MakeContact

Picture this: You've cracked the code to index every business contact on the internet for less than the price of a used car. Sounds impossible, right? Well, that's exactly what I thought I'd achieved with MakeContact back in 2016.

The $5000 Moonshot

In the world of enterprise software, where solutions often cost millions to develop, I had stumbled upon what seemed like digital alchemy. Using NodeJS and some rather clever distributed computing techniques, I'd built a system that could crawl, index, and categorize business contact information from across the web at a fraction of the usual cost.

"It's like having an army of virtual assistants working for pennies an hour," I'd explain to anyone who'd listen. The entire infrastructure - from servers to storage - would cost just $5000 to run at scale. In a market where competitors were burning through millions in venture capital, this felt revolutionary.

From PHP to NodeJS: A Tale of Scale

The journey wasn't straightforward. The initial MVP, built in PHP, could only index a modest 30 sites per minute - barely a drop in the ocean of the internet's estimated 300 million active websites. After two months and 29 iterations, we transformed the system into a single-threaded NodeJS script capable of processing 5,000 sites per minute. Running 100 instances simultaneously, we achieved the remarkable feat of indexing half a million sites per minute - all on a shoestring budget.

The technical challenges were immense, particularly managing the tsunami of data flowing into our databases without causing lockouts. Systems can behave rather unpredictably under such intense pressure, but we managed to crack that nut too. Most surprisingly, our accuracy tests showed MakeContact outperforming even Google in contact information retrieval.

Here's how the costs broke down:

When David Meets Goliath

                  pie
title "Why Indie Projects Fail"
    "Marketing Strategy" : 35
    "Competition" : 25
    "Founder Burnout" : 20
    "Technical Issues" : 10
    "Other" : 10
                

The reality check came during a memorable meeting with a California-based VC firm. I'd pitched MakeContact with all the enthusiasm of someone who'd just invented sliced bread. The technical demo was flawless, the cost savings undeniable. Then came the question that would haunt me: "Have you heard of Monday.com?"

Of course I had. They'd just raised another $150 million, bringing their total funding to over $234 million. My $5000 solution suddenly felt like bringing a knife to a nuclear war.

The Confidence Conundrum

Here's the thing about being an indie hacker: technical brilliance alone isn't enough. While I was obsessing over optimization algorithms and crawl efficiency, Monday.com was building a sales army and marketing machine that would eventually lead to a $6.8 billion valuation.

Unfortunately, fate had other plans. A bout of tropical illness landed me in hospital, and the project lost crucial momentum. By the time I recovered, the market had shifted, and I lacked the resources to pivot effectively. The project started gathering dust in my GitHub repository - not because it didn't work, but because the landscape had changed dramatically.

Lessons from the Trenches

Looking back, MakeContact taught me several crucial lessons:

1. Technical Innovation ≠ Market Success

   • Building something incredible doesn't guarantee adoption
   • Market presence often trumps technical superiority

2. The Marketing Blind Spot

   • Engineers often underestimate the importance of marketing
   • A brilliant product without visibility is like a lighthouse in the fog

3. The Scale of Competition

   • The B2B SaaS market is brutally competitive
   • Being cost-effective isn't enough when competitors have millions for marketing

The Silver Lining

While MakeContact never saw its public launch, the project wasn't a failure in the traditional sense. It proved that innovative thinking could dramatically reduce the cost of enterprise-scale solutions. The technical achievements still influence my approach to system design today.

Perhaps the most valuable lesson was this: in the world of indie hacking, knowing when to pivot or shelve a project is just as important as knowing how to build it. Sometimes, the most technically elegant solutions aren't the ones that win in the marketplace - and that's okay.

The contact center software market may be heading toward $149.58 billion by 2030, but the path to capturing even a small slice of that pie requires more than just technical innovation. It requires a perfect storm of timing, marketing, and yes, sometimes a war chest of venture capital.

For now, MakeContact remains a testament to what's technically possible with modern web technologies - and a reminder that in the startup world, the best product doesn't always win.