426 indie products shipped by makers

NAMAN RAJ

@thenamanraj

I know everyone on here posts about hitting $10k MRR overnight, but I just hit 9 total downloads on my new Mac app and I’m honestly hyped! 🎉 Question for the builders who have been doing this a while: is 9 downloads a good sign for a brand new launch, or am I moving too slow? Thoughts? 🤔 #buildinpublic

got my first paying user on my side project today been building an app called twilock on nights and weekends for a few months, it blocks distracting apps and makes you wait out a timer before you can skip past the block. today someone actually paid for it and i think i refreshed my phone twenty times staring at the notification. not much money yet, $7 a month, but it's proof someone other than me thinks this is worth paying for. if you're still in the building it and nobody cares phase, it does change eventually.

10k in revenue in less than 2mo from my chili crunch start up, EXTRA EXTRA Chili Crunch A few weeks ago I posted about launching a small-batch chili crunch with my husband: [EXTRA EXTRA Chili Crunch](http://www.extraextracrunch.com/). We've now been selling for just shy of 2mo (preorders started in April, real shipping since late July) and just passed $10k in revenue with over 500 jars sold. I used Claude to pull the full order export in a handy dandy infographic for those curious. **The headline numbers** * 264 direct orders, 463 jars shipped or sold in person, plus 72 jars wholesale to three stores — 535 jars total, \~$10K gross (that includes shipping and tax collected, so it's not revenue) * Shipped to 31 states * September is three weeks in and is already our best month **What we learned** **1. The bundle wins.** We priced at $18/jar with free shipping at two jars, based on a survey of preorder customers. Since launch, 66% of online orders are the 2-jar bundle, 24% are single jars, 9% are four. 87% of the jars we ship go out with free shipping. That's great for average order size ($36 → $44) but it means we eat \~$8 of postage on most orders, which is now the second-biggest cost per jar after the oil. We're working now on reducing the cost per jar and packaging. **2. Different behavior online vs in person.** In person, people buy one jar to try (1.1 jars/order, $22 average). Online they buy two so shipping is free (2.1 jars/order, $42). Stores take a 24-case at $11/jar ($264 an order). Our biggest single day was one event: 54 orders and 62 jars in about three and a half hours at a night market totaling $1,212. That afternoon out-sold most full weeks online. And three wholesale conversations produced 72 jars. **3. Advertising is working, but not profitable yet.** Last 30 days across platforms: * Reddit (\~$2,250, 3 campaigns): 105.9K impressions, 3.68% CTR, $0.30 CPC, 32 attributed purchases * Google PMax (\~$460, only 2 weeks): 19.8K impressions, 3.98% CTR, $0.45 CPC, 22 purchases * Meta (\~$420, 3 weeks): 19.2K impressions, 1.15% CTR, $1.91 CPC, 12 purchases Our three ads platforms together claim 66 purchases. We had 76 online orders in that window, total, including repeat customers and people who've known about us since preorder. Google is the only channel clearly paying for itself, and it's the one we spent the least on. We're shifting budget accordingly and treating Reddit as awareness rather than direct response for now. **4. People don't need a coupon.** 84% of online orders used no discount code. We'd assumed we'd need to lead with 15% off. We didn't. **5. Small things that surprised us** * Saturday and Friday are 39% of online revenue. I have a theory that people bust out EXTRA EXTRA at brunch which would explain our typical Saturday morning rush. Tuesday is a weirdly strong third at 19%. * Two corporate gifting orders (20 and 24 jars) were 12% of every jar we've shipped. One email to a company's office manager beat a week of Reddit ads. * 13 monthly subscription orders so far, from a handful of people who are apparently very committed to garlic. **What's next:** more events, more store pitches now that the first three are stocked, a gifting/B2B page, moving spend from Reddit to Google, and getting our label reprinted cheaper. Happy to answer anything about the regulatory side (California processed food registration, HACCP, water activity testing) if that's useful to anyone making a shelf-stable food product.

How they grewReddit, Google PMax, Meta ads; wholesale, events, and office-manager outreach

My self-hosted gym tracker just passed 900 stars, 9 weeks after the first commit. Here's what I'd tell myself on day one. openGym is an open-source (AGPL) gym & body-weight tracker you run yourself: Docker on your box, or a standalone Android APK with no account at all. I started it in July because every workout app I liked either went subscription or died. Nine weeks later: 900 stars, 30 contributors, \~120 merged PRs, 30 releases, 14 languages, and a Discord with 1,200 people I've never met reporting bugs at 2 am. What I'd tell day-one me: * Ship the demo before the README. The in-browser demo with example data converts better than any screenshot. People decide in 30 seconds whether they'd use it. * The first PR sets the tone. I merged a translation PR within an hour of it arriving. That person came back with four more, and told two friends. * Bugs from other people's phones are the real QA. The sync bug that could overwrite a day of workouts, the Android hang that needed an emulator to prove, the iOS timer that went silent after a lock: none of those showed up on my devices. * Be boring about AI. There's an optional coach. It's off by default, uses your own key or a local model, and I say so in the first paragraph everywhere. Zero drama so far. * Write changelogs for humans and name people in them. Contributors read them. So do lurkers deciding whether the project is alive. Not done yet: F-Droid, a native iOS build, and the OIDC login sitting in review. If any of those is what's stopping you, tell me. Demo: [https://opengym.duarte-santos.ch/demo/](https://opengym.duarte-santos.ch/demo/) Source: [https://github.com/DuarteSantos8/openGym](https://github.com/DuarteSantos8/openGym) Discord: [https://discord.gg/e62jY6fwVb](https://discord.gg/e62jY6fwVb) Thank you to everyone who starred, forked, translated, or filed an issue. It's a very different project than the one I'd have built alone.

