VibeBuilders.ai Logo
VibeBuilders.ai
Sign In
Back to Topics

Spent

Explore resources related to spent to help implement AI solutions for your business.

I spent 6 months on building a tool, and got 0 zero users. Here is my story.
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.667
GDbuildsGD•This week

I spent 6 months on building a tool, and got 0 zero users. Here is my story.

Edit Thank you all so much for your time reading my story. Your support, feedback, criticism, and skepticism; all helped me a lot, and I couldn't appreciate it enough \^\_\^ TL;DR I spent 6 months on a tool that currently has 0 users. Below is what I learned during my journey, sharing because I believe most mistakes are easily avoidable. Do not overestimate your product and assume it will be an exception to fundamental principles. Principles are there for a reason. Always look for validation before you start. Avoid building products with a low money-to-effort ratio/in very competitive fields. Unless you have the means, you probably won't make it. Pick a problem space, pick your target audience, and talk to them before thinking about a solution. Identify and match their pain points. Only then should you think of a solution. If people are not overly excited or willing to pay in advance for a discounted price, it might be a sign to rethink. Sell one and only one feature at a time. Avoid everything else. If people don't pay for that one core feature, no secondary feature will change their mind. Always spend twice as much time marketing as you do building. You will not get users if they don't know it exists. Define success metrics ("1000 users in 3 months" or "$6000 in the account at the end of 6 months") before you start. If you don't meet them, strongly consider quitting the project. If you can't get enough users to keep going, nothing else matters. VALIDATION, VALIDATION, VALIDATION. Success is not random, but most of our first products will not make a success story. Know when to admit failure, and move on. Even if a product of yours doesn't succeed, what you learned during its journey will turn out to be invaluable for your future. My story So, this is the story of a product, Summ, that I’ve been working on for the last 6 months. As it's the first product I’ve ever built, after watching you all from the sidelines, I have learned a lot, made many mistakes, and did only a few things right. Just sharing what I’ve learned and some insights from my journey so far. I hope that this post will help you avoid the mistakes I made — most of which I consider easily avoidable — while you enjoy reading it, and get to know me a little bit more 🤓. A slow start after many years Summ isn’t the first product I really wanted to build. Lacking enough dev skills to even get started was a huge blocker for so many years. In fact, the first product I would’ve LOVED to build was a smart personal shopping assistant. I had this idea 4 years ago; but with no GPT, no coding skills, no technical co-founder, I didn’t have the means to make it happen. I still do not know if such a tool exists and is good enough. All I wanted was a tool that could make data-based predictions about when to buy stuff (“buy a new toothpaste every three months”) and suggest physical products that I might need or be strongly interested in. AFAIK, Amazon famously still struggles with the second one. Fast-forward a few years, I learned the very basics of HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS. Still was not there to build a product; but good enough to code my design portfolio from scratch. Yet, I couldn’t imagine myself building a product using Vanilla JS. I really hated it, I really sucked at it. So, back to tutorial hell, and to learn about this framework I just heard about: React.React introduced so many new concepts to me. “Thinking in React” is a phrase we heard a lot, and with quite good reasons. After some time, I was able to build very basic tutorial apps, both in React, and React Native; but I have to say that I really hated coding for mobile. At this point, I was already a fan of productivity apps, and had a concept for a time management assistant app in my design portfolio. So, why not build one? Surely, it must be easy, since every coding tutorial starts with a todo app. ❌ WRONG! Building a basic todo app is easy enough, but building one good enough for a place in the market was a challenge I took and failed. I wasted one month on that until I abandoned the project for good. Even if I continued working on it, as the productivity landscape is overly competitive, I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to cover costs, assuming I make any. Since I was (and still am) in between jobs, I decided to abandon the project. 👉 What I learned: Do not start projects with a low ratio of money to effort and time. Example: Even if I get 500 monthly users, 200 of which are paid users (unrealistically high number), assuming an average subscription fee of $5/m (such apps are quite cheap, mostly due to the high competition), it would make me around $1000 minus any occurring costs. Any founder with a product that has 500 active users should make more. Even if it was relatively successful, due to the high competition, I wouldn’t make any meaningful money. PS: I use Todoist today. Due to local pricing, I pay less than $2/m. There is no way I could beat this competitive pricing, let alone the app itself. But, somehow, with a project that wasn’t even functional — let alone being an MVP — I made my first Wi-Fi money: Someone decided that the domain I preemptively purchased is worth something. By this point, I had already abandoned the project, certainly wasn’t going to renew the domain, was looking for a FT job, and a new project that I could work on. And out of nowhere, someone hands me some free money — who am I not to take it? Of course, I took it. The domain is still unused, no idea why 🤔. Ngl, I still hate the fact that my first Wi-Fi money came from this. A new idea worth pursuing? Fast-forward some weeks now. Around March, I got this crazy idea of building an email productivity tool. We all use emails, yet we all hate them. So, this must be fixed. Everyone uses emails, in fact everyone HAS TO use emails. So, I just needed to build a tool and wait for people to come. This was all, really. After all, the problem space is huge, there is enough room for another product, everyone uses emails, no need for any further validation, right? ❌ WRONG ONCE AGAIN! We all hear from the greatest in the startup landscape that we must validate our ideas with real people, yet at least some of us (guilty here 🥸) think that our product will be hugely successful and prove them to be an exception. Few might, but most are not. I certainly wasn't. 👉 Lesson learned: Always validate your ideas with real people. Ask them how much they’d pay for such a tool (not if they would). Much better if they are willing to pay upfront for a discount, etc. But even this comes later, keep reading. I think the difference between “How much” and “If” is huge for two reasons: (1) By asking them for “How much”, you force them to think in a more realistic setting. (2) You will have a more realistic idea on your profit margins. Based on my competitive analysis, I already had a solution in my mind to improve our email usage standards and email productivity (huge mistake), but I did my best to learn about their problems regarding those without pushing the idea too hard. The idea is this: Generate concise email summaries with suggested actions, combine them into one email, and send it at their preferred times. Save as much as time the AI you end up with allows. After all, everyone loves to save time. So, what kind of validation did I seek for? Talked with only a few people around me about this crazy, internet-breaking idea. The responses I got were, now I see, mediocre; no one got excited about it, just said things along the lines of “Cool idea, OK”. So, any reasonable person in this situation would think “Okay, not might not be working”, right? Well, I did not. I assumed that they were the wrong audience for this product, and there was this magical land of user segments waiting eagerly for my product, yet unknowingly. To this day, I still have not reached this magical place. Perhaps, it didn’t exist in the first place. If I cannot find it, whether it exists or not doesn’t matter. I am certainly searching for it. 👉 What I should have done: Once I decide on a problem space (time management, email productivity, etc.), I should decide on my potential user segments, people who I plan to sell my product to. Then I should go talk to those people, ask them about their pains, then get to the problem-solving/ideation phase only later. ❗️ VALIDATION COMES FROM THE REALITY OUTSIDE. What validation looks like might change from product to product; but what invalidation looks like is more or less the same for every product. Nico Jeannen told me yesterday “validation = money in the account” on Twitter. This is the ultimate form of validation your product could get. If your product doesn’t make any money, then something is invalidated by reality: Your product, you, your idea, who knows? So, at this point, I knew a little bit of Python from spending some time in tutorial hell a few years ago, some HTML/CSS/JS, barely enough React to build a working app. React could work for this project, but I needed easy-to-implement server interactivity. Luckily, around this time, I got to know about this new gen of indie hackers, and learned (but didn’t truly understand) about their approach to indie hacking, and this library called Nextjs. How good Next.js still blows my mind. So, I was back to tutorial hell once again. But, this time, with a promise to myself: This is the last time I would visit tutorial hell. Time to start building this "ground-breaking idea" Learning the fundamentals of Next.js was easier than learning of React unsurprisingly. Yet, the first time I managed to run server actions on Next.js was one of the rarest moments that completely blew my mind. To this day, I reject the idea that it is something else than pure magic under its hood. Did I absolutely need Nextjs for this project though? I do not think so. Did it save me lots of time? Absolutely. Furthermore, learning Nextjs will certainly be quite helpful for other projects that I will be tackling in the future. Already got a few ideas that might be worth pursuing in the head in case I decide to abandon Summ in the future. Fast-forward few weeks again: So, at this stage, I had a barely working MVP-like product. Since the very beginning, I spent every free hour (and more) on this project as speed is essential. But, I am not so sure it was worth it to overwork in retrospect. Yet, I know I couldn’t help myself. Everything is going kinda smooth, so what’s the worst thing that could ever happen? Well, both Apple and Google announced their AIs (Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini, respectively) will have email summarization features for their products. Summarizing singular emails is no big deal, after all there were already so many similar products in the market. I still think that what truly matters is a frictionless user experience, and this is why I built this product in a certain way: You spend less than a few minutes setting up your account, and you get to enjoy your email summaries, without ever visiting its website again. This is still a very cool concept I really like a lot. So, at this point: I had no other idea that could be pursued, already spent too much time on this project. Do I quit or not? This was the question. Of course not. I just have to launch this product as quickly as possible. So, I did something right, a quite rare occurrence I might say: Re-planned my product, dropped everything secondary to the core feature immediately (save time on reading emails), tried launching it asap. 👉 Insight: Sell only one core feature at one time. Drop anything secondary to this core feature. Well, my primary occupation is product design. So one would expect that a product I build must have stellar design. I considered any considerable time spent on design at this stage would be simply wasted. I still think this is both true and wrong: True, because if your product’s core benefits suck, no one will care about your design. False, because if your design looks amateurish, no one will trust you and your product. So, I always targeted an average level design with it and the way this tool works made it quite easy as I had to design only 2 primary pages: Landing page and user portal (which has only settings and analytics pages). However, even though I knew spending time on design was not worth much of my time, I got a bit “greedy”: In fact, I redesigned those pages three times, and still ended up with a so-so design that I am not proud of. 👉 What I would do differently: Unless absolutely necessary, only one iteration per stage as long as it works. This, in my mind, applies to everything. If your product’s A feature works, then no need to rewrite it from scratch for any reason, or even refactor it. When your product becomes a success, and you absolutely need that part of your codebase to be written, do so, but only then. Ready to launch, now is th etime for some marketing, right? By July 26, I already had a “launchable” product that barely works (I marked this date on a Notion docs, this is how I know). Yet, I had spent almost no time on marketing, sales, whatever. After all, “You build and they will come”. Did I know that I needed marketing? Of course I did, but knowingly didn’t. Why, you might ask. Well, from my perspective, it had to be a dev-heavy product; meaning that you spend most of your time on developing it, mostly coding skills. But, this is simply wrong. As a rule of thumb, as noted by one of the greatests, Marc Louvion, you should spend at least twice of the building time on marketing. ❗️ Time spent on building \* 2 people don’t know your product > they don’t use your product > you don’t get users > you don’t make money Easy as that. Following the same reasoning, a slightly different approach to planning a project is possible. Determine an approximate time to complete the project with a high level project plan. Let’s say 6 months. By the reasoning above, 2 months should go into building, and 4 into marketing. If you need 4 months for building instead of 2, then you need 8 months of marketing, which makes the time to complete the project 12 months. If you don’t have that much time, then quit the project. When does a project count as completed? Well, in reality, never. But, I think we have to define success conditions even before we start for indie projects and startups; so we know when to quit when they are not met. A success condition could look like “Make $6000 in 12 months” or “Have 3000 users in 6 months”. It all depends on the project. But, once you set it, it should be set in stone: You don’t change it unless absolutely necessary. I suspect there are few principles that make a solopreneur successful; and knowing when to quit and when to continue is definitely one of them. Marc Louvion is famously known for his success, but he got there after failing so many projects. To my knowledge, the same applies to Nico Jeannen, Pieter Levels, or almost everyone as well. ❗️ Determining when to continue even before you start will definitely help in the long run. A half-aed launch Time-leap again. Around mid August, I “soft launched” my product. By soft launch, I mean lazy marketing. Just tweeting about it, posting it on free directories. Did I get any traffic? Surely I did. Did I get any users? Nope. Only after this time, it hit me: “Either something is wrong with me, or with this product” Marketing might be a much bigger factor for a project’s success after all. Even though I get some traffic, not convincing enough for people to sign up even for a free trial. The product was still perfect in my eyes at the time (well, still is ^(\_),) so the right people are not finding my product, I thought. Then, a question that I should have been asking at the very first place, one that could prevent all these, comes to my mind: “How do even people search for such tools?” If we are to consider this whole journey of me and my so-far-failed product to be an already destined failure, one metric suffices to show why. Search volume: 30. Even if people have such a pain point, they are not looking for email summaries. So, almost no organic traffic coming from Google. But, as a person who did zero marketing on this or any product, who has zero marketing knowledge, who doesn’t have an audience on social media, there is not much I could do. Finally, it was time to give up. Or not… In my eyes, the most important element that makes a founder (solo or not) successful (this, I am not by any means) is to solve problems. ❗️ So, the problem was this: “People are not finding my product by organic search” How do I make sure I get some organic traffic and gets more visibility? Learn digital marketing and SEO as much as I can within very limited time. Thankfully, without spending much time, I came across Neil Patel's YT channel, and as I said many times, it is an absolute gold mine. I learned a lot, especially about the fundamentals, and surely it will be fruitful; but there is no magic trick that could make people visit your website. SEO certainly helps, but only when people are looking for your keywords. However, it is truly a magical solution to get in touch with REAL people that are in your user segments: 👉 Understand your pains, understand their problems, help them to solve them via building products. I did not do this so far, have to admit. But, in case you would like to have a chat about your email usage, and email productivity, just get in touch; I’d be delighted to hear about them. Getting ready for a ProductHunt launch The date was Sept 1. And I unlocked an impossible achievement: Running out of Supabase’s free plan’s Egres limit while having zero users. I was already considering moving out of their Cloud server and managing a Supabase CLI service on my Hetzner VPS for some time; but never ever suspected that I would have to do this quickly. The cheapest plan Supabase offers is $25/month; yet, at that point, I am in between jobs for such a long time, basically broke, and could barely afford that price. One or two months could be okay, but why pay for it if I will eventually move out of their Cloud service? So, instead of paying $25, I spent two days migrating out of Supabase Cloud. Worth my time? Definitely not. But, when you are broke, you gotta do stupid things. This was the first time that I felt lucky to have zero users: I have no idea how I would manage this migration if I had any. I think this is one of the core tenets of an indie hacker: Controlling their own environment. I can’t remember whose quote this is, but I suspect it was Naval: Entrepreneurs have an almost pathological need to control their own fate. They will take any suffering if they can be in charge of their destiny, and not have it in somebody else’s hands. What’s truly scary is, at least in my case, we make people around us suffer at the expense of our attempting to control our own fates. I know this period has been quite hard on my wife as well, as I neglected her quite a bit, but sadly, I know that this will happen again. It is something that I can barely help with. Still, so sorry. After working the last two weeks on a ProductHunt Launch, I finally launched it this Tuesday. Zero ranking, zero new users, but 36 kind people upvoted my product, and many commented and provided invaluable feedback. I couldn't be more grateful for each one of them 🙏. Considering all these, what lies in the future of Summ though? I have no idea, to be honest. On one hand, I have zero users, have no job, no income. So, I need a way to make money asap. On the other hand, the whole idea of it revolves around one core premise (not an assumption) that I am not so willing to share; and I couldn’t have more trust in it. This might not be the best iteration of it, however I certainly believe that email usage is one of the best problem spaces one could work on. 👉 But, one thing is for certain: I need to get in touch with people, and talk with them about this product I built so far. In fact, this is the only item on my agenda. Nothing else will save my brainchild <3. Below are some other insights and notes that I got during my journey; as they do not 100% fit into this story, I think it is more suitable to list them here. I hope you enjoyed reading this. Give Summ a try, it comes with a generous free trial, no credit card required. Some additional notes and insights: Project planning is one of the most underestimated skills for solopreneurs. It saves you enormous time, and helps you to keep your focus up. Building B2C products beats building B2B products. Businesses are very willing to pay big bucks if your product helps them. On the other hand, spending a few hours per user who would pay $5/m probably is not worth your time. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your product is if no one uses it. If you cannot sell a product in a certain category/niche (or do not know how to sell it), it might be a good idea not to start a project in it. Going after new ideas and ventures is quite risky, especially if you don’t know how to market it. On the other hand, an already established category means that there is already demand. Whether this demand is sufficient or not is another issue. As long as there is enough demand for your product to fit in, any category/niche is good. Some might be better, some might be worse. Unless you are going hardcore B2B, you will need people to find your product by means of organic search. Always conduct thorough keyword research as soon as possible.

#reddit#spent#months
I spent 6 months on building a tool, and got 0 zero users. Here is my story.
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.667
GDbuildsGD•This week

I spent 6 months on building a tool, and got 0 zero users. Here is my story.

Edit Thank you all so much for your time reading my story. Your support, feedback, criticism, and skepticism; all helped me a lot, and I couldn't appreciate it enough \^\_\^ TL;DR I spent 6 months on a tool that currently has 0 users. Below is what I learned during my journey, sharing because I believe most mistakes are easily avoidable. Do not overestimate your product and assume it will be an exception to fundamental principles. Principles are there for a reason. Always look for validation before you start. Avoid building products with a low money-to-effort ratio/in very competitive fields. Unless you have the means, you probably won't make it. Pick a problem space, pick your target audience, and talk to them before thinking about a solution. Identify and match their pain points. Only then should you think of a solution. If people are not overly excited or willing to pay in advance for a discounted price, it might be a sign to rethink. Sell one and only one feature at a time. Avoid everything else. If people don't pay for that one core feature, no secondary feature will change their mind. Always spend twice as much time marketing as you do building. You will not get users if they don't know it exists. Define success metrics ("1000 users in 3 months" or "$6000 in the account at the end of 6 months") before you start. If you don't meet them, strongly consider quitting the project. If you can't get enough users to keep going, nothing else matters. VALIDATION, VALIDATION, VALIDATION. Success is not random, but most of our first products will not make a success story. Know when to admit failure, and move on. Even if a product of yours doesn't succeed, what you learned during its journey will turn out to be invaluable for your future. My story So, this is the story of a product, Summ, that I’ve been working on for the last 6 months. As it's the first product I’ve ever built, after watching you all from the sidelines, I have learned a lot, made many mistakes, and did only a few things right. Just sharing what I’ve learned and some insights from my journey so far. I hope that this post will help you avoid the mistakes I made — most of which I consider easily avoidable — while you enjoy reading it, and get to know me a little bit more 🤓. A slow start after many years Summ isn’t the first product I really wanted to build. Lacking enough dev skills to even get started was a huge blocker for so many years. In fact, the first product I would’ve LOVED to build was a smart personal shopping assistant. I had this idea 4 years ago; but with no GPT, no coding skills, no technical co-founder, I didn’t have the means to make it happen. I still do not know if such a tool exists and is good enough. All I wanted was a tool that could make data-based predictions about when to buy stuff (“buy a new toothpaste every three months”) and suggest physical products that I might need or be strongly interested in. AFAIK, Amazon famously still struggles with the second one. Fast-forward a few years, I learned the very basics of HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS. Still was not there to build a product; but good enough to code my design portfolio from scratch. Yet, I couldn’t imagine myself building a product using Vanilla JS. I really hated it, I really sucked at it. So, back to tutorial hell, and to learn about this framework I just heard about: React.React introduced so many new concepts to me. “Thinking in React” is a phrase we heard a lot, and with quite good reasons. After some time, I was able to build very basic tutorial apps, both in React, and React Native; but I have to say that I really hated coding for mobile. At this point, I was already a fan of productivity apps, and had a concept for a time management assistant app in my design portfolio. So, why not build one? Surely, it must be easy, since every coding tutorial starts with a todo app. ❌ WRONG! Building a basic todo app is easy enough, but building one good enough for a place in the market was a challenge I took and failed. I wasted one month on that until I abandoned the project for good. Even if I continued working on it, as the productivity landscape is overly competitive, I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to cover costs, assuming I make any. Since I was (and still am) in between jobs, I decided to abandon the project. 👉 What I learned: Do not start projects with a low ratio of money to effort and time. Example: Even if I get 500 monthly users, 200 of which are paid users (unrealistically high number), assuming an average subscription fee of $5/m (such apps are quite cheap, mostly due to the high competition), it would make me around $1000 minus any occurring costs. Any founder with a product that has 500 active users should make more. Even if it was relatively successful, due to the high competition, I wouldn’t make any meaningful money. PS: I use Todoist today. Due to local pricing, I pay less than $2/m. There is no way I could beat this competitive pricing, let alone the app itself. But, somehow, with a project that wasn’t even functional — let alone being an MVP — I made my first Wi-Fi money: Someone decided that the domain I preemptively purchased is worth something. By this point, I had already abandoned the project, certainly wasn’t going to renew the domain, was looking for a FT job, and a new project that I could work on. And out of nowhere, someone hands me some free money — who am I not to take it? Of course, I took it. The domain is still unused, no idea why 🤔. Ngl, I still hate the fact that my first Wi-Fi money came from this. A new idea worth pursuing? Fast-forward some weeks now. Around March, I got this crazy idea of building an email productivity tool. We all use emails, yet we all hate them. So, this must be fixed. Everyone uses emails, in fact everyone HAS TO use emails. So, I just needed to build a tool and wait for people to come. This was all, really. After all, the problem space is huge, there is enough room for another product, everyone uses emails, no need for any further validation, right? ❌ WRONG ONCE AGAIN! We all hear from the greatest in the startup landscape that we must validate our ideas with real people, yet at least some of us (guilty here 🥸) think that our product will be hugely successful and prove them to be an exception. Few might, but most are not. I certainly wasn't. 👉 Lesson learned: Always validate your ideas with real people. Ask them how much they’d pay for such a tool (not if they would). Much better if they are willing to pay upfront for a discount, etc. But even this comes later, keep reading. I think the difference between “How much” and “If” is huge for two reasons: (1) By asking them for “How much”, you force them to think in a more realistic setting. (2) You will have a more realistic idea on your profit margins. Based on my competitive analysis, I already had a solution in my mind to improve our email usage standards and email productivity (huge mistake), but I did my best to learn about their problems regarding those without pushing the idea too hard. The idea is this: Generate concise email summaries with suggested actions, combine them into one email, and send it at their preferred times. Save as much as time the AI you end up with allows. After all, everyone loves to save time. So, what kind of validation did I seek for? Talked with only a few people around me about this crazy, internet-breaking idea. The responses I got were, now I see, mediocre; no one got excited about it, just said things along the lines of “Cool idea, OK”. So, any reasonable person in this situation would think “Okay, not might not be working”, right? Well, I did not. I assumed that they were the wrong audience for this product, and there was this magical land of user segments waiting eagerly for my product, yet unknowingly. To this day, I still have not reached this magical place. Perhaps, it didn’t exist in the first place. If I cannot find it, whether it exists or not doesn’t matter. I am certainly searching for it. 👉 What I should have done: Once I decide on a problem space (time management, email productivity, etc.), I should decide on my potential user segments, people who I plan to sell my product to. Then I should go talk to those people, ask them about their pains, then get to the problem-solving/ideation phase only later. ❗️ VALIDATION COMES FROM THE REALITY OUTSIDE. What validation looks like might change from product to product; but what invalidation looks like is more or less the same for every product. Nico Jeannen told me yesterday “validation = money in the account” on Twitter. This is the ultimate form of validation your product could get. If your product doesn’t make any money, then something is invalidated by reality: Your product, you, your idea, who knows? So, at this point, I knew a little bit of Python from spending some time in tutorial hell a few years ago, some HTML/CSS/JS, barely enough React to build a working app. React could work for this project, but I needed easy-to-implement server interactivity. Luckily, around this time, I got to know about this new gen of indie hackers, and learned (but didn’t truly understand) about their approach to indie hacking, and this library called Nextjs. How good Next.js still blows my mind. So, I was back to tutorial hell once again. But, this time, with a promise to myself: This is the last time I would visit tutorial hell. Time to start building this "ground-breaking idea" Learning the fundamentals of Next.js was easier than learning of React unsurprisingly. Yet, the first time I managed to run server actions on Next.js was one of the rarest moments that completely blew my mind. To this day, I reject the idea that it is something else than pure magic under its hood. Did I absolutely need Nextjs for this project though? I do not think so. Did it save me lots of time? Absolutely. Furthermore, learning Nextjs will certainly be quite helpful for other projects that I will be tackling in the future. Already got a few ideas that might be worth pursuing in the head in case I decide to abandon Summ in the future. Fast-forward few weeks again: So, at this stage, I had a barely working MVP-like product. Since the very beginning, I spent every free hour (and more) on this project as speed is essential. But, I am not so sure it was worth it to overwork in retrospect. Yet, I know I couldn’t help myself. Everything is going kinda smooth, so what’s the worst thing that could ever happen? Well, both Apple and Google announced their AIs (Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini, respectively) will have email summarization features for their products. Summarizing singular emails is no big deal, after all there were already so many similar products in the market. I still think that what truly matters is a frictionless user experience, and this is why I built this product in a certain way: You spend less than a few minutes setting up your account, and you get to enjoy your email summaries, without ever visiting its website again. This is still a very cool concept I really like a lot. So, at this point: I had no other idea that could be pursued, already spent too much time on this project. Do I quit or not? This was the question. Of course not. I just have to launch this product as quickly as possible. So, I did something right, a quite rare occurrence I might say: Re-planned my product, dropped everything secondary to the core feature immediately (save time on reading emails), tried launching it asap. 👉 Insight: Sell only one core feature at one time. Drop anything secondary to this core feature. Well, my primary occupation is product design. So one would expect that a product I build must have stellar design. I considered any considerable time spent on design at this stage would be simply wasted. I still think this is both true and wrong: True, because if your product’s core benefits suck, no one will care about your design. False, because if your design looks amateurish, no one will trust you and your product. So, I always targeted an average level design with it and the way this tool works made it quite easy as I had to design only 2 primary pages: Landing page and user portal (which has only settings and analytics pages). However, even though I knew spending time on design was not worth much of my time, I got a bit “greedy”: In fact, I redesigned those pages three times, and still ended up with a so-so design that I am not proud of. 👉 What I would do differently: Unless absolutely necessary, only one iteration per stage as long as it works. This, in my mind, applies to everything. If your product’s A feature works, then no need to rewrite it from scratch for any reason, or even refactor it. When your product becomes a success, and you absolutely need that part of your codebase to be written, do so, but only then. Ready to launch, now is th etime for some marketing, right? By July 26, I already had a “launchable” product that barely works (I marked this date on a Notion docs, this is how I know). Yet, I had spent almost no time on marketing, sales, whatever. After all, “You build and they will come”. Did I know that I needed marketing? Of course I did, but knowingly didn’t. Why, you might ask. Well, from my perspective, it had to be a dev-heavy product; meaning that you spend most of your time on developing it, mostly coding skills. But, this is simply wrong. As a rule of thumb, as noted by one of the greatests, Marc Louvion, you should spend at least twice of the building time on marketing. ❗️ Time spent on building \* 2 people don’t know your product > they don’t use your product > you don’t get users > you don’t make money Easy as that. Following the same reasoning, a slightly different approach to planning a project is possible. Determine an approximate time to complete the project with a high level project plan. Let’s say 6 months. By the reasoning above, 2 months should go into building, and 4 into marketing. If you need 4 months for building instead of 2, then you need 8 months of marketing, which makes the time to complete the project 12 months. If you don’t have that much time, then quit the project. When does a project count as completed? Well, in reality, never. But, I think we have to define success conditions even before we start for indie projects and startups; so we know when to quit when they are not met. A success condition could look like “Make $6000 in 12 months” or “Have 3000 users in 6 months”. It all depends on the project. But, once you set it, it should be set in stone: You don’t change it unless absolutely necessary. I suspect there are few principles that make a solopreneur successful; and knowing when to quit and when to continue is definitely one of them. Marc Louvion is famously known for his success, but he got there after failing so many projects. To my knowledge, the same applies to Nico Jeannen, Pieter Levels, or almost everyone as well. ❗️ Determining when to continue even before you start will definitely help in the long run. A half-aed launch Time-leap again. Around mid August, I “soft launched” my product. By soft launch, I mean lazy marketing. Just tweeting about it, posting it on free directories. Did I get any traffic? Surely I did. Did I get any users? Nope. Only after this time, it hit me: “Either something is wrong with me, or with this product” Marketing might be a much bigger factor for a project’s success after all. Even though I get some traffic, not convincing enough for people to sign up even for a free trial. The product was still perfect in my eyes at the time (well, still is ^(\_),) so the right people are not finding my product, I thought. Then, a question that I should have been asking at the very first place, one that could prevent all these, comes to my mind: “How do even people search for such tools?” If we are to consider this whole journey of me and my so-far-failed product to be an already destined failure, one metric suffices to show why. Search volume: 30. Even if people have such a pain point, they are not looking for email summaries. So, almost no organic traffic coming from Google. But, as a person who did zero marketing on this or any product, who has zero marketing knowledge, who doesn’t have an audience on social media, there is not much I could do. Finally, it was time to give up. Or not… In my eyes, the most important element that makes a founder (solo or not) successful (this, I am not by any means) is to solve problems. ❗️ So, the problem was this: “People are not finding my product by organic search” How do I make sure I get some organic traffic and gets more visibility? Learn digital marketing and SEO as much as I can within very limited time. Thankfully, without spending much time, I came across Neil Patel's YT channel, and as I said many times, it is an absolute gold mine. I learned a lot, especially about the fundamentals, and surely it will be fruitful; but there is no magic trick that could make people visit your website. SEO certainly helps, but only when people are looking for your keywords. However, it is truly a magical solution to get in touch with REAL people that are in your user segments: 👉 Understand your pains, understand their problems, help them to solve them via building products. I did not do this so far, have to admit. But, in case you would like to have a chat about your email usage, and email productivity, just get in touch; I’d be delighted to hear about them. Getting ready for a ProductHunt launch The date was Sept 1. And I unlocked an impossible achievement: Running out of Supabase’s free plan’s Egres limit while having zero users. I was already considering moving out of their Cloud server and managing a Supabase CLI service on my Hetzner VPS for some time; but never ever suspected that I would have to do this quickly. The cheapest plan Supabase offers is $25/month; yet, at that point, I am in between jobs for such a long time, basically broke, and could barely afford that price. One or two months could be okay, but why pay for it if I will eventually move out of their Cloud service? So, instead of paying $25, I spent two days migrating out of Supabase Cloud. Worth my time? Definitely not. But, when you are broke, you gotta do stupid things. This was the first time that I felt lucky to have zero users: I have no idea how I would manage this migration if I had any. I think this is one of the core tenets of an indie hacker: Controlling their own environment. I can’t remember whose quote this is, but I suspect it was Naval: Entrepreneurs have an almost pathological need to control their own fate. They will take any suffering if they can be in charge of their destiny, and not have it in somebody else’s hands. What’s truly scary is, at least in my case, we make people around us suffer at the expense of our attempting to control our own fates. I know this period has been quite hard on my wife as well, as I neglected her quite a bit, but sadly, I know that this will happen again. It is something that I can barely help with. Still, so sorry. After working the last two weeks on a ProductHunt Launch, I finally launched it this Tuesday. Zero ranking, zero new users, but 36 kind people upvoted my product, and many commented and provided invaluable feedback. I couldn't be more grateful for each one of them 🙏. Considering all these, what lies in the future of Summ though? I have no idea, to be honest. On one hand, I have zero users, have no job, no income. So, I need a way to make money asap. On the other hand, the whole idea of it revolves around one core premise (not an assumption) that I am not so willing to share; and I couldn’t have more trust in it. This might not be the best iteration of it, however I certainly believe that email usage is one of the best problem spaces one could work on. 👉 But, one thing is for certain: I need to get in touch with people, and talk with them about this product I built so far. In fact, this is the only item on my agenda. Nothing else will save my brainchild <3. Below are some other insights and notes that I got during my journey; as they do not 100% fit into this story, I think it is more suitable to list them here. I hope you enjoyed reading this. Give Summ a try, it comes with a generous free trial, no credit card required. Some additional notes and insights: Project planning is one of the most underestimated skills for solopreneurs. It saves you enormous time, and helps you to keep your focus up. Building B2C products beats building B2B products. Businesses are very willing to pay big bucks if your product helps them. On the other hand, spending a few hours per user who would pay $5/m probably is not worth your time. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your product is if no one uses it. If you cannot sell a product in a certain category/niche (or do not know how to sell it), it might be a good idea not to start a project in it. Going after new ideas and ventures is quite risky, especially if you don’t know how to market it. On the other hand, an already established category means that there is already demand. Whether this demand is sufficient or not is another issue. As long as there is enough demand for your product to fit in, any category/niche is good. Some might be better, some might be worse. Unless you are going hardcore B2B, you will need people to find your product by means of organic search. Always conduct thorough keyword research as soon as possible.

