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Dev.to
Dev.to
5/11/2026
6 years building Planning Poker Online: from a weekend project to 147K users (and 3 mistakes I had to fix)

6 years building Planning Poker Online: from a weekend project to 147K users (and 3 mistakes I had to fix)

Short summary

Indie developer scaled Planning Poker Online from a weekend Firebase project to 147K monthly users through organic growth, smart SEO domain strategy, and game-like UX design. Key learnings: domain naming has long-term brand tradeoffs; beautiful simplicity beats boring tools; founder-as-user drives retention.

  • Weekend Firebase project scaled to 147K monthly users through organic growth and SEO-first domain strategy
  • Game-like design and extreme simplicity (2-click signup) outperformed traditional spreadsheet-style tools
  • Being an active user of own product and avoiding email friction drove retention and feature prioritization

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.

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