Working on CloutSense.io

Initial Thoughts

As a personal side project, I'm also going to be building a social media analytics tool at the same time (CloutSense.io), that utilizes a mixture of Bubble.io, Python, Javascript, Postgresql, and APIs. It's funny, because initially I just wanted to check out Bubble.io as a no-code platform and try to build something without any code, but I ran into quite a few limitations and ended up needing to support some parts of the project with actual code, forcing me to brush up more on Python and Javascript. After spending some time on it, I've realized that Bubble does help accelerate the process for someone trying to make a prototype or MVP to test product idea online, but it falls short in a few areas, particularly in the backend.

Current Progress

I've gotten the base dashboard setup so that it can display the main information to track the changes in social influence. The two social channels that I've decided to work on first were Twitter and LinkedIn. Twitter because it is more developer-friendly and easier build a tracker for than other channels & LinkedIn because I personally would love to have a dashboard to track changes in employee size for various portfolio companies and other startups that I'd like to monitor for the long run. Here's an image of what the LinkedIn dashboard currently looks like for my internal dashboard:

What's Next

I've made a good amount of progress on the base layer of my app and have been collecting a decent amount of data to get started. For what's next, I'll be working on ironing out the initial onboarding UX and implementing a basic upgrade flow for users to increase their account tier (and usage limits). I would love to launch an MVP version of CloutSense by early Q1 2023 for the social channels Twitter and LinkedIn. Depending on if the initial platform gets any traction or not, I'll decide whether to focus on expanding the social channels supported or tweaking the product features itself to see there could be more product-market fit.