When you are at your lowest, there's nowhere else to go.

2 months ago, I lost my 7-year-old Software Development Agency, due to a lack of clients, and inability to land new ones.

It was a very stressful period. I ended up in debt, and couldn’t pay salaries, taxes, and bills. None of my projects was bringing any money. That was the lowest period in my career.

But I kept trying.

I’ve built a couple of projects, launched, failed, and tried again. Suddenly I found out indie hackers community.

Thousands of creative people, chasing their dream on the side of their 9-5 jobs. I started to learn from them, got inspired by them, learned about marketing, and SEO hacks, and met makers whose products I was using before.

My latest product, Larafast, started to work. I made almost $7K in a month. Never expected it to grow like that. But it happened. Paid the majority of my debts.

If you want to support my journey or want to build your next startup fast, check Larafast -> https://larafast.com

Been a crazy launch week trying to accommodate for all the traffic on my app. Looking for feedback :)

I am Peter, CEO of AppAlloy. I have built 7 startups in the past 9 years, and the most successful startup is Habitify - a habit tracker started in 2015 (now 2.6M users, $100k MRR).

After the success of Habitify, we believed that we had a strength in mobile app, so we want to dig deeper into this area.

This led us to the decision to build Starion - A nocode app builder. Starion allows non-tech people to build apps easily and intuitively.

How Starion went

We finished feature by feature, fixed bug by bug.

The product was improved significantly after a relatively short period of time.

We released some versions, got some milestones.

However, little did we know, all those milestones led us to a dead end.

What we did wrong

In order to make a project work, we need to consider:

1. Target customers

2. Their pains

3. Our painkillers

But we solely started from our ideas and assumptions without planning thoroughly.

We thought we built for non-tech people, but we ended up bringing Typescript into the product.

We thought our product was simple enough, but some people (including developers) did not know how to start building an app with Starion.

We thought our product was the solution to build apps with nocode, but we could not articulate the problem clearly to begin with.

Our team spent almost 2 years building into the void, without having any source of revenue.

The way out

After a period of no success, I decided to rethink the strategy with my team.

My philosophy “Just build a good product, it will sell itself.” might need a re-consideration.

It’s not wrong, it just needs some changes.

Big time.

AppAlloy came to life.

"A good product is not determined by the builder, but by the user."

With this mindset, we distributed the idea to the market before even building it.

We dived into communities, utilized personal networks, asked non-biased questions.

And we realized:

1. Users really care about convenience

2. Small wins are important, make it happen fast

3. The product experience should be much more simple

So we shorten the flow down to only two steps, based on the core principle of an app: DATA

Now, customers just need to insert the data, we do the rest.

Apps are created without any initial customization.

Users have their fully functional app as a small win, then they can further customize it later on.

The UI is clear and direct, guiding people to certain steps.

Big lessons learned

- One, do not assume.

The market is more diverse than what you know.

Build a product, bring it to the market.

Gather real feedback.

- Two, you succeeded once, doesn’t mean you will the next time.

We tried so hard and were successful with Habitify.

Hard work is crucial, but luck is vital as well.

Succeeding with one startup cannot guarantee your next success at all.

- Three, you failed once, keep trying, cuz your success might be right around the corner.

What we can control is our actions.

What we can’t (fully) control is the outcome.

You are just one action away from your success.

Keep going.

To all entrepreneurs out there, we’re all in this together.

Don’t lose sight of your dreams.

Thanks for reading. Any comment is greatly appreciated.

Hi everyone, I wanted to share my journey building my first web app — even though I’m not a professional developer.

I’m a Mechanical engineer by profession, but I’ve also been writing ebooks and novels (both short stories and longer works) for years. One day, while searching Google for my book title, I found my ebook on two piracy sites, available for free download.

I’m not a famous author making millions, but my books bring in a decent profit for my hobby. What bothered me wasn’t just the potential loss in revenue, but the fact that pirated downloads could hurt my Amazon rankings, which in turn impacts visibility and sales.

I was frustrated, but instead of just moving on, I decided to try something. I had a basic understanding of Python (from a data analysis job, it's my full-time job), plus some HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Using that, I built a simple scraper that checked a few piracy sites and notified me if my books showed up.

The first run found 3 of my books on different sites.

That gave me an idea: if this helped me, it might help other authors too. So, I turned it into a full web app where authors can submit their books, and the app regularly scans known piracy sites and sends alerts on email when it finds matches.

