Ever heard an indie hacker saying how solving your own problems could lead to a profitable business? Well, that's exactly what happened to me with FrameShare.
Let me tell you how I went from a personal need to a product used by hundreds of customers.
For the past 18 months I’ve been running Frameplate, a directory of templates, resources and blog posts for Framer.
Back in February of this year the traffic increased significantly. Around that time I started taking it more seriously seeing that there was potential to grow it further and increase the revenue it generated.
One of the ideas I had to drive more traffic to the site was to let visitors share pages to their social media platforms.
But there was a bit of a problem - Framer does not have any native integrations to do this. So I decided to build my own share widget.
It only took a bit of back and forth with ChatGPT, as well as my own knowledge of React at the time, to build the first version. After a few iterations I came up with a widget that was just perfect for Frameplate’s needs.
Then it hit me - other Framer designers and developers likely face the same issue. Why not turn this solution into a product?
So I decided to turn my messy code into an actual product other people could use to easily add social share buttons to their Framer websites.
This is how FrameShare was born.
At first I created 2 widgets:
A button to share links on X (Twitter), available for free to let people play with it and try it out on their website.
A full widget, including the most popular platforms like X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Whatsapp, Email and Copy to Clipboard.
Based on the amazing feedback I got from customers, I decided to develop a third widget. The idea was to give users more control on the design of the widget and include a few more social media platforms too.
With the new Custom Widget I launched 2 weeks ago customers can now upload their own icons and customise the buttons to fit to the design of their website.
Since the first launch in March, FrameShare’s widgets have been used by over 150 happy customers and generated several hundred dollars in revenue too.
Today I’m giving it a proper launch on Product Hunt. If you've read this far (thank you!), I'd be incredibly grateful for your support.
Commits
A list of things I did this week:
Added filters to the Blog section of Frameplate.
Set up the Product Hunt launch for FrameShare.
Added a credit system to my new SaaS app (only Stripe payments left)
Loads of update to a Newsletter directory website I’ve been building for the past few months.
Bookmarks
H1 Gallery - a collection of the best marketing headlines on the internet.
How To Build a $10k+ Per Month Newsletter - a step by step video by Matt McGarry.
Cursor AI tutorial for beginners - another great episode from The Startup Ideas Podcast Episodes by Greg Isenberg.
What I’m currently working on:
Frameplate - a directory of Framer templates & resources.
88 Pixels - my Framer studio offering services & templates
FrameShare - a widget to add share buttons to Framer sites.
digilog - my fist web app launching very soon.
That’s it for this week!
Hit reply and let me know what you’re working on at the moment - I’d love to hear from you! You can also follow me on X for daily updates.
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See you next Sunday!