I'm almost 56 and getting close to retiring from a career I'm proud of. I caught the IT wave in the late 80s and early 90s, and I've watched a lot of change since: the internet boom, Y2K, and plenty more. Along the way I've done consulting, engineering, and the last 20 years in front-line sales. My wife and I raised two daughters through all of it.

This AI wave gives me the same feeling I had almost 40 years ago. It's exciting.

Is it true that almost anyone can build things now? Probably, and I think that's a good thing. But standing up an LLC, two app store developer accounts, the cloud infrastructure, trademarks, and the legal side, all in about 90 days, would never have happened for me without AI.

If someone wants to call that slop, that's ok. I'd rather spend my energy appreciating other people's wins. If you're building something right now, good for you. Keep going.

Peace out.

Solo project, built nights and weekends: CLSTR reads ~100k news articles a day from 40k+ sources in 40 languages, figures out which ones cover the same event, and squashes them into one item. Related events get chained into "situations" with dated timelines, so you can follow how a story developed over weeks instead of re-reading the same headline 20 times.

The new thing since my last post here is the world map: Each country is colored by how many events with coverage in the last three hours are about the country or affect it in some way. It refreshes every ten minutes and every hour gets a permanent link, so a screenshot's moment can be revisited.

Right now: 2,526 events across 158 countries - check it out in clstr.news/world

And the numbers, now at 164 days and 11,079,667 articles:

• 12:1 is the ratio for articles written per thing that actually happened. This ratio has remained more or less the same as on the first analysis I made.

• 4 in 10 events never get a second day of coverage.

• One world leader shows up in ~84 new events every single day, more than the next five most-covered people combined.

• Only 0.08% of events rate as "exceptional" according to an LLM judge. The mundane middle is where most of the news lives.

• Biggest single event so far: 1,540 different sources covering one story.

All the charts, stats and methodology: clstr.news/observatory

If you build things, you can access the data behind this through a free API and an MCP server. More info in clstr.news/developers

Would love to know what you guys think, or answer any questions you may have about the project! This started as a hobby project for me and grew into something a lot bigger and more serious than I ever expected, put significant work into it and it's costing a decent amount to keep running (but it feels worth it while I can sustain it).

In February, my main client ran out of money, so I decided to start my solo side project.

I started building yaps.ai as a local super tool that gives you all the local AI tooling you need in a single monthly/annual subscription with no setup costs. I took a bet that local AI tooling in specialised cases would be able to handle things like dictation, etc... as well as SOTA models, with near-zero latency, while keeping your data private. Turns out it's true! In May I got the MVP out on Android and since then I've expanded to Mac (Intel and Silicon), Windows, Linux and most recently iPhone and iPads.

It's been incredible for me as a founder because so many of the tools are useful to me personally! Yaps AI has since expanded to so many tools, e.g. the best cross platform dictation tool, meeting notes, markdown vault, captioning for videos, transcription, translation for localisation, image generation, etc. There's a ton of improvements to make and bugs to fix, but I'm loving it.

Hopefully, Yaps continues to gives people the benefits of local AI tools while:

• Keeping data private

• Working fully offline

• Giving affordable, predictable costs (monthly/annual sub post trial)

• Keeps quality more predictable since you run the models locally

• Improve speed since theres no server round trips

• Saves money since it's all in a single tool

• Removing all the need for setup costs and maintenance issues

So far the earnings have been:

May 2026 - $40 🌱
June 2026 - $550 📈
July 2026 - $150 📉
August 2026 - $6.5k 🤩

Doesn't come close to my consulting/contract earnings yet but it's a good start!

Happy to share anything I've learnt! Feel free to ask me anything.

I know that is crazy because most people ship a product after like 2 claude code prompts but this took serious time and effort.

Obviously it is not perfect but I’m super excited to launch a real product people can actually use.

Here it is:

LYKN is an AI native desktop that gives you access to 260 models+. You can build custom software, generate images, videos, 3d models, music. You can connect to 1500+ tools and use LYKN to run your entire computer.

The idea behind LYKN was to design a useful and intuitive ai interface that ANYONE could use with no technical setup but to still provide insane value with high quality models and agentic systems.

The entire project was designed for people who simply want a better workspace and to reimagine the desktop experience.

I would love to see what people think about the problems something like this could solve, the ideal customer this could target and how I can improve this.