I’ve now added all the planned features, and the site is live. It’s been a big learning experience — not just in coding, but in taking a personal problem and turning it into a usable product.

If you’re curious to check the site, let me know. I don't know if posting the link is allowed in here or not. It's my first post.

Happy to answer questions, get your feedback, or any help in improvement or any help. Thanks.

Hey side hustlers!

I just sold Habits Garden, my first indie startup:

• 1 Twitter DM

• 0 calls

• $10,000

This is my 2nd startup acquisition this year but the story started in March 2022...

I had 200 Twitter followers and barely any income ($700/month from an old startup). I love games, I love habits. I combined both and created Habits Garden: a gamified habit tracker to grow flowers when building habits. In September 2022, the app made less than $200/month despite being my full focus...

Then I met @DanKulkov (who is now my good friend) and the game changed: He helped me bury the product-obsessed developer I was and turned me into an entrepreneur. I launched many free side projects to promote the habit tracker (engineering as marketing). The most viral one is VisualizeHabits.

Three things happened:

1. Habits Garden revenue tripled

2. My Twitter growth tripled too

3. I realized speed is more important than focus (at the beginning)

By January 2023, my Twitter crossed 10,000 followers and Habits Garden was paying the bill (~$800/month). So I decided to build the most requested feature: a mobile app. As a web developer, this is daunting. Apple & Google gatekeepers, 15% revenue cut, new programming language… But I got lucky AF:

@martindonadieu DM-ed me about a new tech called Capacitor. We became friends and.. he flew to my house to help me build the mobile apps. 2 weeks later, Habits Garden was live on the Apple Store & Play Store. I was blown away

Unfortunately, in March 2023, the app wasn’t paying much more than the bills despite working all day on it. I sat down and decided to move on. It was really hard to turn the page after 1 year of focus.

Fast forward to today, I still fix bugs (if any), answer emails, and make sure everything is running well. I don’t add new features and barely tweet about Habits Garden but the revenue is quite steady ($500/month).

@ripper234 reached out by DM, offered to buy at my asking price, and… we closed a deal!

Here’s what I learned from this experience:

1. The people who engage with you in the comments can become your friends and make you a better person. I wouldn’t be here without Dan & Martin.

2. Focusing on a startup without obvious traction is time loss and nerve-breaking.

3. Launching fast creates a shipping muscle and inspires others.

If you want to sell your startup, I wrote a detailed article about it.

Cheers,

Marc

Hey everyone 👋

I’ve been working on CarGPT, an AI-powered car recognition app. You just snap a photo (or upload one), and it instantly tells you the make, model, year, body type, and color.

Key features:

• Works with modern and classic cars

• No account needed, no ads

• Pay-as-you-go credits instead of subscriptions

• Designed for enthusiasts, buyers, and collectors

• Privacy-friendly: images aren’t stored on our servers

Available now on iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cargpt-identify-cars-with-ai/id6749280783

I’d love to hear your thoughts, suggestions, or feature ideas.

Thank you!

Honestly didn't expect this. Was bored a week ago, built a social network for founders, started marketing on Reddit 5 days ago, and we're already past 500 users (soon 600, probably today). Zero ad spend, all word of mouth. Someone submitted it to Hacker News I don't even know. My DMs are flooded with founders saying they've been wanting this for years.

Here's why I built it.

If you actually build things, you already know the problem. Post real work on X, get 50 impressions. Watch some guy with a blue check post "agree?" with a Canva graphic and hit 200k. People are now adding fake "read more..." prompts to their posts just to trick you into clicking so they can farm engagement. The platform is rigged before you start.

LinkedIn went the other way and somehow ended up worse. Corporate fluff, AI thought leadership, fake "I had to lay people off and here's what it taught me" posts, recruiters spamming roles nobody asked for. The people actually doing the work are invisible there.

Strivle is the platform for founders who actually ship.

A public, fair algorithm. Every post starts at 100 random viewers. If they engage, it goes to 1,000. Then 10,000. Same rule for everyone. No paid boost. No celebrity head start. Written on the homepage. Good posts travel.

A leaderboard ranked by verified revenue. Real Stripe MRR pulled live, weighted by growth and churn. The top isn't whoever tweets loudest. It's people running real businesses.