#reddit#spent#months
I spent 6 months on building a tool, and got 0 zero users. Here is my story.
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.667
GDbuildsGD•This week

I spent 6 months on building a tool, and got 0 zero users. Here is my story.

Edit Thank you all so much for your time reading my story. Your support, feedback, criticism, and skepticism; all helped me a lot, and I couldn't appreciate it enough \^\_\^ TL;DR I spent 6 months on a tool that currently has 0 users. Below is what I learned during my journey, sharing because I believe most mistakes are easily avoidable. Do not overestimate your product and assume it will be an exception to fundamental principles. Principles are there for a reason. Always look for validation before you start. Avoid building products with a low money-to-effort ratio/in very competitive fields. Unless you have the means, you probably won't make it. Pick a problem space, pick your target audience, and talk to them before thinking about a solution. Identify and match their pain points. Only then should you think of a solution. If people are not overly excited or willing to pay in advance for a discounted price, it might be a sign to rethink. Sell one and only one feature at a time. Avoid everything else. If people don't pay for that one core feature, no secondary feature will change their mind. Always spend twice as much time marketing as you do building. You will not get users if they don't know it exists. Define success metrics ("1000 users in 3 months" or "$6000 in the account at the end of 6 months") before you start. If you don't meet them, strongly consider quitting the project. If you can't get enough users to keep going, nothing else matters. VALIDATION, VALIDATION, VALIDATION. Success is not random, but most of our first products will not make a success story. Know when to admit failure, and move on. Even if a product of yours doesn't succeed, what you learned during its journey will turn out to be invaluable for your future. My story So, this is the story of a product, Summ, that I’ve been working on for the last 6 months. As it's the first product I’ve ever built, after watching you all from the sidelines, I have learned a lot, made many mistakes, and did only a few things right. Just sharing what I’ve learned and some insights from my journey so far. I hope that this post will help you avoid the mistakes I made — most of which I consider easily avoidable — while you enjoy reading it, and get to know me a little bit more 🤓. A slow start after many years Summ isn’t the first product I really wanted to build. Lacking enough dev skills to even get started was a huge blocker for so many years. In fact, the first product I would’ve LOVED to build was a smart personal shopping assistant. I had this idea 4 years ago; but with no GPT, no coding skills, no technical co-founder, I didn’t have the means to make it happen. I still do not know if such a tool exists and is good enough. All I wanted was a tool that could make data-based predictions about when to buy stuff (“buy a new toothpaste every three months”) and suggest physical products that I might need or be strongly interested in. AFAIK, Amazon famously still struggles with the second one. Fast-forward a few years, I learned the very basics of HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS. Still was not there to build a product; but good enough to code my design portfolio from scratch. Yet, I couldn’t imagine myself building a product using Vanilla JS. I really hated it, I really sucked at it. So, back to tutorial hell, and to learn about this framework I just heard about: React.React introduced so many new concepts to me. “Thinking in React” is a phrase we heard a lot, and with quite good reasons. After some time, I was able to build very basic tutorial apps, both in React, and React Native; but I have to say that I really hated coding for mobile. At this point, I was already a fan of productivity apps, and had a concept for a time management assistant app in my design portfolio. So, why not build one? Surely, it must be easy, since every coding tutorial starts with a todo app. ❌ WRONG! Building a basic todo app is easy enough, but building one good enough for a place in the market was a challenge I took and failed. I wasted one month on that until I abandoned the project for good. Even if I continued working on it, as the productivity landscape is overly competitive, I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to cover costs, assuming I make any. Since I was (and still am) in between jobs, I decided to abandon the project. 👉 What I learned: Do not start projects with a low ratio of money to effort and time. Example: Even if I get 500 monthly users, 200 of which are paid users (unrealistically high number), assuming an average subscription fee of $5/m (such apps are quite cheap, mostly due to the high competition), it would make me around $1000 minus any occurring costs. Any founder with a product that has 500 active users should make more. Even if it was relatively successful, due to the high competition, I wouldn’t make any meaningful money. PS: I use Todoist today. Due to local pricing, I pay less than $2/m. There is no way I could beat this competitive pricing, let alone the app itself. But, somehow, with a project that wasn’t even functional — let alone being an MVP — I made my first Wi-Fi money: Someone decided that the domain I preemptively purchased is worth something. By this point, I had already abandoned the project, certainly wasn’t going to renew the domain, was looking for a FT job, and a new project that I could work on. And out of nowhere, someone hands me some free money — who am I not to take it? Of course, I took it. The domain is still unused, no idea why 🤔. Ngl, I still hate the fact that my first Wi-Fi money came from this. A new idea worth pursuing? Fast-forward some weeks now. Around March, I got this crazy idea of building an email productivity tool. We all use emails, yet we all hate them. So, this must be fixed. Everyone uses emails, in fact everyone HAS TO use emails. So, I just needed to build a tool and wait for people to come. This was all, really. After all, the problem space is huge, there is enough room for another product, everyone uses emails, no need for any further validation, right? ❌ WRONG ONCE AGAIN! We all hear from the greatest in the startup landscape that we must validate our ideas with real people, yet at least some of us (guilty here 🥸) think that our product will be hugely successful and prove them to be an exception. Few might, but most are not. I certainly wasn't. 👉 Lesson learned: Always validate your ideas with real people. Ask them how much they’d pay for such a tool (not if they would). Much better if they are willing to pay upfront for a discount, etc. But even this comes later, keep reading. I think the difference between “How much” and “If” is huge for two reasons: (1) By asking them for “How much”, you force them to think in a more realistic setting. (2) You will have a more realistic idea on your profit margins. Based on my competitive analysis, I already had a solution in my mind to improve our email usage standards and email productivity (huge mistake), but I did my best to learn about their problems regarding those without pushing the idea too hard. The idea is this: Generate concise email summaries with suggested actions, combine them into one email, and send it at their preferred times. Save as much as time the AI you end up with allows. After all, everyone loves to save time. So, what kind of validation did I seek for? Talked with only a few people around me about this crazy, internet-breaking idea. The responses I got were, now I see, mediocre; no one got excited about it, just said things along the lines of “Cool idea, OK”. So, any reasonable person in this situation would think “Okay, not might not be working”, right? Well, I did not. I assumed that they were the wrong audience for this product, and there was this magical land of user segments waiting eagerly for my product, yet unknowingly. To this day, I still have not reached this magical place. Perhaps, it didn’t exist in the first place. If I cannot find it, whether it exists or not doesn’t matter. I am certainly searching for it. 👉 What I should have done: Once I decide on a problem space (time management, email productivity, etc.), I should decide on my potential user segments, people who I plan to sell my product to. Then I should go talk to those people, ask them about their pains, then get to the problem-solving/ideation phase only later. ❗️ VALIDATION COMES FROM THE REALITY OUTSIDE. What validation looks like might change from product to product; but what invalidation looks like is more or less the same for every product. Nico Jeannen told me yesterday “validation = money in the account” on Twitter. This is the ultimate form of validation your product could get. If your product doesn’t make any money, then something is invalidated by reality: Your product, you, your idea, who knows? So, at this point, I knew a little bit of Python from spending some time in tutorial hell a few years ago, some HTML/CSS/JS, barely enough React to build a working app. React could work for this project, but I needed easy-to-implement server interactivity. Luckily, around this time, I got to know about this new gen of indie hackers, and learned (but didn’t truly understand) about their approach to indie hacking, and this library called Nextjs. How good Next.js still blows my mind. So, I was back to tutorial hell once again. But, this time, with a promise to myself: This is the last time I would visit tutorial hell. Time to start building this "ground-breaking idea" Learning the fundamentals of Next.js was easier than learning of React unsurprisingly. Yet, the first time I managed to run server actions on Next.js was one of the rarest moments that completely blew my mind. To this day, I reject the idea that it is something else than pure magic under its hood. Did I absolutely need Nextjs for this project though? I do not think so. Did it save me lots of time? Absolutely. Furthermore, learning Nextjs will certainly be quite helpful for other projects that I will be tackling in the future. Already got a few ideas that might be worth pursuing in the head in case I decide to abandon Summ in the future. Fast-forward few weeks again: So, at this stage, I had a barely working MVP-like product. Since the very beginning, I spent every free hour (and more) on this project as speed is essential. But, I am not so sure it was worth it to overwork in retrospect. Yet, I know I couldn’t help myself. Everything is going kinda smooth, so what’s the worst thing that could ever happen? Well, both Apple and Google announced their AIs (Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini, respectively) will have email summarization features for their products. Summarizing singular emails is no big deal, after all there were already so many similar products in the market. I still think that what truly matters is a frictionless user experience, and this is why I built this product in a certain way: You spend less than a few minutes setting up your account, and you get to enjoy your email summaries, without ever visiting its website again. This is still a very cool concept I really like a lot. So, at this point: I had no other idea that could be pursued, already spent too much time on this project. Do I quit or not? This was the question. Of course not. I just have to launch this product as quickly as possible. So, I did something right, a quite rare occurrence I might say: Re-planned my product, dropped everything secondary to the core feature immediately (save time on reading emails), tried launching it asap. 👉 Insight: Sell only one core feature at one time. Drop anything secondary to this core feature. Well, my primary occupation is product design. So one would expect that a product I build must have stellar design. I considered any considerable time spent on design at this stage would be simply wasted. I still think this is both true and wrong: True, because if your product’s core benefits suck, no one will care about your design. False, because if your design looks amateurish, no one will trust you and your product. So, I always targeted an average level design with it and the way this tool works made it quite easy as I had to design only 2 primary pages: Landing page and user portal (which has only settings and analytics pages). However, even though I knew spending time on design was not worth much of my time, I got a bit “greedy”: In fact, I redesigned those pages three times, and still ended up with a so-so design that I am not proud of. 👉 What I would do differently: Unless absolutely necessary, only one iteration per stage as long as it works. This, in my mind, applies to everything. If your product’s A feature works, then no need to rewrite it from scratch for any reason, or even refactor it. When your product becomes a success, and you absolutely need that part of your codebase to be written, do so, but only then. Ready to launch, now is th etime for some marketing, right? By July 26, I already had a “launchable” product that barely works (I marked this date on a Notion docs, this is how I know). Yet, I had spent almost no time on marketing, sales, whatever. After all, “You build and they will come”. Did I know that I needed marketing? Of course I did, but knowingly didn’t. Why, you might ask. Well, from my perspective, it had to be a dev-heavy product; meaning that you spend most of your time on developing it, mostly coding skills. But, this is simply wrong. As a rule of thumb, as noted by one of the greatests, Marc Louvion, you should spend at least twice of the building time on marketing. ❗️ Time spent on building \* 2 people don’t know your product > they don’t use your product > you don’t get users > you don’t make money Easy as that. Following the same reasoning, a slightly different approach to planning a project is possible. Determine an approximate time to complete the project with a high level project plan. Let’s say 6 months. By the reasoning above, 2 months should go into building, and 4 into marketing. If you need 4 months for building instead of 2, then you need 8 months of marketing, which makes the time to complete the project 12 months. If you don’t have that much time, then quit the project. When does a project count as completed? Well, in reality, never. But, I think we have to define success conditions even before we start for indie projects and startups; so we know when to quit when they are not met. A success condition could look like “Make $6000 in 12 months” or “Have 3000 users in 6 months”. It all depends on the project. But, once you set it, it should be set in stone: You don’t change it unless absolutely necessary. I suspect there are few principles that make a solopreneur successful; and knowing when to quit and when to continue is definitely one of them. Marc Louvion is famously known for his success, but he got there after failing so many projects. To my knowledge, the same applies to Nico Jeannen, Pieter Levels, or almost everyone as well. ❗️ Determining when to continue even before you start will definitely help in the long run. A half-aed launch Time-leap again. Around mid August, I “soft launched” my product. By soft launch, I mean lazy marketing. Just tweeting about it, posting it on free directories. Did I get any traffic? Surely I did. Did I get any users? Nope. Only after this time, it hit me: “Either something is wrong with me, or with this product” Marketing might be a much bigger factor for a project’s success after all. Even though I get some traffic, not convincing enough for people to sign up even for a free trial. The product was still perfect in my eyes at the time (well, still is ^(\_),) so the right people are not finding my product, I thought. Then, a question that I should have been asking at the very first place, one that could prevent all these, comes to my mind: “How do even people search for such tools?” If we are to consider this whole journey of me and my so-far-failed product to be an already destined failure, one metric suffices to show why. Search volume: 30. Even if people have such a pain point, they are not looking for email summaries. So, almost no organic traffic coming from Google. But, as a person who did zero marketing on this or any product, who has zero marketing knowledge, who doesn’t have an audience on social media, there is not much I could do. Finally, it was time to give up. Or not… In my eyes, the most important element that makes a founder (solo or not) successful (this, I am not by any means) is to solve problems. ❗️ So, the problem was this: “People are not finding my product by organic search” How do I make sure I get some organic traffic and gets more visibility? Learn digital marketing and SEO as much as I can within very limited time. Thankfully, without spending much time, I came across Neil Patel's YT channel, and as I said many times, it is an absolute gold mine. I learned a lot, especially about the fundamentals, and surely it will be fruitful; but there is no magic trick that could make people visit your website. SEO certainly helps, but only when people are looking for your keywords. However, it is truly a magical solution to get in touch with REAL people that are in your user segments: 👉 Understand your pains, understand their problems, help them to solve them via building products. I did not do this so far, have to admit. But, in case you would like to have a chat about your email usage, and email productivity, just get in touch; I’d be delighted to hear about them. Getting ready for a ProductHunt launch The date was Sept 1. And I unlocked an impossible achievement: Running out of Supabase’s free plan’s Egres limit while having zero users. I was already considering moving out of their Cloud server and managing a Supabase CLI service on my Hetzner VPS for some time; but never ever suspected that I would have to do this quickly. The cheapest plan Supabase offers is $25/month; yet, at that point, I am in between jobs for such a long time, basically broke, and could barely afford that price. One or two months could be okay, but why pay for it if I will eventually move out of their Cloud service? So, instead of paying $25, I spent two days migrating out of Supabase Cloud. Worth my time? Definitely not. But, when you are broke, you gotta do stupid things. This was the first time that I felt lucky to have zero users: I have no idea how I would manage this migration if I had any. I think this is one of the core tenets of an indie hacker: Controlling their own environment. I can’t remember whose quote this is, but I suspect it was Naval: Entrepreneurs have an almost pathological need to control their own fate. They will take any suffering if they can be in charge of their destiny, and not have it in somebody else’s hands. What’s truly scary is, at least in my case, we make people around us suffer at the expense of our attempting to control our own fates. I know this period has been quite hard on my wife as well, as I neglected her quite a bit, but sadly, I know that this will happen again. It is something that I can barely help with. Still, so sorry. After working the last two weeks on a ProductHunt Launch, I finally launched it this Tuesday. Zero ranking, zero new users, but 36 kind people upvoted my product, and many commented and provided invaluable feedback. I couldn't be more grateful for each one of them 🙏. Considering all these, what lies in the future of Summ though? I have no idea, to be honest. On one hand, I have zero users, have no job, no income. So, I need a way to make money asap. On the other hand, the whole idea of it revolves around one core premise (not an assumption) that I am not so willing to share; and I couldn’t have more trust in it. This might not be the best iteration of it, however I certainly believe that email usage is one of the best problem spaces one could work on. 👉 But, one thing is for certain: I need to get in touch with people, and talk with them about this product I built so far. In fact, this is the only item on my agenda. Nothing else will save my brainchild <3. Below are some other insights and notes that I got during my journey; as they do not 100% fit into this story, I think it is more suitable to list them here. I hope you enjoyed reading this. Give Summ a try, it comes with a generous free trial, no credit card required. Some additional notes and insights: Project planning is one of the most underestimated skills for solopreneurs. It saves you enormous time, and helps you to keep your focus up. Building B2C products beats building B2B products. Businesses are very willing to pay big bucks if your product helps them. On the other hand, spending a few hours per user who would pay $5/m probably is not worth your time. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your product is if no one uses it. If you cannot sell a product in a certain category/niche (or do not know how to sell it), it might be a good idea not to start a project in it. Going after new ideas and ventures is quite risky, especially if you don’t know how to market it. On the other hand, an already established category means that there is already demand. Whether this demand is sufficient or not is another issue. As long as there is enough demand for your product to fit in, any category/niche is good. Some might be better, some might be worse. Unless you are going hardcore B2B, you will need people to find your product by means of organic search. Always conduct thorough keyword research as soon as possible.

#reddit#spent#months
I spent 6 months on building a tool, and got 0 zero users. Here is my story.
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.667
GDbuildsGD•This week

I spent 6 months on building a tool, and got 0 zero users. Here is my story.