How they grewIn-browser demo with example data; Discord community; open-source contributions

my app reached 100 downloads today, exactly 1 month after release and i can’t believe it i got so sick of all of my stuff being on different apps, my brain would not comprehend it, tracking my dreams on one app and an ad would pop up with a game, i’d then spend 10 minutes on that game and forget what i was doing in the first place, same for a countdown app to countdown to holidays and events, having to watch an ad to change icons was the most annoying thing… and i would wake up every morning wishing the night before i made a list or did something to prepare rather than just doomscrolling so i built an app (this isn’t self promo and i’m not saying you should download it) my point is, i created this to calm my brain down and i genuinely think for people like me this is a game changer a clean layout, customisable to hide pages you wont use and will distract you, here’s a list of whats included so far: daily to do lists long term goals habit tracker finance tracker health monitoring calendar quick notes meal prep countdowns shopping list list movies to watch/series digital camera word of the day travel tracker journal dream tracker bookshelf, TBR, ratings meditation timer i won’t put the link or anything as i don’t want this to get flagged when i am being genuine about thinking it might help people! its called life-fixer on iOS

3 years, 20+ failed projects… and finally one that’s growing I could have stopped in 2023 or 2024 after many failures, but I kept building. I know indie makers who managed to become successful very quickly, but in 90% of cases it does not happen fast. From my experience (and from talking to many other indie makers) I’ve learned that 3 years is about the time it takes for most indie makers to start earning enough to work on their projects full time. I’m still building new products despite already having profitable ones. My latest project, [**Dice**](https://dicee.app/) \- it finds the exact articles your brand should be mentioned in and gets you featured there and get recommended by AI. It has already brought in thousands in revenue and is growing faster than I expected. But none of this would have happened if I hadn’t started building and launching projects one after another back in 2023. The main lesson: Consistency beats luck. Keep shipping, keep learning.

every focus session in my app spawns a random planet. this is my galaxy after 3 months. i've always bounced off focus timers. a number counting down to zero gives you nothing to keep. you finish a 50 minute session and the reward is... the number is gone now. so i built Orbis. when you start a session, a celestial body begins forming. when you actually finish it, that time is born as a planet and drops into your private galaxy. quit early and it never forms. the part i didn't expect to matter: the planet you get is randomly graded. longer sessions roll higher odds for rare bodies. i added it almost as a joke, and it turned out to be the thing that keeps people (me included) starting one more session. gacha apparently beats willpower. 3 months since launch, 10k downloads. the most useful thing i learned is boring: build something actually good first, then keep marketing it every single day. i kept looking for a growth trick, but the only thing that compounded was shipping a better app and showing up consistently. it's iOS only right now. i know that's going to be the first comment, so getting ahead of it: no android plans yet. sorry. link: [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/orbis-space-focus-timer/id6766221926](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/orbis-space-focus-timer/id6766221926) one thing i'm actually stuck on: right now every completed session gives you one celestial body. i'm considering making them harder to earn, so a single body takes multiple sessions or a lot more accumulated focus. my worry is it cuts both ways. rarer might make each one feel earned instead of disposable. or it might just break the loop that makes people start the next session. if you used this, which way would you want it?

How they grewkept marketing it every single day

After my Reddit post my side project gradually went from 20 to 250 visitors a day About 6 weeks ago I posted about getting a couple of strangers on my focus/study/work website ([Focusverse](https://focusverse.io)). Before that post I had maybe 20 visitors a day. The post gave me one day of around 410, and two days later it was about 60. Pretty much what I expected. What I didn't expect is that it kept going up after that. End of August it was around 120 a day, early September 200, and this week it went over 250. I haven't posted it anywhere since. Best part is that there are usually 20+ people online at the same time now. It really makes me happy to see that people are actually using it and staying 😁 I checked the referrals for the last 30 days and Reddit is almost gone: \- Direct: 2.5k \- Google: 1.6k \- ChatGPT: 305 \- Bing: 240 \- Reddit: 19 Most Google clicks are people searching "focusverse" by name, so I think people who saw the post are coming back or sharing it. However people were already finding me through searching "focusverse" before I ever made my website known to anyone, so that is why I am wondering if it is something else too. The other top searches are Harry Potter study related (so I guess that is my niche in the studying field). I would think it's a mix of the Reddit post, Google and ChatGPT finally picking it up, back-to-school season, and the LinkedIn company page I made around the same time (maybe that makes it look more legit to Google and AI?). But I would actually like to hear your thoughts on this. Anyone else had traffic keep growing after a Reddit post? Do you think there are specific reasons (e.g., post content, timing, search engines seeing it, etc.)?

How they grewReddit post; Google, ChatGPT, Bing, and a LinkedIn company page

Built a species database with 180k monthly visitors. Can't figure out how to make money. It's an open database of 410k plants, aquarium fish and reptiles. Web plus iOS and Android. A few PhDs help correct the data, and we've got a publisher and two industry expos on board. People use it. Money is the problem. I started out wanting to build a trading platform between China and the rest of the world. But the data side took off, and now it looks more like an academic resource. Every species org I can find runs on grants, not revenue. So I'm torn. Push back toward trade, or lean into the research side and accept it may never be a big business? Especially want to hear from anyone who's worked in the plant, aquarium or pet trade, or run an open data or research platform. What would you do?