Verified shipping, not claims. Your profile shows real numbers. No more "ex-Google, building stealth" bios with nothing behind them.

Tagged posts that reach the right people. "Advice needed" surfaces to operators who've solved your problem. "Hiring" reaches builders looking. "Customer feedback" pulls in your target users.

Investors and operators already browsing the leaderboard for deal flow. Your verified shipping becomes the pitch deck.

The energy on the platform right now is honestly different. Founders posting their progress every hour, real conversations happening, feature requests coming in faster than I can ship them.

This is for you if you ship more than you tweet. If you're a founder, indie hacker, dev, designer, or operator who actually builds things and wants the work to be seen.

Not for you if you haven't shipped anything in 4 years and your strategy is engagement bait. Stay on LinkedIn.

Still very early. The first few hundred founders here become the names everyone references later. You've watched this happen on every platform that took off. You know what early means.

strivle.com

19, building from Sweden. Let's fix this.

Day 1 of building something cool. I’m shayan, a 14-year-old founder with my team from India.

today’s progress (Day 1):
Today i Found the idea for my app i already have the idea before starting it. I am building an ai chrome extension that lets you customize any website change the style, add functions, even turn chatgpt into a claude ui or switch x home page back to old twitter home page .

i think this will change designing because everyone has different style it will be done in seconds . this has infinite use cases like chatgpt to custom style .adding your own feature .blocking unwanted feature .and more .

i plan to build this idea next week .i have bunch of idea for this .

2 years ago I built my clipboard app OneTap which allows you to copy / paste things like photos, links, files & text phrases.

The first year we generated $50 in total revenue.

Year 2 we generated $1,400 in total revenue.

This year we've already surpassed 10k in revenue.

The best part is, we barely spent any money on Marketing.

The first year or two I thought users would start flowing into OneTap eventually and it would spread like wildfire through word of mouth, which didn't help.

We were gaining about 2-4 new users a day.

So I looked up free ways to market your app and I continued to stumble across App Store Search Optimization. I did a deep dive into the topic and spent hours learning best practices.

In November of year 2 I spent hours improving OneTaps ASO, launched a new update to push my ASO changes and within two weeks I was already seeing results.

OneTap went from generating 2-4 new users a day to 6-12. Then we got feature on a decently size Youtube channel in December which drove up our keyword rankings.

(The more keywords you rank up on the higher the chances of people seeing your app when they search for those specific keywords).

By the end of January we added 2k new users and generated over $1,000 in one month which was close to the total revenue generated in year 2.

I continued to improve our ASO over the next month or two. We got featured on other Youtube channels during this time as well.

Keep in mind I haven't spent a dime for these features...

Fast forward to where we are today and App Store Search + Browse drive in over 90% of our new User base each month. OneTap is averaging about 1,400 - 1,800 new user and generating over $1,500 a month.

The best part is gaining these users + the revenue being generated is completely, free thanks to App Store Search Optimization.

The moral of the story is this, if you want your app to grow don't focus on paying Creators to feature your app.

Get your Name, Subtitle, App Description, App Store Preview Screens, Keywords in order first and make sure you've implemented a way to encourage users to review your app. Reviews help your ASO the most, the more positive reviews you get the faster you'll rank up.

This is free marketing people, yes it's boring af, but you will see results within two weeks if you're doing it right.

Feel free to reach out to me with any questions about App Store Search Optimization happy to help.

You can view my app OneTap here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/onetap-ios-keyboard/id1639795583

This is another reminder to validate your ideas before diving hardcore coding for weeks, just to later realize nobody wants what you built (#my_first_product)

The idea came (act surprise) from solving my own pain; every time i needed to make a github repo work, i’d spend like 30 mins in back-and-forth with Cursor (bless Cursor, before it i’d waste hours).
so i automated it using a teacher-student approach. showed it to some friends, they liked it (first validation, but yeah, poorly biased).
then i spent a few hours building a fake mvp page and shared it around.

106 people signed up in less than 20 hours, and i wasn’t even being aggressive
super exciting, and such a different vibe than my first project, where i coded for weeks and ended up with like 7 users after exhausting myself trying to promote it

if any of you devs want to check it out 👉 https://www.repowrap.com/

I built a Photoshop replacement for myself

I spent two weeks building Photon, and it’s now replaced Photoshop entirely for me. I canceled my Adobe subscription.

