Growing the #1 B2B QR Code Generator: Ramy Khuffash (Hovercode)
Welcome back to the Ramen Club podcast, the show where we interview ramen profitable founders from the Ramen Club community on how they discovered, built, and grew their product, ramen profitability, and beyond. My guest today is a friend and ramen club member, Rami Kufash. He is the founder of hovercode.com, among other things, which allows businesses to generate and track dynamic QR codes. Today, we'll learn his advice on finding and growing valuable ideas as he's built a few over the years now. Rami, how are you doing?
Ramy:I'm doing well. I'm excited to to chat and hear some of the questions you have.
Charlie:Me too. Me too. So just to start out for those who are less familiar with what you're up to, what is hover code?
Ramy:Yeah. I, I don't always pitch this well. It's basically a QR code generator. And in summary, businesses use it to create and manage dynamic QR codes. And dynamic QR codes let you edit the QR code destination after printing them and see things like analytics.
Ramy:So So that's kind of where there's a bit more value versus a kind of normal QR code. And we have hundreds of thousands of free users and thousands of paying customers at the moment.
Charlie:Are those mostly businesses who are buying it?
Ramy:Yeah, I'd say it's mostly businesses who are buying it and they vary in size. So they they can be really tiny businesses, and it could be huge businesses. But most of them, even the bigger businesses, aren't paying us a lot. So it's more of a volume type business versus some of the the higher end SaaS businesses.
Charlie:And you you saw us this about four years ago, was it?
Ramy:Yeah. I think it might just be ticking over to four years. I've been saying three for a while. Mhmm. I think we're getting to four.
Ramy:The first few months, it was kind of just a completely free product that was just online. And then, you know, probably six or seven months after doing that, I started working on it more seriously. So it's a bit of a very beginning.
Charlie:And obviously, that takes us to just after COVID. Right? Which is contextually relevant for why that was kind of exploding at the time. But I love, in your own words, just the story about how you kind of came across the idea and what made you decide to give it a go basically? What did that look like?
Ramy:Yeah. So I guess COVID had some relevance, but not a huge amount. At the time I was running a different business called PageFlows and that was, I guess, a ramen profitable business, kind of a lifestyle indie business as well. And I was kind of getting bored of working on that. So I was looking for other ideas to work on.
Ramy:Hovercode was one of many ideas at the time. And, you know, I had a few ideas and different hypotheses about what could work, but I was kind of being experimental with them. And with hover code specifically, the idea started from both a chat with a friend who worked in marketing and was talking about how they were using QR codes and just being somewhat interested in the market. And then finally like keyword research. So at the time I was pretty focused on keyword research for trying to validate some ideas without actually doing much work at all.
Ramy:So just seeing if there was any SEO search volume for anything to do with a topic that I was interested in building. And that to me was some sort of signal that there was something there, but it wasn't enough to fully convince me to go all in. So at the time I built a very simple MVP of hover code and a couple of other products, and I put them online, built some simple landing pages and just kind of let them sit for a few months. So that's why the kind of the beginning of hover code isn't really the beginning of hover code. Was just models experimenting with a bunch of stuff.
Ramy:And then a few months later, it was clear that hover code was getting a lot more traffic and actual usage, even though it was super simple. I was getting more usage than the other stuff, so I just decided to double down on that. Which again, didn't involve huge commitment. It just meant building on some of the stuff people were asking for.
Charlie:And using keyword research to validate ideas is a bit of a common theme on this podcast and that we chat about in the community. Was that the first time you'd seriously done that or you had you done that for other startups before?
Ramy:I've been doing it for other startups before, and and even my previous business page flows was mostly like SEO driven. But I think at that point, I was taking it more seriously in terms of if there's no good intent in the keywords, then it's not worth taking that seriously. So for example, if someone's searching for like funny memes or, you know, how the QR code works, for example, like that to me signals no intent. Like that's just someone looking to, you know, get educated on how QR codes work. They're not interested in using QR codes in their business.