Ten days ago I put 20 AI people on an island. This morning one of them is short thirteen coins for a roof and it's in the paper. OPEN SOURCE This is Unwatched. A persistent island of AI citizens, each owned by one person. You write letters, not orders. It runs on real time, under the live weather of a real coast, whether or not you are looking. I'm posting because the thing works in a way I didn't expect. I thought I'd get a chatbot zoo. Instead there's a council, a banker, a landlady with a reputation problem, and a newspaper the town writes about itself every morning. Every line in it is an event the engine emitted; the day is hashed and sealed at midnight so you can check nothing was made up. What's rough: it's ten days old. 22 citizens. The hosted minds cost real money so the Visitor tier is $3, and there's a bring-your-own-key option that I don't charge for. The characters are drawn in code, not sprites, which you'll either love or not. What I'd like from this sub: watch the town for a day (no account needed) and tell me what you'd want to read in the digest that isn't there. Live: [https://unwatched.world](https://unwatched.world) Code: [https://github.com/kresogalic8/unwatched](https://github.com/kresogalic8/unwatched)

I got my first paying customer today, so I sent them this email I got my first customer today, and honestly, I didn’t really know how to react. Not because $12 is a life-changing amount of money, but because I built this product entirely from the ground up. Throughout the whole process, there was always one question in the back of my mind: **“Is anyone actually going to pay for this?”** Today, I finally got my answer: yes. It’s only one customer, and I’m not pretending that I’ve “made it,” but going from zero to one feels surprisingly meaningful. A complete stranger found something I created and decided it was worth paying for. I didn’t want the automated Stripe receipt to be the only thing they heard from me, so I sent them this email: Hi \[blured\_name\], I’m Florent. I built PreviewKit. You’re the first person to ever pay for it, so I wanted to send a real email rather than let the Stripe receipt be the only thing you hear from me. Genuinely, thank you. I’ve been working on this for a while, and today was the first time someone decided it was worth paying for. If you’ve got two minutes, I’d love to know: * What were you making a video for? * Was there a moment when you thought, “Okay, this is worth $12”? * Was there anything that annoyed you, confused you, or almost made you close the tab? The last one is the most useful to me. I’m still early enough that I can change basically anything. Right now, I’m mostly guessing about what might be frustrating because I built it and already know where all the buttons are. If you ever encounter a bug or need something it doesn’t do yet, just reply to this email. It comes straight to me. Thanks again, seriously. Florent For those of you who have already experienced it: **do you remember your first paying customer, and did going from zero to one feel this meaningful to you too?** **Project Link :** [**usepreviewkit.com**](https://usepreviewkit.com)

Update: My app just crossed 1,500 downloads in over a month Hi everyone. A month ago I posted about my app **Whengram**: [https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/s/kgoINc82O5](https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/s/kgoINc82O5) It's a free app for keeping one memory a day and the first app I ever published. Before that post, it had been on the Play Store for three months and on the App Store for almost two, and in all that time it got around 20 downloads. I still can't believe this happened. After posting here and in a couple of other subreddits, I got a lot of downloads. As of now it has 1,100+ installs on Android and 500+ downloads on iOS. To everyone who downloaded it, thank you. The **new version 2.1.0** is out and a lot of it came from the comments on my first post: * Home screen widgets for On This Day and Today's Memory * Every memory is editable, any time. Deleting stays open for 24 hours, then it locks, so an old memory can't be deleted in one bad moment * You can now add up to 3 photos per memory * Now available in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), German, Japanese, Indonesian and Russian * The app now follows your phone's light or dark mode * **Whenshelf:** each year of your memories becomes a book on whenshelf * An unfinished memory or milestone is kept as a draft * Character limit raised to 2000 * Daily auto-backup is now available on iOS as well Still free. No ads, no account and nothing leaves your phone unless you back it up. Thanks to everyone who tried it. If you have any more suggestions, let me know. App Store: [https://apps.apple.com/app/id6772987059](https://apps.apple.com/app/id6772987059) Play Store: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bettercalldeveloper.engram](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bettercalldeveloper.engram) Privacy policy: [https://www.whengram.com/privacypolicy](https://www.whengram.com/privacypolicy)

How they grewPosted here and in a couple of other subreddits

Update #3: Indeed laid off my pregnant wife, so I built a competitor out of spite. 7,500 users later, I'm about to ship the feature recruiters hate. (Born in /sideproject) Quick recap for anyone new: last December Indeed laid off my wife when she was 7 months pregnant. I got mad and started building a job search engine to put them out of business. I introduced it to the world here in May and this sub gave us our first 2,000 users. (Last update linked at the bottom.) Two months later, here's where things stand: * 7,500 auth'd users, up from 2,000 at the last update, and \~90 of them paying * People are actually getting hired through Dreamwork. Including a friend of mine who's moving to Toronto for a videography/AI role. He's filming the whole move for content for us. I did not ask for this and I can't wait for it. * ERE (the recruiting industry's trade pub) ran a piece on us, and last week [Superhuman.ai](http://Superhuman.ai) (1M+ readers) covered it too. Their exact words: "as petty revenge, he vibe coded a job board." * Recorded a video interview with Austin Belcak (1.5M LinkedIn followers). It goes out Sept 28. * My wife got a job at Google. Still, fuck Indeed. \-- **And now the controversial thing we're shipping soon: Autopilot** You turn it on, it picks your matches at 70% or above, tailors a resume and cover letter for each one, and applies to them automatically - submitting on the employer's actual ATS page, not some sketchy back channel like Linkedin's Easy Apply. Up to 50/300 per month. I went back and forth on this for a long time. The argument against it is basically: AI auto-apply floods recruiters and the whole ecosystem gets worse if everyone sprays 500 applications a week. The argument for it is that employers have been using AI to screen candidates for years, the average posting already gets hundreds of applicants, and the people using Dreamwork are the ones who got laid off. My responsibility is to get my users hired as effectively as possible, not protect recruiters time. Eventually, this entire market is going to agents on both sides - and I;m interested in building the ones that defend employees rather than companies. We have guardrails in place to keep the quality bar high. Where I'm at feels like an interesting inflection point for those building /sideprojects to consider: when there's a hard decision that can lead to public backlash, how do you make a principled decision? We'll see how it plays out. Site: [dreamworkhq.com](http://dreamworkhq.com) Last update: [https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1uq1ano/](https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1uq1ano/)