I wanted Photoshop’s editing power with a much better interface and experience. Something that felt familiar enough to open and start working, with the tools and shortcuts I already knew. and most importantly - I didn't want to pay adobe.

Here’s what’s in Photon:

• Layers and nondestructive editing: groups, masks, clipping masks, adjustment layers, smart objects, and layer effects.

• Photo editing and retouching: curves, levels, healing brushes, clone stamp, content-aware fill, and Liquify.

• Design tools: editable text, vector shapes, Pen paths, brushes, and gradients.

• Local subject selection and background removal: processing happens on your computer.

• PSD support: open and edit Photoshop documents, and save as PSD. Photon flags compatibility limitations before saving.

• Familiar Photoshop shortcuts, plus searchable commands so you can find a tool without digging through menus.

• Offline editing - the app is 100% offline.

BTW I published it for free here, I thought about charging money for it but it took me only 2 weeks to build so decided to just publish it.

Hello everyone,
My name is Abdulrahman. I'm a software developer from Gaza, Palestine, a father of two, and the sole provider for my mother. I have more than 8 years of experience in Python, and I spent over 3 years training students and managing a charitable project, Qubit Coding Center.

Then the war began, and it taught me what responsibility really means. Through displacement I moved between many places and tents. I tried to leave the country but couldn't. In April of this year, I lost my business to the bombing, and I returned to my first field, programming.

I founded a startup called "Fasil", which applies solid, well-established methods of dialogue and reasoning to how AI systems think. I've built two products so far:

- Sijal: an inferential decision engine for organizations
- Saql: a debate analysis engine

Both work today, but only as early-stage products. Because of the lack of support in our region, they're currently on hold. I try to push them forward from time to time, but the weight of life and debt keeps defeating every attempt.

My debts now exceed $20,000. I faced jail time because of them, and I was forced to sell everything I owned. I've reached the point where I struggle to find food for my children.

I hesitated a long time before writing this, because I've always found a way to earn money myself. But right now, I feel I can't keep going on my own.

I'm not asking for success at this moment. I only want to clear the path toward it. What I need is help, direct or indirect, to pay off my debts, even if that means giving up one of my apps. If any of you can help me set up a GoFundMe (or a similar platform) and tell my story in a way that reaches people who can help, I would be deeply grateful.
I apologize for the long post, and thank you all from my heart.

I saw so many people create launch videos, dropping more than 5 figures.

so I wanted to try build one myself with:
- a free editing tool (capcut)
- my dad's old camcorder from 2006 that hasn't been touched in 14 years
- and for some creative aspect, I used the iconic start of one of my favourite movies

thoughts on it?

Not a typical TIFU, but here we go.

I decided to quit my full-time job, to go full into my projects. My side projects, Directify and Larafast, have been my secret obsession for months. Late nights, weekends, every spare moment I could find—I've been pouring my heart into these products.

Today, I made the call. No more full-time jobs.

Six months of runway. That's my safety net. Six months to turn these passion projects into something real. No more juggling a day job and my dreams. This is it.

Some might call it risky. I call it finally listening to that voice inside that's been screaming "GO FOR IT" for way too long.

Directify. Larafast. They're more than just side projects now. They're my entire world.

Wish me luck, Reddit. 🚀

Edit: Holy crap, this blew up. Thanks for the support, kind strangers!

Crossed 13k this month and my whole stack is basically free. heres how

SWE here, bootstrapped, allergic to paying for stuff i can get free. crossed 13k this month and my monthly tooling bill is almost nothing. heres how the free/cheap stack actually holds up.

the foundation:

-Neon Postgres : generous free tier, never hit the ceiling

-Vercel : free hobby tier carried me way longer than i expected tbh

-Velobase : my framework, fully open-source and MIT, $0. this is the big one. instead of renting a 300/mo boilerplate or stiching together a bunch of saas tools, it ships with server-side ad attribution and a double-entry affiliate ledger built in.

-Fly.io : free allowances cover the backend no problem

-Resend : free up to 3k emails/mo, plenty early on

-Mixpanel startup program : FREE and so powerful, apply

-Revenue Cat : only "cost" is their cut once you actually gain traction (2k plus), which is the good kind of cost imo

-Fastlane: got a couple free tiktok accounts for distribution

-Articuler AI: free plan; got me initial 100 customers.

the whole thing runs for basically the price of a domain until you're genuinely scaling. anyway hope that helps someone.