Edit Thank you all so much for your time reading my story. Your support, feedback, criticism, and skepticism; all helped me a lot, and I couldn't appreciate it enough \^\_\^ TL;DR I spent 6 months on a tool that currently has 0 users. Below is what I learned during my journey, sharing because I believe most mistakes are easily avoidable. Do not overestimate your product and assume it will be an exception to fundamental principles. Principles are there for a reason. Always look for validation before you start. Avoid building products with a low money-to-effort ratio/in very competitive fields. Unless you have the means, you probably won't make it. Pick a problem space, pick your target audience, and talk to them before thinking about a solution. Identify and match their pain points. Only then should you think of a solution. If people are not overly excited or willing to pay in advance for a discounted price, it might be a sign to rethink. Sell one and only one feature at a time. Avoid everything else. If people don't pay for that one core feature, no secondary feature will change their mind. Always spend twice as much time marketing as you do building. You will not get users if they don't know it exists. Define success metrics ("1000 users in 3 months" or "$6000 in the account at the end of 6 months") before you start. If you don't meet them, strongly consider quitting the project. If you can't get enough users to keep going, nothing else matters. VALIDATION, VALIDATION, VALIDATION. Success is not random, but most of our first products will not make a success story. Know when to admit failure, and move on. Even if a product of yours doesn't succeed, what you learned during its journey will turn out to be invaluable for your future. My story So, this is the story of a product, Summ, that I’ve been working on for the last 6 months. As it's the first product I’ve ever built, after watching you all from the sidelines, I have learned a lot, made many mistakes, and did only a few things right. Just sharing what I’ve learned and some insights from my journey so far. I hope that this post will help you avoid the mistakes I made — most of which I consider easily avoidable — while you enjoy reading it, and get to know me a little bit more 🤓. A slow start after many years Summ isn’t the first product I really wanted to build. Lacking enough dev skills to even get started was a huge blocker for so many years. In fact, the first product I would’ve LOVED to build was a smart personal shopping assistant. I had this idea 4 years ago; but with no GPT, no coding skills, no technical co-founder, I didn’t have the means to make it happen. I still do not know if such a tool exists and is good enough. All I wanted was a tool that could make data-based predictions about when to buy stuff (“buy a new toothpaste every three months”) and suggest physical products that I might need or be strongly interested in. AFAIK, Amazon famously still struggles with the second one. Fast-forward a few years, I learned the very basics of HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS. Still was not there to build a product; but good enough to code my design portfolio from scratch. Yet, I couldn’t imagine myself building a product using Vanilla JS. I really hated it, I really sucked at it. So, back to tutorial hell, and to learn about this framework I just heard about: React.React introduced so many new concepts to me. “Thinking in React” is a phrase we heard a lot, and with quite good reasons. After some time, I was able to build very basic tutorial apps, both in React, and React Native; but I have to say that I really hated coding for mobile. At this point, I was already a fan of productivity apps, and had a concept for a time management assistant app in my design portfolio. So, why not build one? Surely, it must be easy, since every coding tutorial starts with a todo app. ❌ WRONG! Building a basic todo app is easy enough, but building one good enough for a place in the market was a challenge I took and failed. I wasted one month on that until I abandoned the project for good. Even if I continued working on it, as the productivity landscape is overly competitive, I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to cover costs, assuming I make any. Since I was (and still am) in between jobs, I decided to abandon the project. 👉 What I learned: Do not start projects with a low ratio of money to effort and time. Example: Even if I get 500 monthly users, 200 of which are paid users (unrealistically high number), assuming an average subscription fee of $5/m (such apps are quite cheap, mostly due to the high competition), it would make me around $1000 minus any occurring costs. Any founder with a product that has 500 active users should make more. Even if it was relatively successful, due to the high competition, I wouldn’t make any meaningful money. PS: I use Todoist today. Due to local pricing, I pay less than $2/m. There is no way I could beat this competitive pricing, let alone the app itself. But, somehow, with a project that wasn’t even functional — let alone being an MVP — I made my first Wi-Fi money: Someone decided that the domain I preemptively purchased is worth something. By this point, I had already abandoned the project, certainly wasn’t going to renew the domain, was looking for a FT job, and a new project that I could work on. And out of nowhere, someone hands me some free money — who am I not to take it? Of course, I took it. The domain is still unused, no idea why 🤔. Ngl, I still hate the fact that my first Wi-Fi money came from this. A new idea worth pursuing? Fast-forward some weeks now. Around March, I got this crazy idea of building an email productivity tool. We all use emails, yet we all hate them. So, this must be fixed. Everyone uses emails, in fact everyone HAS TO use emails. So, I just needed to build a tool and wait for people to come. This was all, really. After all, the problem space is huge, there is enough room for another product, everyone uses emails, no need for any further validation, right? ❌ WRONG ONCE AGAIN! We all hear from the greatest in the startup landscape that we must validate our ideas with real people, yet at least some of us (guilty here 🥸) think that our product will be hugely successful and prove them to be an exception. Few might, but most are not. I certainly wasn't. 👉 Lesson learned: Always validate your ideas with real people. Ask them how much they’d pay for such a tool (not if they would). Much better if they are willing to pay upfront for a discount, etc. But even this comes later, keep reading. I think the difference between “How much” and “If” is huge for two reasons: (1) By asking them for “How much”, you force them to think in a more realistic setting. (2) You will have a more realistic idea on your profit margins. Based on my competitive analysis, I already had a solution in my mind to improve our email usage standards and email productivity (huge mistake), but I did my best to learn about their problems regarding those without pushing the idea too hard. The idea is this: Generate concise email summaries with suggested actions, combine them into one email, and send it at their preferred times. Save as much as time the AI you end up with allows. After all, everyone loves to save time. So, what kind of validation did I seek for? Talked with only a few people around me about this crazy, internet-breaking idea. The responses I got were, now I see, mediocre; no one got excited about it, just said things along the lines of “Cool idea, OK”. So, any reasonable person in this situation would think “Okay, not might not be working”, right? Well, I did not. I assumed that they were the wrong audience for this product, and there was this magical land of user segments waiting eagerly for my product, yet unknowingly. To this day, I still have not reached this magical place. Perhaps, it didn’t exist in the first place. If I cannot find it, whether it exists or not doesn’t matter. I am certainly searching for it. 👉 What I should have done: Once I decide on a problem space (time management, email productivity, etc.), I should decide on my potential user segments, people who I plan to sell my product to. Then I should go talk to those people, ask them about their pains, then get to the problem-solving/ideation phase only later. ❗️ VALIDATION COMES FROM THE REALITY OUTSIDE. What validation looks like might change from product to product; but what invalidation looks like is more or less the same for every product. Nico Jeannen told me yesterday “validation = money in the account” on Twitter. This is the ultimate form of validation your product could get. If your product doesn’t make any money, then something is invalidated by reality: Your product, you, your idea, who knows? So, at this point, I knew a little bit of Python from spending some time in tutorial hell a few years ago, some HTML/CSS/JS, barely enough React to build a working app. React could work for this project, but I needed easy-to-implement server interactivity. Luckily, around this time, I got to know about this new gen of indie hackers, and learned (but didn’t truly understand) about their approach to indie hacking, and this library called Nextjs. How good Next.js still blows my mind. So, I was back to tutorial hell once again. But, this time, with a promise to myself: This is the last time I would visit tutorial hell. Time to start building this "ground-breaking idea" Learning the fundamentals of Next.js was easier than learning of React unsurprisingly. Yet, the first time I managed to run server actions on Next.js was one of the rarest moments that completely blew my mind. To this day, I reject the idea that it is something else than pure magic under its hood. Did I absolutely need Nextjs for this project though? I do not think so. Did it save me lots of time? Absolutely. Furthermore, learning Nextjs will certainly be quite helpful for other projects that I will be tackling in the future. Already got a few ideas that might be worth pursuing in the head in case I decide to abandon Summ in the future. Fast-forward few weeks again: So, at this stage, I had a barely working MVP-like product. Since the very beginning, I spent every free hour (and more) on this project as speed is essential. But, I am not so sure it was worth it to overwork in retrospect. Yet, I know I couldn’t help myself. Everything is going kinda smooth, so what’s the worst thing that could ever happen? Well, both Apple and Google announced their AIs (Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini, respectively) will have email summarization features for their products. Summarizing singular emails is no big deal, after all there were already so many similar products in the market. I still think that what truly matters is a frictionless user experience, and this is why I built this product in a certain way: You spend less than a few minutes setting up your account, and you get to enjoy your email summaries, without ever visiting its website again. This is still a very cool concept I really like a lot. So, at this point: I had no other idea that could be pursued, already spent too much time on this project. Do I quit or not? This was the question. Of course not. I just have to launch this product as quickly as possible. So, I did something right, a quite rare occurrence I might say: Re-planned my product, dropped everything secondary to the core feature immediately (save time on reading emails), tried launching it asap. 👉 Insight: Sell only one core feature at one time. Drop anything secondary to this core feature. Well, my primary occupation is product design. So one would expect that a product I build must have stellar design. I considered any considerable time spent on design at this stage would be simply wasted. I still think this is both true and wrong: True, because if your product’s core benefits suck, no one will care about your design. False, because if your design looks amateurish, no one will trust you and your product. So, I always targeted an average level design with it and the way this tool works made it quite easy as I had to design only 2 primary pages: Landing page and user portal (which has only settings and analytics pages). However, even though I knew spending time on design was not worth much of my time, I got a bit “greedy”: In fact, I redesigned those pages three times, and still ended up with a so-so design that I am not proud of. 👉 What I would do differently: Unless absolutely necessary, only one iteration per stage as long as it works. This, in my mind, applies to everything. If your product’s A feature works, then no need to rewrite it from scratch for any reason, or even refactor it. When your product becomes a success, and you absolutely need that part of your codebase to be written, do so, but only then. Ready to launch, now is th etime for some marketing, right? By July 26, I already had a “launchable” product that barely works (I marked this date on a Notion docs, this is how I know). Yet, I had spent almost no time on marketing, sales, whatever. After all, “You build and they will come”. Did I know that I needed marketing? Of course I did, but knowingly didn’t. Why, you might ask. Well, from my perspective, it had to be a dev-heavy product; meaning that you spend most of your time on developing it, mostly coding skills. But, this is simply wrong. As a rule of thumb, as noted by one of the greatests, Marc Louvion, you should spend at least twice of the building time on marketing. ❗️ Time spent on building \* 2 people don’t know your product > they don’t use your product > you don’t get users > you don’t make money Easy as that. Following the same reasoning, a slightly different approach to planning a project is possible. Determine an approximate time to complete the project with a high level project plan. Let’s say 6 months. By the reasoning above, 2 months should go into building, and 4 into marketing. If you need 4 months for building instead of 2, then you need 8 months of marketing, which makes the time to complete the project 12 months. If you don’t have that much time, then quit the project. When does a project count as completed? Well, in reality, never. But, I think we have to define success conditions even before we start for indie projects and startups; so we know when to quit when they are not met. A success condition could look like “Make $6000 in 12 months” or “Have 3000 users in 6 months”. It all depends on the project. But, once you set it, it should be set in stone: You don’t change it unless absolutely necessary. I suspect there are few principles that make a solopreneur successful; and knowing when to quit and when to continue is definitely one of them. Marc Louvion is famously known for his success, but he got there after failing so many projects. To my knowledge, the same applies to Nico Jeannen, Pieter Levels, or almost everyone as well. ❗️ Determining when to continue even before you start will definitely help in the long run. A half-aed launch Time-leap again. Around mid August, I “soft launched” my product. By soft launch, I mean lazy marketing. Just tweeting about it, posting it on free directories. Did I get any traffic? Surely I did. Did I get any users? Nope. Only after this time, it hit me: “Either something is wrong with me, or with this product” Marketing might be a much bigger factor for a project’s success after all. Even though I get some traffic, not convincing enough for people to sign up even for a free trial. The product was still perfect in my eyes at the time (well, still is ^(\_),) so the right people are not finding my product, I thought. Then, a question that I should have been asking at the very first place, one that could prevent all these, comes to my mind: “How do even people search for such tools?” If we are to consider this whole journey of me and my so-far-failed product to be an already destined failure, one metric suffices to show why. Search volume: 30. Even if people have such a pain point, they are not looking for email summaries. So, almost no organic traffic coming from Google. But, as a person who did zero marketing on this or any product, who has zero marketing knowledge, who doesn’t have an audience on social media, there is not much I could do. Finally, it was time to give up. Or not… In my eyes, the most important element that makes a founder (solo or not) successful (this, I am not by any means) is to solve problems. ❗️ So, the problem was this: “People are not finding my product by organic search” How do I make sure I get some organic traffic and gets more visibility? Learn digital marketing and SEO as much as I can within very limited time. Thankfully, without spending much time, I came across Neil Patel's YT channel, and as I said many times, it is an absolute gold mine. I learned a lot, especially about the fundamentals, and surely it will be fruitful; but there is no magic trick that could make people visit your website. SEO certainly helps, but only when people are looking for your keywords. However, it is truly a magical solution to get in touch with REAL people that are in your user segments: 👉 Understand your pains, understand their problems, help them to solve them via building products. I did not do this so far, have to admit. But, in case you would like to have a chat about your email usage, and email productivity, just get in touch; I’d be delighted to hear about them. Getting ready for a ProductHunt launch The date was Sept 1. And I unlocked an impossible achievement: Running out of Supabase’s free plan’s Egres limit while having zero users. I was already considering moving out of their Cloud server and managing a Supabase CLI service on my Hetzner VPS for some time; but never ever suspected that I would have to do this quickly. The cheapest plan Supabase offers is $25/month; yet, at that point, I am in between jobs for such a long time, basically broke, and could barely afford that price. One or two months could be okay, but why pay for it if I will eventually move out of their Cloud service? So, instead of paying $25, I spent two days migrating out of Supabase Cloud. Worth my time? Definitely not. But, when you are broke, you gotta do stupid things. This was the first time that I felt lucky to have zero users: I have no idea how I would manage this migration if I had any. I think this is one of the core tenets of an indie hacker: Controlling their own environment. I can’t remember whose quote this is, but I suspect it was Naval: Entrepreneurs have an almost pathological need to control their own fate. They will take any suffering if they can be in charge of their destiny, and not have it in somebody else’s hands. What’s truly scary is, at least in my case, we make people around us suffer at the expense of our attempting to control our own fates. I know this period has been quite hard on my wife as well, as I neglected her quite a bit, but sadly, I know that this will happen again. It is something that I can barely help with. Still, so sorry. After working the last two weeks on a ProductHunt Launch, I finally launched it this Tuesday. Zero ranking, zero new users, but 36 kind people upvoted my product, and many commented and provided invaluable feedback. I couldn't be more grateful for each one of them 🙏. Considering all these, what lies in the future of Summ though? I have no idea, to be honest. On one hand, I have zero users, have no job, no income. So, I need a way to make money asap. On the other hand, the whole idea of it revolves around one core premise (not an assumption) that I am not so willing to share; and I couldn’t have more trust in it. This might not be the best iteration of it, however I certainly believe that email usage is one of the best problem spaces one could work on. 👉 But, one thing is for certain: I need to get in touch with people, and talk with them about this product I built so far. In fact, this is the only item on my agenda. Nothing else will save my brainchild <3. Below are some other insights and notes that I got during my journey; as they do not 100% fit into this story, I think it is more suitable to list them here. I hope you enjoyed reading this. Give Summ a try, it comes with a generous free trial, no credit card required. Some additional notes and insights: Project planning is one of the most underestimated skills for solopreneurs. It saves you enormous time, and helps you to keep your focus up. Building B2C products beats building B2B products. Businesses are very willing to pay big bucks if your product helps them. On the other hand, spending a few hours per user who would pay $5/m probably is not worth your time. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your product is if no one uses it. If you cannot sell a product in a certain category/niche (or do not know how to sell it), it might be a good idea not to start a project in it. Going after new ideas and ventures is quite risky, especially if you don’t know how to market it. On the other hand, an already established category means that there is already demand. Whether this demand is sufficient or not is another issue. As long as there is enough demand for your product to fit in, any category/niche is good. Some might be better, some might be worse. Unless you are going hardcore B2B, you will need people to find your product by means of organic search. Always conduct thorough keyword research as soon as possible.

#reddit#spent#months
I spent 6 months on building a web product, and got zero users. Here is my story.
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.667
GDbuildsGD•This week

I spent 6 months on building a web product, and got zero users. Here is my story.

Edit Thank you all so much for your time reading my story. Your support, feedback, criticism, and skepticism; all helped me a lot, and I couldn't appreciate it enough \^\_\^ I have stuff to post on Reddit very rarely, but I share how my project is going on, random stuff, and memes on X. Just in case few might want to keep in touch 👀 TL;DR I spent 6 months on a tool that currently has 0 users. Below is what I learned during my journey, sharing because I believe most mistakes are easily avoidable. Do not overestimate your product and assume it will be an exception to fundamental principles. Principles are there for a reason. Always look for validation before you start. Avoid building products with a low money-to-effort ratio/in very competitive fields. Unless you have the means, you probably won't make it. Pick a problem space, pick your target audience, and talk to them before thinking about a solution. Identify and match their pain points. Only then should you think of a solution. If people are not overly excited or willing to pay in advance for a discounted price, it might be a sign to rethink. Sell one and only one feature at a time. Avoid everything else. If people don't pay for that one core feature, no secondary feature will change their mind. Always spend twice as much time marketing as you do building. You will not get users if they don't know it exists. Define success metrics ("1000 users in 3 months" or "$6000 in the account at the end of 6 months") before you start. If you don't meet them, strongly consider quitting the project. If you can't get enough users to keep going, nothing else matters. VALIDATION, VALIDATION, VALIDATION. Success is not random, but most of our first products will not make a success story. Know when to admit failure, and move on. Even if a product of yours doesn't succeed, what you learned during its journey will turn out to be invaluable for your future. My story So, this is the story of a product that I’ve been working on for the last 6 months. As it's the first product I’ve ever built, after watching you all from the sidelines, I have learned a lot, made many mistakes, and did only a few things right. Just sharing what I’ve learned and some insights from my journey so far. I hope that this post will help you avoid the mistakes I made — most of which I consider easily avoidable — while you enjoy reading it, and get to know me a little bit more 🤓. A slow start after many years Summ isn’t the first product I really wanted to build. Lacking enough dev skills to even get started was a huge blocker for so many years. In fact, the first product I would’ve LOVED to build was a smart personal shopping assistant. I had this idea 4 years ago; but with no GPT, no coding skills, no technical co-founder, I didn’t have the means to make it happen. I still do not know if such a tool exists and is good enough. All I wanted was a tool that could make data-based predictions about when to buy stuff (“buy a new toothpaste every three months”) and suggest physical products that I might need or be strongly interested in. AFAIK, Amazon famously still struggles with the second one. Fast-forward a few years, I learned the very basics of HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS. Still was not there to build a product; but good enough to code my design portfolio from scratch. Yet, I couldn’t imagine myself building a product using Vanilla JS. I really hated it, I really sucked at it. So, back to tutorial hell, and to learn about this framework I just heard about: React.React introduced so many new concepts to me. “Thinking in React” is a phrase we heard a lot, and with quite good reasons. After some time, I was able to build very basic tutorial apps, both in React, and React Native; but I have to say that I really hated coding for mobile. At this point, I was already a fan of productivity apps, and had a concept for a time management assistant app in my design portfolio. So, why not build one? Surely, it must be easy, since every coding tutorial starts with a todo app. ❌ WRONG! Building a basic todo app is easy enough, but building one good enough for a place in the market was a challenge I took and failed. I wasted one month on that until I abandoned the project for good. Even if I continued working on it, as the productivity landscape is overly competitive, I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to cover costs, assuming I make any. Since I was (and still am) in between jobs, I decided to abandon the project. 👉 What I learned: Do not start projects with a low ratio of money to effort and time. Example: Even if I get 500 monthly users, 200 of which are paid users (unrealistically high number), assuming an average subscription fee of $5/m (such apps are quite cheap, mostly due to the high competition), it would make me around $1000 minus any occurring costs. Any founder with a product that has 500 active users should make more. Even if it was relatively successful, due to the high competition, I wouldn’t make any meaningful money. PS: I use Todoist today. Due to local pricing, I pay less than $2/m. There is no way I could beat this competitive pricing, let alone the app itself. But, somehow, with a project that wasn’t even functional — let alone being an MVP — I made my first Wi-Fi money: Someone decided that the domain I preemptively purchased is worth something. By this point, I had already abandoned the project, certainly wasn’t going to renew the domain, was looking for a FT job, and a new project that I could work on. And out of nowhere, someone hands me some free money — who am I not to take it? Of course, I took it. The domain is still unused, no idea why 🤔. Ngl, I still hate the fact that my first Wi-Fi money came from this. A new idea worth pursuing? Fast-forward some weeks now. Around March, I got this crazy idea of building an email productivity tool. We all use emails, yet we all hate them. So, this must be fixed. Everyone uses emails, in fact everyone HAS TO use emails. So, I just needed to build a tool and wait for people to come. This was all, really. After all, the problem space is huge, there is enough room for another product, everyone uses emails, no need for any further validation, right? ❌ WRONG ONCE AGAIN! We all hear from the greatest in the startup landscape that we must validate our ideas with real people, yet at least some of us (guilty here 🥸) think that our product will be hugely successful and prove them to be an exception. Few might, but most are not. I certainly wasn't. 👉 Lesson learned: Always validate your ideas with real people. Ask them how much they’d pay for such a tool (not if they would). Much better if they are willing to pay upfront for a discount, etc. But even this comes later, keep reading. I think the difference between “How much” and “If” is huge for two reasons: (1) By asking them for “How much”, you force them to think in a more realistic setting. (2) You will have a more realistic idea on your profit margins. Based on my competitive analysis, I already had a solution in my mind to improve our email usage standards and email productivity (huge mistake), but I did my best to learn about their problems regarding those without pushing the idea too hard. The idea is this: Generate concise email summaries with suggested actions, combine them into one email, and send it at their preferred times. Save as much as time the AI you end up with allows. After all, everyone loves to save time. So, what kind of validation did I seek for? Talked with only a few people around me about this crazy, internet-breaking idea. The responses I got were, now I see, mediocre; no one got excited about it, just said things along the lines of “Cool idea, OK”. So, any reasonable person in this situation would think “Okay, not might not be working”, right? Well, I did not. I assumed that they were the wrong audience for this product, and there was this magical land of user segments waiting eagerly for my product, yet unknowingly. To this day, I still have not reached this magical place. Perhaps, it didn’t exist in the first place. If I cannot find it, whether it exists or not doesn’t matter. I am certainly searching for it. 👉 What I should have done: Once I decide on a problem space (time management, email productivity, etc.), I should decide on my potential user segments, people who I plan to sell my product to. Then I should go talk to those people, ask them about their pains, then get to the problem-solving/ideation phase only later. ❗️ VALIDATION COMES FROM THE REALITY OUTSIDE. What validation looks like might change from product to product; but what invalidation looks like is more or less the same for every product. Nico Jeannen told me yesterday “validation = money in the account” on Twitter. This is the ultimate form of validation your product could get. If your product doesn’t make any money, then something is invalidated by reality: Your product, you, your idea, who knows? So, at this point, I knew a little bit of Python from spending some time in tutorial hell a few years ago, some HTML/CSS/JS, barely enough React to build a working app. React could work for this project, but I needed easy-to-implement server interactivity. Luckily, around this time, I got to know about this new gen of indie hackers, and learned (but didn’t truly understand) about their approach to indie hacking, and this library called Nextjs. How good Next.js still blows my mind. So, I was back to tutorial hell once again. But, this time, with a promise to myself: This is the last time I would visit tutorial hell. Time to start building this "ground-breaking idea" Learning the fundamentals of Next.js was easier than learning of React unsurprisingly. Yet, the first time I managed to run server actions on Next.js was one of the rarest moments that completely blew my mind. To this day, I reject the idea that it is something else than pure magic under its hood. Did I absolutely need Nextjs for this project though? I do not think so. Did it save me lots of time? Absolutely. Furthermore, learning Nextjs will certainly be quite helpful for other projects that I will be tackling in the future. Already got a few ideas that might be worth pursuing in the head in case I decide to abandon Summ in the future. Fast-forward few weeks again: So, at this stage, I had a barely working MVP-like product. Since the very beginning, I spent every free hour (and more) on this project as speed is essential. But, I am not so sure it was worth it to overwork in retrospect. Yet, I know I couldn’t help myself. Everything is going kinda smooth, so what’s the worst thing that could ever happen? Well, both Apple and Google announced their AIs (Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini, respectively) will have email summarization features for their products. Summarizing singular emails is no big deal, after all there were already so many similar products in the market. I still think that what truly matters is a frictionless user experience, and this is why I built this product in a certain way: You spend less than a few minutes setting up your account, and you get to enjoy your email summaries, without ever visiting its website again. This is still a very cool concept I really like a lot. So, at this point: I had no other idea that could be pursued, already spent too much time on this project. Do I quit or not? This was the question. Of course not. I just have to launch this product as quickly as possible. So, I did something right, a quite rare occurrence I might say: Re-planned my product, dropped everything secondary to the core feature immediately (save time on reading emails), tried launching it asap. 👉 Insight: Sell only one core feature at one time. Drop anything secondary to this core feature. Well, my primary occupation is product design. So one would expect that a product I build must have stellar design. I considered any considerable time spent on design at this stage would be simply wasted. I still think this is both true and wrong: True, because if your product’s core benefits suck, no one will care about your design. False, because if your design looks amateurish, no one will trust you and your product. So, I always targeted an average level design with it and the way this tool works made it quite easy as I had to design only 2 primary pages: Landing page and user portal (which has only settings and analytics pages). However, even though I knew spending time on design was not worth much of my time, I got a bit “greedy”: In fact, I redesigned those pages three times, and still ended up with a so-so design that I am not proud of. 👉 What I would do differently: Unless absolutely necessary, only one iteration per stage as long as it works. This, in my mind, applies to everything. If your product’s A feature works, then no need to rewrite it from scratch for any reason, or even refactor it. When your product becomes a success, and you absolutely need that part of your codebase to be written, do so, but only then. Ready to launch, now is th etime for some marketing, right? By July 26, I already had a “launchable” product that barely works (I marked this date on a Notion docs, this is how I know). Yet, I had spent almost no time on marketing, sales, whatever. After all, “You build and they will come”. Did I know that I needed marketing? Of course I did, but knowingly didn’t. Why, you might ask. Well, from my perspective, it had to be a dev-heavy product; meaning that you spend most of your time on developing it, mostly coding skills. But, this is simply wrong. As a rule of thumb, as noted by one of the greatests, Marc Louvion, you should spend at least twice of the building time on marketing. ❗️ Time spent on building \* 2 people don’t know your product > they don’t use your product > you don’t get users > you don’t make money Easy as that. Following the same reasoning, a slightly different approach to planning a project is possible. Determine an approximate time to complete the project with a high level project plan. Let’s say 6 months. By the reasoning above, 2 months should go into building, and 4 into marketing. If you need 4 months for building instead of 2, then you need 8 months of marketing, which makes the time to complete the project 12 months. If you don’t have that much time, then quit the project. When does a project count as completed? Well, in reality, never. But, I think we have to define success conditions even before we start for indie projects and startups; so we know when to quit when they are not met. A success condition could look like “Make $6000 in 12 months” or “Have 3000 users in 6 months”. It all depends on the project. But, once you set it, it should be set in stone: You don’t change it unless absolutely necessary. I suspect there are few principles that make a solopreneur successful; and knowing when to quit and when to continue is definitely one of them. Marc Louvion is famously known for his success, but he got there after failing so many projects. To my knowledge, the same applies to Nico Jeannen, Pieter Levels, or almost everyone as well. ❗️ Determining when to continue even before you start will definitely help in the long run. A half-aed launch Time-leap again. Around mid August, I “soft launched” my product. By soft launch, I mean lazy marketing. Just tweeting about it, posting it on free directories. Did I get any traffic? Surely I did. Did I get any users? Nope. Only after this time, it hit me: “Either something is wrong with me, or with this product” Marketing might be a much bigger factor for a project’s success after all. Even though I get some traffic, not convincing enough for people to sign up even for a free trial. The product was still perfect in my eyes at the time (well, still is ^(\_),) so the right people are not finding my product, I thought. Then, a question that I should have been asking at the very first place, one that could prevent all these, comes to my mind: “How do even people search for such tools?” If we are to consider this whole journey of me and my so-far-failed product to be an already destined failure, one metric suffices to show why. Search volume: 30. Even if people have such a pain point, they are not looking for email summaries. So, almost no organic traffic coming from Google. But, as a person who did zero marketing on this or any product, who has zero marketing knowledge, who doesn’t have an audience on social media, there is not much I could do. Finally, it was time to give up. Or not… In my eyes, the most important element that makes a founder (solo or not) successful (this, I am not by any means) is to solve problems. ❗️ So, the problem was this: “People are not finding my product by organic search” How do I make sure I get some organic traffic and gets more visibility? Learn digital marketing and SEO as much as I can within very limited time. Thankfully, without spending much time, I came across Neil Patel's YT channel, and as I said many times, it is an absolute gold mine. I learned a lot, especially about the fundamentals, and surely it will be fruitful; but there is no magic trick that could make people visit your website. SEO certainly helps, but only when people are looking for your keywords. However, it is truly a magical solution to get in touch with REAL people that are in your user segments: 👉 Understand your pains, understand their problems, help them to solve them via building products. I did not do this so far, have to admit. But, in case you would like to have a chat about your email usage, and email productivity, just get in touch; I’d be delighted to hear about them. Getting ready for a ProductHunt launch The date was Sept 1. And I unlocked an impossible achievement: Running out of Supabase’s free plan’s Egres limit while having zero users. I was already considering moving out of their Cloud server and managing a Supabase CLI service on my Hetzner VPS for some time; but never ever suspected that I would have to do this quickly. The cheapest plan Supabase offers is $25/month; yet, at that point, I am in between jobs for such a long time, basically broke, and could barely afford that price. One or two months could be okay, but why pay for it if I will eventually move out of their Cloud service? So, instead of paying $25, I spent two days migrating out of Supabase Cloud. Worth my time? Definitely not. But, when you are broke, you gotta do stupid things. This was the first time that I felt lucky to have zero users: I have no idea how I would manage this migration if I had any. I think this is one of the core tenets of an indie hacker: Controlling their own environment. I can’t remember whose quote this is, but I suspect it was Naval: Entrepreneurs have an almost pathological need to control their own fate. They will take any suffering if they can be in charge of their destiny, and not have it in somebody else’s hands. What’s truly scary is, at least in my case, we make people around us suffer at the expense of our attempting to control our own fates. I know this period has been quite hard on my wife as well, as I neglected her quite a bit, but sadly, I know that this will happen again. It is something that I can barely help with. Still, so sorry. After working the last two weeks on a ProductHunt Launch, I finally launched it this Tuesday. Zero ranking, zero new users, but 36 kind people upvoted my product, and many commented and provided invaluable feedback. I couldn't be more grateful for each one of them 🙏. Considering all these, what lies in the future of Summ though? I have no idea, to be honest. On one hand, I have zero users, have no job, no income. So, I need a way to make money asap. On the other hand, the whole idea of it revolves around one core premise (not an assumption) that I am not so willing to share; and I couldn’t have more trust in it. This might not be the best iteration of it, however I certainly believe that email usage is one of the best problem spaces one could work on. 👉 But, one thing is for certain: I need to get in touch with people, and talk with them about this product I built so far. In fact, this is the only item on my agenda. Nothing else will save my brainchild <3. Below are some other insights and notes that I got during my journey; as they do not 100% fit into this story, I think it is more suitable to list them here. I hope you enjoyed reading this. Give Summ a try, it comes with a generous free trial, no credit card required. Some additional notes and insights: Project planning is one of the most underestimated skills for solopreneurs. It saves you enormous time, and helps you to keep your focus up. Building B2C products beats building B2B products. Businesses are very willing to pay big bucks if your product helps them. On the other hand, spending a few hours per user who would pay $5/m probably is not worth your time. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your product is if no one uses it. If you cannot sell a product in a certain category/niche (or do not know how to sell it), it might be a good idea not to start a project in it. Going after new ideas and ventures is quite risky, especially if you don’t know how to market it. On the other hand, an already established category means that there is already demand. Whether this demand is sufficient or not is another issue. As long as there is enough demand for your product to fit in, any category/niche is good. Some might be better, some might be worse. Unless you are going hardcore B2B, you will need people to find your product by means of organic search. Always conduct thorough keyword research as soon as possible.

#reddit#spent#months
I spent 6 months on building a web product, and got zero users. Here is my story.
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.667
GDbuildsGD•This week

I spent 6 months on building a web product, and got zero users. Here is my story.

