My first SaaS project: launched the landing page of dataunlocker.com

Jun 16, 2020Kyiv, Ukraine#tech

DataUnlocker is my first project which turned to have a big demand and is now serving hundreds of customers worldwide! This timeline record tells a short story about how it all started.

Back in 2017, on April 28, I published a technical article about "saving" website analytics from ad blockers. To understand what it is about, imagine you are a website or web application owner. You need to somehow understand your website users' behavior to be able to do a better service for them, but, because of ad blockers, you can't see a good slice of your user base, hence you can miss some of your users. I faced this problem on my personal website, because I wanted not to miss even a single user visiting it. Because many internet users install ad blockers, and many of ad blockers block any "tracking" tools like Google Analytics by default, I wasn't the only one who faced this problem. Turns out, there are a lot of businesses who will be happy to have a solution for that.

Before I created DataUnlocker, on 6/1/2020, I made a proof of concept (PoC) solution for my own website and then for my very first customer, freecodecamp.org. This solution was also open-sourced, as a part of the article written in 2017.

At some point in time, not as soon as I wished, I realized that there is a big demand for it! Not only measured by repository stars on GitHub, but also by the number of reads of my article per day, I realized that there is a HUGE opportunity to create a software-as-a-service, paid solution for everyone who needs it.

And now, only after 3.5 years of publishing the article, and after this *aha!* moment, in under a week, I quickly created dataunlocker.com landing page to check whether people are ready to pay for it. Turns out, yes, they are! Just by having a single article, I started to get emails from people and companies who wanted to access an "early preview" of DataUnlocker. And for sure, I started the active development of DataUnlocker, which is not only a kind of engineering masterpiece, but also the trickiest and the most technical project I was ever working on.

My first SaaS project: launched the landing page of dataunlocker.com

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