Easy billing hundreds of models you can orchestrate. And yes LYKN has an insane agentic harness. You can do anything and everything. Pretty nuts. People have already started downloading it and there's been some pretty cool things built just in the last 24 hrs.

Anyway lmk what you think of it. It’s free to download so no worries just give it a shot and see what you think.

lykn.io

Hey everyone.

I've had bad posture my whole life, so I built a posture coach that works through AirPods.

Quick backstory. My posture has been bad since school. I tried a better chair, a standing desk, reminders on a timer. Nothing stuck, because none of it knew when I was actually slouching. It just nagged on a schedule.

Then I found out AirPods Pro, AirPods 3/4 and AirPods Max have motion sensors, and apps can read head orientation from them. I spent the last few months turning that into Pillar.

What it does

• You sit up once and it learns your upright position. From then on it watches your head. When it drops forward and stays there, you get a quiet cue in your ear. Straighten up and it stops.

• It's also a Pomodoro timer. Focus block, break, repeat, and every block gets a posture score.

• Insights: your weekly trend, your best hour and your worst one.

• Live Activity on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island, plus widgets.

• Keeps working with the phone locked in your pocket.

I tried to make it fit how you sit, not an average person. Your own angles, your own cue sound, how fast it nudges, quiet hours, session length, daily goal. Pretty much everything is adjustable.

Posture data stays on your phone.

If you want to try it, here's the App Store link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pillar-posture-reminder/id6809597345

Needs iOS 17+ and AirPods Pro, AirPods 3/4 or AirPods Max.

I'd love feedback from people who sit a lot. I read every comment. And if you find a bug, DM me and I'll send you a lifetime code.

I started building apps while studying at university. No team, no funding, no connections in tech.

8 months later I've crossed $20k in revenue. It's not "quit your job" money yet, but for a student working alone, it feels surreal to type that out.

One thing that made a massive difference was time management. Balancing uni, building, and everything else can get messy fast, so I had to be intentional about how I planned my time, tracked what I was working on, and actually followed through. I ended up using my own app, Proseed, to manage everything — tasks, ideas, and progress — which helped me stay consistent even on the days where motivation wasn’t there.

Here's the honest breakdown of what moved the needle:

→ Solving a problem I personally had (not what I thought people wanted)

→ Charging from day one — free users give you zero signal

→ Organic social content before paid ads (carousels > random posts)

→ Shipping fast and iterating based on actual user feedback, not assumptions

→ Treating the App Store listing like a landing page (most devs ignore this)

The hardest part wasn't the code. It was convincing myself to keep going through the weeks where nothing seemed to work.

Happy to answer any questions — about the tech stack, monetisation, growth, whatever. Ask away.

I'm a software developer, and a big part of my work involves writing and managing documentation. In one of my previous projects, users asked for better editing features, and that feedback stuck with me. After doing a lot of research, I decided to start building this project.

My first goal was to create something that could go beyond Typora in the areas I care about most: performance, UI, and overall editing experience.

Long term, I want to keep improving it until it becomes a serious alternative to tools like Obsidian.

I'd genuinely love feedback on the UI, usability, and editing flow.

I'm planning to officially launch it next week.

I've grown my sass to $20,000 in revenue. (proof)

honestly i think i could've saved myself months of going down the wrong paths if i understood this before i started.

1. validate your idea before you start building. i got lucky that the problem was one i had myself.

2. don't chase investors. focus on getting users instead and the rest sorts itself out. bootstrapped is completely fine.

3. talk to your users constantly. it's the fastest way to know what's working and where basically all my good ideas came from.

4. inspiration is the design key when you're new. don't build your landing page from scratch, copy sections from tools you love and make them your own.

5. post online daily. reddit, x, linkedin, tiktok, whatever suits your audience. for me it's mostly reddit since that's where my users are.

6. solve your own problem and let that decide if you're b2b or b2c. i built leadradar because i was the one wasting an hour a day digging through reddit.

7. i'm bootstrapped and highly recommend it. keep the 9-5 until you've got 1-2 years of runway (living cheap), then go all in.

8. you earn the right to paid ads by getting organic to work first. i'm still 100% organic. you'll burn thousands just learning how ads work.

9. define your most important metrics and track them. they should be the pillars that guide every decision.

10. offer some sort of free trial at the start. controversial maybe, but the feedback and testimonials i got from it were worth way more than the "lost" revenue.