Edit Thank you all so much for your time reading my story. Your support, feedback, criticism, and skepticism; all helped me a lot, and I couldn't appreciate it enough \^\_\^ I have stuff to post on Reddit very rarely, but I share how my project is going on, random stuff, and memes on X. Just in case few might want to keep in touch 👀 TL;DR I spent 6 months on a tool that currently has 0 users. Below is what I learned during my journey, sharing because I believe most mistakes are easily avoidable. Do not overestimate your product and assume it will be an exception to fundamental principles. Principles are there for a reason. Always look for validation before you start. Avoid building products with a low money-to-effort ratio/in very competitive fields. Unless you have the means, you probably won't make it. Pick a problem space, pick your target audience, and talk to them before thinking about a solution. Identify and match their pain points. Only then should you think of a solution. If people are not overly excited or willing to pay in advance for a discounted price, it might be a sign to rethink. Sell one and only one feature at a time. Avoid everything else. If people don't pay for that one core feature, no secondary feature will change their mind. Always spend twice as much time marketing as you do building. You will not get users if they don't know it exists. Define success metrics ("1000 users in 3 months" or "$6000 in the account at the end of 6 months") before you start. If you don't meet them, strongly consider quitting the project. If you can't get enough users to keep going, nothing else matters. VALIDATION, VALIDATION, VALIDATION. Success is not random, but most of our first products will not make a success story. Know when to admit failure, and move on. Even if a product of yours doesn't succeed, what you learned during its journey will turn out to be invaluable for your future. My story So, this is the story of a product that I’ve been working on for the last 6 months. As it's the first product I’ve ever built, after watching you all from the sidelines, I have learned a lot, made many mistakes, and did only a few things right. Just sharing what I’ve learned and some insights from my journey so far. I hope that this post will help you avoid the mistakes I made — most of which I consider easily avoidable — while you enjoy reading it, and get to know me a little bit more 🤓. A slow start after many years Summ isn’t the first product I really wanted to build. Lacking enough dev skills to even get started was a huge blocker for so many years. In fact, the first product I would’ve LOVED to build was a smart personal shopping assistant. I had this idea 4 years ago; but with no GPT, no coding skills, no technical co-founder, I didn’t have the means to make it happen. I still do not know if such a tool exists and is good enough. All I wanted was a tool that could make data-based predictions about when to buy stuff (“buy a new toothpaste every three months”) and suggest physical products that I might need or be strongly interested in. AFAIK, Amazon famously still struggles with the second one. Fast-forward a few years, I learned the very basics of HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS. Still was not there to build a product; but good enough to code my design portfolio from scratch. Yet, I couldn’t imagine myself building a product using Vanilla JS. I really hated it, I really sucked at it. So, back to tutorial hell, and to learn about this framework I just heard about: React.React introduced so many new concepts to me. “Thinking in React” is a phrase we heard a lot, and with quite good reasons. After some time, I was able to build very basic tutorial apps, both in React, and React Native; but I have to say that I really hated coding for mobile. At this point, I was already a fan of productivity apps, and had a concept for a time management assistant app in my design portfolio. So, why not build one? Surely, it must be easy, since every coding tutorial starts with a todo app. ❌ WRONG! Building a basic todo app is easy enough, but building one good enough for a place in the market was a challenge I took and failed. I wasted one month on that until I abandoned the project for good. Even if I continued working on it, as the productivity landscape is overly competitive, I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to cover costs, assuming I make any. Since I was (and still am) in between jobs, I decided to abandon the project. 👉 What I learned: Do not start projects with a low ratio of money to effort and time. Example: Even if I get 500 monthly users, 200 of which are paid users (unrealistically high number), assuming an average subscription fee of $5/m (such apps are quite cheap, mostly due to the high competition), it would make me around $1000 minus any occurring costs. Any founder with a product that has 500 active users should make more. Even if it was relatively successful, due to the high competition, I wouldn’t make any meaningful money. PS: I use Todoist today. Due to local pricing, I pay less than $2/m. There is no way I could beat this competitive pricing, let alone the app itself. But, somehow, with a project that wasn’t even functional — let alone being an MVP — I made my first Wi-Fi money: Someone decided that the domain I preemptively purchased is worth something. By this point, I had already abandoned the project, certainly wasn’t going to renew the domain, was looking for a FT job, and a new project that I could work on. And out of nowhere, someone hands me some free money — who am I not to take it? Of course, I took it. The domain is still unused, no idea why 🤔. Ngl, I still hate the fact that my first Wi-Fi money came from this. A new idea worth pursuing? Fast-forward some weeks now. Around March, I got this crazy idea of building an email productivity tool. We all use emails, yet we all hate them. So, this must be fixed. Everyone uses emails, in fact everyone HAS TO use emails. So, I just needed to build a tool and wait for people to come. This was all, really. After all, the problem space is huge, there is enough room for another product, everyone uses emails, no need for any further validation, right? ❌ WRONG ONCE AGAIN! We all hear from the greatest in the startup landscape that we must validate our ideas with real people, yet at least some of us (guilty here 🥸) think that our product will be hugely successful and prove them to be an exception. Few might, but most are not. I certainly wasn't. 👉 Lesson learned: Always validate your ideas with real people. Ask them how much they’d pay for such a tool (not if they would). Much better if they are willing to pay upfront for a discount, etc. But even this comes later, keep reading. I think the difference between “How much” and “If” is huge for two reasons: (1) By asking them for “How much”, you force them to think in a more realistic setting. (2) You will have a more realistic idea on your profit margins. Based on my competitive analysis, I already had a solution in my mind to improve our email usage standards and email productivity (huge mistake), but I did my best to learn about their problems regarding those without pushing the idea too hard. The idea is this: Generate concise email summaries with suggested actions, combine them into one email, and send it at their preferred times. Save as much as time the AI you end up with allows. After all, everyone loves to save time. So, what kind of validation did I seek for? Talked with only a few people around me about this crazy, internet-breaking idea. The responses I got were, now I see, mediocre; no one got excited about it, just said things along the lines of “Cool idea, OK”. So, any reasonable person in this situation would think “Okay, not might not be working”, right? Well, I did not. I assumed that they were the wrong audience for this product, and there was this magical land of user segments waiting eagerly for my product, yet unknowingly. To this day, I still have not reached this magical place. Perhaps, it didn’t exist in the first place. If I cannot find it, whether it exists or not doesn’t matter. I am certainly searching for it. 👉 What I should have done: Once I decide on a problem space (time management, email productivity, etc.), I should decide on my potential user segments, people who I plan to sell my product to. Then I should go talk to those people, ask them about their pains, then get to the problem-solving/ideation phase only later. ❗️ VALIDATION COMES FROM THE REALITY OUTSIDE. What validation looks like might change from product to product; but what invalidation looks like is more or less the same for every product. Nico Jeannen told me yesterday “validation = money in the account” on Twitter. This is the ultimate form of validation your product could get. If your product doesn’t make any money, then something is invalidated by reality: Your product, you, your idea, who knows? So, at this point, I knew a little bit of Python from spending some time in tutorial hell a few years ago, some HTML/CSS/JS, barely enough React to build a working app. React could work for this project, but I needed easy-to-implement server interactivity. Luckily, around this time, I got to know about this new gen of indie hackers, and learned (but didn’t truly understand) about their approach to indie hacking, and this library called Nextjs. How good Next.js still blows my mind. So, I was back to tutorial hell once again. But, this time, with a promise to myself: This is the last time I would visit tutorial hell. Time to start building this "ground-breaking idea" Learning the fundamentals of Next.js was easier than learning of React unsurprisingly. Yet, the first time I managed to run server actions on Next.js was one of the rarest moments that completely blew my mind. To this day, I reject the idea that it is something else than pure magic under its hood. Did I absolutely need Nextjs for this project though? I do not think so. Did it save me lots of time? Absolutely. Furthermore, learning Nextjs will certainly be quite helpful for other projects that I will be tackling in the future. Already got a few ideas that might be worth pursuing in the head in case I decide to abandon Summ in the future. Fast-forward few weeks again: So, at this stage, I had a barely working MVP-like product. Since the very beginning, I spent every free hour (and more) on this project as speed is essential. But, I am not so sure it was worth it to overwork in retrospect. Yet, I know I couldn’t help myself. Everything is going kinda smooth, so what’s the worst thing that could ever happen? Well, both Apple and Google announced their AIs (Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini, respectively) will have email summarization features for their products. Summarizing singular emails is no big deal, after all there were already so many similar products in the market. I still think that what truly matters is a frictionless user experience, and this is why I built this product in a certain way: You spend less than a few minutes setting up your account, and you get to enjoy your email summaries, without ever visiting its website again. This is still a very cool concept I really like a lot. So, at this point: I had no other idea that could be pursued, already spent too much time on this project. Do I quit or not? This was the question. Of course not. I just have to launch this product as quickly as possible. So, I did something right, a quite rare occurrence I might say: Re-planned my product, dropped everything secondary to the core feature immediately (save time on reading emails), tried launching it asap. 👉 Insight: Sell only one core feature at one time. Drop anything secondary to this core feature. Well, my primary occupation is product design. So one would expect that a product I build must have stellar design. I considered any considerable time spent on design at this stage would be simply wasted. I still think this is both true and wrong: True, because if your product’s core benefits suck, no one will care about your design. False, because if your design looks amateurish, no one will trust you and your product. So, I always targeted an average level design with it and the way this tool works made it quite easy as I had to design only 2 primary pages: Landing page and user portal (which has only settings and analytics pages). However, even though I knew spending time on design was not worth much of my time, I got a bit “greedy”: In fact, I redesigned those pages three times, and still ended up with a so-so design that I am not proud of. 👉 What I would do differently: Unless absolutely necessary, only one iteration per stage as long as it works. This, in my mind, applies to everything. If your product’s A feature works, then no need to rewrite it from scratch for any reason, or even refactor it. When your product becomes a success, and you absolutely need that part of your codebase to be written, do so, but only then. Ready to launch, now is th etime for some marketing, right? By July 26, I already had a “launchable” product that barely works (I marked this date on a Notion docs, this is how I know). Yet, I had spent almost no time on marketing, sales, whatever. After all, “You build and they will come”. Did I know that I needed marketing? Of course I did, but knowingly didn’t. Why, you might ask. Well, from my perspective, it had to be a dev-heavy product; meaning that you spend most of your time on developing it, mostly coding skills. But, this is simply wrong. As a rule of thumb, as noted by one of the greatests, Marc Louvion, you should spend at least twice of the building time on marketing. ❗️ Time spent on building \* 2 people don’t know your product > they don’t use your product > you don’t get users > you don’t make money Easy as that. Following the same reasoning, a slightly different approach to planning a project is possible. Determine an approximate time to complete the project with a high level project plan. Let’s say 6 months. By the reasoning above, 2 months should go into building, and 4 into marketing. If you need 4 months for building instead of 2, then you need 8 months of marketing, which makes the time to complete the project 12 months. If you don’t have that much time, then quit the project. When does a project count as completed? Well, in reality, never. But, I think we have to define success conditions even before we start for indie projects and startups; so we know when to quit when they are not met. A success condition could look like “Make $6000 in 12 months” or “Have 3000 users in 6 months”. It all depends on the project. But, once you set it, it should be set in stone: You don’t change it unless absolutely necessary. I suspect there are few principles that make a solopreneur successful; and knowing when to quit and when to continue is definitely one of them. Marc Louvion is famously known for his success, but he got there after failing so many projects. To my knowledge, the same applies to Nico Jeannen, Pieter Levels, or almost everyone as well. ❗️ Determining when to continue even before you start will definitely help in the long run. A half-aed launch Time-leap again. Around mid August, I “soft launched” my product. By soft launch, I mean lazy marketing. Just tweeting about it, posting it on free directories. Did I get any traffic? Surely I did. Did I get any users? Nope. Only after this time, it hit me: “Either something is wrong with me, or with this product” Marketing might be a much bigger factor for a project’s success after all. Even though I get some traffic, not convincing enough for people to sign up even for a free trial. The product was still perfect in my eyes at the time (well, still is ^(\_),) so the right people are not finding my product, I thought. Then, a question that I should have been asking at the very first place, one that could prevent all these, comes to my mind: “How do even people search for such tools?” If we are to consider this whole journey of me and my so-far-failed product to be an already destined failure, one metric suffices to show why. Search volume: 30. Even if people have such a pain point, they are not looking for email summaries. So, almost no organic traffic coming from Google. But, as a person who did zero marketing on this or any product, who has zero marketing knowledge, who doesn’t have an audience on social media, there is not much I could do. Finally, it was time to give up. Or not… In my eyes, the most important element that makes a founder (solo or not) successful (this, I am not by any means) is to solve problems. ❗️ So, the problem was this: “People are not finding my product by organic search” How do I make sure I get some organic traffic and gets more visibility? Learn digital marketing and SEO as much as I can within very limited time. Thankfully, without spending much time, I came across Neil Patel's YT channel, and as I said many times, it is an absolute gold mine. I learned a lot, especially about the fundamentals, and surely it will be fruitful; but there is no magic trick that could make people visit your website. SEO certainly helps, but only when people are looking for your keywords. However, it is truly a magical solution to get in touch with REAL people that are in your user segments: 👉 Understand your pains, understand their problems, help them to solve them via building products. I did not do this so far, have to admit. But, in case you would like to have a chat about your email usage, and email productivity, just get in touch; I’d be delighted to hear about them. Getting ready for a ProductHunt launch The date was Sept 1. And I unlocked an impossible achievement: Running out of Supabase’s free plan’s Egres limit while having zero users. I was already considering moving out of their Cloud server and managing a Supabase CLI service on my Hetzner VPS for some time; but never ever suspected that I would have to do this quickly. The cheapest plan Supabase offers is $25/month; yet, at that point, I am in between jobs for such a long time, basically broke, and could barely afford that price. One or two months could be okay, but why pay for it if I will eventually move out of their Cloud service? So, instead of paying $25, I spent two days migrating out of Supabase Cloud. Worth my time? Definitely not. But, when you are broke, you gotta do stupid things. This was the first time that I felt lucky to have zero users: I have no idea how I would manage this migration if I had any. I think this is one of the core tenets of an indie hacker: Controlling their own environment. I can’t remember whose quote this is, but I suspect it was Naval: Entrepreneurs have an almost pathological need to control their own fate. They will take any suffering if they can be in charge of their destiny, and not have it in somebody else’s hands. What’s truly scary is, at least in my case, we make people around us suffer at the expense of our attempting to control our own fates. I know this period has been quite hard on my wife as well, as I neglected her quite a bit, but sadly, I know that this will happen again. It is something that I can barely help with. Still, so sorry. After working the last two weeks on a ProductHunt Launch, I finally launched it this Tuesday. Zero ranking, zero new users, but 36 kind people upvoted my product, and many commented and provided invaluable feedback. I couldn't be more grateful for each one of them 🙏. Considering all these, what lies in the future of Summ though? I have no idea, to be honest. On one hand, I have zero users, have no job, no income. So, I need a way to make money asap. On the other hand, the whole idea of it revolves around one core premise (not an assumption) that I am not so willing to share; and I couldn’t have more trust in it. This might not be the best iteration of it, however I certainly believe that email usage is one of the best problem spaces one could work on. 👉 But, one thing is for certain: I need to get in touch with people, and talk with them about this product I built so far. In fact, this is the only item on my agenda. Nothing else will save my brainchild <3. Below are some other insights and notes that I got during my journey; as they do not 100% fit into this story, I think it is more suitable to list them here. I hope you enjoyed reading this. Give Summ a try, it comes with a generous free trial, no credit card required. Some additional notes and insights: Project planning is one of the most underestimated skills for solopreneurs. It saves you enormous time, and helps you to keep your focus up. Building B2C products beats building B2B products. Businesses are very willing to pay big bucks if your product helps them. On the other hand, spending a few hours per user who would pay $5/m probably is not worth your time. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your product is if no one uses it. If you cannot sell a product in a certain category/niche (or do not know how to sell it), it might be a good idea not to start a project in it. Going after new ideas and ventures is quite risky, especially if you don’t know how to market it. On the other hand, an already established category means that there is already demand. Whether this demand is sufficient or not is another issue. As long as there is enough demand for your product to fit in, any category/niche is good. Some might be better, some might be worse. Unless you are going hardcore B2B, you will need people to find your product by means of organic search. Always conduct thorough keyword research as soon as possible.

#reddit#spent#months
I spent 6 months on building a web product, and got zero users. Here is my story.
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.667
GDbuildsGD•This week

I spent 6 months on building a web product, and got zero users. Here is my story.

Edit Thank you all so much for your time reading my story. Your support, feedback, criticism, and skepticism; all helped me a lot, and I couldn't appreciate it enough \^\_\^ I have stuff to post on Reddit very rarely, but I share how my project is going on, random stuff, and memes on X. Just in case few might want to keep in touch 👀 TL;DR I spent 6 months on a tool that currently has 0 users. Below is what I learned during my journey, sharing because I believe most mistakes are easily avoidable. Do not overestimate your product and assume it will be an exception to fundamental principles. Principles are there for a reason. Always look for validation before you start. Avoid building products with a low money-to-effort ratio/in very competitive fields. Unless you have the means, you probably won't make it. Pick a problem space, pick your target audience, and talk to them before thinking about a solution. Identify and match their pain points. Only then should you think of a solution. If people are not overly excited or willing to pay in advance for a discounted price, it might be a sign to rethink. Sell one and only one feature at a time. Avoid everything else. If people don't pay for that one core feature, no secondary feature will change their mind. Always spend twice as much time marketing as you do building. You will not get users if they don't know it exists. Define success metrics ("1000 users in 3 months" or "$6000 in the account at the end of 6 months") before you start. If you don't meet them, strongly consider quitting the project. If you can't get enough users to keep going, nothing else matters. VALIDATION, VALIDATION, VALIDATION. Success is not random, but most of our first products will not make a success story. Know when to admit failure, and move on. Even if a product of yours doesn't succeed, what you learned during its journey will turn out to be invaluable for your future. My story So, this is the story of a product that I’ve been working on for the last 6 months. As it's the first product I’ve ever built, after watching you all from the sidelines, I have learned a lot, made many mistakes, and did only a few things right. Just sharing what I’ve learned and some insights from my journey so far. I hope that this post will help you avoid the mistakes I made — most of which I consider easily avoidable — while you enjoy reading it, and get to know me a little bit more 🤓. A slow start after many years Summ isn’t the first product I really wanted to build. Lacking enough dev skills to even get started was a huge blocker for so many years. In fact, the first product I would’ve LOVED to build was a smart personal shopping assistant. I had this idea 4 years ago; but with no GPT, no coding skills, no technical co-founder, I didn’t have the means to make it happen. I still do not know if such a tool exists and is good enough. All I wanted was a tool that could make data-based predictions about when to buy stuff (“buy a new toothpaste every three months”) and suggest physical products that I might need or be strongly interested in. AFAIK, Amazon famously still struggles with the second one. Fast-forward a few years, I learned the very basics of HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS. Still was not there to build a product; but good enough to code my design portfolio from scratch. Yet, I couldn’t imagine myself building a product using Vanilla JS. I really hated it, I really sucked at it. So, back to tutorial hell, and to learn about this framework I just heard about: React.React introduced so many new concepts to me. “Thinking in React” is a phrase we heard a lot, and with quite good reasons. After some time, I was able to build very basic tutorial apps, both in React, and React Native; but I have to say that I really hated coding for mobile. At this point, I was already a fan of productivity apps, and had a concept for a time management assistant app in my design portfolio. So, why not build one? Surely, it must be easy, since every coding tutorial starts with a todo app. ❌ WRONG! Building a basic todo app is easy enough, but building one good enough for a place in the market was a challenge I took and failed. I wasted one month on that until I abandoned the project for good. Even if I continued working on it, as the productivity landscape is overly competitive, I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to cover costs, assuming I make any. Since I was (and still am) in between jobs, I decided to abandon the project. 👉 What I learned: Do not start projects with a low ratio of money to effort and time. Example: Even if I get 500 monthly users, 200 of which are paid users (unrealistically high number), assuming an average subscription fee of $5/m (such apps are quite cheap, mostly due to the high competition), it would make me around $1000 minus any occurring costs. Any founder with a product that has 500 active users should make more. Even if it was relatively successful, due to the high competition, I wouldn’t make any meaningful money. PS: I use Todoist today. Due to local pricing, I pay less than $2/m. There is no way I could beat this competitive pricing, let alone the app itself. But, somehow, with a project that wasn’t even functional — let alone being an MVP — I made my first Wi-Fi money: Someone decided that the domain I preemptively purchased is worth something. By this point, I had already abandoned the project, certainly wasn’t going to renew the domain, was looking for a FT job, and a new project that I could work on. And out of nowhere, someone hands me some free money — who am I not to take it? Of course, I took it. The domain is still unused, no idea why 🤔. Ngl, I still hate the fact that my first Wi-Fi money came from this. A new idea worth pursuing? Fast-forward some weeks now. Around March, I got this crazy idea of building an email productivity tool. We all use emails, yet we all hate them. So, this must be fixed. Everyone uses emails, in fact everyone HAS TO use emails. So, I just needed to build a tool and wait for people to come. This was all, really. After all, the problem space is huge, there is enough room for another product, everyone uses emails, no need for any further validation, right? ❌ WRONG ONCE AGAIN! We all hear from the greatest in the startup landscape that we must validate our ideas with real people, yet at least some of us (guilty here 🥸) think that our product will be hugely successful and prove them to be an exception. Few might, but most are not. I certainly wasn't. 👉 Lesson learned: Always validate your ideas with real people. Ask them how much they’d pay for such a tool (not if they would). Much better if they are willing to pay upfront for a discount, etc. But even this comes later, keep reading. I think the difference between “How much” and “If” is huge for two reasons: (1) By asking them for “How much”, you force them to think in a more realistic setting. (2) You will have a more realistic idea on your profit margins. Based on my competitive analysis, I already had a solution in my mind to improve our email usage standards and email productivity (huge mistake), but I did my best to learn about their problems regarding those without pushing the idea too hard. The idea is this: Generate concise email summaries with suggested actions, combine them into one email, and send it at their preferred times. Save as much as time the AI you end up with allows. After all, everyone loves to save time. So, what kind of validation did I seek for? Talked with only a few people around me about this crazy, internet-breaking idea. The responses I got were, now I see, mediocre; no one got excited about it, just said things along the lines of “Cool idea, OK”. So, any reasonable person in this situation would think “Okay, not might not be working”, right? Well, I did not. I assumed that they were the wrong audience for this product, and there was this magical land of user segments waiting eagerly for my product, yet unknowingly. To this day, I still have not reached this magical place. Perhaps, it didn’t exist in the first place. If I cannot find it, whether it exists or not doesn’t matter. I am certainly searching for it. 👉 What I should have done: Once I decide on a problem space (time management, email productivity, etc.), I should decide on my potential user segments, people who I plan to sell my product to. Then I should go talk to those people, ask them about their pains, then get to the problem-solving/ideation phase only later. ❗️ VALIDATION COMES FROM THE REALITY OUTSIDE. What validation looks like might change from product to product; but what invalidation looks like is more or less the same for every product. Nico Jeannen told me yesterday “validation = money in the account” on Twitter. This is the ultimate form of validation your product could get. If your product doesn’t make any money, then something is invalidated by reality: Your product, you, your idea, who knows? So, at this point, I knew a little bit of Python from spending some time in tutorial hell a few years ago, some HTML/CSS/JS, barely enough React to build a working app. React could work for this project, but I needed easy-to-implement server interactivity. Luckily, around this time, I got to know about this new gen of indie hackers, and learned (but didn’t truly understand) about their approach to indie hacking, and this library called Nextjs. How good Next.js still blows my mind. So, I was back to tutorial hell once again. But, this time, with a promise to myself: This is the last time I would visit tutorial hell. Time to start building this "ground-breaking idea" Learning the fundamentals of Next.js was easier than learning of React unsurprisingly. Yet, the first time I managed to run server actions on Next.js was one of the rarest moments that completely blew my mind. To this day, I reject the idea that it is something else than pure magic under its hood. Did I absolutely need Nextjs for this project though? I do not think so. Did it save me lots of time? Absolutely. Furthermore, learning Nextjs will certainly be quite helpful for other projects that I will be tackling in the future. Already got a few ideas that might be worth pursuing in the head in case I decide to abandon Summ in the future. Fast-forward few weeks again: So, at this stage, I had a barely working MVP-like product. Since the very beginning, I spent every free hour (and more) on this project as speed is essential. But, I am not so sure it was worth it to overwork in retrospect. Yet, I know I couldn’t help myself. Everything is going kinda smooth, so what’s the worst thing that could ever happen? Well, both Apple and Google announced their AIs (Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini, respectively) will have email summarization features for their products. Summarizing singular emails is no big deal, after all there were already so many similar products in the market. I still think that what truly matters is a frictionless user experience, and this is why I built this product in a certain way: You spend less than a few minutes setting up your account, and you get to enjoy your email summaries, without ever visiting its website again. This is still a very cool concept I really like a lot. So, at this point: I had no other idea that could be pursued, already spent too much time on this project. Do I quit or not? This was the question. Of course not. I just have to launch this product as quickly as possible. So, I did something right, a quite rare occurrence I might say: Re-planned my product, dropped everything secondary to the core feature immediately (save time on reading emails), tried launching it asap. 👉 Insight: Sell only one core feature at one time. Drop anything secondary to this core feature. Well, my primary occupation is product design. So one would expect that a product I build must have stellar design. I considered any considerable time spent on design at this stage would be simply wasted. I still think this is both true and wrong: True, because if your product’s core benefits suck, no one will care about your design. False, because if your design looks amateurish, no one will trust you and your product. So, I always targeted an average level design with it and the way this tool works made it quite easy as I had to design only 2 primary pages: Landing page and user portal (which has only settings and analytics pages). However, even though I knew spending time on design was not worth much of my time, I got a bit “greedy”: In fact, I redesigned those pages three times, and still ended up with a so-so design that I am not proud of. 👉 What I would do differently: Unless absolutely necessary, only one iteration per stage as long as it works. This, in my mind, applies to everything. If your product’s A feature works, then no need to rewrite it from scratch for any reason, or even refactor it. When your product becomes a success, and you absolutely need that part of your codebase to be written, do so, but only then. Ready to launch, now is th etime for some marketing, right? By July 26, I already had a “launchable” product that barely works (I marked this date on a Notion docs, this is how I know). Yet, I had spent almost no time on marketing, sales, whatever. After all, “You build and they will come”. Did I know that I needed marketing? Of course I did, but knowingly didn’t. Why, you might ask. Well, from my perspective, it had to be a dev-heavy product; meaning that you spend most of your time on developing it, mostly coding skills. But, this is simply wrong. As a rule of thumb, as noted by one of the greatests, Marc Louvion, you should spend at least twice of the building time on marketing. ❗️ Time spent on building \* 2 people don’t know your product > they don’t use your product > you don’t get users > you don’t make money Easy as that. Following the same reasoning, a slightly different approach to planning a project is possible. Determine an approximate time to complete the project with a high level project plan. Let’s say 6 months. By the reasoning above, 2 months should go into building, and 4 into marketing. If you need 4 months for building instead of 2, then you need 8 months of marketing, which makes the time to complete the project 12 months. If you don’t have that much time, then quit the project. When does a project count as completed? Well, in reality, never. But, I think we have to define success conditions even before we start for indie projects and startups; so we know when to quit when they are not met. A success condition could look like “Make $6000 in 12 months” or “Have 3000 users in 6 months”. It all depends on the project. But, once you set it, it should be set in stone: You don’t change it unless absolutely necessary. I suspect there are few principles that make a solopreneur successful; and knowing when to quit and when to continue is definitely one of them. Marc Louvion is famously known for his success, but he got there after failing so many projects. To my knowledge, the same applies to Nico Jeannen, Pieter Levels, or almost everyone as well. ❗️ Determining when to continue even before you start will definitely help in the long run. A half-aed launch Time-leap again. Around mid August, I “soft launched” my product. By soft launch, I mean lazy marketing. Just tweeting about it, posting it on free directories. Did I get any traffic? Surely I did. Did I get any users? Nope. Only after this time, it hit me: “Either something is wrong with me, or with this product” Marketing might be a much bigger factor for a project’s success after all. Even though I get some traffic, not convincing enough for people to sign up even for a free trial. The product was still perfect in my eyes at the time (well, still is ^(\_),) so the right people are not finding my product, I thought. Then, a question that I should have been asking at the very first place, one that could prevent all these, comes to my mind: “How do even people search for such tools?” If we are to consider this whole journey of me and my so-far-failed product to be an already destined failure, one metric suffices to show why. Search volume: 30. Even if people have such a pain point, they are not looking for email summaries. So, almost no organic traffic coming from Google. But, as a person who did zero marketing on this or any product, who has zero marketing knowledge, who doesn’t have an audience on social media, there is not much I could do. Finally, it was time to give up. Or not… In my eyes, the most important element that makes a founder (solo or not) successful (this, I am not by any means) is to solve problems. ❗️ So, the problem was this: “People are not finding my product by organic search” How do I make sure I get some organic traffic and gets more visibility? Learn digital marketing and SEO as much as I can within very limited time. Thankfully, without spending much time, I came across Neil Patel's YT channel, and as I said many times, it is an absolute gold mine. I learned a lot, especially about the fundamentals, and surely it will be fruitful; but there is no magic trick that could make people visit your website. SEO certainly helps, but only when people are looking for your keywords. However, it is truly a magical solution to get in touch with REAL people that are in your user segments: 👉 Understand your pains, understand their problems, help them to solve them via building products. I did not do this so far, have to admit. But, in case you would like to have a chat about your email usage, and email productivity, just get in touch; I’d be delighted to hear about them. Getting ready for a ProductHunt launch The date was Sept 1. And I unlocked an impossible achievement: Running out of Supabase’s free plan’s Egres limit while having zero users. I was already considering moving out of their Cloud server and managing a Supabase CLI service on my Hetzner VPS for some time; but never ever suspected that I would have to do this quickly. The cheapest plan Supabase offers is $25/month; yet, at that point, I am in between jobs for such a long time, basically broke, and could barely afford that price. One or two months could be okay, but why pay for it if I will eventually move out of their Cloud service? So, instead of paying $25, I spent two days migrating out of Supabase Cloud. Worth my time? Definitely not. But, when you are broke, you gotta do stupid things. This was the first time that I felt lucky to have zero users: I have no idea how I would manage this migration if I had any. I think this is one of the core tenets of an indie hacker: Controlling their own environment. I can’t remember whose quote this is, but I suspect it was Naval: Entrepreneurs have an almost pathological need to control their own fate. They will take any suffering if they can be in charge of their destiny, and not have it in somebody else’s hands. What’s truly scary is, at least in my case, we make people around us suffer at the expense of our attempting to control our own fates. I know this period has been quite hard on my wife as well, as I neglected her quite a bit, but sadly, I know that this will happen again. It is something that I can barely help with. Still, so sorry. After working the last two weeks on a ProductHunt Launch, I finally launched it this Tuesday. Zero ranking, zero new users, but 36 kind people upvoted my product, and many commented and provided invaluable feedback. I couldn't be more grateful for each one of them 🙏. Considering all these, what lies in the future of Summ though? I have no idea, to be honest. On one hand, I have zero users, have no job, no income. So, I need a way to make money asap. On the other hand, the whole idea of it revolves around one core premise (not an assumption) that I am not so willing to share; and I couldn’t have more trust in it. This might not be the best iteration of it, however I certainly believe that email usage is one of the best problem spaces one could work on. 👉 But, one thing is for certain: I need to get in touch with people, and talk with them about this product I built so far. In fact, this is the only item on my agenda. Nothing else will save my brainchild <3. Below are some other insights and notes that I got during my journey; as they do not 100% fit into this story, I think it is more suitable to list them here. I hope you enjoyed reading this. Give Summ a try, it comes with a generous free trial, no credit card required. Some additional notes and insights: Project planning is one of the most underestimated skills for solopreneurs. It saves you enormous time, and helps you to keep your focus up. Building B2C products beats building B2B products. Businesses are very willing to pay big bucks if your product helps them. On the other hand, spending a few hours per user who would pay $5/m probably is not worth your time. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your product is if no one uses it. If you cannot sell a product in a certain category/niche (or do not know how to sell it), it might be a good idea not to start a project in it. Going after new ideas and ventures is quite risky, especially if you don’t know how to market it. On the other hand, an already established category means that there is already demand. Whether this demand is sufficient or not is another issue. As long as there is enough demand for your product to fit in, any category/niche is good. Some might be better, some might be worse. Unless you are going hardcore B2B, you will need people to find your product by means of organic search. Always conduct thorough keyword research as soon as possible.