Ramy:Whereas like dynamic QR code generator, for example, is like that someone looking to generate QR codes that are dynamic, which tend to be paid. That it's like, I started being more serious about looking for keywords within 10 at that point.
Charlie:Yeah, because before that, you mentioned PageFlows earlier. Yeah. And we've discussed this before, but I was actually a page flows user back Which in the
Ramy:is awesome. Which was
Charlie:it was great. So when I was kind of learning a bit more about design, so Rami spent a lot of time kind of mapping the different UX flows, like onboarding flows for different apps, for example, and, you know, offboarding flows and, like, upgrade flows and things like that. And it was just really good inspiration for when you're creating something new or designing something new. But that was the thing that got you kind of ramen profitable in the first place.
Ramy:Yeah. That was my my first business that kinda worked and allowed me to go full time doing my own thing. So, yeah, I really like that business. I didn't start that with keyword research. No.
Ramy:I started that with, like, a just a design newsletter and then trying to figure out what I could do to kinda monetize that audience. But during that process, I learned that, like, how powerful SEO was because there was a lot of there was like low traffic, but like a lot of long tail content that was getting SEO. It would just be like Slack onboarding flow and stuff like that people would be searching for. So I just kind of liked SEO more after that business, and that's kinda why I started to focus on it more. And then with the kind of intent and deciding what business to build based off SEO is partially that.
Ramy:Also in MicroConf a few years ago, Saba from Veed, who obviously you co host a podcast with, did a talk. A big part of it was, he said, like, build something people search for. And he gave a few examples of things people search for that would be a kinda good bet to build. And that, you know, just resonated with me massively. So it was it was a combination of the experience with PaceFlows and and kinda that talk really.
Charlie:Because I guess when you're fulfilling search intent, you're kind of capturing demand rather than kind of educating the market. A 100%. Trying to teach them, you know, that maybe that they should try this new thing out.
Ramy:A 100%. Yeah. I think like a lot of businesses can make it work where you do have to educate the market and something's new and they figured out a way to do something better. But that just seems like so much hard work. And and I was I was just trying to kind of avoid as much hard work as possible in all honesty.
Charlie:Did you not get to a stage with page flows where, obviously, it was going well, but you'd actually didn't need to spend a lot of time on it?
Ramy:Yeah. I was spending very, very little time on it.
Charlie:Like, how much would you say?
Ramy:There was a there was a long phase where I'd spend about a day a week on it. And then the other And it paying your
Charlie:expenses at the same time.
Ramy:It was, yeah, it was, yeah, it was a really good business for me, honestly. And I kind of I'm unsure how I feel about spending so little time on it. Because when I started that business, a similar business called Mobbin started. Yeah. And they, from the beginning, took it very seriously.
Ramy:I think they were a team of six when I was just getting started. I was a team of one, obviously. And then years later, they were a team of 20, and I was still a team of one. And they've been very successful. So I'm very happy with how page flows turned out, but I didn't really believe in it.
Ramy:I didn't take it seriously as maybe I could have. I don't know if I'd do things differently, but I think there's definitely some sort of lesson there based on how Bobbin ran their business. But, I mean, that was the type of business I like to run, like one that whether you could not take it that seriously and it would still grow.
Charlie:And up from there, you were working on, like you said, a few different things. Yeah. Experimenting on a few different projects. What, would you describe that as a small bets kind of approach?
Ramy:Yeah, I'd say so. I went through a phase during page flows where I spent six months building a thing. Ended up kind of hating working on it and not launching it and not really launching it. So that kind of taught me the I mean, a lot of us have made this mistake, but it just made me focus more on the small bets thing. If I can't get something out there in front of some people within a few weeks, I feel like either I'll start building in the wrong direction, or I'll just stop enjoying working on it.
