We're Live!

Hey everyone!

This week I've officially launched the open beta for Hypermod! After more than a year of hard work, I'm so glad to have the opportunity to open the platform up and get initial feedback from the developer community.

I'm starting off by offering a Lifetime Deal for $39 throughout the beta period. With the lifetime deal, you get access to all current and future pro features:

• Deploy to private repositories: Deploy your code to private repositories.
• AI-powered codemod generation: Generate codemods for your codebase using AI.
• Codebase Analytics (soon): Get insights into migration progress, technical debt remediation, and more.
• Automated dependency upgrades: Hypermod will handle the pain of managing dependency updates across your codebases.

Our First Customers 🚀

A month ago friend gave me a challenge to make $100 by the end of October and only do work that was in direct support of reaching that goal. As a solo developer, with a family and a 9-5 job, it was the kick in the bum I needed (I find peer-pressure to be a great motivator). It got me to hyper-focus on the essentials and think about implementing a go to market plan like a real grown-up.

It was that friend's suggestion to launch a life time deal, not so much with the goal to make loads of sales but to get paying customers that are invested enough to use and develop the platform. To me, the most important thing is knowing the precious time I'm investing into the platform is absolutely in the right direction so people genuinely Hypermod useful.

I naively thought I was already doing a good job of being focused on building an MVP, but the mistake I made was only looking at it from a features and bugs perspective, ignoring all of the “marketing stuff” that is absolutely necessary for ship something for real... I had barely thought about how I would actually launch, or market the product. I fell into the classic developer trap of just building and waiting for the customers to come.

When I finally did launch this week on Twitter and Reddit, I almost immediately received two payments. And in that moment, I couldn't be happier. All the hours I put in before and after work, on the weekends and standing in the shower thinking about how I'll implement certain features (a surprisingly good method), were instantly worth it to me. I'm not trying to become the next silicon valley unicorn, I just want to make a tool that genuinely helps people and makes a few bucks on the side.

The effort it took me to prepare all of the marketing material and configure/test Stripe was non-trivial, but now that I've been through the process, I feel this is the reality of shipping something to real customers. I realized I had been beating around the bush for a long time and was sitting on a perfectly good MVP for a couple months. I just wish I did it all sooner, because I could have had some real world feedback earlier.

Regardless, after working on the project for more than a year and thinking about it for even longer, it was an incredible feeling seeing people trust and find value in Hypermod enough to pay for the LTD! At the time of writing this, 4 days after launch, I've hit my goal of $100 and then some 🎉!

Feeback & takeaways

I think it's important to share some of the feedback I've received so far, both good and bad, incase you're thinking about buying or launching your own product. I was told I need to develop some thick skin if I wanted to do this, so here goes:

Huge fan of your work. I never bought something so fast in my life. I honestly don't even know what this does entirely, I just wanted to give you money. The price is low enough I didn't have to think twice, it's not a reoccurring subscription, combined with the light pressure of beta and limited-time locked in one time fee, was a no-brainer for me.

So you wrote an editor for find and replace? Why would I use it instead of my own custom bash/js/python script which looks like I anyways need to write to use your tool? How does it differ/is better from https://docs.openrewrite.org/ which is an open-source, mature solution?

There's a fair bit to be gleaned from both of these comments, one really positive and the other seems like quite a negative tone, but both point to the same issue and perhaps it's something you're wondering also – What does Hypermod do?

I've been so focused on building the product that I've somewhat neglected to communicate the value proposition on the landing page effectively. I did slap it together over a weekend and at the time didn't have much to show aside from the fancy editor I made. The messaging is very much about what the product is today rather than what it will be in the future and exactly how it helps you in context.

To try and articulate it the best I can – it's not necessarily about the ability to write and deploy a codemod, the value is in the orchestration of migrations across a large organization. For example, and this should resonate with you if you're a developer working for a large org. When you need to make a breaking change to a shared module (Design Systems, Platform teams, etc), you need to coordinate the migration across all the dependant repositories or open source consumers. This is a manual and tedious process, but what's worse is the human factor. Trying to get all the teams to agree on a timeline, actually do the migration, review the PR, troubleshoot issues, etc.

This is the core problem I'm trying to solve, it's about automating and distributing the migration process across an organization in a way that makes the human element as small as hitting approve on a PR. A technical product trying to solve an organizational problem.

Some products to compare it with would be moderne, grit.io or codemod.com/. (btw the founders of these products are all super nice and helpful, I've had great chats with them).

Looking Ahead

I'm really looking forward to seeing where this goes. The support we've gotten so far has been amazing, and we can't wait to continue building features and improving Hypermod with your feedback.

Special thanks to Juntao Qiu for being the ultimate alpha tester, he provided loads of valuable feedback which gave me the confidence to launch the open beta. And to Mike Hill, for mentoring me on the marketing side of things, I wouldn't have had the courage to launch the lifetime deal without his guidance and insights.

Thanks for being part of this journey with us! If you haven't already, check out the open beta and get the Lifetime Deal while it lasts from hypermod.io/pricing.

Cheers, Daniel