11. the first few minutes of your app are a promise: this will help you hit your goal. put a lot of effort into the beginning to convert more people.

12. have an mvp mindset with everything. ship the minimal version asap, then use feedback to improve it.

13. just because someone else has done it doesn't mean you can't compete. you have no idea how well they're actually executing.

14. discipline over motivation. no one's holding a solo founder accountable, so build systems that force consistency.

15. if you're not passionate about what you're building, the early months with no results will break you.

16. good testimonials increase the perceived value of your product. collect them relentlessly.

17. marketing is constant experimentation to learn what works. speed it up by drawing on what works for similar products.

18. getting your first paying customers is the hardest part by far. do things that don't scale to get them.

19. building a good product comes down to obsessing over what your users actually want.

20. track where people drop off. i pipe everything into posthog and let it (plus claude) show me exactly where i'm losing users.

the hardest part is the start, but knowing these things really helps get through it. keep pushing, keep working hard, and stay disciplined and consistent.

I’m a CS student building apps on the side.

Just hit 18,000+ users on one of them. Here’s what actually worked.

What didn’t matter

• Perfect code

• Fancy features

• Polishing UI for weeks

None of that got users.

What did work

1. Speed over perfection
   Shipped fast. If something took too long, I simplified it or used tools.

2. Tools = time back
   Used tools like Proseed to organise ideas, plan content, and stay consistent.
   Let me focus on getting users.

3. Marketing > building
   Spent more time on:

• short form content

• testing hooks

• iterating

Not adding random features.

4. Clear, simple idea
If people don’t get it in 3 seconds, they scroll.

5. Volume wins
Most things flop.
Post more, test more, double down on what works.

Takeaway

It’s not about being the best dev.

It’s about:

• moving fast

• focusing on distribution

• removing friction

If you’re building something:

Stop perfecting.
Start getting users.

Happy to answer questions 👍

Started this because I kept seeing the same misconception everywhere: people think a will keeps their family out of probate court. It doesn't — a will is actually what sends your estate through probate. A trust is the thing that avoids it, and almost nobody explains the difference clearly, or walks through the part that actually matters (funding the trust — retitling assets into it — which is the step most people skip and then wonder why it didn't work).

So I put together two guides:

• The Family Trust & Probate Protection Guide (30 pages) — how revocable trusts work, the funding checklist by asset type, Medicaid look-back rules, 10 case studies (blended family, business owner, rental investor, special needs beneficiary, etc.), a digital assets/crypto chapter, and worksheets for guardian planning and trust funding

• The Beneficiary & Account Protection Checklist (18 pages) — because retirement accounts, life insurance, and POD/TOD accounts don't follow your will or your trust — they follow a separate beneficiary form that overrides both, and most people haven't touched theirs since they opened the account

Both are written in plain English, no legal jargon, and both are upfront about where a real attorney is actually worth the money (Medicaid trusts, blended families, business succession) vs. where you can reasonably do it yourself.

Selling it as a bundle on Gumroad — link in comments/profile so this doesn't read as a drive-by ad.

Genuinely curious what this community thinks of the format — is 48 pages across two guides the right depth for something like this, or does a niche like estate planning actually do better as a shorter, punchier single doc? Open to feedback either way.

This is just so incredible... I honestly never thought this was possible for me. But I did the thing...

I JUST STARTED!

I put together a working MVP. Just the bare minimum functionality. Bought a domain and put it out there. I posted about it here on Reddit and got in contact with the people who commented and started using it.

I followed a simple concept that just came to me naturally:

• put out what you have

• post about it

• listen to feedback in the comments

• implement the feedback and adapt quickly

• start the loop over again

And after some time your product becomes so good that it no longer sounds absurd to charge money for some features.

Anyways... I'm super grateful that this is working out so well and I really think I've built a community that is actually useful to many people.

About the product:

I've built IndieAppCircle, a platform where small app developers can upload their apps and other people can give them feedback in exchange for credits. I grew it by posting about it here on Reddit. It didn't explode or something but I managed to get some slow but steady growth.

For those of you who never heard about IndieAppCircle, it works like this:

• You can earn credits by testing indie apps (fun + you help other makers)

• You can use credits to get your own app tested by real people

• No fake accounts -> all testers are real users

• Test more apps -> earn more credits -> your app will rank higher -> you get more visibility and more testers/users

Since many people suggested it to me in the comments, I have also created a community for IndieAppCircle: r/IndieAppCircle (you can ask questions or just post relevant stuff there).