Ramy:So, yeah, after that point, I definitely started to kinda shrink the time frame. There's a
Charlie:bit of a debate with small bets that that while you are opening yourself up to, you know, place bets on multiple different things and maybe one of them comes off, there also can be a risk of spreading yourself too thin and that you don't spend enough time on one of them for it to, like, really get there, which obviously you managed to avoid this with other code. But, like, what's the kind of approach you did to just avoid making sure that you were doing enough on something to give it a chance of success and also not just, like, doing, like, five different things at once? But did you sequence things at all, or what kind of approach did you take?
Ramy:So I guess I did sequence things, but I think that there is potentially a world where, you know, I could have ended up in that scenario where hover code didn't get any initial signs of traction. And then I just kept building more small tools and, you know, I'd still be doing that today. I guess what worked from my approach was to do some, to focus on the SEO aspect, to do some landing page building and backlink building, and then just leaving it for a few months. Obviously I was in a position where that was doable because page flows was kind of paying my bills and I was in no rush to get something to work. So just having that time for something to sit kind of in the market and get some signs of interest from people was very helpful.
Ramy:It didn't mean that I had to keep rushing or keep building new products. But, yeah, there's there's definitely a risk there. I I think when doing the small bets, I think it's it shouldn't be seen as more of a trying to get signals back from the market versus trying to make five things work at once. Yeah. And then if you see that one is working better than the others, then, you know, it's kinda fine to just drop the others.
Charlie:Yeah. And double down on it.
Ramy:A 100%. Yeah.
Charlie:What were some of the other projects you were working on in this period? I think you were actually working on ScreenJar Yeah. At one point. Were you working something called DashVine?
Ramy:I was. Yeah. Good research. DashVine is actually the thing that I spent six six months on and didn't end up really really haunting.
Charlie:Yeah. And that's like a feedback tool.
Ramy:Yes. Many indie hackers ended building feedback tools. But yeah, so I guess at the time there was another feedback tool I built called Feedback Lane, and that was like a feedback widget that fed into Notion. So there was some search volume around there, and then Notion was becoming really popular, so the idea was to kind of hopefully ride that wave. And I got one customer.
Ramy:It still potentially has one customer, I don't know. So yeah, it's still live. And then another one was called memo.fm, and it was kind of voicemail for podcasters tool. And that like, you know, it did start to rank for a couple of keywords and I got a couple of customers, but I think it's at like $200 MRR. So it was just like the scale and the difference that I saw early on with that versus Holocaust was just so clear.
Ramy:I mean, you can see that they're all very simple tools, very easy to build MVPs for. I guess one difference worth highlighting is they did have some search volume, but nowhere near the volume QR code related stuff has. And like while I always, people ask how HoverCode grew, I mentioned the kind of SEO approach I took. I I don't think it does work for every type of product or business because there's not that many with, like, this high volume, like, low price way of growing. But I do think seeing some level of volume and some intent in SEO is is still a useful signal for for most bootstrappers.
Charlie:Yeah. It's definitely a common theme here. And you also had experience with shoutout. So
Ramy:Yeah.
Charlie:Which was a product that you acquired Yeah. Which is like a testimonial and gathering tool, a bit like Sendja, which is run by Ollie, who's actually in the room right now. Yeah. And what do you talk me through because that sounds like a slightly different approach to some of the other stuff you were doing. Right?
Charlie:But do wanna tell us a little bit of the back well, and we'll get back to HoverCode very soon. Yeah. But I also love to know a bit more of the backstory behind Yeah.
Ramy:It's all kinda related to what we were talking about. So so that was at the time where I'd I'd actually just built HoverCode and the other two tools. Mhmm. And I saw on Twitter that Shoutout was for sale, and it was kind of a product I'd been following on Twitter for a while. And it looked like there was opportunity to grow that.
Ramy:But for example, like SEO wise, there's not much search volume for those types of tools, but that page had, that site, sorry, had tons of great backlinks, some really good customers, but their website was just like a single page. They had like no content, no blog or anything.
