One Year of Lopaka: Analytics, Growth, and Gratitude

Year in Analytics

In December 2022 (over a year ago) the first version of Lopaka appeared. Or rather, a rough draft of an editor that only worked with the Flipper API. Around May I set up a dashboard in Airtable to monitor the growth of my Twitter, Telegram, and GitHub. The lopaka.app launch was in June 2023. That’s roughly when I started collecting DATA.

Let’s go in order: the very first version was published on my site, and it’s still there: https://ilin.pt/stuff/fui-editor/ (you can compare before-and-after). I checked analytics through cloudflare.com — they show the number of unique users over the last month. An excellent free option for starters. Though I have a feeling that a noticeable chunk of traffic is bots, because Google’s numbers are noticeably different. Any idea why?

After the June launch I set up Google Analytics and started watching 👀

The first big spike on the graph is the day of the major announcement with a bunch of reposts. It’s hard to see, but monthly traffic doubled over six months! It’s incredibly exciting to watch people from all over the world visit your site, actually use it, and come back again and again.

I also set up Events to see which buttons people press, which tools they use, and which screen sizes and libraries they choose. The most popular tools are SELECT, LINE, STRING. The most popular canvas zoom is 100%. People want to see the design as close to the real display as possible. The AdafruitGFX library overtook U8g2 in popularity.

Airtable.com lets you build interfaces for displaying data. First thing I started collecting there were marketing metrics: subscriber count, followers, GitHub stars. All of this runs automatically through an n8n.io flow that launches every day and makes API requests.

Then I set up graphs for beta signup and feedback forms. There I also display numbers for how many users signed up for the beta and how many interviews I conducted. Submissions land in Airtable, where for each record I check boxes with status: interview, invite, etc.

There were also experiments with openreplay.com — it’s an analog of Yandex Webvisor. And it’s paid. It’s fun to watch users, but not very useful so far.

Results are very positive:

Over six months we grew from zero to several thousand monthly users. Beta signup numbers are growing. February feedback is already almost catching up to December numbers. Real contributors started appearing on GitHub: people writing code, drawing icons, creating issues! I’m very pleased.

And we continue actively working together with Denis @deadlink. Without him the project wouldn’t have grown this cool and this fast. THANK YOU.

My social media activities finally yielded some visible results. Over the last month I got about 20,000 views total (seems like small potatoes, but for this project those are serious numbers). And people are still coming from this Wojciech video.

If you’re interested, follow our Instagram https://www.instagram.com/lopaka_app Our Twitter https://twitter.com/lopaka_app My YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCkpvBeKwMAjc-mwGLuzNnA My TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@ilin.pt (warning: lots of trash content and experiments)

P.S.: feedback we’ve received:

Wow! To sum it up in one word, WOW! Thank you for your work, effort, and passion in creating this application. What a joy it was to stumble onto it and use it. I’m mostly a hobby user with a passion for microcontrollers and sensors, but it has also crossed over into my day to day work life where I work manufacturing custom HVAC equipment. Thank you for creating this.

Who Am I Without My Job? A Scary Thought Experiment

Recently a scary thought hit me: who am I without my Job? What happens if I remove my work as a programmer from my life. What remains? Who am I, really? Try this thought experiment yourself.

Well, I’m Misha — a human being. I have some skills, knowledge, experience, acquaintances. What is sufficient grounds to call yourself someone? When you meet new people, what do you tell them about yourself? What do you need to say for others to truly know you?

And I got a bit stuck on this question: what remains if I remove my job as an employee at an international company?

Turns out, it’s crucial to draw a boundary between yourself as a person and your main activity. The absence of such a boundary and complete, inseparable identification with your work leads to burnout. It’s extremely risky to heavily depend on some business, someone else’s idea, or a large number of people who created it or work at that company.

If you don’t establish this separation, any problems or changes at work will automatically be associated with and perceived as your personal problems or changes. And the reverse seems true too: any problems or changes in my personal life will automatically affect my work performance and reflect in it.

There’s this show called Severance. It raises a similar question. It describes a technology that allows completely separating your work self from your free-time self. People enter the office through a special elevator where the severance happens. And then these personalities never intersect: they have different memories. So the free-time personality is completely separated from the work personality. A safe solution, essentially.

How are you doing with this? Do you have an answer to the question of who you are? Have you managed to draw the boundary between your personality and your work?

I'm Not an Impostor — I'm a Generalist

I’m not an impostor anymore. Time to admit it: I’m a generalist. I know and can do a lot of different things across many areas. I don’t want to study how the memory allocator is designed in the Chromium engine. And I love that about myself. I do what I want.