Currently, there are 2726 users, 2192 tests done and 609 apps uploaded!

You can check it out here (it's totally free): https://www.indieappcircle.com/

I'm glad for any feedback/suggestions/roasts in the comments.

After 6 years of research, failed approaches and countless iterations, I finally have my quantitative trading system running live.

The project started because I wanted to find out whether a systematic approach could remove as much human decision-making as possible from my trading.

Most of the work wasn’t finding one magical strategy. It was building the infrastructure around it: collecting and cleaning market data, backtesting ideas without look-ahead bias, validating them out-of-sample, automating execution, and implementing risk management.

One of my biggest lessons: a great backtest means surprisingly little. I’ve thrown away plenty of systems that others have mentioned and had to question everything I’ve read on the internet about quantum ideas, signals etc and had to build my own model from scratch instead (markets are indeed very efficient). Most ideas you find out there are just black box magic - never ever trust on these over fitting charts of a random YouTube ads where a guy showed his machine learning model. Most machine learning / black box quants are full of bs.

The current version now runs automatically with real capital. The screenshot shows its live performance so far. It’s still early, so a few weeks obviously don’t prove long-term profitability but the backtests are SO promising that I can’t ignore it anymore, especially as they don’t fall for overfitting.

I can’t share the actual signals/parameters because that’s the core IP, but I’m happy to answer questions about the development process, backtesting, infrastructure, deployment or mistakes I made along the way.

Insurers are legally required to publish their negotiated rates with hospitals (Transparency in Coverage Act), but they bury it in massive, nearly impossible to access files.

So I scraped 100TB+ of this data and built a AI chat-based tool that makes it searchable:

• Estimate costs for medical procedures, visits, labs, imaging before you go

• Find cheaper providers nearby and see exactly how much you'd save

• Check if they're in-network and see reviews

The price gaps are insane. Same MRI can be $400 at one place and $2,800 ten minutes away. Insurers hope you won't shop around.

Try it out: https://momentarylab.com/healthcare-navigator

Got to 10K users through SEO and the product is still rough around the edges, but would love feedback on what would make it more useful! Happy to chat about what worked well for us regarding distribution :)

Already posted on r/SideProject - posting here after making fixes from the feedback I received

My roommates and I have been building apps on the side for a bit over a year (we’re all engineers/product managers in our day jobs). After a few apps that flopped, we finally have something that’s working.

Our app, Tote, helps people save and organize online content, like Screenshots, TikToks, and Instagram reels of restaurants, bars, recipes, articles, clothing, products…really anything. We use AI to search for what’s in the post and structure the data in an easy-to-use way. We turn messy saves into searchable lists, maps, and collections. Tote is $30/year (there’s no monthly subscription).

I got the idea because I moved to a new city and I kept taking screenshots of different bars that I saw on TikTok/Reels and then making lists in Apple Notes at the end of each day. 

Here’s what actually worked for us:

1. Start with a paid product. Our past apps were all free, and we were able to get some users but we never found enough traction to monetize the product. There’s a limit to organic growth and we didn’t want to burn money on ads that had no chance of paying back. This time, once we had positive retention signal from our friends and family, we launched a paid product with ads on the app store and focused on the conversion and retention there. If it didn’t work, we could easily say this idea didn’t have product market fit and move on to the next one….but it did.

2. Iterate toward ‘negative CAC.’ Organic growth is amazing, but running meta ads is a much more predictable way to grow. The holy grail is if your acquisition cost for an annual subscriber is less than the subscription revenue, recouping your marketing costs immediately. Start by running some ads and meticulously look through every user’s journey to improve the funnel. On a daily basis, we’d go through the screens and situations that had the most drop off to improve them. We even changed our freemium model a few times before we found something that was working. What worked for us is allowing users to save things, but not show them all of the details unless they are subscribed. This part is not easy, but it’s worth working toward.

3. Ask Claude for user play by plays. Watching people sign up and get started with your app is obviously really helpful. Now, you can ask Claude to go through on the logs on a customer-by-customer basis and put a play-by-play together. We did this for our early customers (anonymized) and then had Claude write stories of where people were getting tripped up and dropped off. You can also do the same thing to understand retention and churn. Big companies have teams of people to help facilitate bringing users in and watching them use them, now you can do it with Claude and PostHog.