Charlie:So I
Ramy:just thought there'd be some low hanging fruit there. And the idea was to acquire that and go all in on it. Cause I assumed that the products that I built wouldn't go anywhere. Cause that's what happens with most products, I suppose. But like, as I acquired that, Hovercode started to see signs of growth.
Ramy:And then it kind of quickly grew to the point where the MRR from Holocaust was higher than the MRR of Shoutout. So I just essentially neglected that. Yeah. I just fully neglected it until I I, you know, sold it at at a pretty big loss quite recently. I have no regrets there.
Ramy:I think if, like, if Hovercode didn't work out, it probably would have been a decent bet. But, yeah, they just whipped out differently.
Charlie:So we talked about five or six products you've worked on
Ramy:Yeah.
Charlie:The last five years, all leading up to Hovercode. If you had to distill kind of the main lessons you've taken from these, you're like, okay, I've learned this. I'm gonna like, this is how we're gonna approach hover code. How would you kind of explain that?
Ramy:I'm not sure there's many great lessons. I think like the volume of SEO was the difference. I think there's a lot of luck involved as well, to be honest. So, you know, an example of luck is one that Google picked up of the code in the first place and seemed to like some of the pages and ranked them well. I've built products where there's good volume and apparently low competition for stuff, but then they just don't rank that well in Google and there's no reason I can figure out why.
Ramy:So I think there's some luck with that stuff. But another thing was early on in the process with Hobbit Code, Canva re released their app store. So I just kinda dropped everything that week. And this was really early on at HoverCode. And I built a Canva app and I called it dynamic QR codes, which is one of the big keywords I was kinda focused on.
Ramy:And they ended up they're really liking the app and heavily promoting it during the kind of relaunch of their app store. And they even ended up linking to hovercode.com and our blog weirdly from the help docs. Amazing. So that's an incredible couple of backlinks, which really just helped with our SEO and kind of everything else in the business from that point on. And I couldn't redo that now because Canva isn't relaunching their app store.
Ramy:So I think there's just a lot of luck involved. I guess the lessons for me would be like, look for stuff with intent, look for stuff with volume, and just try stuff. And keep an eye out for potential, like, lucky opportunities.
Charlie:Yeah. Because something could have a good intent, got loads of traffic. It's a matter of time for others' notice. Right? Yeah.
Charlie:Suddenly, you're not it's really hard to rank for those things. Yeah. These opportunities have a bit of a shelf life sometimes.
Ramy:I think so. I think I would still prefer to try something with a lot of volume and a lot of opportunity and good competition than something that's completely new where there's no volume and no intent. I still I don't know if it's true that I would I would manage in that scenario, but I feel like I'd have a better chance than kind of educating the market with with a kind of new product category.
Charlie:Yeah. Definitely agree. And with the first 100 customers or so, so that was just SEO in the early days? And is it to what extent is it still different flavors of SEO? Or do you have kind of anything else you do for marketing now that's like, you know, meaningful?
Charlie:How's that?
Ramy:It's it's hard to kind of separate SEO because a lot of it is just the brand now. Because there's there's a whole bunch of QR code generators out there. Some of them have a pretty, like, kinda scammy approach, let's say, to growth where where they kind of make it seem like people are creating free QR codes, but actually those QR codes are on a free trial and they expire. And at that point, a lot of people have already, like, printed their posters and, you know, spent hundreds of dollars on leaflets or whatever.
Charlie:That's got me before, actually.
Ramy:Yeah. It it's it's super common. And then that kind of scamminess allows them to spend a lot of money on ads and be profitable because people are kind of forced to upgrade at that point. So like a big part of the success of Public Code is we don't do that sort of thing. And that has kind of spread.
Ramy:I mean, we have some good reviews and it's kind of known as a decent QR code generator brand. But obviously when we look in the analytics, like a lot of people just search for like hover code in Google. So it's still SEO, but I guess it's kind of different. We're trying stuff with YouTube. It's not going great yet.
