Nilan Saha

Discipline beats motivation

March 8, 2023

Your adult life has been always related to code correct? Was it always a passion, just happened, or a bit of both?

I was introduced to computers and coding by my dad at an extremely early age. So both my childhood and adult life has been related to code. It’s always been my passion and I made a career out of it.

Before jumping on the solopreneur questions, you are the CTO of Juna,  a really great service/product. Can you share a bit about how code is important there and what you do?

Juna is a telehealth company. So code is absolutely crucial here because it enables the delivery of healthcare services for patients from the comfort of their homes who otherwise might not have access to these services. With healthcare, security is also a huge priority because we are dealing with actual patient data, and hence writing secure code is the name of the game.

My role as a CTO varies a lot because we are a very small and nimble startup at the moment. Obviously, I am primarily responsible for the product side of things so I code a lot but I am also heavily involved in setting up marketing campaigns, analyzing data to figure out new business directions, etc. 

Can you talk about your project Landings.dev and why you decided to go to an entrepreneurial route?

Last year I really started using Twitter a lot and made a lot of great friends in the indie hacker space. Everyone was doing something cool. As a CTO I don’t necessarily code all day but I still love it. I figured working on a side project would be a good way to get both sides of it. I also really enjoy looking at cool website designs but I have a very specific taste in terms of color palettes. There wasn’t any good product out there with a good color palette search so I built it.

“Knowing how to code saves you money” could be a slogan to learn how to code. What is your take on nocode? Is it worth even that can become so expensive?

Tweet from Nilan Saha

I wasn’t a big fan of nocode initially but this year I am really embracing it. As an engineer by heart, my primary instinct is to code everything up. But as a CTO I am responsible for figuring out the most efficient ways to do stuff. In a lot of cases nocode is a really good way to get the job done. It can be expensive but definitely less expensive than hiring engineers. For example, Zapier is on the expensive side but it’s still less expensive considering what you can do with it and how many people otherwise would be required to code it all up.

Can code and nocode become friends?

Absolutely, I think you should always try to start with nocode and then code when you grow and there is a need.

Do you have a new project coming in or landings.dev is your only one?

I always have plenty of ideas but what I don’t have is time because of my full-time job. There aren’t any new projects in the pipeline but that could change in one evening to be honest.

What is the business model of landing.dev or do you plan to monetize it somehow?

Right now, I do not monetize it. To be honest, money was never the motivation behind building Landings so I am not in a rush. However, Ads would be a decent enough business model if and when I do decide to monetize it. I have also been thinking of integration some sort of UI shop

What about marketing strategies? What you use

I talk about it a lot on Twitter and because my circle is primarily tech people they are also target users for Landings. Once in a while, I do outreach to get it listed in different blogs or directories to get some traffic and it has worked decently well. I also started a Twitter account for Landings @LandingsDev where I feature all the landing pages so that’s another source too apart from my personal Twitter.

Favorite tool and why?

It’s super niche but I love Ahrefs

Word of advice?

Discipline beats motivation. Be motivated to start something but then create habits and be disciplined

One book, one person to follow on Twitter, and one music?

Book - Atomic Habits

Person to follow on Twitter - Pieter Levels. He is the OG indiehacker and I take inspiration from a lot of scrappy things he does

Music - Glitch Mob - Fortune Days

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