#reddit#spent#months
Spent months patching no-code tools—built a full custom business app in 5 minutes with AI
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
yahllilevy•This week

Spent months patching no-code tools—built a full custom business app in 5 minutes with AI

Hey r/SideProject, I’ve spent months trying to patch together off-the-shelf tools and no-code platforms to create software for small businesses, but I kept running into the same problem—they just don’t fit how businesses actually work. That’s when I realized most small businesses need custom software tailored to their unique workflows, but the time and cost of building it from scratch are out of reach for most of them. So I decided to build a solution. Introducing Crust AI—a tool that lets SMB owners describe their exact needs, and in 5 minutes, it generates a fully functional app: client portals, employee hubs, vendor management systems—anything you need to streamline external collaboration. I went from wasting weeks stitching together no-code tools to having a zero-dev solution up and running in minutes. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. If you’ve been in the same boat as me, check out trycrust.co and let me know what you think!

#reddit#spent#months
I spent 6 months on a web app as a side project, and got 0 users. Here is my story.
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.667
GDbuildsGD•This week

I spent 6 months on a web app as a side project, and got 0 users. Here is my story.

Edit Thank you all so much for your time reading my story. Your support, feedback, criticism, and skepticism; all helped me a lot, and I couldn't appreciate it enough \^\_\^ I very rarely have stuff to post on Reddit, but I share how my project is going on, just random stuff, and memes on X. In case few might want to keep up 👀 TL;DR I spent 6 months on a tool that currently has 0 users. Below is what I learned during my journey, sharing because I believe most mistakes are easily avoidable. Do not overestimate your product and assume it will be an exception to fundamental principles. Principles are there for a reason. Always look for validation before you start. Avoid building products with a low money-to-effort ratio/in very competitive fields. Unless you have the means, you probably won't make it. Pick a problem space, pick your target audience, and talk to them before thinking about a solution. Identify and match their pain points. Only then should you think of a solution. If people are not overly excited or willing to pay in advance for a discounted price, it might be a sign to rethink. Sell one and only one feature at a time. Avoid everything else. If people don't pay for that one core feature, no secondary feature will change their mind. Always spend twice as much time marketing as you do building. You will not get users if they don't know it exists. Define success metrics ("1000 users in 3 months" or "$6000 in the account at the end of 6 months") before you start. If you don't meet them, strongly consider quitting the project. If you can't get enough users to keep going, nothing else matters. VALIDATION, VALIDATION, VALIDATION. Success is not random, but most of our first products will not make a success story. Know when to admit failure, and move on. Even if a product of yours doesn't succeed, what you learned during its journey will turn out to be invaluable for your future. My story So, this is the story of a product that I’ve been working on for the last 6 months. As it's the first product I’ve ever built, after watching you all from the sidelines, I have learned a lot, made many mistakes, and did only a few things right. Just sharing what I’ve learned and some insights from my journey so far. I hope that this post will help you avoid the mistakes I made — most of which I consider easily avoidable — while you enjoy reading it, and get to know me a little bit more 🤓. A slow start after many years Summ isn’t the first product I really wanted to build. Lacking enough dev skills to even get started was a huge blocker for so many years. In fact, the first product I would’ve LOVED to build was a smart personal shopping assistant. I had this idea 4 years ago; but with no GPT, no coding skills, no technical co-founder, I didn’t have the means to make it happen. I still do not know if such a tool exists and is good enough. All I wanted was a tool that could make data-based predictions about when to buy stuff (“buy a new toothpaste every three months”) and suggest physical products that I might need or be strongly interested in. AFAIK, Amazon famously still struggles with the second one. Fast-forward a few years, I learned the very basics of HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS. Still was not there to build a product; but good enough to code my design portfolio from scratch. Yet, I couldn’t imagine myself building a product using Vanilla JS. I really hated it, I really sucked at it. So, back to tutorial hell, and to learn about this framework I just heard about: React.React introduced so many new concepts to me. “Thinking in React” is a phrase we heard a lot, and with quite good reasons. After some time, I was able to build very basic tutorial apps, both in React, and React Native; but I have to say that I really hated coding for mobile. At this point, I was already a fan of productivity apps, and had a concept for a time management assistant app in my design portfolio. So, why not build one? Surely, it must be easy, since every coding tutorial starts with a todo app. ❌ WRONG! Building a basic todo app is easy enough, but building one good enough for a place in the market was a challenge I took and failed. I wasted one month on that until I abandoned the project for good. Even if I continued working on it, as the productivity landscape is overly competitive, I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to cover costs, assuming I make any. Since I was (and still am) in between jobs, I decided to abandon the project. 👉 What I learned: Do not start projects with a low ratio of money to effort and time. Example: Even if I get 500 monthly users, 200 of which are paid users (unrealistically high number), assuming an average subscription fee of $5/m (such apps are quite cheap, mostly due to the high competition), it would make me around $1000 minus any occurring costs. Any founder with a product that has 500 active users should make more. Even if it was relatively successful, due to the high competition, I wouldn’t make any meaningful money. PS: I use Todoist today. Due to local pricing, I pay less than $2/m. There is no way I could beat this competitive pricing, let alone the app itself. But, somehow, with a project that wasn’t even functional — let alone being an MVP — I made my first Wi-Fi money: Someone decided that the domain I preemptively purchased is worth something. By this point, I had already abandoned the project, certainly wasn’t going to renew the domain, was looking for a FT job, and a new project that I could work on. And out of nowhere, someone hands me some free money — who am I not to take it? Of course, I took it. The domain is still unused, no idea why 🤔. Ngl, I still hate the fact that my first Wi-Fi money came from this. A new idea worth pursuing? Fast-forward some weeks now. Around March, I got this crazy idea of building an email productivity tool. We all use emails, yet we all hate them. So, this must be fixed. Everyone uses emails, in fact everyone HAS TO use emails. So, I just needed to build a tool and wait for people to come. This was all, really. After all, the problem space is huge, there is enough room for another product, everyone uses emails, no need for any further validation, right? ❌ WRONG ONCE AGAIN! We all hear from the greatest in the startup landscape that we must validate our ideas with real people, yet at least some of us (guilty here 🥸) think that our product will be hugely successful and prove them to be an exception. Few might, but most are not. I certainly wasn't. 👉 Lesson learned: Always validate your ideas with real people. Ask them how much they’d pay for such a tool (not if they would). Much better if they are willing to pay upfront for a discount, etc. But even this comes later, keep reading. I think the difference between “How much” and “If” is huge for two reasons: (1) By asking them for “How much”, you force them to think in a more realistic setting. (2) You will have a more realistic idea on your profit margins. Based on my competitive analysis, I already had a solution in my mind to improve our email usage standards and email productivity (huge mistake), but I did my best to learn about their problems regarding those without pushing the idea too hard. The idea is this: Generate concise email summaries with suggested actions, combine them into one email, and send it at their preferred times. Save as much as time the AI you end up with allows. After all, everyone loves to save time. So, what kind of validation did I seek for? Talked with only a few people around me about this crazy, internet-breaking idea. The responses I got were, now I see, mediocre; no one got excited about it, just said things along the lines of “Cool idea, OK”. So, any reasonable person in this situation would think “Okay, not might not be working”, right? Well, I did not. I assumed that they were the wrong audience for this product, and there was this magical land of user segments waiting eagerly for my product, yet unknowingly. To this day, I still have not reached this magical place. Perhaps, it didn’t exist in the first place. If I cannot find it, whether it exists or not doesn’t matter. I am certainly searching for it. 👉 What I should have done: Once I decide on a problem space (time management, email productivity, etc.), I should decide on my potential user segments, people who I plan to sell my product to. Then I should go talk to those people, ask them about their pains, then get to the problem-solving/ideation phase only later. ❗️ VALIDATION COMES FROM THE REALITY OUTSIDE. What validation looks like might change from product to product; but what invalidation looks like is more or less the same for every product. Nico Jeannen told me yesterday “validation = money in the account” on Twitter. This is the ultimate form of validation your product could get. If your product doesn’t make any money, then something is invalidated by reality: Your product, you, your idea, who knows? So, at this point, I knew a little bit of Python from spending some time in tutorial hell a few years ago, some HTML/CSS/JS, barely enough React to build a working app. React could work for this project, but I needed easy-to-implement server interactivity. Luckily, around this time, I got to know about this new gen of indie hackers, and learned (but didn’t truly understand) about their approach to indie hacking, and this library called Nextjs. How good Next.js still blows my mind. So, I was back to tutorial hell once again. But, this time, with a promise to myself: This is the last time I would visit tutorial hell. Time to start building this "ground-breaking idea" Learning the fundamentals of Next.js was easier than learning of React unsurprisingly. Yet, the first time I managed to run server actions on Next.js was one of the rarest moments that completely blew my mind. To this day, I reject the idea that it is something else than pure magic under its hood. Did I absolutely need Nextjs for this project though? I do not think so. Did it save me lots of time? Absolutely. Furthermore, learning Nextjs will certainly be quite helpful for other projects that I will be tackling in the future. Already got a few ideas that might be worth pursuing in the head in case I decide to abandon Summ in the future. Fast-forward few weeks again: So, at this stage, I had a barely working MVP-like product. Since the very beginning, I spent every free hour (and more) on this project as speed is essential. But, I am not so sure it was worth it to overwork in retrospect. Yet, I know I couldn’t help myself. Everything is going kinda smooth, so what’s the worst thing that could ever happen? Well, both Apple and Google announced their AIs (Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini, respectively) will have email summarization features for their products. Summarizing singular emails is no big deal, after all there were already so many similar products in the market. I still think that what truly matters is a frictionless user experience, and this is why I built this product in a certain way: You spend less than a few minutes setting up your account, and you get to enjoy your email summaries, without ever visiting its website again. This is still a very cool concept I really like a lot. So, at this point: I had no other idea that could be pursued, already spent too much time on this project. Do I quit or not? This was the question. Of course not. I just have to launch this product as quickly as possible. So, I did something right, a quite rare occurrence I might say: Re-planned my product, dropped everything secondary to the core feature immediately (save time on reading emails), tried launching it asap. 👉 Insight: Sell only one core feature at one time. Drop anything secondary to this core feature. Well, my primary occupation is product design. So one would expect that a product I build must have stellar design. I considered any considerable time spent on design at this stage would be simply wasted. I still think this is both true and wrong: True, because if your product’s core benefits suck, no one will care about your design. False, because if your design looks amateurish, no one will trust you and your product. So, I always targeted an average level design with it and the way this tool works made it quite easy as I had to design only 2 primary pages: Landing page and user portal (which has only settings and analytics pages). However, even though I knew spending time on design was not worth much of my time, I got a bit “greedy”: In fact, I redesigned those pages three times, and still ended up with a so-so design that I am not proud of. 👉 What I would do differently: Unless absolutely necessary, only one iteration per stage as long as it works. This, in my mind, applies to everything. If your product’s A feature works, then no need to rewrite it from scratch for any reason, or even refactor it. When your product becomes a success, and you absolutely need that part of your codebase to be written, do so, but only then. Ready to launch, now is th etime for some marketing, right? By July 26, I already had a “launchable” product that barely works (I marked this date on a Notion docs, this is how I know). Yet, I had spent almost no time on marketing, sales, whatever. After all, “You build and they will come”. Did I know that I needed marketing? Of course I did, but knowingly didn’t. Why, you might ask. Well, from my perspective, it had to be a dev-heavy product; meaning that you spend most of your time on developing it, mostly coding skills. But, this is simply wrong. As a rule of thumb, as noted by one of the greatests, Marc Louvion, you should spend at least twice of the building time on marketing. ❗️ Time spent on building \* 2 people don’t know your product > they don’t use your product > you don’t get users > you don’t make money Easy as that. Following the same reasoning, a slightly different approach to planning a project is possible. Determine an approximate time to complete the project with a high level project plan. Let’s say 6 months. By the reasoning above, 2 months should go into building, and 4 into marketing. If you need 4 months for building instead of 2, then you need 8 months of marketing, which makes the time to complete the project 12 months. If you don’t have that much time, then quit the project. When does a project count as completed? Well, in reality, never. But, I think we have to define success conditions even before we start for indie projects and startups; so we know when to quit when they are not met. A success condition could look like “Make $6000 in 12 months” or “Have 3000 users in 6 months”. It all depends on the project. But, once you set it, it should be set in stone: You don’t change it unless absolutely necessary. I suspect there are few principles that make a solopreneur successful; and knowing when to quit and when to continue is definitely one of them. Marc Louvion is famously known for his success, but he got there after failing so many projects. To my knowledge, the same applies to Nico Jeannen, Pieter Levels, or almost everyone as well. ❗️ Determining when to continue even before you start will definitely help in the long run. A half-aed launch Time-leap again. Around mid August, I “soft launched” my product. By soft launch, I mean lazy marketing. Just tweeting about it, posting it on free directories. Did I get any traffic? Surely I did. Did I get any users? Nope. Only after this time, it hit me: “Either something is wrong with me, or with this product” Marketing might be a much bigger factor for a project’s success after all. Even though I get some traffic, not convincing enough for people to sign up even for a free trial. The product was still perfect in my eyes at the time (well, still is ^(\_),) so the right people are not finding my product, I thought. Then, a question that I should have been asking at the very first place, one that could prevent all these, comes to my mind: “How do even people search for such tools?” If we are to consider this whole journey of me and my so-far-failed product to be an already destined failure, one metric suffices to show why. Search volume: 30. Even if people have such a pain point, they are not looking for email summaries. So, almost no organic traffic coming from Google. But, as a person who did zero marketing on this or any product, who has zero marketing knowledge, who doesn’t have an audience on social media, there is not much I could do. Finally, it was time to give up. Or not… In my eyes, the most important element that makes a founder (solo or not) successful (this, I am not by any means) is to solve problems. ❗️ So, the problem was this: “People are not finding my product by organic search” How do I make sure I get some organic traffic and gets more visibility? Learn digital marketing and SEO as much as I can within very limited time. Thankfully, without spending much time, I came across Neil Patel's YT channel, and as I said many times, it is an absolute gold mine. I learned a lot, especially about the fundamentals, and surely it will be fruitful; but there is no magic trick that could make people visit your website. SEO certainly helps, but only when people are looking for your keywords. However, it is truly a magical solution to get in touch with REAL people that are in your user segments: 👉 Understand your pains, understand their problems, help them to solve them via building products. I did not do this so far, have to admit. But, in case you would like to have a chat about your email usage, and email productivity, just get in touch; I’d be delighted to hear about them. Getting ready for a ProductHunt launch The date was Sept 1. And I unlocked an impossible achievement: Running out of Supabase’s free plan’s Egres limit while having zero users. I was already considering moving out of their Cloud server and managing a Supabase CLI service on my Hetzner VPS for some time; but never ever suspected that I would have to do this quickly. The cheapest plan Supabase offers is $25/month; yet, at that point, I am in between jobs for such a long time, basically broke, and could barely afford that price. One or two months could be okay, but why pay for it if I will eventually move out of their Cloud service? So, instead of paying $25, I spent two days migrating out of Supabase Cloud. Worth my time? Definitely not. But, when you are broke, you gotta do stupid things. This was the first time that I felt lucky to have zero users: I have no idea how I would manage this migration if I had any. I think this is one of the core tenets of an indie hacker: Controlling their own environment. I can’t remember whose quote this is, but I suspect it was Naval: Entrepreneurs have an almost pathological need to control their own fate. They will take any suffering if they can be in charge of their destiny, and not have it in somebody else’s hands. What’s truly scary is, at least in my case, we make people around us suffer at the expense of our attempting to control our own fates. I know this period has been quite hard on my wife as well, as I neglected her quite a bit, but sadly, I know that this will happen again. It is something that I can barely help with. Still, so sorry. After working the last two weeks on a ProductHunt Launch, I finally launched it this Tuesday. Zero ranking, zero new users, but 36 kind people upvoted my product, and many commented and provided invaluable feedback. I couldn't be more grateful for each one of them 🙏. Considering all these, what lies in the future of Summ though? I have no idea, to be honest. On one hand, I have zero users, have no job, no income. So, I need a way to make money asap. On the other hand, the whole idea of it revolves around one core premise (not an assumption) that I am not so willing to share; and I couldn’t have more trust in it. This might not be the best iteration of it, however I certainly believe that email usage is one of the best problem spaces one could work on. 👉 But, one thing is for certain: I need to get in touch with people, and talk with them about this product I built so far. In fact, this is the only item on my agenda. Nothing else will save my brainchild <3. Below are some other insights and notes that I got during my journey; as they do not 100% fit into this story, I think it is more suitable to list them here. I hope you enjoyed reading this. Give Summ a try, it comes with a generous free trial, no credit card required. Some additional notes and insights: Project planning is one of the most underestimated skills for solopreneurs. It saves you enormous time, and helps you to keep your focus up. Building B2B products beats building B2C products. Businesses are very willing to pay big bucks if your product helps them. On the other hand, spending a few hours per user who would pay $5/m probably is not worth your time. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your product is if no one uses it. If you cannot sell a product in a certain category/niche (or do not know how to sell it), it might be a good idea not to start a project in it. Going after new ideas and ventures is quite risky, especially if you don’t know how to market it. On the other hand, an already established category means that there is already demand. Whether this demand is sufficient or not is another issue. As long as there is enough demand for your product to fit in, any category/niche is good. Some might be better, some might be worse. Unless you are going hardcore B2B, you will need people to find your product by means of organic search. Always conduct thorough keyword research as soon as possible.

#reddit#spent#months
I spent 6 months on a web app as a side project, and got 0 users. Here is my story.
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.667
GDbuildsGD•This week

I spent 6 months on a web app as a side project, and got 0 users. Here is my story.

Edit Thank you all so much for your time reading my story. Your support, feedback, criticism, and skepticism; all helped me a lot, and I couldn't appreciate it enough \^\_\^ I very rarely have stuff to post on Reddit, but I share how my project is going on, just random stuff, and memes on X. In case few might want to keep up 👀 TL;DR I spent 6 months on a tool that currently has 0 users. Below is what I learned during my journey, sharing because I believe most mistakes are easily avoidable. Do not overestimate your product and assume it will be an exception to fundamental principles. Principles are there for a reason. Always look for validation before you start. Avoid building products with a low money-to-effort ratio/in very competitive fields. Unless you have the means, you probably won't make it. Pick a problem space, pick your target audience, and talk to them before thinking about a solution. Identify and match their pain points. Only then should you think of a solution. If people are not overly excited or willing to pay in advance for a discounted price, it might be a sign to rethink. Sell one and only one feature at a time. Avoid everything else. If people don't pay for that one core feature, no secondary feature will change their mind. Always spend twice as much time marketing as you do building. You will not get users if they don't know it exists. Define success metrics ("1000 users in 3 months" or "$6000 in the account at the end of 6 months") before you start. If you don't meet them, strongly consider quitting the project. If you can't get enough users to keep going, nothing else matters. VALIDATION, VALIDATION, VALIDATION. Success is not random, but most of our first products will not make a success story. Know when to admit failure, and move on. Even if a product of yours doesn't succeed, what you learned during its journey will turn out to be invaluable for your future. My story So, this is the story of a product that I’ve been working on for the last 6 months. As it's the first product I’ve ever built, after watching you all from the sidelines, I have learned a lot, made many mistakes, and did only a few things right. Just sharing what I’ve learned and some insights from my journey so far. I hope that this post will help you avoid the mistakes I made — most of which I consider easily avoidable — while you enjoy reading it, and get to know me a little bit more 🤓. A slow start after many years Summ isn’t the first product I really wanted to build. Lacking enough dev skills to even get started was a huge blocker for so many years. In fact, the first product I would’ve LOVED to build was a smart personal shopping assistant. I had this idea 4 years ago; but with no GPT, no coding skills, no technical co-founder, I didn’t have the means to make it happen. I still do not know if such a tool exists and is good enough. All I wanted was a tool that could make data-based predictions about when to buy stuff (“buy a new toothpaste every three months”) and suggest physical products that I might need or be strongly interested in. AFAIK, Amazon famously still struggles with the second one. Fast-forward a few years, I learned the very basics of HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS. Still was not there to build a product; but good enough to code my design portfolio from scratch. Yet, I couldn’t imagine myself building a product using Vanilla JS. I really hated it, I really sucked at it. So, back to tutorial hell, and to learn about this framework I just heard about: React.React introduced so many new concepts to me. “Thinking in React” is a phrase we heard a lot, and with quite good reasons. After some time, I was able to build very basic tutorial apps, both in React, and React Native; but I have to say that I really hated coding for mobile. At this point, I was already a fan of productivity apps, and had a concept for a time management assistant app in my design portfolio. So, why not build one? Surely, it must be easy, since every coding tutorial starts with a todo app. ❌ WRONG! Building a basic todo app is easy enough, but building one good enough for a place in the market was a challenge I took and failed. I wasted one month on that until I abandoned the project for good. Even if I continued working on it, as the productivity landscape is overly competitive, I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to cover costs, assuming I make any. Since I was (and still am) in between jobs, I decided to abandon the project. 👉 What I learned: Do not start projects with a low ratio of money to effort and time. Example: Even if I get 500 monthly users, 200 of which are paid users (unrealistically high number), assuming an average subscription fee of $5/m (such apps are quite cheap, mostly due to the high competition), it would make me around $1000 minus any occurring costs. Any founder with a product that has 500 active users should make more. Even if it was relatively successful, due to the high competition, I wouldn’t make any meaningful money. PS: I use Todoist today. Due to local pricing, I pay less than $2/m. There is no way I could beat this competitive pricing, let alone the app itself. But, somehow, with a project that wasn’t even functional — let alone being an MVP — I made my first Wi-Fi money: Someone decided that the domain I preemptively purchased is worth something. By this point, I had already abandoned the project, certainly wasn’t going to renew the domain, was looking for a FT job, and a new project that I could work on. And out of nowhere, someone hands me some free money — who am I not to take it? Of course, I took it. The domain is still unused, no idea why 🤔. Ngl, I still hate the fact that my first Wi-Fi money came from this. A new idea worth pursuing? Fast-forward some weeks now. Around March, I got this crazy idea of building an email productivity tool. We all use emails, yet we all hate them. So, this must be fixed. Everyone uses emails, in fact everyone HAS TO use emails. So, I just needed to build a tool and wait for people to come. This was all, really. After all, the problem space is huge, there is enough room for another product, everyone uses emails, no need for any further validation, right? ❌ WRONG ONCE AGAIN! We all hear from the greatest in the startup landscape that we must validate our ideas with real people, yet at least some of us (guilty here 🥸) think that our product will be hugely successful and prove them to be an exception. Few might, but most are not. I certainly wasn't. 👉 Lesson learned: Always validate your ideas with real people. Ask them how much they’d pay for such a tool (not if they would). Much better if they are willing to pay upfront for a discount, etc. But even this comes later, keep reading. I think the difference between “How much” and “If” is huge for two reasons: (1) By asking them for “How much”, you force them to think in a more realistic setting. (2) You will have a more realistic idea on your profit margins. Based on my competitive analysis, I already had a solution in my mind to improve our email usage standards and email productivity (huge mistake), but I did my best to learn about their problems regarding those without pushing the idea too hard. The idea is this: Generate concise email summaries with suggested actions, combine them into one email, and send it at their preferred times. Save as much as time the AI you end up with allows. After all, everyone loves to save time. So, what kind of validation did I seek for? Talked with only a few people around me about this crazy, internet-breaking idea. The responses I got were, now I see, mediocre; no one got excited about it, just said things along the lines of “Cool idea, OK”. So, any reasonable person in this situation would think “Okay, not might not be working”, right? Well, I did not. I assumed that they were the wrong audience for this product, and there was this magical land of user segments waiting eagerly for my product, yet unknowingly. To this day, I still have not reached this magical place. Perhaps, it didn’t exist in the first place. If I cannot find it, whether it exists or not doesn’t matter. I am certainly searching for it. 👉 What I should have done: Once I decide on a problem space (time management, email productivity, etc.), I should decide on my potential user segments, people who I plan to sell my product to. Then I should go talk to those people, ask them about their pains, then get to the problem-solving/ideation phase only later. ❗️ VALIDATION COMES FROM THE REALITY OUTSIDE. What validation looks like might change from product to product; but what invalidation looks like is more or less the same for every product. Nico Jeannen told me yesterday “validation = money in the account” on Twitter. This is the ultimate form of validation your product could get. If your product doesn’t make any money, then something is invalidated by reality: Your product, you, your idea, who knows? So, at this point, I knew a little bit of Python from spending some time in tutorial hell a few years ago, some HTML/CSS/JS, barely enough React to build a working app. React could work for this project, but I needed easy-to-implement server interactivity. Luckily, around this time, I got to know about this new gen of indie hackers, and learned (but didn’t truly understand) about their approach to indie hacking, and this library called Nextjs. How good Next.js still blows my mind. So, I was back to tutorial hell once again. But, this time, with a promise to myself: This is the last time I would visit tutorial hell. Time to start building this "ground-breaking idea" Learning the fundamentals of Next.js was easier than learning of React unsurprisingly. Yet, the first time I managed to run server actions on Next.js was one of the rarest moments that completely blew my mind. To this day, I reject the idea that it is something else than pure magic under its hood. Did I absolutely need Nextjs for this project though? I do not think so. Did it save me lots of time? Absolutely. Furthermore, learning Nextjs will certainly be quite helpful for other projects that I will be tackling in the future. Already got a few ideas that might be worth pursuing in the head in case I decide to abandon Summ in the future. Fast-forward few weeks again: So, at this stage, I had a barely working MVP-like product. Since the very beginning, I spent every free hour (and more) on this project as speed is essential. But, I am not so sure it was worth it to overwork in retrospect. Yet, I know I couldn’t help myself. Everything is going kinda smooth, so what’s the worst thing that could ever happen? Well, both Apple and Google announced their AIs (Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini, respectively) will have email summarization features for their products. Summarizing singular emails is no big deal, after all there were already so many similar products in the market. I still think that what truly matters is a frictionless user experience, and this is why I built this product in a certain way: You spend less than a few minutes setting up your account, and you get to enjoy your email summaries, without ever visiting its website again. This is still a very cool concept I really like a lot. So, at this point: I had no other idea that could be pursued, already spent too much time on this project. Do I quit or not? This was the question. Of course not. I just have to launch this product as quickly as possible. So, I did something right, a quite rare occurrence I might say: Re-planned my product, dropped everything secondary to the core feature immediately (save time on reading emails), tried launching it asap. 👉 Insight: Sell only one core feature at one time. Drop anything secondary to this core feature. Well, my primary occupation is product design. So one would expect that a product I build must have stellar design. I considered any considerable time spent on design at this stage would be simply wasted. I still think this is both true and wrong: True, because if your product’s core benefits suck, no one will care about your design. False, because if your design looks amateurish, no one will trust you and your product. So, I always targeted an average level design with it and the way this tool works made it quite easy as I had to design only 2 primary pages: Landing page and user portal (which has only settings and analytics pages). However, even though I knew spending time on design was not worth much of my time, I got a bit “greedy”: In fact, I redesigned those pages three times, and still ended up with a so-so design that I am not proud of. 👉 What I would do differently: Unless absolutely necessary, only one iteration per stage as long as it works. This, in my mind, applies to everything. If your product’s A feature works, then no need to rewrite it from scratch for any reason, or even refactor it. When your product becomes a success, and you absolutely need that part of your codebase to be written, do so, but only then. Ready to launch, now is th etime for some marketing, right? By July 26, I already had a “launchable” product that barely works (I marked this date on a Notion docs, this is how I know). Yet, I had spent almost no time on marketing, sales, whatever. After all, “You build and they will come”. Did I know that I needed marketing? Of course I did, but knowingly didn’t. Why, you might ask. Well, from my perspective, it had to be a dev-heavy product; meaning that you spend most of your time on developing it, mostly coding skills. But, this is simply wrong. As a rule of thumb, as noted by one of the greatests, Marc Louvion, you should spend at least twice of the building time on marketing. ❗️ Time spent on building \* 2 people don’t know your product > they don’t use your product > you don’t get users > you don’t make money Easy as that. Following the same reasoning, a slightly different approach to planning a project is possible. Determine an approximate time to complete the project with a high level project plan. Let’s say 6 months. By the reasoning above, 2 months should go into building, and 4 into marketing. If you need 4 months for building instead of 2, then you need 8 months of marketing, which makes the time to complete the project 12 months. If you don’t have that much time, then quit the project. When does a project count as completed? Well, in reality, never. But, I think we have to define success conditions even before we start for indie projects and startups; so we know when to quit when they are not met. A success condition could look like “Make $6000 in 12 months” or “Have 3000 users in 6 months”. It all depends on the project. But, once you set it, it should be set in stone: You don’t change it unless absolutely necessary. I suspect there are few principles that make a solopreneur successful; and knowing when to quit and when to continue is definitely one of them. Marc Louvion is famously known for his success, but he got there after failing so many projects. To my knowledge, the same applies to Nico Jeannen, Pieter Levels, or almost everyone as well. ❗️ Determining when to continue even before you start will definitely help in the long run. A half-aed launch Time-leap again. Around mid August, I “soft launched” my product. By soft launch, I mean lazy marketing. Just tweeting about it, posting it on free directories. Did I get any traffic? Surely I did. Did I get any users? Nope. Only after this time, it hit me: “Either something is wrong with me, or with this product” Marketing might be a much bigger factor for a project’s success after all. Even though I get some traffic, not convincing enough for people to sign up even for a free trial. The product was still perfect in my eyes at the time (well, still is ^(\_),) so the right people are not finding my product, I thought. Then, a question that I should have been asking at the very first place, one that could prevent all these, comes to my mind: “How do even people search for such tools?” If we are to consider this whole journey of me and my so-far-failed product to be an already destined failure, one metric suffices to show why. Search volume: 30. Even if people have such a pain point, they are not looking for email summaries. So, almost no organic traffic coming from Google. But, as a person who did zero marketing on this or any product, who has zero marketing knowledge, who doesn’t have an audience on social media, there is not much I could do. Finally, it was time to give up. Or not… In my eyes, the most important element that makes a founder (solo or not) successful (this, I am not by any means) is to solve problems. ❗️ So, the problem was this: “People are not finding my product by organic search” How do I make sure I get some organic traffic and gets more visibility? Learn digital marketing and SEO as much as I can within very limited time. Thankfully, without spending much time, I came across Neil Patel's YT channel, and as I said many times, it is an absolute gold mine. I learned a lot, especially about the fundamentals, and surely it will be fruitful; but there is no magic trick that could make people visit your website. SEO certainly helps, but only when people are looking for your keywords. However, it is truly a magical solution to get in touch with REAL people that are in your user segments: 👉 Understand your pains, understand their problems, help them to solve them via building products. I did not do this so far, have to admit. But, in case you would like to have a chat about your email usage, and email productivity, just get in touch; I’d be delighted to hear about them. Getting ready for a ProductHunt launch The date was Sept 1. And I unlocked an impossible achievement: Running out of Supabase’s free plan’s Egres limit while having zero users. I was already considering moving out of their Cloud server and managing a Supabase CLI service on my Hetzner VPS for some time; but never ever suspected that I would have to do this quickly. The cheapest plan Supabase offers is $25/month; yet, at that point, I am in between jobs for such a long time, basically broke, and could barely afford that price. One or two months could be okay, but why pay for it if I will eventually move out of their Cloud service? So, instead of paying $25, I spent two days migrating out of Supabase Cloud. Worth my time? Definitely not. But, when you are broke, you gotta do stupid things. This was the first time that I felt lucky to have zero users: I have no idea how I would manage this migration if I had any. I think this is one of the core tenets of an indie hacker: Controlling their own environment. I can’t remember whose quote this is, but I suspect it was Naval: Entrepreneurs have an almost pathological need to control their own fate. They will take any suffering if they can be in charge of their destiny, and not have it in somebody else’s hands. What’s truly scary is, at least in my case, we make people around us suffer at the expense of our attempting to control our own fates. I know this period has been quite hard on my wife as well, as I neglected her quite a bit, but sadly, I know that this will happen again. It is something that I can barely help with. Still, so sorry. After working the last two weeks on a ProductHunt Launch, I finally launched it this Tuesday. Zero ranking, zero new users, but 36 kind people upvoted my product, and many commented and provided invaluable feedback. I couldn't be more grateful for each one of them 🙏. Considering all these, what lies in the future of Summ though? I have no idea, to be honest. On one hand, I have zero users, have no job, no income. So, I need a way to make money asap. On the other hand, the whole idea of it revolves around one core premise (not an assumption) that I am not so willing to share; and I couldn’t have more trust in it. This might not be the best iteration of it, however I certainly believe that email usage is one of the best problem spaces one could work on. 👉 But, one thing is for certain: I need to get in touch with people, and talk with them about this product I built so far. In fact, this is the only item on my agenda. Nothing else will save my brainchild <3. Below are some other insights and notes that I got during my journey; as they do not 100% fit into this story, I think it is more suitable to list them here. I hope you enjoyed reading this. Give Summ a try, it comes with a generous free trial, no credit card required. Some additional notes and insights: Project planning is one of the most underestimated skills for solopreneurs. It saves you enormous time, and helps you to keep your focus up. Building B2B products beats building B2C products. Businesses are very willing to pay big bucks if your product helps them. On the other hand, spending a few hours per user who would pay $5/m probably is not worth your time. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your product is if no one uses it. If you cannot sell a product in a certain category/niche (or do not know how to sell it), it might be a good idea not to start a project in it. Going after new ideas and ventures is quite risky, especially if you don’t know how to market it. On the other hand, an already established category means that there is already demand. Whether this demand is sufficient or not is another issue. As long as there is enough demand for your product to fit in, any category/niche is good. Some might be better, some might be worse. Unless you are going hardcore B2B, you will need people to find your product by means of organic search. Always conduct thorough keyword research as soon as possible.

