Promoting GoIndex - a tool to get indexed on Google

Meet Mark Jivko.

Mark has been writing software for the past 17 years. He has spent more than 25,000 hours on personal projects ranging from backend frameworks to games and native Android apps.

Mark recently quit his job as CTO after 10 years so that he could focus entirely on building and marketing his own products.

This is the story about GoIndex.

The story told by Mark Jivko

As with most of my projects, I built GoIndex to “scratch my own itch”.

I discovered that an earlier project of mine was not doing so well. Although more than 3 years had passed since I launched it, the website comprising close to 50,000 pages was still not getting indexed by Google.

I studied available solutions and edge cases and decided to build my own tool so that I would have better control over outcomes and more transparency.

The very first version of GoIndex was built in less than 30 days. I launched it on ProductHunt and, to my surprise, it got voted 3rd Product of the Day for December 9th, 2023. I kept building and improving the product based on Ideal Customer Profile feedback.

The interesting technical challenges gravitated around Google’s API rate limits. I had to create a cron task management system that triggered actions based on the “minute of the day” in order to improve Quality of Service for all clients and to avoid exceeding the rate limits. Race conditions are handled by calculating the “minute of the day” relative to January 1st 1970 - so based on the UNIX timestamp instead of the relative minute of the day.

Downloading and parsing large sitemaps for websites with more than 1 million URLs was also challenging. Not because of local memory management issues, but rather unpredictable firewall rules set by various Content Delivery Networks used by our clients. Fun stuff.

Sale number #100 came on February 19th 2024. So that’s two and a half months after launch.

Most of the initial sales were generated by the ProductHunt launch so I didn’t have to spend a dime on ads.

I later experimented with Reddit ads and others with lackluster results.

The entire campaign on Reddit cost $290 and generated 3 sales ($27 in revenue). Not bueno.

The launch on BetaList didn’t do so well either, although I’m grateful for their very valuable backlink.

The main struggle with marketing GoIndex is finding the right audience. I must admit that I’m really not good at promoting my products. I barely have 100-something followers on X, and I post very rarely.

Marketing is a skill and I hope to get better at it with time, but I’m nowhere near giving anyone advice on how to market their products. GoIndex’s success on ProductHunt was total luck - and completely outside of my control.

Hold on! Just want to mention a few more products from Mark.

He has launched another product after GoIndex - EchoDuck. An instant folder sharing browser application. It too got featured on ProductHunt, although no crown this time. This one managed to generate a sale on its launch day although recently traffic seems to have died out.

The next project he is working on is called Social Detox.

It’s a social media automation tool with an emphasis on mental health. Mark is building this thing so that he can keep growing his audience without the dopamine and cortisol hits of social media.

By the way, Go Index Me is launching again Monday 10th of June 2024 on Product Hunt. Don’t miss the launch and this coupon for 20% off your purchase: PH2024