Ramy:The integration with Canva has obviously been amazing for us. We've tried building some integrations with other, so like Figma, for example, or a firm extension or Airtable. I don't know if that's really worked out either, to be honest. AI search is working pretty well, but that's pretty much SEO as well, right?
Charlie:Yeah. Cold email?
Ramy:Definitely not cold email. It's like, you heard of QR codes?
Charlie:Have you done ads yet?
Ramy:We're doing some Google ads. They're not profitable because we don't run the scam, but I think, you know, they lead to some customers.
Charlie:Of your SEO traffic, how would you split up the impact of more content based SEO traffic versus tool
Ramy:It's all products landing pages, which everybody assumes like SEO means writing blog posts, but the majority of the, you know, the SEO traffic that leads to customers is like, for every feature that people search for, we just have a product page with that exact phrase in the title and in the URL, and people just click on it.
Charlie:This is very similar to Veed, isn't it?
Ramy:I think so. Yeah. I think it is very similar.
Charlie:And so, yeah, it must have just in terms of how this might evolve, is this just more doubling down on what's working in the future, do you think?
Ramy:Still trying to figure that out, but I think so. It's doubling down. It's improving the product, improving the documentation. There's a lot of low hanging fruit still. Growth is, well, it feels like it's starting to slow.
Ramy:I'm not sure if it's just the end of the year, but I think, you know, I'll soon get to the point where new customers and churn start to kind of match each other and I'll have to get a bit more aggressive. But it's kind of nice again, with the being in an existing market to see that there's a bunch of other QR code companies that are way bigger than us. There is, obviously I don't wanna become a scammer, but there are some reputable ones as well that are much bigger than us. So we can kind of know that it's possible and try to figure it out.
Charlie:What does team hover code look like now? Is it you still, or do you have other
Ramy:people It's to help me and I work with a couple of contractors. So there's one contractor who built the iOS app and built some of the integrations, and he's working on a ChatGPT app at the moment, is kind of fun. And then there's someone who's helping with the scaling and back end sort of sort of stuff. We started to hit some scaling issues a couple of months ago. I I didn't really wanna deal with it myself.
Charlie:No. How do you typically devise your time? Let's say if, you know, if you had the perfect week or month, like, of marketing versus doing maybe more dev or product work, is there kind of an ideal sort of split for you?
Ramy:I honestly don't know. I'm a very unorganized worker. I I mostly just decide what to work on based on what I feel like will have the most impact. If I'm up for the challenge, sometimes I'll just pick the easy stuff if I've had like a busy life week. If I feel like I've done something that's gonna work for the business and it was difficult, that always feels good.
Ramy:Whether that's marketing or otherwise. But yeah, I don't know is the answer to that question.
Charlie:That's all good. What does the feedback loop look like from say, on deciding, okay, we need to make these improvements or try this new feature from either customers or looking at the market or just your own inspiration. Is there a typical way that works?
Ramy:A lot of it's just based on, like, customer support and then more keyword research, honestly. So, yeah, I still do a lot of keyword research to see if, like, if there's a potential feature we could build, are people searching for it, is there intent? And then customers ask for stuff constantly. And sometimes it's kind of reading between the lines. So there's a lot of customers who struggle to kind of organize their QR codes.
Ramy:So some will just have huge teams and huge amounts of QR codes. So it's just trying to plan both around building better ways for them to organize their QR codes, like folders or whatever, and then thinking about potentially how to market it. So like, I see that as like an opportunity to like, we are the QR code platform for big teams who need to organize QR codes, and then obviously we can go a bit more upmarket with that. So when stuff like that starts to come in, that of sticks out in my mind. And then I'll take note, and then I'll forget about the note.
Ramy:And then, you know, it comes up a few times, and then sometimes I'll decide to actually go ahead and do something.