#reddit#spent#months
Spent months patching no-code tools—built a full custom business app in 5 minutes with AI
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
yahllilevy•This week

Spent months patching no-code tools—built a full custom business app in 5 minutes with AI

Hey r/SideProject, I’ve spent months trying to patch together off-the-shelf tools and no-code platforms to create software for small businesses, but I kept running into the same problem—they just don’t fit how businesses actually work. That’s when I realized most small businesses need custom software tailored to their unique workflows, but the time and cost of building it from scratch are out of reach for most of them. So I decided to build a solution. Introducing Crust AI—a tool that lets SMB owners describe their exact needs, and in 5 minutes, it generates a fully functional app: client portals, employee hubs, vendor management systems—anything you need to streamline external collaboration. I went from wasting weeks stitching together no-code tools to having a zero-dev solution up and running in minutes. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. If you’ve been in the same boat as me, check out trycrust.co and let me know what you think!

#reddit#spent#months
I spent 18 hours every week tracking marketing trends and latest news. Here are my predictions for 2024
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.778
lazymentors•This week

I spent 18 hours every week tracking marketing trends and latest news. Here are my predictions for 2024

1/ Securing Digital Footprint becomes #1 Priority For Chronically Online Users, Protecting their digital footprint will become one of the main things. We saw influencers getting cancelled over Old Content and Brands used Old Travis Kelce Tweets, we saw what could happen without digital footprint protection. Online Engagement Precautions will be taken again with Twitter & IG showing your usernames above ‘Algorithm Suggested Content’. What you like is more visible to other people in UI Design of these apps, another reason behind why Digital Footprint preservation will matter a lot in 2024. This will impact likes to viewership ratio on your organic and paid content. &#x200B; 2/  TikTok wants Long Videos with Storytelling As I was writing this report, TikTok also released their What’s Next 2024 Report. It focuses heavily on how the audiences on the app demand better storytelling and from the examples in the report, you can judge what TikTok wants. They also rolled out a 30-minute video upload limit. Engaging Content over 1-Minute Mark to keep the audiences longer on the app. I highlighted in the first trend, every social media platform wants the same thing, more time spent. 3/ Use of Shop the Look While Streaming Netflix or Amazon Prime. This year’s one of the most successful TV series, The Bear caused Men to go mad for the T-Shirt worn by Jeremy Allen White in the show. Showing us how TV Shows influence or encourage us to dress in a particular way. It’s nothing new, TV Shows like Friends & Gossip Girl influenced all demographics when they came out. But now, Streamings Services such as Roku & Amazon enable consumers to shop the look while watching the TV Shows. Many Brands will jump on these opportunities in upcoming months. 4/ Brands in Comments & Memes are the new norm By Summer 2024, Most Online Users & Creators will no longer feel too excited or answered when they see your brand in the comments. Why? It’s becoming too common for Brands to show in comments under viral content about them. Or Brands being funny with Internet Culture Trends is known to most users. The Saturation of Every Brand being funny and being present leads to increased competition of levitating the content quality. &#x200B; 5/ Marketers decrease their focus on Traffic & Views With AI recommendations taking over, The Structure of content distributing on social media is changing, the same goes for SEO. Conversational AIs are changing how web traffic is distributed to publishers. An Increased focus on managing the conversion rate and landing page relevancy will be the main focus. 6/ OOH is kind of making a comeback. First, US OOH Ads Industry grew 1.1% in Q3 2023. Second, Outfront Media reported slight revenue increase in Q3 as Billboard Ad Revenue grew in Q3. Many Brands in UK are also aligning more toward traditional media Channels. With Burger King in UK focusing on only OOH for Christmas this year and Fashion Brands like SSENSE launching Billboards as Branding Play. 7/ Rise of Curation Continues This Year, we witnessed success of Pinterest Shuffles App, Gen-Z loved it. Similar Success with formats like IG photo dump & TikTok ‘My Fav Finds’ Carousels being the center of Gen-Z Content. Just look at this recent trend and tell me Curation isn’t personal to Online Teens. Spotify won with their idea of curating Songs with Astrology-type signs. The Fashion Products with Curated Emojis and Stickers on them, that scrappy curated approach is predicted to grow in 2024, data from Pinterest. 8/ Use of AI to Trace Consumers in the wild This year we saw a huge trend of people using Image/ face recognition tools to find or dig dirt about famous people. The biggest example was Dillion Dannis exposing Multiple images of Logan Paul’s girlfriend using AI tools. (Which was Obviously bad) But next year, I believe with better rules, big brands like Adidas or Nike will be able to find worldwide micro-influencers & Online Consumers seen wearing adidas. And partnering with them on a large scale through automated outreach. 9/ More Cartoons than Influencer-Brand Products. All the Cartoon shows are seeing huge rise on IG and TikTok, Shaun the sheep is viral, Snoopy was big this year, Sesame Street’s TikTok is working. Aussie Show Bluey is making a huge spark in the US. More Brand collaborations are on the road. Why? Cartoons have built a very consistent identity and they have social channels. I know many see Cartoons as Kids Content but on social, looking at TikTok Account of Sesame Street & Snoopy. Last month, Powerpuff Girls launched a collaboration with Nike. &#x200B; 10/ The Best Trend to get people off social media &#x200B; Try to get people off the social media apps, build your own loops. You can’t rely on social and you clearly shouldn’t burn out trying to win on social and streaming with Paid Ads or without them. This matters a lot because data shares most of your customers buy from you once or twice a year. And then they interact with your content, how bad will you feel if the only thing they remember as your content is being on TikTok. Nothing about your brand. 11/ The Internet Aesthetic will Die for Cafes & Restaurants When I wrote my post about Instagram Marketing, I mentioned this issue of Every Account looking the same. In reality, It isn’t limited to IG Feeds, This Creator points out the same Problem, mentioning the aesthetic Standards from Internet are changing how new businesses approach their whole business. More Content from Cafes & Restaurants need to be around their people and neighbourhood. 12/ Echo Chambers & Sonic Influence All Podcasts are Echo Chambers because if people wanted a new perspective in form of value. We would have chosen debates, but we chose Podcasts to find new value while being in comfort. People are now looking for more value in comfort than ever, Podcasts will continue to rise. 13/ Clever AI Integration to Better Customer Journeys in B2B & B2C Marketing Agencies can provide clever solutions to B2B Companies, and help them overcome the tag of Boring Ads only. How? Ogilvy India created an AI Ad Campaign for Cadbury, allowing SMBs to have the Bollywood Actor endorse them. They used the AI voice generation allowing businesses to alter the voice and have Shah Rukh Khan endorse their shop. A similar approach was taken by IPG India, An AI Ad with Shah Rukh Khan allowing everyone to add their face in the Branded Content. &#x200B; If I sounded like an Old head in this report or I missed on some elements like Programmatic Advertising and PPC. I will try to include better analysis and new content about future trends. You can find the post shared with examples & research, linked here.

#reddit#spent#hours
Finally Launched My First App Without Any Coding Experience
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
Consistent_Access844•This week

Finally Launched My First App Without Any Coding Experience

About Myself I am a structural engineer that are taught to design buildings in the day and I have been dreaming forever to build a SaaS business to get out of the rat race. However, as a structural engineer, coding is definitely not something I am capable of doing (I have some simple knowledge, but its no way close to building an app) The Journey As I've mentioned, I always wanted to build a SaaS business because in my mind the business model is most attractive to me, where you only need to build once and can sell to millions. So I started off searching and exploring on the internet and my first ever "SaaS" was from Wordpress. I am buying plugin from other user and then pluggin into my own Wordpress website. It was a project management tool SaaS. I was so excited about the website and can't even sleep well at night because I'm just so hype about it. But, the reality is because this is my first ever business, I totally didn't realise about the importance of UI UX or my business differentiation, thinking that everyone will be as excited as I am. Then, I went deeper and deeper into the journey (I can write more about this in another post if anyone is interested) and finally landed on Flutterflow to create my first ever app. No Code Journey Thanks to no code builder, I never thought that a non-coder like me can ever create an app and got accepted by the App Store/Play Store. Since that I am using a low-code builder, for any specific requirement that I need that are not covered natively, I will just talk to ChatGPT and boom I pretty much got most of the answer I needed. About The App As someone that always try to keep track of my expenses, I never able to find an app that are simple and interesting enough for me to continue on the journey. I realise that I could have incorporate AI into this journey and hence there go, I created an AI Money Tracker. Let me introduce Rolly: AI Money Tracker - a new AI expense tracker where you can easily record your transactions just by chatting with our bot Rolly and it will automatically record and categorise the transaction into the most suitable category (you can also create any of your own category and it will also take care of it in consideration). I am not sharing the app link here to avoid getting ban, but feel free to search up Rolly: AI Money Tracker on either App Store on Play Store. My Learnings As someone that can't code and never imagine that I could create a production app by myself and publish it on to the App Store and Play Store. Since I am not making any money yet and just at the beginning of my entrepreneur journey, I can't give any substantial advice, all I can say is just my own learnings and feelings. My advice is if you have a dream of building a business, just go for it, don't worry about all the problems that you can think of to convince yourself not making the start at all. From my point of view, as long as you're not giving up everything (eg, putting yourself in huge debt etc), why don't just go for it and you've got nothing much to lose. You'll only lose if you never even get started. And also, I believe that creating an app is always the easiest step out of the entreprenuership journey, marketing and distribution is the key to success. Even though you've spent days and nights on it and it might mean everything to you, the truth is people don't really cares and you'll need to market for it. I am still in journey to learn how to do marketing, content, building a business and everything. I think this is just a very beginning of my journey and hopefully there's more interesting one to share further down the road.

#reddit#finally#launched
I fell into the builder's trap and need help getting out
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
stellarcitizen•This week

I fell into the builder's trap and need help getting out

Hi r/startups, First-time technical founder here. Two years ago, I decided to leave the 9-5 grind and build something meaningful. Now, I have (what I believe is) a brilliant technical solution but no clear business case. I’m seeking a cofounder with product and marketing expertise to help pivot my project into a viable business - or start a new one. Details below. About Me 36yo, born in Berlin and moved to San Francisco 8 years ago Master's in Software Engineering with 15 years of experience Worked with early-stage startups in Berlin and a venture studio in SF Spent the past years leading a team of 12 shipping enterprise software The tech I've built An AI engine that makes it easy for developers to automate their workflows. It works with code, issues, PRs and integrates with 3rd party systems like error trackers, wikis, ticketing systems, etc. It takes natural language instructions, fulfills them autonomously and responds with a result. The functionality is served as a platform, with an API and an SDK. On top of it, I've built a CLI and a web application with productivity tools for developers. Who and what I'm looking for My main goal is to leave my current job and build a company around a problem that matters to me, ideally with considerable equity. I’m looking for: A cofounder with product and marketing expertise who sees potential in my tech and can help turn it into a successful business—or someone with a strong business case who needs a technical founder. Mentorship from someone experienced in dev tool startups or as a successful solo founder. I’d love to learn from your journey and would be happy to offer my technical expertise or collaborate on projects in return. Happy to answer any questions or provide more details. Cheers!

#reddit#fell#into
Joined an AI Startup with Ex-ShipStation Team - Need Tips on Finding Early Users
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
welcomeread•This week

Joined an AI Startup with Ex-ShipStation Team - Need Tips on Finding Early Users

Hey Reddit, My name’s Welcome (Yes, that’s really my name), and I’ve been in tech for most of my career, mostly at bigger companies with established brands and resources. But recently, I decided to join a small startup called BotDojo. It’s my first time being part of a small team, and it’s been a pretty eye-opening experience so far. But, like with anything new, I’ve hit a few bumps along the way, and I’m hoping you all might have some advice. A little backstory: BotDojo was started by some of the engineers who used to work together at ShipStation. After ShipStation sold, they spent some time experimenting with AI but kept running into the same problems—having to patch together tools, getting inconsistent results, handling data ingestion, and struggling to track performance. So, they decided to build a platform to help developers build, test, and deploy AI solutions. Since I came on board, my focus has been on finding early users, and it’s been a mixed bag of wins and frustrations. We’ve got a solid group of people using the free version (which is great), but only a few have upgraded to the paid plan so far (ranging from startups to large enterprises). The cool thing is that those who have become paying customers absolutely love the product. It’s just been hard getting more people to that point. We’ve tried a bunch of things: Attending industry events, doing cold email outreach, running social ads (the usual stuff). And while we’ve seen some interest, we’re running into a few challenges:   Learning curve: The software is really powerful, but it takes a week or two for users to really see what it can do. Without a dedicated sales team to walk them through it, it’s been tough getting people to stick around long enough to see the value. Standing out is hard: The AI space is super crowded right now. I think a lot of people see “AI tool” and assume it’s just like everything else out there (even though BotDojo has some awesome features that really set it apart).  Sign-ups, but limited engagement: We’re on a freemium model to make it easy for people to try it out, but that also means we get a lot of bots and people who sign up but don’t really dive in. So, I thought I’d reach out here and see if anyone has been through this early stage before. How did you manage to break through and find those first paying users who really saw the value in what you were building?  Are there any strategies, communities, or tactics that worked particularly well for you? And if you had to do it all over again, what would you focus on? I figure I’m not the only one trying to navigate these waters, so I’m hoping this can be a helpful thread for others too. Thanks so much for reading, and I’d be super grateful for any advice or insights you can share! 🙏

#reddit#joined#startup
From “Green” to “Smart” – Tom Gorski’s Word of Advice
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
DanielleHarrison1•This week

From “Green” to “Smart” – Tom Gorski’s Word of Advice

Sharing this interview with entrepreneur Tom Gorski. I think it contains a few nice tips for beginner entrepreneurs. What is the problem with the term “Green?” what are the top 3 mistakes entrepreneurs make that can prevent them from enjoying the sweet taste of success? And what should young entrepreneurs always keep in mind? Continuing our expert interview series, we asked entrepreneur Tom Gorski to share some of his secrets to success with us. Gorski is the CEO and Co-Founder at SaaSGenius.com, and an Inbound Marketer & Growth Hacker at InboundWay.com. His career spans over 12 years of developing and implementing online marketing, SEO and conversion optimization campaigns. He defines his biggest accomplishment to date as “achieving 4500% growth for one of my clients over a three­year period.” logo-saasgenius Q: It’s no secret that the SaaS market is saturated, as new companies are having very hard time acquiring, retaining and monetizing users. In your view – what are the top 3 mistakes SaaS companies make? What are some key differentiators you recognize in a successful product? A: Mistake No. 1: Product-market fit is not good enough There are a number of reasons for this, including the fact that inertia, incumbency and bureaucracy are all working against you. For emerging companies, this means finding a way to be exponentially better with fewer resources. As a result, focus is key. Mistake No. 2: Not Specializing Your Sales Roles When you specialize your sales people, you allow them to focus, which creates greater output form your sales team. Mistake No. 3: You Need a Niche To be able to market and sell well, you need to have a niche. The world is noisy and messy, and you’ll struggle if you don’t have a sharp, direct message. When you try to speak to everyone, no one can hear you. Q: Which innovative trends do you recognize in the high tech world nowadays? A: “Green” was a mega trend of the last decade and while it will continue to be very important, there will be a shift towards “smart” solutions, which are intelligent, connected and have the ability to sense, report, and take the right action. Smart solutions will be everywhere around us from smart clothing, phones, to smart homes and smart cities. Q: What is the most significant advice you can give young entrepreneurs? A: Being very successful means learning from those who have already achieved success. Having a mentor is an amazing blessing to an entrepreneur, but not everyone can find one in person. My advice is to work smarter, not harder. This is the most non-intuitive observation I will probably make. If you want to compete in the arena, hard work isn’t enough. And judging yourself on how hard you work, rather than how smart you work can be fatal. Q: We are flooded with buzzwords lately – VR / AI / Bots… where do you think the software world is heading? A: AI and bots are a very hot topic in 2016 and it’s sometimes hard to distinguish the real potential behind the hype. My point of view is that, like with many things, there’s no revolution but evolution. It’s unrealistic to think that AI can become mainstream in SaaS products without proper AI infrastructure. SaaS delivery will significantly outpace traditional software product delivery, growing nearly five times faster than the traditional software market and will become a significant growth driver for all functional software markets. By 2019, the SaaS software model will account for $1 of every $4 spent on software. Q: Let us in on some of your secrets… where do you look for innovation? For inspiration and revolutionary ideas? A: Ideas for new startups often begin with a real problem that needs to be solved. And they don’t come while you’re sitting around sipping coffee and contemplating life. They tend to reveal themselves while you’re at work on something else. Start with brainstorming with problems that you are personally invested in. Building a business is hard and takes the kind of relentless dedication that comes from personal passion. Perhaps the greatest factor that determines whether or not an entrepreneur will be successful isn’t the business idea itself, but rather the entrepreneur’s willingness to try to turn the idea into reality. Great ideas are abundant, but it’s what we decide to do with them that counts. Original post: http://saasaddict.walkme.com/from-green-to-smart-tom-gorskis-words-of-advice/

#reddit#“green”#“smart”
Finally Launched My First App Without Any Coding Experience
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
Consistent_Access844•This week

Finally Launched My First App Without Any Coding Experience

About Myself I am a structural engineer that are taught to design buildings in the day and I have been dreaming forever to build a SaaS business to get out of the rat race. However, as a structural engineer, coding is definitely not something I am capable of doing (I have some simple knowledge, but its no way close to building an app) The Journey As I've mentioned, I always wanted to build a SaaS business because in my mind the business model is most attractive to me, where you only need to build once and can sell to millions. So I started off searching and exploring on the internet and my first ever "SaaS" was from Wordpress. I am buying plugin from other user and then pluggin into my own Wordpress website. It was a project management tool SaaS. I was so excited about the website and can't even sleep well at night because I'm just so hype about it. But, the reality is because this is my first ever business, I totally didn't realise about the importance of UI UX or my business differentiation, thinking that everyone will be as excited as I am. Then, I went deeper and deeper into the journey (I can write more about this in another post if anyone is interested) and finally landed on Flutterflow to create my first ever app. No Code Journey Thanks to no code builder, I never thought that a non-coder like me can ever create an app and got accepted by the App Store/Play Store. Since that I am using a low-code builder, for any specific requirement that I need that are not covered natively, I will just talk to ChatGPT and boom I pretty much got most of the answer I needed. About The App As someone that always try to keep track of my expenses, I never able to find an app that are simple and interesting enough for me to continue on the journey. I realise that I could have incorporate AI into this journey and hence there go, I created an AI Money Tracker. Let me introduce Rolly: AI Money Tracker - a new AI expense tracker where you can easily record your transactions just by chatting with our bot Rolly and it will automatically record and categorise the transaction into the most suitable category (you can also create any of your own category and it will also take care of it in consideration). I am not sharing the app link here to avoid getting ban, but feel free to search up Rolly: AI Money Tracker on either App Store on Play Store. My Learnings As someone that can't code and never imagine that I could create a production app by myself and publish it on to the App Store and Play Store. Since I am not making any money yet and just at the beginning of my entrepreneur journey, I can't give any substantial advice, all I can say is just my own learnings and feelings. My advice is if you have a dream of building a business, just go for it, don't worry about all the problems that you can think of to convince yourself not making the start at all. From my point of view, as long as you're not giving up everything (eg, putting yourself in huge debt etc), why don't just go for it and you've got nothing much to lose. You'll only lose if you never even get started. And also, I believe that creating an app is always the easiest step out of the entreprenuership journey, marketing and distribution is the key to success. Even though you've spent days and nights on it and it might mean everything to you, the truth is people don't really cares and you'll need to market for it. I am still in journey to learn how to do marketing, content, building a business and everything. I think this is just a very beginning of my journey and hopefully there's more interesting one to share further down the road.