Over the course of my life, I’ve managed to be:

• handyman
• hookah master
• gas station attendant
• casino dealer
• sysadmin / IT support guy
• tech support operator
• pastry cook
• plumber
• electrician
• DJ
• musician
• party freak
• psychonaut
• radio host
• gamer
• streamer
• trader
• photographer
• videographer
• snowboarder
• boulderer
• tourist
• surfer
• airsoft player
• internet provider
• electronics engineer
• SEO specialist
• designer
• 3D artist
• webmaster
• backend developer
• frontend developer
• product owner
• conference speaker
• founder
• FPV drone operator
• blogger
• TikToker, finally

Different levels of involvement, of course. Some at an amateur level, some professionally for a paycheck. I could tell a story about every single one.

I’m not planning to stop. I wish everyone to do whatever they want without shame or fear. Try more different things, expand your horizons. Broad horizons are one of the most important investments in your future.

You can become an ace pilot, or you can become an aerial planet and be sure it’ll pass the textbook exam.

My 87-Year-Old Grandma and the Internet: A Love Story

I regularly chat with my grandma on Telegram. She’s 87. Lately she’s been saying more often that what she wants most is to peacefully pass away. And I completely understand her.

She’s lonely. It’s hard to find people she’d actually enjoy talking to. I’m 38 and I barely find interesting people myself. Imagine what it’s like at 90? Most of your friends are already gone. Those who survived have probably lost their minds. You’re mainly left with people you would never have befriended even in your youth.

Kids and grandkids won’t visit every day. Maybe once or twice a week.

Plus her health is basically gone. Moving around the house is hard. You can’t really go for walks, hang out, or even shop without it being a whole adventure.

The biggest joy for her? The internet. She ignored computers for quite a while, even though her grandkids constantly played on them at her place. About five years ago she started using one herself: she can do stuff in Word, browses the internet on her own, handles YouTube and Instagram no problem, downloads videos, saves pictures to her desktop. She’s got it all organized perfectly.

It’s literally a breath of fresh air and an endless source of joy. On Telegram she chats with relatives, they send each other bunnies on rainbow backgrounds 😃

Just like me back in 2008…

I Love Feedback. No, Really — Give Me More.

I absolutely love feedback. From coworkers, relatives, friends, and especially from Lopaka users 🙂 I’m incredibly grateful for any feedback I get.

It’s such a rare thing that people aren’t used to giving it. They worry they might offend someone. They fear being misunderstood.

But giving feedback means sharing and caring. Don’t be shy!

• Button broken on the site? Drop it in the chat. Maybe no one knows about that bug or edge case where everything breaks. Human error happens.
• Got a survey from a brand you love? Honestly go fill it out. You use the product, so it’s in your best interest to make it better.
• Time for 360 reviews at work? Go ahead and tell people where they’re consistently dropping the ball.

Everyone benefits from knowing their blind spots. I’m forced to pay a therapist to tell me where I’m constantly messing up. I could’ve gotten that for free from friends.

I believe one of the most important functions of the people we surround ourselves with is to give feedback. To provide another perspective on reality. This same principle is at the core of the scientific method: mandatory peer review and ruthless criticism. That’s the only way progress happens.

For example, how would you know if you’ve lost your mind? Could you catch that moment yourself? What if you smell bad? What if you’re giving people advice that actually harms them? What if you’ve unintentionally offended someone? Would you want to know about all of this?

Unfortunately, that’s how the world works: most of the time you’ll remain in the dark. And only in extreme situations, when you cross the boundaries of morality or public safety, will feedback likely arrive in the form of a beating.

I really need feedback. Any product in the prototype stage, searching for product-market fit, is basically just trying to learn about users’ pain and suffering. To find the most important scenarios people need solved. The entire product backlog at this stage is built on reviews.

Back in June (four months ago) I added a beta signup form on lopaka.app to collect at least some leads. There I also mention that I’d love to chat. Over that time, 49 people signed up! When it hit 25, I started emailing everyone with an invitation to talk and a Calendly link. And then I waited…

Then I repeated the mailing every 10 people, slightly tweaking the subject and copy, checking SendGrid stats — it showed 90% of people received and opened the emails. Recently I sent a fresh email to EVERYONE in case someone missed it. But over all this time, only TWO people booked an interview 🤬 No one replied to the emails.

Now I immediately message everyone who fills out the form: “Hey, thanks, let’s chat.” While they’re still interested. And out of ten people, I found ONE more who actually responded. We had a great conversation, and as usual I learned a ton. Plus got a lot of gratitude for a cool and convenient project that 100% solved their problem.

Final conversion to interview: 7.5% 😔

Any advice on what to do?