Charlie:Just on the Teams based stuff, would you say you are currently more a bit more focused on the SME mid market kind of audience compared to your competitors?
Ramy:I'm not sure to be honest. Some of them definitely go enterprising. So some are way more focused on enterprise. But there's definitely a lot that seem to just do similar things to us in terms of like who they're targeting. So, yeah, I'm not sure.
Charlie:Do you feel there's a lot of opportunity with enterprise for you then based on some of the feedback you're hearing?
Ramy:I imagine there's tons of opportunity, but I don't know if it's opportunity that I wanna kinda chase down. I've never really gone through like a 12 sales cycle or whatever, But I'm open to potentially hiring to kind of solve that problem if if there is a big opportunity there.
Charlie:I think it's a good example of why bootstrapping is good. Yeah. Basically, about the can you imagine the amount of pressure that would be on you to be like, okay. You have to go at at this with all of your mind.
Ramy:Like, say, say, yeah.
Charlie:It's something you actually don't wanna do.
Ramy:A 100%.
Charlie:And you don't actually obviously, you would grow, but, like, you don't actually need to do it to survive. Yeah. So you don't have to do it.
Ramy:The the ones who I mentioned that came to mind, sorry, when you said that going up market or enterprise, they have all raised loads of money. So I guess maybe they're doing it because they have to as well.
Charlie:Yeah. I imagine so when they keep diluting over and over again as well. And is there any kind of, like, major things that move the needle apart from so the Canva integration definitely sounds like an example of that. You know? It's something that, you know, maybe didn't take you months to do, but actually was very effective.
Charlie:Yeah. Is there anything else like that you you remember in terms of even if it's just like a new pricing plan or it's like just a particular tool or something like that? Or is the rest of it a bit more kind of incremental grinding out SEO and stuff?
Ramy:It's all been incremental. And it and it and if, like, if you saw the chart of the revenue, it's just like, it's very linear. There's no obvious signs of anything major happening in either direction. So yeah, it's just continuing to make small improvements and kind of keeping up with the market, trying to stay relevant in SEO or AI or wherever people look for stuff. But, yeah, nothing nothing major, to be honest, apart from just the landing pages initially and the camera app.
Ramy:I think they're kinda riding that way for four years.
Charlie:I hear you. And just on the kind of meta kind of basis of being a, you know, longtime bootstrapper, Indyaka, founder, whatever you call it, how do you think you've evolved and, like, how you approach it, like, publicly? Do you think you maybe used to share more stuff in public? I know you don't really talk about, say, like, ARR metrics, for example, as much these days, which is understandable. Most people don't do that.
Charlie:But, yeah, how do you think you've kind of transitioned over time in that respect?
Ramy:I've definitely got more private about sharing things like numbers. Like, if someone if I meet someone personally, I'll kind of tell them whatever they wanna know. But sharing sharing them online just I think attracts copycats. And I know a lot of people say that doesn't make a huge difference, which in most cases, I don't think it makes a huge difference and it isn't like a massive impact on the business, but in some cases it does. I don't know if you saw, but one of the indie hackers co founders recently tweeted saying that he doesn't think people should be building in public and sharing stuff publicly because all it does is bring out copycats and it's really positive.
Ramy:And obviously, he got a bunch of responses saying like, didn't you didn't you start this whole trend? Which I found interesting. But yeah. I know some people say they give back to the community or whatever, and I get that if they're sharing, like, their learnings. I think just sharing numbers doesn't really do any do much for people other than inspire, but I think there's, like, enough inspiration out there at the moment.
Charlie:I think it also oh, I mean, the answer to every question is it depends. Right? But in in this context, I guess there are some where it's much more beneficial to you than others. Yeah. So for you, I don't actually know what the major benefit is, but there's there's somewhere actually let's say most of your target audience are on Twitter and they are your followers and stuff, and they are, say, makers as well.
Charlie:I mean, good example might be Sendja, actually. That's one of your channels, not the only one. But in terms of, like, it makes sense. Right? You know?