We still have a looooooooong way to go, but we finally have some traction and I wanted to share some lessons back with this group, since I’ve been lurking for a while. Happy to answer any questions and also happy to get roasted if you want

EDIT:

Website: https://tote.fyi

App Store link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tote-save-organize-anything/id6757465631

It's been a little over six months since I launched and it has been quite a journey. No exponential growth or huge user spikes but rather slow and steady growth. But in my opinion that is the best for building something actually valuable because you can react to user feedback along the way and constantly keep improving the app.

It's so crazy, just three weeks ago I was celebrating 1,500 users here and now I have hit that unreal number of 2,000! I can't thank everyone enough. I really mean it, so many people were offering their help along the way.

Of course I will not stop here and I am already working on the next big update for the platform which will benefit all the community. More is coming soon.

I've built IndieAppCircle, a platform where small app developers can upload their apps and other people can give them feedback in exchange for credits. I grew it by posting about it here on Reddit. It didn't explode or something but I managed to get some slow but steady growth.

For those of you who never heard about IndieAppCircle, it works like this:

• You can earn credits by testing indie apps (fun + you help other makers)

• You can use credits to get your own app tested by real people

• No fake accounts -> all testers are real users

• Test more apps -> earn more credits -> your app will rank higher -> you get more visibility and more testers/users

Since many people suggested it to me in the comments, I have also created a community for IndieAppCircle: r/IndieAppCircle (you can ask questions or just post relevant stuff there).

Currently, there are 2008 users, 1469 tests done and 477 apps uploaded!

You can check it out here (it's totally free): https://www.indieappcircle.com/

I'm glad for any feedback/suggestions/roasts in the comments.

It’s called spelunkr.

24 channels (so far) of forgotten videos organized into themed "cable tv channels" that play on a synced schedule 'round the clock.

The entire collection so far is about 2,700 hours of video, running around the clock. You tune in and land in the middle of whatever is on, at the same moment as everyone else watching, the way TV used to work.

Codebase is about 87,000 lines, made up of 24,000 of app code, 13,000 of CSS, 28,000 of tooling scripts, 16,000 of tests and 5,000 of SQL. 670 commits over 8 months, and we run over 850 unit tests and 160 browser tests. It's been a real passion project for me, really my first idea of what to build with Claude and has just been growing slowly as I've had time to work on it.

I've been plugging away at this off and on for the past 8 months, about 30 days of "total" work across that time, nearly all of it done with Claude Code. Here's how it works under the hood:

All videos on the website are streamed directly from the Internet Archive. The player is a plain HTML <video> element pointed at the Archive’s own file. No iframe, no proxy, no re-encoding, no copy. Spelunkr itself serves the page (about 110 KB of JavaScript, gzipped), small JSON schedules, and about 200 public domain or CC BY or BY-SA music tracks for the breaks. Every title links to the tape’s own page at the Archive.

There are station "bump" breaks between videos as an homage to the classic Adult Swim bumps.

Channels are built from Archive search audits to see if the IA has enough content to support a full length channel. Some channels are classed as "REWIND" and usually are 2 to 6 hour long VHS rips of actual live cable TV from someone's VCR in 1993. There's also classic movie channels dedicated to horror, monster flicks, detective noir capers, and western flicks. I even found every episode of The Joy of Painting and gave it CH 12: HAPPY TREES.

Claude checks all the tapes to make sure they're legit, then formulates the descriptions, facts, and schedule for me to approve. Each channel has its own branding, a 32×32 pixel logo drawn from eight color tokens, its own station-break voice and its own music pool.

A channel orders its tapes one of three ways: by year (8 channels), shuffled (12), or block rotation (4). Block rotation is a few episodes of one show, then the next show, round and round.

A channel is a published list of tapes with a start time.

“What is on now” is arithmetic: walk the schedule from its start to the present. The same code runs in the browser, the publishing tool and the tests, in whole milliseconds, so every machine gets the identical spot on every channel's schedule across the globe.

The math also accounts for the bump breaks, which get re-picked on every pass through the lineup. The browser measures its clock against the server’s once (the HTTP Date header) and corrects it only when it is more than 2 seconds off. A new lineup is published at least two minutes ahead and takes over at the end of a break. Open tabs hear of it over a websocket and switch without a reload.