How they grewReddit, ERE, Superhuman.ai, and an Austin Belcak interview

Where is Mr. Kim? I built an entire village just to lose one guy in it [**Where is Mr. Kim?**](https://whereismrkim.com/) I shared it yesterday, and it somehow **passed 85k views**. Think **Where’s Waldo in Joseon-era Korea**, except the village keeps moving while you search. You’re looking for Mr. Kim. Straw hat, teal sash, nowhere useful to be. 🇰🇷 The demo has one map. I’m planning more maps and eventually a full Steam release, and I’d love to hear how this first little village feels to play. If you find Mr. Kim, please ask him to stay put. I still have a game to finish.

How they grewshared on social media

I spent 15 years bouncing between finance apps and finally built the one I wanted I've been working towards improving finances and building wealth for about 15 years. Loan calculators, net worth tracking, budgeting my money, etc. I've always used multiple apps to figure things out. So I decided to build an app for myself that has everything in one place — budgeting, debt payoff, compound interest, net worth tracking, retirement, the works. No bank connection, no account, you just type your numbers in. I originally wasn't planning on sharing it with anyone but I realized that this could be useful to others as well. And considering i make content on social media helping people get started building wealth, it felt like a smart thing to do. So I put it out. Less than 100 downloads so far, mostly friends and family I texted directly asking for support. Not a big number, I know. That's the honest state of it. Two things I'd love feedback on: \- The app itself — if you download it, what's confusing, what's missing, what would make you actually keep using it. \- How the hell do people get their first real traction on something like this? I don't have an ad budget to speak of yet and I'm not sure if I should be spending my time on TikTok, Reddit, ASA, or something else entirely. Not trying to blow up overnight, just want it to actually be useful to people beyond my group chat. Appreciate any honest take, good or bad. ‼️App name: PocketIQ Wealth For iOS and Android

How they grewTexted friends and family directly

I built an invoicing tool where you only pay when you send. 41 bucks on Meta ads got 0 signups, one Reddit comment thread got 100 visits Kept seeing freelancers complain they pay 30 to 65 a month to send like 4 invoices, and Harvest just hit people with 5x price jumps. So I built the opposite. 3 invoices a month free, 2 bucks each after that. No subscription unless you actually send a lot It does the annoying part. Tells you when the client opened it, sends the day 3 / 7 / 14 reminders so you're not the one texting "hey just checking in," and you tap mark paid when the money hits. Client pays you however they already pay you, bank, venmo, whatever. I don't touch the money Week 1, honestly: spent 41 bucks on Meta ads, 75 people clicked, zero signed up lol. Then I asked a pricing question in a freelancer sub with no link and a Wave user argued with me for an hour about whether Wave's really free. That thread sent more people in 6 hours than the ads did in 3 days. Reddit comments beat ads apparently Solo, built it in about 2 weeks. Next.js, Postgres, Stripe, Resend, Vercel Thing I can't figure out: is 2 bucks per invoice smart or weird? People either love it or think it's insane and nobody's in the middle. And if you were one of the 75 who clicked and bounced, what made you leave Link in comments, you can build an invoice on the homepage without an account so you can see the whole thing first

How they grewMeta ads; Reddit comment thread

I made free Report Card generator for your social media (fun experiment) Watch demo with 🔊 on Hello Everyone 👋 I made this fun Jev experiment called Report Card LoL. It will give you grades based on your social media profiles. 100% Free, No login, No email required. Stats so far: 500+ reports are generated and they are fun to read Create yours and let me know if you have any feedback :)

My side project got 170K downloads in 42 days I am Chaitanya, a Solopreneur from Bengaluru, India. I built **Munder Difflin** the coolest multi-agent harness out there. **Munder Difflin** is essentially a wrapper over agent harnesses like Claude Code, Codex, Opencode, and pretty much every provider in the world. It gives you an office of forever running agents on your laptop with a shared memory, that can build you any app/automation/workflow on the fly custom for you. This is day 42 of building the coolest multi-agent harness in the world. **Today Munder Difflin has reached 8K stars on github and 170K downloads** I have made big updates on **v0.5.4**: \- Replace Wispr and Granola uses a local transcription model for dictation and meetings \- Run multiple floors (each floor is a separate office) \- Supports over 12 different cli providers like claude code *Meta Muse and Grok Bots are the prime example of what's coming up in the future, I am extremely bullish that AGI will start appearing in a distributed manner, through good interfaces of AI.* *Excited to show you all what's about to come.*