Charlie:Because you can get a lot of attention from sort of sharing the story, getting feedback, and that kind of thing. Definitely. Whereas your customers might be like a cafe or something. You know? Or, you know, all sorts of types of businesses and, like, doing a Twitter thread about top 10 tips, building promo code is not gonna reach these cafe owners.
Ramy:Think, like, building in public can lead to, like, things like backlinks or whatever, even from people in your market that kinda help generally. But yeah, I don't know. I don't think it'd be huge. I think the other thing honestly with something like Hovercode is it's so easy to build like an MVP. So I think it could be one of those tools where every new indie hacker is like, I'm just gonna build one of these things because I see someone tweeting about it, and it's easy to build.
Ramy:So I didn't really wanna encourage the hack so much.
Charlie:Yeah. Makes sense. Is there anything you would do differently with other codes if you started from scratch, like, four years ago? I don't think I would have done much differently.
Ramy:There's some, like, technical decisions I've messed up, but I think if I spent time trying to optimize that in in the early days, then I probably would have never launched. I mean, now I say I don't think I'd do anything differently. Maybe in a few years, I'll I'll answer differently from now.
Charlie:To what extent do you feel you've now or do you, like, what you're after? Because, you know, a lot of people, they start doing this kind of journey because they, you know, they don't want a boss and they want income not tied to a specific location, for example, or their time. To some extent, like, you have done that. Right? So you can travel.
Charlie:You know? You don't have a boss, that sort of thing. But, like, does it feel like, oh, I finished the game. And
Ramy:I'm done. I'm I'm I'm happy now, Charlie.
Charlie:Or is it more like you just feel like there's just, you know, a lot more you want to kind of do in this in this kind of
Ramy:A bit of both, to be honest. Like, I I I'm super grateful for how things have turned out. And, you know, I say there's a lot of luck involved, and it is an amazing life. Like, I get to, you know, play tennis in the middle of the day. But then there are times when, you know, I do kind of wanna feel a bit more motivated, wanna feel a bit more fulfilled.
Ramy:Yeah. So it just kind of depends on the day, but overall super happy with how it's turned out and very grateful. And I think like more recently, I'm less fearful. For the first many years of kind of, well, throughout all of page flows and a lot of the early years of hover code, I just always had the fear that everything would go away. And while I do still feel that, a lot of the times, don't know.
Ramy:I feel more at peace. Like, if it does, I'll figure something out. But, yeah, most most days, it is good, and and I am super grateful for the whole the whole situation.
Charlie:In terms of when you meet other people building, maybe it's their first house, maybe it's their second, whatever, what's the kind of common mistakes that you think you see from people, which are just maybe the most avoidable ones you don't make now, but you just keep see it happening over and over again?
Ramy:Yeah. Mean, it's the the the mistakes I made, though, like spending six months building something without showing it to anyone is always scary. Not figuring out any if there's any sort of intent, whether it's using SEO or or any other any other method. But it's like, people actually want this thing? But then I will say like, I've met tons of people where it seems like they're making those mistakes and they make it work somehow anyway.
Ramy:So I try to never assume, you know, even if someone seems like they're doing everything wrong, it's not gonna work. It can always work.
Charlie:I think another one is just not doing nearly enough marketing. Yeah. As well. It seems like you've kind of always been a bit on top of that. Like, you
Ramy:know don't know because I don't actually do that much marketing.
Charlie:Okay. Yeah.
Ramy:That's the thing. It's like like it depends it depends what you consider marketing, but like I did some initial SEO work and built some landing pages and built like a Canva app, and that's kind of it pretty much. Like I've experimented with some other stuff, but not seriously.
Charlie:Yeah. I guess to you, you didn't feel like marketing because you were still coding most of the time.
Ramy:Yeah. But then also what like, that was four years ago. How much marketing have I done since? Like, Ollie knows.