Some key features built in:

• Limited DVR: Pause, skip back 15 seconds, or scrub within the tape that is on. The player shows how far behind live you are, and LIVE snaps back. (While paused you fall further behind each second)

• In-line timestamped comments and reactions: A comment is stored against the tape (its Archive identifier) and a second within it, not against a channel or an air date. It comes back at that second every time the tape airs, on any channel that carries it. I've linked up a discord to help moderate potential comments (there are none yet lol). Signing in to comment also joins you to the Discord. Reactions work the same way and require no account or Discord. Its a free for all. A reaction from someone within 10 seconds of your playhead floats up over your picture as it happens.

• Comments are permanent pins on the timeline and pop up over the picture as the playhead crosses them. I like to think of it as pop-up video cable graffiti.

Future plans:

• Marathon blocks

• GeoCities-accurate homepages for every channel with guest books and webrings.

• 90's chatroom skinned live chats from the discord server for every station.

• Machine-generated live synced English subtitles for foreign stations (big interest in vintage Japanese Game Show channels)

• Clipping for users and a leaderboard to browse and share clipped moments from live TV.

• More channels: I'm currently building a "horror hosts" B-movie channel for Halloween. Think Elvira and many other public access hosts from bygone eras showing terrible creature features.

  • I've also got infomercials, game shows, paranormal TV, and probably another 50 channels worth of stockpiled ideas ready to build!

LYKN.io

This is a personal intelligence system that you can build out yourself for free. You connect it to AI tools and the AI learns you. I hate having to repeat myself in chats or losing context when switching tools so I spent over 1000 hours building a constant memory layer. You can go in and try building out your own. It's pretty fun and makes AI WAY more accurate and useful.

There is real AI slop. There is also a growing habit of calling anything AI-assisted “slop” without doing the harder work of evaluating it.

Those are not the same thing.

If somebody ships a broken one-prompt app with fake buttons, no error handling, no tests and zero understanding of the code, roast it. It deserves it.

But if somebody uses agents to scaffold, refactor, inspect, test and iterate while they are still making the architecture decisions, reviewing the output and validating the system, what exactly is the objection? That fewer keystrokes were typed by hand?

That is not a quality metric.

Software quality is correctness, reliability, security, maintainability, usability and whether the system actually solves the problem. Authorship method is relevant only insofar as it affects those things.

I think some of the anger is really about a collapsing status signal. Knowing syntax and being able to manually assemble an application used to be a larger moat. Now the leverage is moving toward judgment: knowing what to build, how to decompose it, what can fail, what needs testing, where the model is lying, and when the generated solution is architecturally stupid.

Experienced developers should have an advantage in that world, not a disadvantage — if they use the tools.

The part I reject is the idea that doing something manually is inherently more legitimate because it was harder.

Nobody is owed technological scarcity.

Use AI badly and you can produce garbage at incredible speed. Use it well and a strong engineer can cover a ridiculous amount of ground.

So criticize the output. Demand proof. But “AI = slop” is starting to sound less like engineering judgment and more like nostalgia for the old bottleneck.

A little over 4 months ago I sat in my cramped apartment and pushed the first line of code for https://www.megaviral.games

I was using an older laptop a stack I actually know: Python, Django, and vanilla JS/CSS. No fancy frameworks, just some basic programming that I was familiar with.

The Struggle: I fell for the classic dev trap: "If you build it, they will come." I pushed the code to the site and... nothing. Total silence. I started asking my friends and family to try it, but I could tell they were getting annoyed. There’s nothing worse than that "pity look" your friends give you when you’re asking for feedback for the 10th time on like the 10th different project I’ve worked on. I felt like a failure.

The Pivot: I stopped bothering my inner circle and started sharing on indie game dev subreddits. That’s when it clicked. I realized that indie game devs are incredible at building games, but they usually have no idea how to promote or market them. Their work just sits on a server somewhere, waiting for an audience that never finds it.

Suddenly, that 1 user who wasn't my friend or family turned into 2, then 3, then 10! Watching the analytics show people I didn't know actually interacting with the site was such a great feeling that was so foreign to me.

I realized I didn't just want to build a "game site".. I wanted to build a discovery engine that pulls the best games from across the entire internet and puts them in front of the right people.