#reddit#finally#launched
10y of product development, 2 bankruptcies, and 1 Exit — what next? [Extended Story]
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
Slight-Explanation29•This week

10y of product development, 2 bankruptcies, and 1 Exit — what next? [Extended Story]

10 years of obsessive pursuit from the bottom to impressive product-market fit and exit. Bootstrapping tech products as Software Developer and 3x Startup Founder (2 bankruptcies and 1 exit). Hi everyone, your motivation has inspired me to delve deeper into my story. So, as promised to some of you, I've expanded on it a bit more, along with my brief reflections. There are many founders, product creators, and proactive individuals, I’ve read many of your crazy stories and lessons so I decided to share mine and the lessons I learned from the bottom to impressive product-market fit and exit. I've spent almost the past 10 years building tech products as a Corporate Team Leader, Senior Software Developer, Online Course Creator, Programming Tutor, Head of Development/CTO, and 3x Startup Founder (2 bankruptcies, and 1 exit). And what next? good question... A brief summary of my journey: Chapter 1: Software Developer / Team Leader / Senior Software Developer I’ve always wanted to create products that win over users’ hearts, carry value, and influence users. Ever since my school days, I’ve loved the tech part of building digital products. At the beginning of school, I started hosting servers for games, blogs and internet forums, and other things that did not require much programming knowledge. My classmates and later even over 100 people played on servers that I hosted on my home PC. Later, as the only person in school, I passed the final exam in computer science. During my computer science studies, I started my first job as a software developer. It was crazy, I was spending 200–300 hours a month in the office attending also to daily classes. Yes, I didn’t have a life, but it truly was the fulfillment of my dreams. I was able to earn good money doing what I love, and I devoted fully myself to it. My key to effectively studying IT and growing my knowledge at rocket speed was learning day by day reading guides, building products to the portfolio, watching youtube channels and attending conferences, and even watching them online, even if I didn’t understand everything at the beginning. In one year we’ve been to every possible event within 400km. We were building healthcare products that were actually used in hospitals and medical facilities. It was a beautiful adventure and tons of knowledge I took from this place. That time I built my first product teams, hired many great people, and over the years became a senior developer and team leader. Even I convinced my study mates to apply to this company and we studied together and worked as well. Finally, there were 4 of us, when I left a friend of mine took over my position and still works there. If you’re reading this, I’m sending you a flood of love and appreciation. I joined as the 8th person, and after around 4 years, when I left hungry for change, there were already over 30 of us, now around 100. It was a good time, greetings to everyone. I finished my Master’s and Engineering degrees in Computer Science, and it was time for changes. Chapter 2: 1st time as a Co-founder — Marketplace In the meantime, there was also my first startup (a marketplace) with four of my friends. We all worked on the product, each of us spent thousands of hours, after hours, entire weekends… and I think finally over a year of work. As you might guess, we lacked the most important things: sales, marketing, and product-market fit. We thought users think like us. We all also worked commercially, so the work went very smoothly, but we didn’t know what we should do next with it… Finally, we didn’t have any customers, but you know what, I don’t regret it, a lot of learning things which I used many times later. The first attempts at validating the idea with the market and business activities. In the end, the product was Airbnb-sized. Landing pages, listings, user panels, customer panels, admin site, notifications, caches, queues, load balancing, and much more. We wanted to publish the fully ready product to the market. It was a marketplace, so if you can guess, we had to attract both sides to be valuable. “Marketplace” — You can imagine something like Uber, if you don’t have passengers it was difficult to convince taxi drivers, if you don’t have a large number of taxi drivers you cannot attract passengers. After a year of development, we were overloaded, and without business, marketing, sales knowledge, and budget. Chapter 3: Corp Team Lead / Programming Tutor / Programming Architecture Workshop Leader Working in a corporation, a totally different environment, an international fintech, another learning experience, large products, and workmates who were waiting for 5 pm to finish — it wasn’t for me. Very slow product development, huge hierarchy, being an ant at the bottom, and low impact on the final product. At that time I understood that being a software developer is not anything special and I compared my work to factory worker. Sorry for that. High rates have been pumped only by high demand. Friends of mine from another industry do more difficult things and have a bigger responsibility for lower rates. That’s how the market works. This lower responsibility time allowed for building the first online course after hours, my own course platform, individual teaching newbies programming, and my first huge success — my first B2C customers, and B2B clients for workshops. I pivoted to full focus on sales, marketing, funnels, advertisements, demand, understanding the market, etc. It was 10x easier than startups but allowed me to learn and validate my conceptions and ideas on an easier market and showed me that it’s much easier to locate their problem/need/want and create a service/product that responds to it than to convince people of your innovative ideas. It’s just supply and demand, such a simple and basic statement, in reality, is very deep and difficult to understand without personal experience. If you’re inexperienced and you think you understand, you don’t. To this day, I love to analyze this catchword in relation to various industries / services / products and rediscover it again and again... While writing this sentence, I’m wondering if I’m not obsessed. Chapter 4: Next try — 2nd time as a founder — Edtech Drawing upon my experiences in selling services, offering trainings, and teaching programming, I wanted to broaden my horizons, delve into various fields of knowledge, involve more teachers, and so on. We started with simple services in different fields of knowledge, mainly relying on teaching in the local area (without online lessons). As I had already gathered some knowledge and experience in marketing and sales, things were going well and were moving in the right direction. The number of teachers in various fields was growing, as was the number of students. I don’t remember the exact statistics anymore, but it was another significant achievement that brought me a lot of satisfaction and new experiences. As you know, I’m a technology lover and couldn’t bear to look at manual processes — I wanted to automate everything: lessons, payments, invoices, customer service, etc. That’s when I hired our first developers (if you’re reading this, I’m sending you a flood of love — we spent a lot of time together and I remember it as a very fruitful and great year) and we began the process of tool and automation development. After a year we had really extended tools for students, teachers, franchise owners, etc. We had really big goals, we wanted to climb higher and higher. Maybe I wouldn’t even fully call it Startup, as the client was paying for the lessons, not for the software. But it gave us positive income, bootstrap financing, and tool development for services provided. Scaling this model was not as costless as SaaS because customer satisfaction was mainly on the side of the teacher, not the quality of the product (software). Finally, we grew to nearly 10 people and dozens of teachers, with zero external funding, and almost $50k monthly revenue. We worked very hard, day and night, and by November 2019, we were packed with clients to the brim. And as you know, that’s when the pandemic hit. It turned everything upside down by 180 degrees. Probably no one was ready for it. With a drastic drop in revenues, society started to save. Tired from the previous months, we had to work even harder. We had to reduce the team, change the model, and save what we had built. We stopped the tool’s development and sales, and with the developers, we started supporting other product teams to not fire them in difficult times. The tool worked passively for the next two years, reducing incomes month by month. With a smaller team providing programming services, we had full stability and earned more than relying only on educational services. At the peak of the pandemic, I promised myself that it was the last digital product I built… Never say never… Chapter 5: Time for fintech — Senior Software Developer / Team Lead / Head of Development I worked for small startups and companies. Building products from scratch, having a significant impact on the product, and complete fulfillment. Thousands of hours and sacrifices. This article mainly talks about startups that I built, so I don’t want to list all the companies, products, and applications that I supported as a technology consultant. These were mainly start-ups with a couple of people up to around 100 people on board. Some of the products were just a rescue mission, others were building an entire tech team. I was fully involved in all of them with the hope that we would work together for a long time, but I wasn’t the only one who made mistakes when looking for a product-market fit. One thing I fully understood: You can’t spend 8–15 hours a day writing code, managing a tech team, and still be able to help build an audience. In marketing and sales, you need to be rested and very creative to bring results and achieve further results and goals. If you have too many responsibilities related to technology, it becomes ineffective. I noticed that when I have more free time, more time to think, and more time to bounce the ball against the wall, I come up with really working marketing/sales strategies and solutions. It’s impossible when you are focused on code all day. You must know that this chapter of my life was long and has continued until now. Chapter 6: 3rd time as a founder — sold Never say never… right?\\ It was a time when the crypto market was really high and it was really trending topic. You know that I love technology right? So I cannot miss the blockchain world. I had experience in blockchain topics by learning on my own and from startups where I worked before. I was involved in crypto communities and I noticed a “starving crowd”. People who did things manually and earned money(crypto) on it.I found potential for building a small product that solves a technological problem. I said a few years before that I don’t want to start from scratch. I decided to share my observations and possibilities with my good friend. He said, “If you gonna built it, I’m in”. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I had thought and planned every aspect of marketing and sales. And you know what. On this huge mindmap “product” was only one block. 90% of the mindmap was focused on marketing and sales. Now, writing this article, I understood what path I went from my first startup to this one. In the first (described earlier) 90% was the product, but in the last one 90% was sales and marketing. Many years later, I did this approach automatically. What has changed in my head over the years and so many mistakes? At that time, the company for which I provided services was acquired. The next day I got a thank you for my hard work and all my accounts were blocked. Life… I was shocked. We were simply replaced by their trusted technology managers. They wanted to get full control. They acted a bit unkindly, but I knew that they had all my knowledge about the product in the documentation, because I’m used to drawing everything so that in the moment of my weakness (illness, whatever) the team could handle it. That’s what solid leaders do, right? After a time, I know that these are normal procedures in financial companies, the point is that under the influence of emotions, do not do anything inappropriate. I quickly forgot about it, that I was brutally fired. All that mattered was to bring my plan to life. And it has been started, 15–20 hours a day every day. You have to believe me, getting back into the game was incredibly satisfying for me. I didn’t even know that I would be so excited. Then we also noticed that someone was starting to think about the same product as me. So the race began a game against time and the market. I assume that if you have reached this point, you are interested in product-market fit, marketing, and sales, so let me explain my assumptions to you: Product: A very very small tool that allowed you to automate proper tracking and creation of on-chain transactions. Literally, the whole app for the user was located on only three subpages. Starving Crowd: We tapped into an underserved market. The crypto market primarily operates via communities on platforms like Discord, Reddit, Twitter, Telegram, and so on. Therefore, our main strategy was directly communicating with users and demonstrating our tool. This was essentially “free marketing” (excluding the time we invested), as we did not need to invest in ads, promotional materials, or convince people about the efficacy of our tool. The community could directly observe on-chain transactions executed by our algorithms, which were processed at an exceptionally fast rate. This was something they couldn’t accomplish manually, so whenever someone conducted transactions using our algorithm, it was immediately noticeable and stirred a curiosity within the community (how did they do that!). Tests: I conducted the initial tests of the application on myself — we had already invested significantly in developing the product, but I preferred risking my own resources over that of the users. I provided the tool access to my wallet, containing 0.3ETH, and went to sleep. Upon waking up, I discovered that the transactions were successful and my wallet had grown to 0.99ETH. My excitement knew no bounds, it felt like a windfall. But, of course, there was a fair chance I could have lost it too. It worked. As we progressed, some users achieved higher results, but it largely hinged on the parameters set by them. As you can surmise, the strategy was simple — buy low, sell high. There was considerable risk involved. Churn: For those versed in marketing, the significance of repeat visitors cannot be overstated. Access to our tool was granted only after email verification and a special technique that I’d prefer to keep confidential. And this was all provided for free. While we had zero followers on social media, we saw an explosion in our email subscriber base and amassed a substantial number of users and advocates. Revenue Generation: Our product quickly gained popularity as we were effectively helping users earn — an undeniable value proposition. Now, it was time to capitalize on our efforts. We introduced a subscription model charging $300 per week or $1,000 per month — seemingly high rates, but the demand was so intense that it wasn’t an issue. Being a subscriber meant you were prioritized in the queue, ensuring you were among the first to reap benefits — thus adding more “value”. Marketing: The quality of our product and its ability to continually engage users contributed to it achieving what can best be described as viral. It was both a source of pride and astonishment to witness users sharing charts and analyses derived from our tool in forum discussions. They weren’t actively promoting our product but rather using screenshots from our application to illustrate certain aspects of the crypto world. By that stage, we had already assembled a team to assist with marketing, and programming, and to provide round-the-clock helpdesk support. Unforgettable Time: Despite the hype, my focus remained steadfast on monitoring our servers, their capacity, and speed. Considering we had only been on the market for a few weeks, we were yet to implement alerts, server scaling, etc. Our active user base spanned from Japan to the West Coast of the United States. Primarily, our application was used daily during the evenings, but considering the variety of time zones, the only time I could afford to sleep was during the evening hours in Far Eastern Europe, where we had the least users. However, someone always needed to be on guard, and as such, my phone was constantly by my side. After all, we couldn’t afford to let our users down. We found ourselves working 20 hours a day, catering to thousands of users, enduring physical fatigue, engaging in talks with VCs, and participating in conferences. Sudden Downturn: Our pinnacle was abruptly interrupted by the war in Ukraine (next macroeconomic shot straight in the face, lucky guy), a precipitous drop in cryptocurrency value, and swiftly emerging competition. By this time, there were 5–8 comparable tools had infiltrated the market. It was a challenging period as we continually stumbled upon new rivals. They immediately embarked on swift fundraising endeavors — a strategy we overlooked, which in retrospect was a mistake. Although our product was superior, the competitors’ rapid advancement and our insufficient funds for expeditious scaling posed significant challenges. Nonetheless, we made a good decision. We sold the product (exit) to competitors. The revenue from “exit” compensated for all the losses, leaving us with enough rest. We were a small team without substantial budgets for rapid development, and the risk of forming new teams without money to survive for more than 1–2 months was irresponsible. You have to believe me that this decision consumed us sleepless nights. Finally, we sold it. They turned off our app but took algorithms and users. Whether you believe it or not, after several months of toiling day and night, experiencing burnout, growing weary of the topic, and gaining an extra 15 kg in weight, we finally found our freedom… The exit wasn’t incredibly profitable, but we knew they had outdone us. The exit covered all our expenses and granted us a well-deserved rest for the subsequent quarter. It was an insane ride. Despite the uncertainty, stress, struggles, and sleepless nights, the story and experience will remain etched in my memory for the rest of my life. Swift Takeaways: Comprehending User Needs: Do you fully understand the product-market fit? Is your offering just an accessory or does it truly satisfy the user’s needs? The Power of Viral Marketing: Take inspiration from giants like Snapchat, ChatGPT, and Clubhouse. While your product might not attain the same scale (but remember, never say never…), the closer your concept is to theirs, the easier your journey will be. If your user is motivated to text a friend saying, “Hey, check out how cool this is” (like sharing ChatGPT), then you’re on the best track. Really. Even if it doesn’t seem immediately evident, there could be a way to incorporate this into your product. Keep looking until you find it. Niche targeting — the more specific and tailored your product is to a certain audience, the easier your journey will be People love buying from people — establishing a personal brand and associating yourself with the product can make things easier. Value: Seek to understand why users engage with your product and keep returning. The more specific and critical the issue you’re aiming to solve, the easier your path will be. Consider your offerings in terms of products and services and focus on sales and marketing, regardless of personal sentiments. These are just a few points, I plan to elaborate on all of them in a separate article. Many products undergo years of development in search of market fit, refining the user experience, and more. And guess what? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Each product and market follows its own rules. Many startups have extensive histories before they finally make their mark (for instance, OpenAI). This entire journey spanned maybe 6–8 months. I grasped and capitalized on the opportunity, but we understood from the start that establishing a startup carried a significant risk, and our crypto product was 10 times riskier. Was it worth it? Given my passion for product development — absolutely. Was it profitable? — No, considering the hours spent — we lose. Did it provide a stable, problem-free life — nope. Did this entire adventure offer a wealth of happiness, joy, and unforgettable experiences — definitely yes. One thing is certain — we’ve amassed substantial experience and it’s not over yet :) So, what lies ahead? Chapter 7: Reverting to the contractor, developing a product for a crypto StartupReturning to the past, we continue our journey… I had invested substantial time and passion into the tech rescue mission product. I came on board as the technical Team Leader of a startup that had garnered over $20M in seed round funding, affiliated with the realm of cryptocurrencies. The investors were individuals with extensive backgrounds in the crypto world. My role was primarily technical, and there was an abundance of work to tackle. I was fully immersed, and genuinely devoted to the role. I was striving for excellence, knowing that if we secured another round of financing, the startup would accelerate rapidly. As for the product and marketing, I was more of an observer. After all, there were marketing professionals with decades of experience on board. These were individuals recruited from large crypto-related firms. I had faith in them, kept an eye on their actions, and focused on my own responsibilities. However, the reality was far from satisfactory. On the last day, the principal investor for the Series A round withdrew. The board made the tough decision to shut down. It was a period of intense observation and gaining experience in product management. This was a very brief summary of the last 10 years. And what next? (Last) Chapter 8: To be announced — Product Owner / Product Consultant / Strategist / CTO After spending countless hours and days deliberating my next steps, one thing is clear: My aspiration is to continue traversing the path of software product development, with the hopeful anticipation that one day, I might ride the crest of the next big wave and ascend to the prestigious status of a unicorn company. I find myself drawn to the process of building products, exploring product-market fit, strategizing, engaging in software development, seeking out new opportunities, networking, attending conferences, and continuously challenging myself by understanding the market and its competitive landscape. Product Owner / Product Consultant / CTO / COO: I’m not entirely sure how to categorize this role, as I anticipate that it will largely depend on the product to which I will commit myself fully. My idea is to find one startup/company that wants to build a product / or already has a product, want to speed up, or simply doesn’t know what’s next. Alternatively, I could be a part of an established company with a rich business history, which intends to invest in digitization and technological advancements. The goal would be to enrich their customer experience by offering complementary digital products Rather than initiating a new venture from ground zero with the same team, I am receptive to new challenges. I am confident that my past experiences will prove highly beneficial for the founders of promising, burgeoning startups that already possess a product, or are in the initial phases of development. ‘Consultant’ — I reckon we interpret this term differently. My aim is to be completely absorbed in a single product, crafting funnels, niches, strategies, and all that is necessary to repeatedly achieve the ‘product-market fit’ and significant revenue. To me, ‘consultant’ resonates more akin to freelancing than being an employee. My current goal is to kickstart as a consultant and aide, dealing with facilitating startups in their journey from point A to B. Here are two theoretical scenarios to illustrate my approach: Scenario 1: (Starting from point A) You have a product but struggle with marketing, adoption, software, strategy, sales, fundraising, or something else. I conduct an analysis and develop a strategy to reach point B. I take on the “dirty work” and implement necessary changes, including potential pivots or shifts (going all-in) to guide the product to point B. The goal is to reach point B, which could involve achieving a higher valuation, expanding the user base, increasing sales, or generating monthly revenue, among other metrics. Scenario 2: (Starting from point A) You have a plan or idea but face challenges with marketing, adoption, strategy, software, sales, fundraising, or something else. I analyze the situation and devise a strategy to reach point B. I tackle the necessary tasks, build the team, and overcome obstacles to propel the product to point B. I have come across the view that finding the elusive product-market fit is the job of the founder, and it’s hard for me to disagree. However, I believe that my support and experiences can help save money, many failures, and most importantly, time. I have spent a great deal of time learning from my mistakes, enduring failure after failure, and even had no one to ask for support or opinion, which is why I offer my help. Saving even a couple of years, realistically speaking, seems like a value I’m eager to provide… I invite you to share your thoughts and insights on these scenarios :) Closing Remarks: I appreciate your time and effort in reaching this point. This has been my journey, and I wouldn’t change it for the world. I had an extraordinary adventure, and now I’m ready for the next exciting battle with the market and new software products. While my entire narrative is centered around startups, especially the ones I personally built, I’m planning to share more insights drawn from all of my experiences, not just those as a co-founder. If you’re currently developing your product or even just considering the idea, I urge you to reach out to me. Perhaps together, we can create something monumental :) Thank you for your time and insights. I eagerly look forward to engaging in discussions and hearing your viewpoints. Please remember to like and subscribe. Nothing motivates to write more than positive feedback :) Matt.

#reddit#product#development,
I fell into the builder's trap and need help getting out
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
stellarcitizen•This week

I fell into the builder's trap and need help getting out

Hi r/startups, First-time technical founder here. Two years ago, I decided to leave the 9-5 grind and build something meaningful. Now, I have (what I believe is) a brilliant technical solution but no clear business case. I’m seeking a cofounder with product and marketing expertise to help pivot my project into a viable business - or start a new one. Details below. About Me 36yo, born in Berlin and moved to San Francisco 8 years ago Master's in Software Engineering with 15 years of experience Worked with early-stage startups in Berlin and a venture studio in SF Spent the past years leading a team of 12 shipping enterprise software The tech I've built An AI engine that makes it easy for developers to automate their workflows. It works with code, issues, PRs and integrates with 3rd party systems like error trackers, wikis, ticketing systems, etc. It takes natural language instructions, fulfills them autonomously and responds with a result. The functionality is served as a platform, with an API and an SDK. On top of it, I've built a CLI and a web application with productivity tools for developers. Who and what I'm looking for My main goal is to leave my current job and build a company around a problem that matters to me, ideally with considerable equity. I’m looking for: A cofounder with product and marketing expertise who sees potential in my tech and can help turn it into a successful business—or someone with a strong business case who needs a technical founder. Mentorship from someone experienced in dev tool startups or as a successful solo founder. I’d love to learn from your journey and would be happy to offer my technical expertise or collaborate on projects in return. Happy to answer any questions or provide more details. Cheers!

#reddit#fell#into
I fell into the builder's trap and need help getting out
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
stellarcitizen•This week

I fell into the builder's trap and need help getting out

Hi r/startups, First-time technical founder here. Two years ago, I decided to leave the 9-5 grind and build something meaningful. Now, I have (what I believe is) a brilliant technical solution but no clear business case. I’m seeking a cofounder with product and marketing expertise to help pivot my project into a viable business - or start a new one. Details below. About Me 36yo, born in Berlin and moved to San Francisco 8 years ago Master's in Software Engineering with 15 years of experience Worked with early-stage startups in Berlin and a venture studio in SF Spent the past years leading a team of 12 shipping enterprise software The tech I've built An AI engine that makes it easy for developers to automate their workflows. It works with code, issues, PRs and integrates with 3rd party systems like error trackers, wikis, ticketing systems, etc. It takes natural language instructions, fulfills them autonomously and responds with a result. The functionality is served as a platform, with an API and an SDK. On top of it, I've built a CLI and a web application with productivity tools for developers. Who and what I'm looking for My main goal is to leave my current job and build a company around a problem that matters to me, ideally with considerable equity. I’m looking for: A cofounder with product and marketing expertise who sees potential in my tech and can help turn it into a successful business—or someone with a strong business case who needs a technical founder. Mentorship from someone experienced in dev tool startups or as a successful solo founder. I’d love to learn from your journey and would be happy to offer my technical expertise or collaborate on projects in return. Happy to answer any questions or provide more details. Cheers!

#reddit#fell#into
What I Learned from a Failed Startup: Seeking Advice on Engineering, Co-Founder Agreements & Execution (i will not promote)
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
GummyBear8659•This week

What I Learned from a Failed Startup: Seeking Advice on Engineering, Co-Founder Agreements & Execution (i will not promote)

Hey everyone! Long-time lurker, first-time founder here. I’m reaching out to get feedback on a recent startup experience—what went wrong, what I could have done better, and how I should approach future opportunities. The Background There were three founders in this venture: • Founder A (CEO, 50%) – The product/growth guy who identified the problem space. • Founder B (Me, CTO, 37.5%) – A software engineer with a software dev shop and multiple clients. I wanted to diversify into building my own products but am not inherently a “product person.” • Founder C (COO, 12.5%) – Brought into the mix by Founder A, with the goal of leveraging his network for traction once the product was built. The idea was to create Product X, a solution targeting the SMB space while competitors were moving upmarket. It wasn’t revolutionary—more of a strategic market play. The Initial Plan & My Role • Founder A would define and prioritize product specs, guiding what needed to be built. • I (Founder B) didn’t have time to code myself, so I allocated engineers from my dev shop (which I personally paid for). My stake was adjusted from 32.5% to 37.5% to reflect this contribution. • Founder C was more of an observer early on, planning to help with traction once we had a product ready. We agreed on a 1-year cliff and a 4-year vesting schedule for equity. Where Things Started to Go Wrong • Lack of a Clear Product Roadmap – Founder A was very focused on getting something built fast, but we never signed off on a structured roadmap or milestones. I underestimated the complexity of what was actually needed for customer conversations. • Engineering Expectations vs. Reality – The team (one part-time lead + two full-time juniors from my dev shop) faced early feedback that development was too slow. In response, I ramped up the lead to full-time and added a part-time PM. But Founder A continued pushing for speed, despite real hurdles (OAuth integrations, etc.). • Shifting MVP Goalposts – Midway, Founder A concluded that an MVP wouldn’t cut it—we needed a more complete product to be competitive. This meant more engineering, more delays, and more of my own money spent on development. The Breaking Point Near the 1-year vesting mark, we had an opportunity: a paying client willing to fund an app. I didn’t have devs on the bench, so I asked Founder A to hold off our project briefly while I hired more engineers to avoid stalling either effort. This was the final straw. Founder A (with Founder C somewhat aligned) decided the arrangement wasn’t working—citing past disagreements and the “slowness” issue. The decision was made to end the partnership. Now, Founder A, as majority holder, is requesting a full handover of the code, Founder C is indifferent, and all engineering costs I covered are essentially lost. Key Takeaways (So Far) Crystal-Clear Agreements Upfront – A formalized product roadmap and timeline should’ve been locked in from day one. Business Needs > Engineering Standards – I wanted to build something solid and scalable, but in an early-stage startup, speed to market is king. This was before AI tools became mainstream, so our approach wasn’t as optimized. Don’t Overextend Without Protection – I personally financed all engineering, but without clear safeguards, that investment became a sunk cost. Expenses Must Be Distributed – I was solely covering engineering salaries, which created an imbalance in financial risk. Future partnerships should ensure costs are shared proportionally, rather than one person shouldering the burden. Where I Need Advice Looking back, I want to improve as an engineer, CEO, and co-founder. • What should I have done differently in structuring this partnership? • How do you balance engineering quality with the startup need for speed? • As a dev shop owner, how can I better navigate equity deals where I’m also bringing in engineering resources? I really appreciate everyone who went through this long post and provide any insights from founders, engineers, or anyone who has been in a similar situation. Thanks for reading! ===================================================================== For readers who might be thinking what set this type of expectation? Because I had a dev shop and I thought my co-founders will be understanding of my business circumstance and I was a bit trigger to build a product with a C-exec team, I gave the impression of "unlimited" engineering which I later realized down the line that it was not feasible for me. Something I learned that I have to be more careful with and set expectations accordingly from the very beginning. And from the feedback of the commenters here, I am much more aware what I should offer and how to set expectations, esp. in the early stages of execution. So thank you all! 🙏🏾 EDIT: I would like to thank everyone who contributed to this thread. You not only helped me but future founders who are considering to get into the startup scene!

#reddit#learned#failed
We received 25k investment offer, need advice [I will not promote]
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
Agreeable_Ad6424•This week

We received 25k investment offer, need advice [I will not promote]

We received a $25k for 2.5% on a convertible note offer from a US based investor. The note matures in 18 months with an interest rate of 5%, but the investor said they can extend it further. It’s an AI SaaS in graphic design. We have been bootstrapping till now, and we feel that this money could help us hire better engineers and marketeers, we want to grow it to a good revenue, but don't see it becoming a billion dollar startup as such. Our initial plans were to build it like an indie-hacker, grow it a decent revenue and sell it to someone who can take better care of it. We built it as a side project with full time jobs. We already have decent traction with 10k+ signups and $600+ in revenue per month with <100 dollars spent on marketing. But our AI model costs are high, 0.2 USD per user that we onboard and provide free credits. But we as founders are more interested in another idea that we have been thinking about and see a bigger potential + founder market fit in. The current product is good, and we can foresee that with better hiring and marketing, we can grow our revenue to about 10-20k a month, like a regular online business. What should we do? We don't want to simply let go of the product because it's not that it doesn't work, it's just that we as founders are better fit for something else. We can't sell it yet as the revenue isn't too high and we haven't even incorporated. Is it okay if we think of growing it to 10-20k+ a month and then intend to sell it to someone who can take better care of it? Should we take the investment in such a case, given this investment is definitely gonna help us grow? Process of incorporation will also help us in selling this business later I think?

#reddit#received#investment
What I Learned from a Failed Startup: Seeking Advice on Engineering, Co-Founder Agreements & Execution (i will not promote)
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
GummyBear8659•This week

What I Learned from a Failed Startup: Seeking Advice on Engineering, Co-Founder Agreements & Execution (i will not promote)

Hey everyone! Long-time lurker, first-time founder here. I’m reaching out to get feedback on a recent startup experience—what went wrong, what I could have done better, and how I should approach future opportunities. The Background There were three founders in this venture: • Founder A (CEO, 50%) – The product/growth guy who identified the problem space. • Founder B (Me, CTO, 37.5%) – A software engineer with a software dev shop and multiple clients. I wanted to diversify into building my own products but am not inherently a “product person.” • Founder C (COO, 12.5%) – Brought into the mix by Founder A, with the goal of leveraging his network for traction once the product was built. The idea was to create Product X, a solution targeting the SMB space while competitors were moving upmarket. It wasn’t revolutionary—more of a strategic market play. The Initial Plan & My Role • Founder A would define and prioritize product specs, guiding what needed to be built. • I (Founder B) didn’t have time to code myself, so I allocated engineers from my dev shop (which I personally paid for). My stake was adjusted from 32.5% to 37.5% to reflect this contribution. • Founder C was more of an observer early on, planning to help with traction once we had a product ready. We agreed on a 1-year cliff and a 4-year vesting schedule for equity. Where Things Started to Go Wrong • Lack of a Clear Product Roadmap – Founder A was very focused on getting something built fast, but we never signed off on a structured roadmap or milestones. I underestimated the complexity of what was actually needed for customer conversations. • Engineering Expectations vs. Reality – The team (one part-time lead + two full-time juniors from my dev shop) faced early feedback that development was too slow. In response, I ramped up the lead to full-time and added a part-time PM. But Founder A continued pushing for speed, despite real hurdles (OAuth integrations, etc.). • Shifting MVP Goalposts – Midway, Founder A concluded that an MVP wouldn’t cut it—we needed a more complete product to be competitive. This meant more engineering, more delays, and more of my own money spent on development. The Breaking Point Near the 1-year vesting mark, we had an opportunity: a paying client willing to fund an app. I didn’t have devs on the bench, so I asked Founder A to hold off our project briefly while I hired more engineers to avoid stalling either effort. This was the final straw. Founder A (with Founder C somewhat aligned) decided the arrangement wasn’t working—citing past disagreements and the “slowness” issue. The decision was made to end the partnership. Now, Founder A, as majority holder, is requesting a full handover of the code, Founder C is indifferent, and all engineering costs I covered are essentially lost. Key Takeaways (So Far) Crystal-Clear Agreements Upfront – A formalized product roadmap and timeline should’ve been locked in from day one. Business Needs > Engineering Standards – I wanted to build something solid and scalable, but in an early-stage startup, speed to market is king. This was before AI tools became mainstream, so our approach wasn’t as optimized. Don’t Overextend Without Protection – I personally financed all engineering, but without clear safeguards, that investment became a sunk cost. Expenses Must Be Distributed – I was solely covering engineering salaries, which created an imbalance in financial risk. Future partnerships should ensure costs are shared proportionally, rather than one person shouldering the burden. Where I Need Advice Looking back, I want to improve as an engineer, CEO, and co-founder. • What should I have done differently in structuring this partnership? • How do you balance engineering quality with the startup need for speed? • As a dev shop owner, how can I better navigate equity deals where I’m also bringing in engineering resources? I really appreciate everyone who went through this long post and provide any insights from founders, engineers, or anyone who has been in a similar situation. Thanks for reading! ===================================================================== For readers who might be thinking what set this type of expectation? Because I had a dev shop and I thought my co-founders will be understanding of my business circumstance and I was a bit trigger to build a product with a C-exec team, I gave the impression of "unlimited" engineering which I later realized down the line that it was not feasible for me. Something I learned that I have to be more careful with and set expectations accordingly from the very beginning. And from the feedback of the commenters here, I am much more aware what I should offer and how to set expectations, esp. in the early stages of execution. So thank you all! 🙏🏾 EDIT: I would like to thank everyone who contributed to this thread. You not only helped me but future founders who are considering to get into the startup scene!