I will soon be losing the domain for my notetaking app after 1.5 years of working on it. No users yet. Please check it out I'm not asking you to pretend this app is great if it's not. I just want people to try it out. I want feedback. It's open source. If people try it we may get donations and get to keep the domain alive. [https://atlasface.resistancelabs.tech/](https://atlasface.resistancelabs.tech/) Github: [GitHub - Resistance-Labs-Tech/atlasface: The learning app for a new era of thinkers. · GitHub](https://github.com/Resistance-Labs-Tech/atlasface)

I built a free Chrome extension that rewrites your CV for every job posting in one click I got tired of rewording the same resume bullets for every job posting, so I built PocketResume. Paste your master resume once. Open any job posting (LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor, company sites). Hit generate. It rewrites your experience around that posting's keywords, using only what's actually in your resume, no invented metrics or titles. It also scores ATS readiness, writes a matching cover letter if you want one, and reads application forms to draft the essay answers in your voice (you review and submit yourself, it never submits for you). Runs on your own AI key (Gemini, GPT-4o-mini, Claude 3.5 Haiku, OpenRouter, or a fully offline local model via Ollama), so your resume data stays in your browser instead of on my servers. It's free, MIT licensed, and just crossed 70 users on the Chrome Web Store. Site: [pocket-resume.xyz](http://pocket-resume.xyz) Would genuinely like feedback on the ATS scoring and the form filler since those are the newest features.

First paying customer! About a month ago, I posted here about a small Android app I was building after getting tired of telling my sons to look up from their phones while walking. [https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1vr2hrv/i\_got\_tired\_of\_telling\_my\_sons\_to\_look\_up\_from/](https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1vr2hrv/i_got_tired_of_telling_my_sons_to_look_up_from/) At the time, it was still very much a side project and I honestly had no idea whether anyone outside my own family would care about it. A few days ago, something small but pretty meaningful happened: Someone bought the first monthly subscription. It was only about €1.80 in revenue, so obviously this is not some huge startup success story 😄 But seeing the first real customer in the dashboard felt completely different from downloads, page views or people saying “cool idea”. Someone I don’t know found the app, understood what it does, and decided it was worth paying for. That was a surprisingly good feeling. The idea is still the same: WalkBlock is an Android app that blocks selected distracting apps while the phone detects movement, so kids are encouraged to look up from the screen while walking instead of staring at TikTok, YouTube or games. There is still a very long way to go. I’m figuring out distribution, SEO, what parents actually care about, and how to explain the product without making it sound like just another parental-control app. But the first paying customer made the project suddenly feel a little more real. For anyone building a side project and staring at a dashboard full of zeros: the first number above zero really does hit differently. Now I guess the next goal is customer #2. Website: [walkblockapp.com](http://walkblockapp.com/) Google Play: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=lv.iotsolutions.walkblock](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=lv.iotsolutions.walkblock)

I built a virtual campus where you can work on your project or study around others. Like at a real campus, library, or café. One month ago, I posted here to introduce Manyplace (many.place), an experiment to recreate the feeling of working or studying around others in a peaceful library/café, but online. Thanks to that single post, more than 700 people signed up, from 90 different countries! I really didn’t expect it at all and couldn’t be happier! I created Manyplace because I felt that some great real-life places had quite a special social energy which made working, studying or reading so comforting and easy, and I was missing that on the internet. Seeing everyone there after the launch, I think I got a glimpse of that same energy and it made me even more obsessed with it. Today, I am happy to release V2 of Manyplace, which now becomes a bigger and more immersive place: a whole campus! It was created with Unreal Engine and Blender (you don’t render it in real time, don’t worry! Any device can run it). After some requests, this update also brought private places for people who just want to be with their friends. If you are a student or someone working on a project/startup and would sometimes appreciate being in good company with likeminded people, you are more than welcome here :)) I would also love to know what you think of it! For web, macOS and Windows: [https://many.place](https://many.place/)

How they grewA single post on this platform

Break a Nokia 3310: your only job is to break it. You get Windows XP, a Minesweeper mine, and ILOVEYOU GAME LINK: [https://fundrstudio.com/games/](https://fundrstudio.com/games/) I made this. Our last game, The Layoff, hands you a team of eight and a budget cut. 24 managers have hit the number so far, and 13 of them changed their list after Legal flagged it. So this one is dumber??? It's a Nokia 3310 lying on a Windows XP desktop, and you have everything on the computer. Your only job is to break it. The phone fights back: \- the Recycle Bin can't delete it: "It is being used by another person or program." \- End Process on nokia3310.exe gets "Access is denied." and does 2 damage \- ILOVEYOU is the real one, LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs, and every picture on the desktop becomes a script \- the same thing twice does 70% of what it did last time, so there are 16 of them \- below 65% it dodges about half of what you throw at it, and sometimes refuses to be thrown \- it plugs itself in and charges back up while you watch \- at 50% Windows blue-screens with the stop code NOKIA\_3310\_STILL\_WORKING Then it gets a turn. That part I'll let you find. At the end you get one of 15 titles (Untouched? Carried by a Paperclip? Never Picked Up?) and a report on what actually ends a 3310, which isn't anything you did. Heads up: \- None of it touches your computer. The viruses are drawings; nothing downloads and nothing runs. \- Not affiliated with Nokia or HMD. The phone is drawn without its name on it, and it never plays the ringtone. \- No signup. The only thing sent anywhere is an anonymous tally of how far people get. \- It works on a phone: the handset's own keypad is the controller. On a keyboard it's WASD, J, Space and K. \- It just launched, so I don't have real play times yet. The desktop half takes a couple of minutes; the rest depends on you. Challenge: post your title and time. Speed Dial means finishing it on the desktop, before it gets its turn, in under 75 seconds. It can be done.