6 weeks ago I launched a side project. Today it has 10,000 active users, 250+ products listed, 50+ independent creators, revenue coming in, and I quit my business development job to go full-time on it.

The project is Agensi a marketplace for AI agent skills. If you use AI coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor, or GitHub Copilot, you can install SKILL.md files that make your agent better at specific tasks. Code review, testing, documentation, DevOps, git automation. Think of it like an app store but for AI agent capabilities.

I'm not a developer. I built the entire thing with Lovable and Claude. Here's what happened.

Week 1: The idea that almost didn't happen

I was using Claude Code daily for work and kept searching GitHub for SKILL.md files to make it better at code reviews. The experience was terrible. Random repos, broken YAML, no way to know if a skill was safe to install. I found one that looked like it had prompt injection buried in the instructions.

I mentioned this to a friend and he said "sounds like there should be an app store for that." I spent the weekend building a v1 with Lovable. It was ugly but it worked. Listed 15 skills I built myself. Showed it to a few people in Discord. Three of them uploaded their own skills within 24 hours.

Week 2-3: The SEO play that changed everything

I had a working marketplace but zero traffic. I almost spent money on ads. Instead, I decided to try something different: I treated every product page as a landing page and started writing articles targeting specific search queries.

Not generic "what is AI" content. Specific questions like "where are Claude skills stored" and "how to install skills in Codex CLI." I found these queries by checking Google Search Console for what terms were already showing impressions.

I wrote 30 articles in two weeks. Claude did the keyword research by analyzing my GSC data, finding gaps, and identifying queries where I had high impressions but no dedicated content. Every article followed a structure: Quick Answer block at the top (40-60 words), H2 headings phrased as questions, FAQ schema, internal links to related articles.

By the end of week 3, I had 50+ page-1 Google rankings. Traffic started compounding.

Week 4: The AEO moment

Something unexpected happened. I checked Google Analytics and saw traffic from chatgpt.com, gemini.google.com, and perplexity.ai. AI engines were citing my site when developers asked where to find SKILL.md skills.

I didn't optimize for this intentionally at first. But the article structure I was using (Quick Answer blocks, question-format H2s, FAQ schema) was exactly what AI engines prefer to extract and cite. So I doubled down. Added Organization + Person schema for entity anchoring. Created an llms.txt file. Made sure robots.txt allowed all AI crawlers.

Today: 350+ AI-referred sessions per month from 9 different AI engines including ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and even Doubao (ByteDance's AI). This channel is growing faster than organic search.

Week 5: First revenue and the "oh shit" moment

A creator uploaded a premium skill with reference files, scripts, and an OWASP checklist. Priced it at $10. Someone bought it within 48 hours. Then two more sales. Then an MCP subscription ($9/month for live agent-native access to the full catalog).

The numbers were small but the model worked. Creators upload skills, set their own price, keep 80% of every sale through Stripe Connect. The marketplace takes 20%. Every skill goes through an 8-point automated security scan before it goes live.

I did the math. If I could get to 1,000 skills and maintain the current growth trajectory, the marketplace commission alone would cover my salary. The MCP subscription added predictable MRR on top.

Handed in my notice on Monday, had my last day on Friday.

Week 6: The current numbers

• 10,000+ monthly active users

• 250+ skills from 50+ creators

• 150 articles across 12 topic clusters

• 350K Google impressions/month

• 1,000+ organic clicks/week

• 850+ page-1 rankings

• 350+ AI-referred sessions/month from 9 AI engines

• 39 paid transactions, 4 MCP subscribers

• $0 spent on ads. Ever.

Where this is going

The marketplace is step one. The bigger vision is becoming the trust and distribution layer for AI agent capabilities, not just skills, but any capability an agent needs to do its job better.

Right now SKILL.md is the standard. Tomorrow it might be tool configs, MCP integrations, workflow templates, or something that doesn't exist yet. The format will evolve. What won't change is that agents need capabilities, those capabilities need to be trusted, and creators need a way to distribute them.

We already have the MCP server live, your agent connects to Agensi and searches, evaluates, and loads skills on demand without downloading anything. That's the first version of what an agent-native marketplace looks like. By 2027, both sides of the marketplace run through MCP. Creators publish through their agent. Buyers discover and install through theirs. The web UI becomes optional.