How it actually works:

• For Players: It’s a discovery engine for games. It pulls web games from all over the internet Reddit, itch.io, indie portals..and shows them to you one by one. No doom-scrolling through lists.

• The "Taste" Engine: As you play and "Like" games, the algorithm builds a profile. It starts showing you games that people with similar tastes enjoyed.

• For Developers: It solves the "Post-Reddit Slump." It keep game developers games discoverable long after the initial upvotes fade by matching it with the right players based on gameplay feel, not just "newness."

The Reality Check: Yesterday, the numbers finally got serious:

• 30,000 + real users.

• 600+ games listed.

I was so happy when I saw the first user who wasn't my brother or my roommate. I’m so tired, and I feel like this laptop could go any day now. But seeing strangers actually find and play hidden games on something I built makes it worth it.

If you’re a solo dev grinding in a crappy apartment: Keep pushing. Find one subreddit where you think your project would be valuable, share it on that subreddit, then go from there. Your friends might not get it, but the right audience should be out there.

https://www.megaviral.games

I run a 2D-to-3D tool called FormFromLight, and I noticed that some users were creating multiple accounts to repeatedly claim the free credits.

Instead of simply blocking them, I added a small anti-abuse system: if we detect that someone is creating additional accounts, those accounts start with 0 free tokens. The exception is users signing up with a verified company email, since legitimate teams may naturally have multiple accounts.

Curious how other SaaS founders handle free-tier abuse without making onboarding too restrictive

Solo project, built during nights and weekends: CLSTR reads 100k+ news articles a day from 40k+ sources, figures out which ones are covering the same event, and squashes them into one item. Related events get chained into "situations" - storylines with timelines, so you can see how a story developed over weeks instead of re-reading the same headline 20 times.

After 138 days, I asked Claude to analyze all the data I had ingested and published the stats. The news looks weird from above:

• 12:1 - articles written per thing that actually happened. The news is mostly echo.

• 82% of stories are still developing after day 3 - which is exactly when news sites stop showing them to you.

• One world leader appeared in 2,672 distinct events in 31 days (guess who) - more than the next five most-covered people combined.

• Only 0.06% of events rate as genuinely exceptional. Almost everything is the mundane middle.

All the charts: clstr.news/observatory

About CLSTR: There's a free API, and if you use Claude or agent stuff there's an MCP server you can try without even signing up: clstr.news/developers

A few days ago I had a dumb idea: what if snow on the Mac desktop didn't just
fall, but actually piled up on your windows? Desktop snow apps have existed
since the 2000s, but they're flat 2D sprites that only touch the active window.
I wanted the real thing.

So I built Snowfall for Mac:
- Snow piles up on every window, the menu bar and the Dock
- Drag a window and its snow slides off and lands on whatever is below
- Close a window and the whole pile drops

How it works, for the curious:
- A transparent click-through overlay sits above everything
- The app tracks window positions and z-order every frame, so snow only lands
on top edges that are actually exposed
- Snow is rendered in 3D with RealityKit, and piles are real meshes that grow
and collapse

Timeline: idea to working app, landing page and Paddle checkout in about 24 hours.

First day numbers, since this sub likes honesty:
- ~120 visitors from a few small communities
- 2 paid sales at $2.99
- 2 free licenses redeemed from a giveaway

Tiny, but it told me what I wanted to know: people will pay for something
completely useless if it looks good enough.

I'd love feedback on two things:

1. Would you pay $2.99 for this, or is it a "cool, but no" for you?

2. Any edge case you'd try to break it with? (multiple monitors, Spaces,
   full-screen apps...)

Link in the comments.

"I got fed up of [insert same 5 reasons] so I build habit / health / sleep / finance tracker / Note app"

It's like every other post and they all do exactly the same thing - there's enough already.

Honestly, I think it's an intentional spam assault just to flood this subs.

And those building with AI. You got the wealth of stolen human knowledge in the form of a half baked chat bot.

Use your imagination! build something that doesn't exist! build something weird or interesting because you can now.

We do not need any more trackers or note takers.

It's got a SIM7600 with usb audio card, and I run a local python server that interacts with it. I can now have an AI order me pizza or call every mechanic/electrical/plumbing/pool/etc. company in town to get multiple competing quotes. It cost about $150 to make + $7/month for phone service and 30+ hours of programming (but it will save me much more time than that!)