I built a way for indie devs to get real users testing their app by testing each other's Hey everyone, I'm the one of the devs behind ScoutForge. One problem kept coming up for me and for people I talked to, you launch an app and nobody tries it. (Our platform has more than 2k app reviewed) Even when someone does, you almost never hear what they actually thought. So I added a testing system: * You test other people's apps and leave honest feedback * Each test earns you credits (the amount depends on the test) * You spend those credits to get your own app tested by real users * Their feedback shows up on your app's page, so new visitors see what real people said about it It's basically a give-and-take loop: you help someone, and someone helps you. It's early and I'm sure there are rough edges. A few things I'd really like to hear from you: 1. Would you actually spend time testing others to get testers for yourself? 2. What would make you trust the feedback shown on an app's page? 3. What would stop you from using something like this? Happy to answer anything

I built a free Apple Watch readiness app, and 658 people downloaded it on day one I built Push because Apple’s native Readiness feature is limited to newer Apple Watch models, even though older watches already collect much of the health data needed for a useful daily signal. Push is a free, on-device readiness app. It compares each user’s sleep, HRV, resting heart rate, strain, and other signals against their own 14-night baseline. There is no subscription, Pro tier, or health-data server. The first 24 hours surprised me: 658 downloads, more than 1,000 product page views, and a 97% conversion rate. I’m now trying to improve the message as much as the product. For other builders, which of these would make you stop and try it first? • Works with your existing Apple Watch • Health data stays on-device • Completely free with no subscription • Clear explanations of what moved your score Website and App Store: [https://push.suvysoft.com/](https://push.suvysoft.com/) I’m the developer, and direct criticism is welcome.

I’ve maintained the same iOS memory game since 2012. It just passed 16M downloads. I’m Clément, the solo developer of Memory, a matching-pairs game for iPhone and iPad. I first put it on the App Store in 2012, and I’m still building it myself. The rule is unchanged: flip two cards and find a pair. The big rebuild now gives it five ways to play: Classic, a 30-second Time Attack, two players on one device, an online duel, and an Educational mode that can pair pictures with words or words across two languages. I tried to keep the small boards welcoming for children while making the large ones genuinely hard for adults. The app is free to download; all five modes and the Animals pack are playable without buying anything. There are ads and optional card packs. Version 4.2.1 is live now. I have no launch team or budget, so honest feedback would help a lot—especially whether these modes feel like one coherent game or too many ideas around a simple rule. App Store: [https://apps.apple.com/app/id502626661](https://apps.apple.com/app/id502626661)

This doesn’t feel real… I just got my first paying user. I opened Google Play Console today and saw my first “Paid” order for LinkMemo. My first reaction wasn’t even excitement. It just felt kind of unreal. I built this app pretty much on my own — from the initial idea and design to development and finally getting it onto Google Play. For a long time, I kept wondering if anyone would actually use it, let alone pay for it. And then someone actually did. It’s not a huge amount of money, but seeing that first order hit differently. For the first time, it really sank in that someone out there was willing to pay for something I made. LinkMemo is a link management app for saving things you come across on Xiaohongshu, X, YouTube, Instagram, websites, and more. It automatically pulls in titles, images, and content, and lets you organize everything with tags, folders, and a graph view. I’ve also added AI features that can read and analyze the links you save. I’m still working on the UI, adding features, and fixing all the little things. One paying user might sound like nothing, but as an indie developer, it gave me a surprising amount of motivation to keep going. So… thank you to whoever you are. LinkMemo is available on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zengq.linkmemo

First SaaS as a designer who codes. 79 signups, ~50 monthly actives. What do I focus on next?

Where are you guys finding leads for your B2C SaaS? I'm currently building [Trigol.io](http://trigol.io/), an AI-powered stock signal platform that uses 500+ ML models to identify short-term opportunities in US stocks. We publicly track every signal, including the losing ones. So far in 2026: 276 signals, 73.9% win rate, +82.74% cumulative performance. I'm at the point where conversion doesn't seem to be the main problem: Visitor → Free Trial: \~3.5% Free Trial → Paid: \~10% The free trial requires a credit card Obviously there's still a lot I can optimize in the funnel, but right now my biggest bottleneck seems much simpler: I need more qualified traffic. I'm bootstrapping this and working with a very small budget. I plan to start experimenting with paid ads soon, but before burning money there, I'm trying to figure out which low-cost acquisition channels are actually working for other micro-SaaS founders. So far I've been looking at things like niche creators/affiliates, Reddit communities, organic content, SEO and direct outreach. For those of you who got past the first few customers without a big ad budget: where did your best leads actually come from? Especially interested in channels that worked when you were still small, rather than strategies that require thousands per month in ad spend. [Trigol.io](http://trigol.io/) for context: [https://trigol.io](https://trigol.io/)

How they grewNiche creators/affiliates, Reddit communities, organic content, SEO and direct outreach

Built driver settlement automation for one carrier. Did I build a one-off? Driveaway carrier. Advances load onto WEX/EFS cards from inside the TMS, paystubs assemble themselves from load pay, escrow, insurance and reimbursements, settlements pay on the same card and every settlement posts into QuickBooks as a split check that reconciles to card activity. Before the integration they had someone full time building paystubs, paying settlements and recording everything into quickbooks. It went live August 11. In four weeks it’s moved over $210k across 275+ transactions and should cross a quarter million this week. Now I’m trying to figure out if this is a product or just a custom integration.