The endgame: when any AI agent anywhere needs a new capability, Agensi is where it looks first. Curated, scanned, accountable. The trust layer the ecosystem doesn't have yet.

What I'd tell you if you're building a side project

Don't build for 6 months in stealth. I launched an ugly v1 in a weekend and got real users within days. Their feedback shaped everything that came after. The product I have now looks nothing like that first weekend build.

SEO is the most underrated growth channel for side projects. Everyone chases Product Hunt launches and Twitter threads. Those give you a spike that dies in 48 hours. Every article I wrote 6 weeks ago still drives traffic today. Content compounds. Ads don't.

Use your side project's data, not your intuition, to decide what to build next. I don't guess which articles to write or which features to build. I look at GSC data, GA4 data, and skill request submissions. The users tell you what they want if you set up the right feedback loops.

The "should I quit my job" question answers itself. I didn't quit because I felt confident. I quit because the growth curve made it irrational not to. When your side project is growing 50% week-over-week with zero paid acquisition, the opportunity cost of staying employed is higher than the risk of going full-time.

AEO is the cheat code nobody is talking about. If your side project's content is structured for AI engines (Quick Answer blocks, FAQ schema, entity anchoring), you get a distribution channel that literally didn't exist 18 months ago. 350 sessions/month from AI citations and I've barely started optimizing for it.

The site is agensi.io. Happy to answer questions about the build, the growth strategy, the tech stack (Lovable + Claude + Supabase + Netlify + Stripe), or the decision to go full-time. Also open to feedback on the product itself, that's why I'm posting here.

If you're a developer who builds SKILL.md skills or .cursorrules files, you can publish them on Agensi and start getting users (and revenue) from day one. And if you need a skill that doesn't exist yet, drop it on the skill request board creators get notified and build to real demand.

Also, please make an account it helps me more than you can imagine!

1 month ago, I built a directory of an exclusive list of the best Mac apps and tools, curated and maintained by real people. This directory helps you to find the Mac apps based on your preferences and use cases.

The directory has gained traction through Twitter and I got my first 4 customers, then I promoted it on some Reddit communities and the sales increased and I reached the milestone of $380 total revenue plus some affiliate commissions.

Just want to sell because I have many projects and work to focus on. I write articles, build framer templates, and work on other side-projects too. That's why I don't have time to manage this.

Tech stack: Nextjs, Supabase ( for database )

Traffic: 7k visitors in the last 30 days

I would appreciate any feedback on my directory

It started as a tool to help me find jobs and cut down on the countless hours each week I spent filling out applications. Pretty quickly friends and coworkers were asking if they could use it as well so I got some help and made it available to more people.

Our goal is to level the playing field between employers and applicants. We don’t flood them with applications (that would cost us too much money anyway) instead we target roles that match skills and experience that people already have.

In previous posts I highlighted our ability to auto apply to jobs. However, our users are also noticing we’re able to find a ton of remote jobs for them that they can’t find anywhere else. So you don’t even need to use auto apply (people have varying opinions about it) to find jobs you want to apply to. As an additional bonus we also added a job match score, optimizing for the likelihood a user will get an interview.

It’s as simple as uploading your resume and our AI agent does the rest. Plus it’s free to use.

SimpleApply.ai

Hello, It's crazy how leveraging AI tools can make you money.

I solved a very simple problem over the weekends, client had couple of websites that needed auto indexing of pages in google search console when blogs/pages are added on websites.

I used lovable platform along with supabase integration to store the data. It just cost me $100 for the lovable platform rest everything was build for free of cost along with netlify hosting on custom domain.

It's crazy how if you can explain your problem better to such AI tools you can easily build small, simple solutions that generates insane ROI to the client.

The project had google search console API integration done without writing single line of code all by just explaining what I wanted to build.

Im a software engineer so I could explain the technical requirements better, though it needed back and forth iteration for fixing some of the issues. Testing was the key part, I had to keep testing the functionality to make sure there is no bug introduced with each new feature addition.

Client loved the web app and was impressed with that it could do.

Key lessons: • Leveraging AI to solve problems can take you to new heights you never imagined. Get better at explaining to AI and watch the magic happen.

I almost didn't launch it.

It felt too simple. A free AI tool that solved one small specific problem connected to my main paid product. Two screens. Input on the left, results on the right. Took 6 days to build using a boilerplate and GPT-3.5 with a detailed prompt.

