early beta-testers pointed me a lack of a feature – „Hey, why don’t you add Chrome extension, so you can save a page while browsing it?”. My answer was: „Yeah, sure, but first I need to learn how to do it :D”. So I did – again with the help of „THE INTERNET” 🙏 I’ve managed to write and publish Mailist Chrome Extension. It simply allows you to add any Chrome browser tab to Mailist with just a few clicks.

The future?

For the upcoming weeks, I’m going to validate the idea with more users and see if there is a real need on the market. If that works, I have plenty of new features for this product. Its further development will be more than an exciting journey for me, and I’m looking forward to it, so dear Indiehackers, visit Mailist.app and give it a try!

👊🏻 Any feedback is much appreciated!