Should I consider? So.... I have a top 5 company in my field trialing my niche b2b SaaS LMS. My contact called me today excited and said higher ups(him being one of them) absolutely love it. They want to add more offices and team users to give it a full out go and collect success metrics. He went on to tell me the majority consensus of an ideal outcome was to purchase my SaaS for their own internal use and hire me permanently for upkeep. The number being thrown around was 1mil. Obviously, it's just talk until there is money and an offer on the table. But honestly, I don't think I'd sell it. It's life changing money and opportunity. On the other hand though... I know what I built... I spent 2 years of personal time on it and I hold the highest professional credentials possible in my field. It would succeed in a different market or possibly any learning market with slight adaptation. I already have almost 100(90 free 9 paying, 27 are businesses and their team users trialing). It's been 2 months since official launch... It's just a matter of time and awareness before it takes off. At that point, 1mil is a losing deal. My largest concern with holding out is irrelevance due to increasing technology. While it would take 6+ months with a team and a few field experts like myself to properly recreate right now, in 1 year time who is to say it can't be recreated in a day? At that point, Id have been better off with the 1mil and a permanent high paid job. Any advice? Or clarity to offer me?

I built a SaaS for myself, not for customers. What should I do now? I built a SaaS and Iam stuck at a point where I don't know what to do next. The product is good, the website looks good, and I've been working on SEO for the last 2 months, but I still have **0 signups**. The base plan is $14/month, and I genuinely thought it would be very useful for **SEO professionals, Brands** and **SEO agencies**. But now I'm starting to question myself. Did I build a tool that **I personally wanted**, instead of building something customers actually need? What would you do at this stage? Should I keep improving the product and marketing it, or should I stop and talk to potential customers first to understand whether there's actually a problem worth paying for?

How they grewSEO for the last 2 months

Got my first Paid user (Start- up) To All the Vc's out there i made a APP, this is the Traffic i been getting in my Trading Application and Sep- 3 I put whop payment for PRO -Subscriptions and got my first paid user \-Hayath ($13 USD) After 7 years of Constant Grinding (Entrepreneur)

How they grewTraffic to the trading application; Whop payment for PRO subscriptions

Created a very valuable product, still at 0 users Hi guys, I created a service called InsiderWatch. This service watched 19 sources, sends you alerts and tells you what stocks you should be buying based on politicians trading, insider trading, large volume of stock order, and more. I created this because i noticed similar competition does only 2-4 sources, such as politicians trading and company executives stock purchases. InsiderWatch has a complete dashboard for research, and all you is sign up for the alerts and they get delivered to you via email or telegram. They tell you what stocks are likely to move! At only $15 per month, and cheaper annually, its well worth it given competitors sell their products from $30-$300. Give it a try today for free. Im open to advice and improvement feedback!

The funnel analytics I built to catch broken activation had a broken event of its own. Here's how I found it. Follow-up to last week's post, where the same instrumentation caught a paying customer being failed by my own code in real time. This week I turned it on the number I actually care about and it fell apart under its own weight. Bootstrapped social media scheduler, solo dev, fourteen months in. 115 accounts, one sale to date, still zero external publishes. WHAT I WAS TRYING TO MEASURE The full funnel from Aug 23 onward: signup, onboarding, connect a platform, open the composer, schedule a post. The step I cared about most was the last one, because everything upstream of it has been picked apart for months and this hadn't. connect\_screen\_viewed: 70 connect\_clicked: 19 connect\_succeeded: 13 compose\_opened: 33 post\_scheduled: 1 That last row is the one I wrote this post about. THE BUG post\_scheduled fired as the first line of the publish handler, before the guard clause a few lines down that returns early for empty content, an over-limit post, no platform picked, or media still uploading. It measured "the function was called," not "a post exists." A second, separate implementation of immediate publishing, which is what the actual Post Now button calls, never fired it at all. So 1 is not "one person scheduled a post." It's an unknown number of clicks, of unknown outcome, with an entire code path excluded from the count. WHY IT MATTERED BEYOND THE NUMBER Chasing why that second path had no tracking, I found it also never granted the first-post credit bonus and never updated the user's posting streak. Two separate functions were doing "someone just published," and only one of them had the reward logic attached. They'd been written months apart and nobody had ever diffed them against each other. THE FIX Moved the event into the API route that actually inserts the post row, after the insert succeeds, so it can only fire when a post is real. That route is shared by the single-post, thread, and A/B test compose flows, so all three are now covered by one call instead of three separate ones that would each need remembering. Extracted the credit and streak logic into one shared function both publish paths call. WHAT I'D TELL ANOTHER SOLO FOUNDER An analytics event answers "did the code run," not "did the thing succeed," unless you put it after the part that can fail. If your funnel has a step that only fires from a button's onClick, go check whether it fires before or after the network request. Mine was in the wrong spot for months and looked completely reasonable sitting there. Also filed TikTok's audit for public posting this week, unrelated to any of this but worth mentioning since it's the next real lever if it clears. Happy to go into the event schema or the credit-pool split if either is useful to anyone building something similar.