Charlie:So are you saying, okay. How I'm not saying don't do marketing. No. No. No.
Charlie:No. No one's saying that. But, like, are you are you saying that, like, the majority of the sort of landing pages, which are now getting your traffic built in the first, like, year? Yes. Yes.
Charlie:And you haven't
Ramy:The first, like,
Charlie:two months. So what percent what percentage of all of the landing pages were built in the first year, would you say?
Ramy:80. Really? I think I think the majority of the traffic that converts was built on the first two months.
Charlie:Yeah. Just those, like, really high intent, high volume keywords Yep. Have just been just what's been killing it ever since. Yeah. That's amazing, actually.
Charlie:Okay. It's been come to a good start then. Yeah. I've been able to do more fun things since.
Ramy:Pretty much. Yeah. And and like none of the marketing I've experimented with has worked since. So I don't know what what the takeaway is there. But What do you
Charlie:think you'd be working on if you weren't working on hover codes? Like, as in, you know, I'm sure you have a backlog of other ideas, but is there something that you really, like, want to work on even if it's outside of software?
Ramy:I think about some stuff sometimes. I'm not sure if I'd actually enjoy it in real life, but I feel like it'd be cool to help set up, like, a sport event in a city, like a a marathon. Okay. Because I think it's kinda cool when people set up a marathon. It becomes like a whole thing in a place every year.
Ramy:Yeah. Brings people into, a small town or whatever. Whether that would be fun in real life, I don't actually know. But Alright. The idea
Charlie:is Love logistics.
Ramy:I hate logistics. Yeah. Do you like running? I like running, but not a marathon.
Charlie:Not a not a marathon. Yeah.
Ramy:Not a marathon. Yeah. Or ever.
Charlie:That's not the what I was expecting. You wanna organize a marathon. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Ramy:Love the dance.
Charlie:Well, I'll take it. Yeah. I'm sure you can apply his skills to that. Potentially. Do you use AI much at the moment in your workflows?
Charlie:Constantly. Yeah. What is your setup?
Ramy:Recently started using Chord Code. Yeah. I think it's really good now. I tried a bunch of this stuff early on and it wasn't great, but I think it's really good now. It's kinda getting scary.
Ramy:Most of the time I just chat to Claude and chat GBT. But, yeah, simple. I'm not, like, super early adopter y with these things.
Charlie:Right. Jeez. Is it because you just kinda wanna wait and see and just wait until it gets a bit better?
Ramy:A little bit of that, but sometimes I'll I guess I I'm so I'm early to try stuff, but not adopt them. Like, I'll try a lot of stuff early, and most if it's not straightforward or easy, I'll just kind of abandon ship.
Charlie:Yeah. How about you? How much are you using it? Yeah. Well, I'm not a dev, but I use core code to make simple websites and fun things kind of thing.
Charlie:I find it easier to use than Framer sometimes for, like, landing pages if I wanna make, like, a specific component. I So actually just use it for lots of other people who use, like, Framer and Webflow, to be honest. I think Webflow is an absolute nightmare. They also made a set of medieval sound boards recently.
Ramy:Yes. I saw that.
Charlie:Yeah. Beautiful. Which was fun. And me and my girlfriend, Ravik, who's sitting opposite me, may build into an app at some point. So watch out for that plug alert.
Charlie:What's the next few years look like for you and for HoverCode, would you say?
Ramy:So for Hovercode, I am unsure. I'm I'm working to get to a certain milestone, and then I'm gonna decide, oh, let's start the plan, like the future once I hit that. For me, I'm I'm kind of so I'm actually experimenting working on something new with Rauno, who's also a Ramen Space member. And, you know, at the moment, we're we're still super early with it, but I think it'd be fun to work with someone because I've been working quite alone for a while. But, yeah, outside of that, I'm I'm I'm not sure.
Ramy:Just trying to get to the next milestone and then figure it out.
Charlie:Awesome. Well, thanks very much, Rami.