I figured maybe 50-100 people would use it. Mostly developers curious about the implementation.

Week 1 after launch: 1,400 signups.
Week 2: another 1,600.
3,000 total in 14 days. Zero ad spend.

Here's exactly what happened and why:

Day 1: Product Hunt.
Spent the month before launch building a list of founders willing to support the launch in exchange for me supporting theirs. Hit top 5 on launch day. Got featured in 2 AI newsletters automatically as a result of the Product Hunt placement. Those newsletter features drove the first 400 signups.

Day 2-3: AI directories.
Submitted to every legitimate AI directory simultaneously on launch day. Not the 75% of directories with zero link strength the specific ones with real traffic. Within 48 hours the tool was indexed on thereisanaiforthat.com and 3 other high-traffic directories.

Day 4: Reddit.
One post in a relevant subreddit. Personal story format. Described the problem the tool solved, shared that I'd built it over a weekend, linked to it naturally in the middle of the post. 847 upvotes. 340 signups from that single post.

Day 5 onwards: influencer discovery.
This part I didn't engineer it happened because of the Product Hunt and directory presence. Two Instagram creators with combined audiences of 180,000 found the tool through thereisanaiforthat.com and featured it in their content without me asking. Those two posts drove another 800 signups over the following week.

The full side project marketing playbook Dan Kulkov's framework, Marc Lou's approach, Sveta Bay's distribution sequence, and how to combine all three for maximum reach is inside foundertoolkit. That's where I learned the sequencing that made this launch work.

The one detail that made the biggest difference: I didn't gate the results behind an email. People could use the tool completely freely. That frictionless experience is what made it shareable. On the results screen I offered a valuable resource that required an email to download. That's where the 3,000 signups actually came from.

Of those 3,000 free tool signups: 340 clicked through to my paid product page. 87 signed up for the paid product trial. 34 converted to paying customers in the first month.

34 paying customers from a free tool I built in 6 days.

The side project didn't just get signups. It became my most efficient acquisition channel for the main product and it keeps sending traffic 6 months later without me touching it.

What's stopping you from building a free tool this weekend?

Hi, everyone ! I've been working on this for a few months and I still can't tell if it's a good idea or a stupid one 😅

It's a big cube, 21x21x21, so 9261 small cubes in it. You buy one of them, it's yours forever, and you can put your name, a message, a picture or a voice note on it. Each cube is sold once and that's it, no resale.

The weird part is you can't just buy whatever you want. There are 9 layers and layer 2 only opens once all 2402 cubes of layer 1 are sold. So you have to wait for a bunch of strangers to finish the outside before anyone can go deeper. Each layer going in costs double and unlocks one new thing (image, then voice, then a link, a glow color, and so on). In the middle there's one big cube, sold once.

To move around you just zoom. Pushing the camera in dissolves the layer in front of you so you can see the one behind it.

No account, no login, nothing to sign up for.

I'm not trying to sell anything here. I just want to know if this sounds interesting to anyone, or if the whole "wait for other people" thing is just annoying. And if there's an obvious problem I'm missing, please tell me. I can give some gift cubes for who's want to try, just ask me !

Thanks

This is Desktop Pet, a macOS app I built because I kept missing my dog while working at my desk.

It started as a small thing just for myself. Then a friend saw it and asked me to make one of his cat, who had crossed the rainbow bridge last year. Watching him smile at a little animated version of the cat he lost is what made me finish this properly.

How it works:

- Upload 1 to 3 photos of your cat or dog

- You get a free 3-view concept to confirm the look before anything is made

- A few hours later, your pet lives on your desktop with smooth, looping animations: wandering around, greeting you with a little head tilt, dozing off when you're focused

- It stays quiet, never bounces around begging for attention, and never blocks your clicks

- You can also tell your pet to remind you to take a break. When time's up, it taps your screen with its little paw

If you don't have pet photos handy, there are free preset companions (a ragdoll, a golden retriever, a maine coon and more) so you can try it immediately.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/cn/app/desktop-pet-custom-companion/id6792518134?l=en-GB&mt=12

I'd genuinely love your feedback, especially: what does YOUR pet do that I should turn into an animation? And if you'd like to try it and share your honest experience, here or anywhere else, DM me a photo of your pet. The first few custom pets are on me.