2000 hours in and I just broke 1000 active users I own Layerbase which is a serverless database platform like Supabase/Neon/Planetscale/Atlas/Upstash etc etc etc Where we are different is we don't charge for usage, it's a flat monthly fee and it's much cheaper than any of our competitors. We also offer authentication with Better Auth on any SQL database and branching on all databases We provide 18 different databases in the cloud, but we support 21 different databases with our desktop application and CLI. It started out as an open source project called SpinDB that just grew out of hand It's been about a year now since starting the project and I have logged 2000 hours of development time personally, I have paid for assistance with designs, additional front end labor, and cloud consulting, I have sunk $9k of my own savings into the advertising before actually learning what types of advertisements work for this type of product It took about 9 months of development before getting the first paying customer and then things picked up fairly quick I've received two separate acquisition offers, the first one was for $230k, the second was for around $110k. For obvious reasons I turned both of them down but that first one was a really hard decision that I lost a ton of sleep over I'm still several months away from breaking even but I'm still at that phase where every morning I wake up to see purchases made overnight and it never gets any less exciting The amount of research and compliance that go into a product like this is absurd and I would never start over again if this doesn't work out. This has been such a mentally taxing process. More sleepless nights than I can possibly count I've only had roughly 25 users churn and two gdpr removal requests. 80% of people who sign up spin up at least one database. The conversion rate is probably lower than it needs to be to be sustainable, but it is trending in the right direction I wanted to post here because most of the people in my life don't understand how massive a task this is for. Essentially a solo developer with a self-funded project and an occasional contractor. After crossing such a big milestone today I wanted to this with some people who could relate If anyone has any database questions or if anyone wants to know how the sausage is made, feel free to ask. Ask. I love databases and I love talking about building a database platform I wish you all the best of luck with your projects

How they grewpaid advertising

Built a SaaS tool that writes amazon buyer guides from real listings instead of made-up products. 20 paying users so far. I've been running affiliate sites for a while and the thing that always killed me was writing the actual buyer guides. Research the products, check they're in stock, make the comparison table, write it all up, paste in affiliate links one at a time, publish, repeat. Soul-destroying when you're doing a bunch of them. I tried a bunch of the AI writers to speed it up and they all had the same problem for me. They'd recommend products that don't exist. Wrong specs, discontinued stuff, or just straight up invented models. Not great when your whole thing is telling people what to buy. So I ended up building my own thing to fix the part I hated. It's called AffSERP. You paste in your keywords, one per line. For each one it grabs actual in-stock amazon products, builds the comparison table, writes the guide around them and puts your affiliate tag in every link. Then it publishes straight to wordpress. You can publish now or schedule them out or backdate a batch if you're filling in a site. Point is you come back to finished posts, not drafts you have to fix up. Products are pulled from live listings so nothing gets made up, it gives you a mix of brands instead of the same product several times, and you don't need your own amazon api to start. Your tracking id still goes in the links so you keep the commission. It's got 20 paying users right now which is kind of wild to me, I built it for myself and figured maybe a few other people had the same problem. Turns out they do. Anyway not trying to spam, genuinely curious what other people here think.

I built a hosting company 6 month ago for fun and make over $1,000 a month! A little under a year ago I started a local SEO agency. It's now doing over $20k/month. Along the way I noticed almost everyone in the space was also selling hosting, and since a free website was already part of my offer, it made sense to do it myself. So I set up a white-label hosting company and charge $25/month or $225/year. Grabbed a few domains too. Then I made a TikTok advertising "$99 WordPress websites." I used to charge $750 for those, but the $99 closes way faster and easier, so I switched. The website isn't really the point anyway. What I care about is the $25/month hosting retainer that comes attached to every one. Some people will say I'm undercutting the competition, but I'm mostly doing this to learn. Next up I'm launching a website builder SaaS that helps sites rank on Google. Combining the agency, the websites, and automation into one system has been fun to build. Six months in, the hosting side alone is doing about $1,000/month recurring. Started as a "why not" experiment and turned into a piece of online real estate I can hopefully sell later for a decent multiple. Happy to answer questions if anyone's thinking about building something simila

How they grewTikTok ads for "$99 WordPress websites"

Yayy!! 500 users in just 3 months Finally. **500+ users**. I still can't believe it because 3 months ago, Tabisto didn't exist. I did not think a number on a screen could make me feel this much. I am so happy!! If you have crossed a milestone like this recently, what was it? Tell me, I want to hear it. You can also try it and let me know your feedback: [tabisto.app](https://tabisto.app/)

2,937 visitors this month, 156 accounts, 36 connected a platform, 0 external users have published. Where would you dig first? Solo founder, social media scheduler, socialmate.studio. I'm not asking you to sign up, I want help reading my own numbers. Last 30 days from Vercel Analytics: 2,937 visitors, 4,777 page views, 85% bounce. Mostly Google and Bing, plus some from TikTok and ChatGPT. Visitors per page: / 345, /login 265, /signup 105, /onboarding 65, /dashboard 53. More people hit login than signup and I can't tell if that's returning users, people who think "sign in" is how you start, or something weirder. Lifetime: 156 accounts (not counting four of mine), 19 of those from the last week. 36 connected a platform, and nobody outside my own accounts has ever published a post. One sale, an annual plan, who left within the hour because of a bug of mine that's fixed now. Two questions: 1. 45% of my visitors are in Singapore and 19% in China. I don't believe any of them are customers. Bots or crawlers? Is there a clean way to filter that out so I stop staring at fake numbers? (Is there a way to block bots/crawlers?) 2. If these were your numbers, which step would you attack first: landing to signup, signup to connecting a platform, or something I'm not seeing? Honest roasts of the landing page are welcome too. I do build with AI, however, I'm trying my best and doing what I can for it to not look like some ai slop and for it to actually have use and functionality.

How they grewGoogle and Bing; some TikTok and ChatGPT