#reddit#learned#failed
I fell into the builder's trap and need help getting out
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
stellarcitizen•This week

I fell into the builder's trap and need help getting out

Hi r/startups, First-time technical founder here. Two years ago, I decided to leave the 9-5 grind and build something meaningful. Now, I have (what I believe is) a brilliant technical solution but no clear business case. I’m seeking a cofounder with product and marketing expertise to help pivot my project into a viable business - or start a new one. Details below. About Me 36yo, born in Berlin and moved to San Francisco 8 years ago Master's in Software Engineering with 15 years of experience Worked with early-stage startups in Berlin and a venture studio in SF Spent the past years leading a team of 12 shipping enterprise software The tech I've built An AI engine that makes it easy for developers to automate their workflows. It works with code, issues, PRs and integrates with 3rd party systems like error trackers, wikis, ticketing systems, etc. It takes natural language instructions, fulfills them autonomously and responds with a result. The functionality is served as a platform, with an API and an SDK. On top of it, I've built a CLI and a web application with productivity tools for developers. Who and what I'm looking for My main goal is to leave my current job and build a company around a problem that matters to me, ideally with considerable equity. I’m looking for: A cofounder with product and marketing expertise who sees potential in my tech and can help turn it into a successful business—or someone with a strong business case who needs a technical founder. Mentorship from someone experienced in dev tool startups or as a successful solo founder. I’d love to learn from your journey and would be happy to offer my technical expertise or collaborate on projects in return. Happy to answer any questions or provide more details. Cheers!

#reddit#fell#into
Should we give up?
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
mind4wave•This week

Should we give up?

I'm currently very demotivated because we're working on our SaaS startup since 1,5 years and we still haven't found active users, let alone a customer. We're building an AI-first tool that automates user research analysis. We've released two MVPs so far and are planning to build a third. People respond well to outreach (5-7% book a demo from those who received a first message) but then they fail to use it. We are talking with users a lot so we are aware of the problems, and we might be able to solve them if we continue building and testing. I find it hard though to solve these problems efficiently, because there are no similar established AI-first products on the market and it feels like we have to create a new UX standard. Some problems might be very hard to be solved, e.g. there are high cost of switching products for many of our potential users. Also, my time is limited, as I recently (5 months ago) became a mother. I can only work 30 hours per week. It's a competitive area we're in and our competitors have gradually developed into the same direction and it's getting harder to position ourselves. Also, GPTs might soon be able to do what we're doing - for free. I feel like AI tools are generally expected by many to be free. The price we're expecting to be able to bill is getting lower and lower and our finance plan is already looking tight. However, there are adjacent audiences which we could target as well, but none of us knows them. Is it normal as a founder to struggle so much at the beginning? I've read that it took established SaaS 2,5 years on average from founding to first revenue. We haven't founded so far so you could say we're not behind \sarcasm\ Shall we keep pushing? My tech co-founder is optimistic and thinks this is where the wheat is separated from the chaff. We're currently supported financially by a government fund so we haven't spent much private money. However, I feel like my career outlook gets worse with each day that I unsuccessfully try to raise this startup.

#reddit#should#give
The Birth of My First (and Hilariously Flawed) Voice Agent: A Tale of No-Code Chaos
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.778
No-Understanding5609•This week

The Birth of My First (and Hilariously Flawed) Voice Agent: A Tale of No-Code Chaos

Okay Reddit, buckle up. I'm about to tell you the saga of how I birthed my very first voice agent, a chaotic and frankly, slightly embarrassing journey involving Retell.ai, Make.com, and Zapier. Looking back, it's equal parts hilarious and traumatizing. The Naive Dream: Back then (it feels like ages ago!), I was convinced I could easily whip up a voice agent that would take restaurant orders over the phone. Elegant, efficient, and completely automated! I envisioned a world where my clients' restaurant never missed a beat, all thanks to my coding prowess... or rather, my no-code prowess. How wrong I was. The Gauntlet Begins: Retell.ai's Murky Depths Retell.ai was the starting point, the "voice" of my operation. Getting the phone number hooked up felt like a small victory, quickly overshadowed by the realization that their documentation was... well, let's just say it wasn't written for complete novices. I spent what felt like an eternity staring at API keys, convinced I'd entered them correctly, only to be greeted by cryptic error messages. The sheer frustration I felt wrestling with that initial setup is something I'll never forget. Make.com: From Pretty Picture to Painful Puzzle Then came Make.com, the orchestra conductor of my workflow. It looked so beautiful, so user-friendly! Drag and drop, visual modules... what could go wrong? Oh, so much could go wrong. Trying to decipher the JSON data stream from Retell was like trying to understand a foreign language I only knew a few words of. Mapping that data to a Google Sheet? A complete and utter disaster. I remember spending hours just trying to get the correct fields to populate, each failed attempt fueling my growing despair. Zapier: Briefly Considered, Quickly Dismissed I flirted with the idea of using Zapier instead, seduced by its simplicity. But its limitations became glaringly obvious when I tried to build the complex, multi-step process I needed. Make.com was the only real option, which meant diving headfirst into a whole new world of modules, triggers, and data transformations. The Infernal Testing Loop: The absolute WORST part of the entire process was the testing. Picture this: Calling the agent, rambling through a mock order, waiting for the workflow to execute, only to discover (yet another) error. Then, tweaking the scenario, pushing "save," and repeating the entire agonizing process. Each test call felt like a mini-marathon, a grueling race against time and my own dwindling patience. The AI's... Quirks: And then there was the AI itself. It was... let's just say it had a personality of its own. Sometimes, it perfectly understood my order. Other times, it decided I wanted to order 500 pizzas with extra anchovies. Debugging the AI's interpretation felt like negotiating with a stubborn toddler. Lessons Hard-Learned (And Forever Etched in My Memory): Start absurdly small: I tried to build a fully functional system right away. A HUGE mistake. If I could go back, I would have focused on just extracting one piece of information (like, say, just the quantity) and gotten that rock solid before adding anything else. JSON is your friend (or should be): Back then, JSON felt like alien code. Now, I have a slightly better grasp on it. Trust me, learn JSON. It will save you so much pain. Test like your sanity depends on it: Because it does. After every. Single. Change. Test the entire flow. It's tedious, but it's the only way to catch errors before they snowball into a catastrophe. Don't suffer in silence: I tried to be a lone wolf, figuring everything out myself. Big mistake. Retell.ai's forums and Make.com's documentation are goldmines. Use them! Embrace the struggle: This is the most important lesson. Building a voice agent, especially your first one, is hard. It's frustrating. It will test your limits. But don't give up. The feeling of finally making it work (even partially) is worth it. The Bot That (Barely) Lived: In the end, I did create a voice agent that could take orders and log them into a spreadsheet. It wasn't pretty. It was buggy. It occasionally ordered things that didn't make any sense. But it was mine. And it was the first step on a long and winding road. Looking back, I laugh (and cringe) at my naivety. But I also appreciate the lessons I learned and the sheer grit it took to bring my little AI Frankenstein to life. Anyone else have a similar "first bot" story? Let's hear them! Misery (and laughter) loves company. #RetellAI #Makecom #Zapier #FirstBot #NoCodeFail #VoiceAgentStruggles #StoryTime

#reddit#birth#first
Exploring AI Tools for Enhancing Push Notification Campaigns
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
nguha_am•This week

Exploring AI Tools for Enhancing Push Notification Campaigns

Hey everyone, I've been diving into ways to improve push notification strategies and came across some AI-driven features that seem promising: AI Text Generation: This tool assists in crafting notification copy, potentially reducing the time spent on content creation. AI-Based Multilingual Support: It offers the capability to send campaigns in various languages, which could be beneficial for reaching a global audience. Has anyone here experimented with AI tools for push notifications or similar marketing efforts? I'd love to hear about your experiences and any recommendations you might have. Looking forward to your insights!

#reddit#exploring#tools
As a Business Owner, what are your technology challenges?
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
timehackerio•This week

As a Business Owner, what are your technology challenges?

Premise: I've spent way too long in IT (as a developer) and worked primarily with technical clients for past 17+ years. I am a bit in a bubble. Lately I've been considering pivoting from freelancing into a different kind of business and need some feedback from SMB community. So I would like to hear from non-technical business owners. If you consider yourself non-technical owner what are some challenges you face with modern day technology (including AI, social media, digital advertising)? For example (some areas non-technical owners have challenges), 👉 digital marketing, social media, content, etc? 👉 Or more in terms of operations, inventory tracking, customer management is manual? 👉 /Or does it feel like you have a lot of manual tasks that should have been automated, but you just don't know how or don't know if possible? 👉 Perhaps you're using frankenstein-system of documents, email attachments, spreadsheets, written notes that lack organization? 👉 Or you're not marketing your business online? Obviously solution would have a price tag, but if it reduces overhead costs or increase ROI, why wouldn't you? Some ideas, but feel free to throw in more. I have not figured out my current offer nor service, just doing my market research. Thank you for feedback 🙏

#reddit#business#owner,
Seeking Feedback on My Business Idea – SaaS + Lead Generation for Small Businesses
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
sarveshpandey89•This week

Seeking Feedback on My Business Idea – SaaS + Lead Generation for Small Businesses

Edit: TL;DR I’m Sarvesh, a digital marketer with 10 years of experience in paid ads. After losing my job last year, I started freelancing and discovered how much small businesses struggle with getting reviews (Google, Yelp, TrustPilot, etc.). My Business Idea – SaaS + Paid Ads Free Plan: Businesses can track & reply to reviews across 40+ platforms in one dashboard. Paid Plan ($99/month): Automates review collection, AI-powered responses, social media posting, and spam detection. Custom Plan: Paid ads to generate leads, offered only to businesses on my paid plan for 3+ months. Goal: SaaS platform attracts users → Some upgrade to paid plan → Best clients get lead-generation help → More leads → More reviews → More organic customers → A profitable business cycle. Need Feedback: Does this idea have potential? How can I get my first beta users? Any features I should add/remove? Would love your thoughts—thanks for reading! 😊 TL: Hi everyone, I’m Sarvesh, and I’m in the process of starting my own business. Since my target audience is small businesses, I’d love to get some input, advice, or critiques from this community. A Little About Me I’ve spent the last 10 years working in paid advertising, helping medium and large businesses generate leads through Facebook and Google Ads. I also have experience running e-commerce campaigns. You can check out my background on LinkedIn: LinkedIn Profile Last year, my second daughter was born, and around the same time, my company shut down all its offices (India & UK), leaving me without a job. I decided to take a break and spend time with my wife and newborn, something I regretted not doing with my first child. By November, I started job hunting again, but in the meantime, I got some freelance work through Reddit, helping small businesses with ads for the first time. For context, in my previous jobs, I managed ad campaigns with daily budgets of £4K–£8K. Working with small businesses was a new challenge, but to my surprise, I was able to generate solid leads for beauty salons, hair salons, and nail salons, helping them grow. What stood out to me was how much impact my work had—unlike my corporate job, where I was just another person in the system, here I felt truly valued. That feeling led me to explore starting my own business. The Problem I Noticed While working with small businesses, I realized that online reviews (Google, Yelp, Trustpilot, etc.) are critical for them, yet many struggle to get them. Customers often don’t leave reviews, and employees are either too shy or don’t prioritize asking for them. This gave me an idea—to build a system that helps businesses get more genuine Google reviews from customers. I developed the system but struggled to find businesses willing to test it, even for free. My target audience is U.S. small businesses, but since I’m based in India, cold emails and Reddit outreach didn’t get much traction. My Business Idea – SaaS + Custom Plans I’m now thinking of pivoting my business model into a SaaS platform with optional paid upgrades. Here’s how it would work: Free Plan (Review Tracking & Management) Businesses can track their reviews across 40+ platforms (Google, Yelp, Facebook, Trustpilot, TripAdvisor, etc.) in one dashboard. They can reply to reviews manually from a single place instead of switching between platforms. This will be completely free forever. Paid Plan ($99/month, Plus SMS/Email Costs) For businesses that struggle to get reviews, they can upgrade to a paid plan that includes: Automated Review Requests – Automatically send review requests via SMS & email. Website Widget – Showcase 4- and 5-star reviews dynamically. Social Media Automation – Automatically post positive reviews on Facebook/Instagram. AI-Powered Responses – AI can reply to reviews automatically. Spam Detection – The system will notify businesses of suspicious reviews (but won’t take direct action). Custom Plan (Lead Generation via Paid Ads) I will personally manage paid ad campaigns to generate leads. Pricing depends on the niche, budget, and contract duration. Money-Back Guarantee – If I don’t deliver results, I refund the month’s fee. Small businesses can’t afford wasted ad spend, and I want to ensure I provide real value. Limited spots per month to maintain quality and avoid burnout. How Everything Ties Together The SaaS platform serves as a lead generation tool for my custom plans: Businesses use the free plan to track their reviews. Some upgrade to the paid plan to automate and improve reviews. A select few, after 3 months on the paid plan, can join my custom plan for paid ads to generate more leads. More leads → More reviews → Better Google Maps ranking → More organic customers → A more profitable business. Would Love Your Feedback! What do you think about this approach? Do you see potential for this business to take off? Any features I should add or remove? Any suggestions on how I can get my first beta users to test the SaaS platform? What about pricing? Do you think $99 is good pricing? I know this is a long post, but I really appreciate anyone taking the time to read and share their thoughts. Thanks in advance!

#reddit#seeking#feedback
Seeking Feedback: Offering Free Customer Support Automation Setup for Small Business Owners
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
yaplao•This week

Seeking Feedback: Offering Free Customer Support Automation Setup for Small Business Owners

Hello Redditors, I run a small online digital business solo and found myself spending a lot of time handling repetitive customer support tasks. To reduce my time spent on these tasks, improve response times, and increase customer satisfaction, I built a small customer support automation tool that connects my Gmail account with OpenAI agents. This tool knows my business well, can reply to questions about my products, and provides common-sense responses. It also integrates with Stripe and my order processing system, allowing it to fetch order details and process refunds automatically. Impressively, my setup has automated 95% of customer inquiries, providing immediate resolutions and consistently impressing my customers. I'm now considering turning this automation into a SaaS product, but first, I want to understand if there is a demand for it and identify the most common needs of small business owners. To gather insights, I would like to offer a free service to set up this customer support automation for a few small business owners. If you're interested, please post a comment or send me a DM with a summary of your business, your existing customer support system, and your customer support volume. Your feedback and experience will be invaluable in shaping this product. Looking forward to hearing from you!

#reddit#seeking#feedback:
Seeking Feedback: Offering Free Customer Support Automation Setup for Small Business Owners
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
yaplao•This week

Seeking Feedback: Offering Free Customer Support Automation Setup for Small Business Owners

Hello Redditors, I run a small online digital business solo and found myself spending a lot of time handling repetitive customer support tasks. To reduce my time spent on these tasks, improve response times, and increase customer satisfaction, I built a small customer support automation tool that connects my Gmail account with OpenAI agents. This tool knows my business well, can reply to questions about my products, and provides common-sense responses. It also integrates with Stripe and my order processing system, allowing it to fetch order details and process refunds automatically. Impressively, my setup has automated 95% of customer inquiries, providing immediate resolutions and consistently impressing my customers. I'm now considering turning this automation into a SaaS product, but first, I want to understand if there is a demand for it and identify the most common needs of small business owners. To gather insights, I would like to offer a free service to set up this customer support automation for a few small business owners. If you're interested, please post a comment or send me a DM with a summary of your business, your existing customer support system, and your customer support volume. Your feedback and experience will be invaluable in shaping this product. Looking forward to hearing from you!

#reddit#seeking#feedback:
Would You Pay for a Simple Course on How Small Businesses Can Integrate AI Without the Noise?
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
heavyriro•This week

Would You Pay for a Simple Course on How Small Businesses Can Integrate AI Without the Noise?

Helli, I’m Dan, and I’ve spent a lot of time exploring and working with various business tools. Over the years, I’ve self-taught myself how to navigate the overwhelming amount of information out there about AI and its potential for small businesses. One thing I’ve noticed is that many small business owners are struggling to cut through the noise and figure out how AI can actually help their businesses—without needing a tech background or spending a fortune. So, I’m working on a simple, actionable course designed specifically for small businesses. It would cover: Filtering through the hype and picking the right AI tools Practical applications like automating social media, customer service, or invoicing Using data to make better decisions Balancing automation with the human touch The idea is to make it straightforward and practical, showing real tools in action that you can implement right away. Would you find value in a course like this? If so, what would you want to learn, and what price point feels reasonable for such content? Thanks for your input—I’d love to make something that’s genuinely helpful for the community!

#reddit#would#simple
Would You Pay for a Simple Course on How Small Businesses Can Integrate AI Without the Noise?
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
heavyriro•This week

Would You Pay for a Simple Course on How Small Businesses Can Integrate AI Without the Noise?

Helli, I’m Dan, and I’ve spent a lot of time exploring and working with various business tools. Over the years, I’ve self-taught myself how to navigate the overwhelming amount of information out there about AI and its potential for small businesses. One thing I’ve noticed is that many small business owners are struggling to cut through the noise and figure out how AI can actually help their businesses—without needing a tech background or spending a fortune. So, I’m working on a simple, actionable course designed specifically for small businesses. It would cover: Filtering through the hype and picking the right AI tools Practical applications like automating social media, customer service, or invoicing Using data to make better decisions Balancing automation with the human touch The idea is to make it straightforward and practical, showing real tools in action that you can implement right away. Would you find value in a course like this? If so, what would you want to learn, and what price point feels reasonable for such content? Thanks for your input—I’d love to make something that’s genuinely helpful for the community!

#reddit#would#simple
What I learn from my $200 MRR App I built 4 months ago?
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.857
ricky0603•This week

What I learn from my $200 MRR App I built 4 months ago?

4 month ago, I am just a 10-years experienced product manager without any software development experience. I have an $3K/month job, but I am so tired, I don’t like my life, don’t like my boss, don’t like my daily work, that make me feeling I already died however I am still living. I yearn for freedom and want to live each day the way I want to. So I quit my job, and become a Indie developer to build my own business, my own app, even my own life. I am so grateful for this time and experience, now my app reach $200 MRR, still very little compared to my previous salary, but I never regret. I have learned lots of things from this time and experience, more than I had in last 10 years. Here is the time-line of my App: \- Sep 2023: Launch first version to iOS App store \- Oct 2023: Release in-app-purchase features and have first subscriber, the revenue in October is $154 \- Nov 2023: Change from subscription to pay per use, and I did lots of marketing jobs in November, however, the revenue reduced to only $40. \- Dec 2023: Change back to subscription, and stop some invalid marketing jobs, only keep the ones that actually work. I almost did nothing in December, and the revenue come to $243. During this process, I have learned lots of things, there are some of them that I think could help you as well. Web or App My App is an iOS app that only can running on Apple’s device such like iPhone/iPad or Mac with Apple silicon. Many people ask me why my product is an iOS app not a website, because they don’t have any Apple device. It's true that promoting an app is much harder than promoting a website. However I am now very glad I made an App and not a website! If I make a website, I don't think it's possible to make $100 in the first month. My App is about keyword research, to help people find some ideas from search keyword, because every keyword people searched in Google are representing a real need of them, also can be used in SEO field. However there are a lot of website tools about keyword research, some of them are famous like Ahrefs, SEMrush… I have no intention of competing with them. Actually I don’t have any chance. While in app store, there are little apps about keyword research, each of them have terrible data and user experience, that means if my app has better data and experience that could be my chance. In fact, the App store brings me 20 organic installs a day that Google would never have been able to bring me if I had a website, at least for the first few months. Furthermore, Apple nearly did everything for developer, I don’t need to care about user login, payment and so on, Apple did everything, I just need to call their API, that save lots of time, if I build a website, I need to implement login and payment by myself, that would add some extra work. Not to mention I'd need to buy servers and domains, that would cost me a lot of money. Although Apple will take 30% of the revenue, I can live with that in the early stages because the most important thing for me is to get the product to market as soon as possible. Actually thought Apple’s SMB program, the take rate is 15% now. So Web or App is not important in the early stage, time is important, if people need my product, it's easy to make a website one. More Users or More Valuable Users In November, I notice some users would like use my app, and they were meet paywall, but they never subscribe. I provided 7 day free trail, but it seem that they don’t like it. So I decide to change subscription to pay per use. Because as a user, I don’t like subscription as well, pay per use seem like more friendly. So I change from subscription to pay per use. People can afford $9.99 to subscribe monthly for unlimited use or pay $1.99 for each data they want(First purchase is $0.99 then $1.99). I was expecting more user to pay, but it was the complete opposite! Some users who would have paid a higher subscription fee are switching to a lower priced single payment. Users are encountering paywalls more often, and each time they need to make a decision about whether or not to pay, which increases the probability that they will abandon payment. This resulted in a 75% decrease in revenue in November. In fact, the mostly of my revenue comes from a handful of long-cycle subscribers, such as annual subscription. \\Few bring in most of the revenue,\\ that is the most important thing I learned. You don't need a lot of customers, you just need more valuable ones. That's why it's only right to design a mechanism to filter out high-value customers and focus on them, all the things you want do is just let more people into the filter, and from that point of view, subscription with free trial period is the best way, even if most people don't like it. The rule of 20/80 will always be there. The most important thing is always focus on the 20 percent things and people. Effort does not always guarantee rewards. Unless one engages in deep thinking, or most efforts are invalid. I have been working very hard to promote my product for a period of time. It’s about in November. I did a lot of job, such as write script to send message to my potential clients on Fiverr, post and write comments on others post on Reddit, find related questions and answer them on Quora, post and comments on Twitte, etc. During that period, I was exhausted every day, but the outcome did not meet my expectations. There is only little growth on App installation, even less revenue than before. That make me frustrated. I finally realized that If I need to put in a tremendous amount of effort just to make a little progress, there is must something wrong. So I stop 80% of promote work I have ever did, only keep app store search ad, which will bring a installation with less than $0.5 cost. Then I dive into long time and deeply thinking, I spent more time on reading books, investigate other product with great MRR, watch interviews with people who are already living the kind of life I aspire to live, for example, u/levelsio. These things have given me great inspiration, and my life has become easier. It seems that the life I anticipated when I resigned is getting closer. I also have a clearer understanding of my app. Meanwhile, MRR has been growing. This experience let me learn that effort does not always guarantee results. Many times, our efforts are just wishful thinking, they are invalid, do the right thing after deeply thinking is more important. What Next? My goal is reach $3K MRR, as same as my job payment, I will never stop to building things, and I will keep my currently lifestyle. I still don't know how to get more people to use my app, but levelsio's interviews give me some inspiration that I can verified something by manually instead of build a software. I plan to launch a trend analysis product based on the keyword data provided by my current app. I have always wanted to combine AI to build such a product, but I didn't know how to do it. Now I intend to manually complete it first and start software development once there are paying users. If you are interested to my App, you could try it.

#reddit#learn#$200
As a Business Owner, what are your technology challenges?
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
timehackerio•This week

As a Business Owner, what are your technology challenges?

Premise: I've spent way too long in IT (as a developer) and worked primarily with technical clients for past 17+ years. I am a bit in a bubble. Lately I've been considering pivoting from freelancing into a different kind of business and need some feedback from SMB community. So I would like to hear from non-technical business owners. If you consider yourself non-technical owner what are some challenges you face with modern day technology (including AI, social media, digital advertising)? For example (some areas non-technical owners have challenges), 👉 digital marketing, social media, content, etc? 👉 Or more in terms of operations, inventory tracking, customer management is manual? 👉 /Or does it feel like you have a lot of manual tasks that should have been automated, but you just don't know how or don't know if possible? 👉 Perhaps you're using frankenstein-system of documents, email attachments, spreadsheets, written notes that lack organization? 👉 Or you're not marketing your business online? Obviously solution would have a price tag, but if it reduces overhead costs or increase ROI, why wouldn't you? Some ideas, but feel free to throw in more. I have not figured out my current offer nor service, just doing my market research. Thank you for feedback 🙏

#reddit#business#owner,
Looking for feedback on small business communities
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
adamwfletcher•This week

Looking for feedback on small business communities

Hi folks - I'm working on a new company (I've built and sold two developer tools companies), and instead of building some AI tech I want to build small business communities to help SMB owners. Both my parents ran their own small businesses and I spent my youth working behind a register. I'd love to hear about your experiences interacting with your SMB neighbors, online or off - here's a survey link: https://marketstreet.cc/survey \- and once we get enough results I'll post here with any insights.

#reddit#looking#feedback
[Help Needed] Developing an AI to Play Mini Metro – Struggling with Data Extraction & Strategy method
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
Primary_Cheesecake63•This week

[Help Needed] Developing an AI to Play Mini Metro – Struggling with Data Extraction & Strategy method

Hello everyone ! First of all, please excuse my English if i do mistakes, as it is not my native language and I am not necessarily comfortable with it :) Regarding this project, I will explain my initial intention. I know very little about coding, but I enjoy it and have had some Python lessons, along with a few small personal projects for fun, mostly using YouTube tutorials. Nothing too advanced... However, now I want to take it to the next level. Since I have some familiarity with coding, I’ve wanted to work on artificial intelligence for a while. I have never coded AI myself, but I enjoy downloading existing projects (for chess, checkers, cat-and-mouse games, etc.), testing their limits, and understanding how they work. One of my favorite strategy game genres is management games, especially Mini Metro. Given its relatively simple mechanics, I assumed there would already be AI projects for it. But to my surprise, I could only find mods that add maps ! I admit that I am neither the best nor the most patient researcher, so I haven’t spent hours searching, but the apparent lack of projects for this game struck me. Maybe the community is just small ? I haven't looked deeply into it. So, I got it into my head to create my own AI. After all, everything is on the internet, and perseverance is key ! However, perseverance alone is not enough when you are not particularly experienced, so I am turning to the community to find knowledgeable people who can help me. The First Obstacle: Getting Game Data I quickly realized that the biggest challenge is that Mini Metro does not have an accessible API (at least, not one I could find). This means I cannot easily extract game data. My initial idea was to have an AI analyze the game, think about the best move, and then write out the actions to be performed, instead of coding a bot that directly manipulates the game. But first, I needed a way to retrieve and store game data. Attempt #1: Image Recognition (Failed) Since there was no API, I tried using image recognition to gather game data. Unfortunately, it was a disaster. I used mss for screenshots ,Tesseract for OCR, andNumPy to manipulate images in the HSV color space but it produced unreliable results : It detected many false positives (labeling empty spaces as stations) It failed to consistently detect numbers (scores or resources like trains and lines) Dotted bridge indicators over rivers were misinterpreted as stations While I could detect stations, lines, and moving trains, the data was chaotic and unreliable Attempt #2: Manual Data Entry (Partially Successful but Impractical) Since image recognition was unreliable, I decided to manually update the game data in real-time. I created a script that : Displays an overlay when I press Shift+R. Allows me to manually input stations, lines, and other game elements. Saves the current state when I press Shift+R again, so I can resume playing. Implements a simple resource management system (trains, lines, etc.). This works better than image recognition because I control the input, but I’m running into serious limitations : Some game mechanics are hard to implement manually (adding a station in the middle of a line, extending the correct line when two lines overlap at a station) Keeping track of station demands (the shapes passengers want to travel to) becomes overwhelming as the game progresses Updating the score in real-time is practically impossible manually, and the score is essential for training an AI (for my reward systems) My Dilemma At this point, I am unsure of how to proceed. My questions for the community : Am I going in the right direction? Should I continue improving my manual tracking system or is it a dead end? Should I have persevered with image recognition instead? Is there a better way to extract game data that I haven’t thought of? I would appreciate any guidance or ideas. Thanks in advance ! if you need more info, i have posted my codes here : https://github.com/Dmsday/mini\metro\data\analyzer (for the image detection version I'm not sure that it's the latest version aka the most "functional" version that I could do because I think I deleted it out of boredom...)

#reddit#[help#needed]
I started with 0 AI knowledge on the 2nd of Jan 2024 and blogged and studied it for 365. Here is a summary.
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0
Bobsthejob•This week

I started with 0 AI knowledge on the 2nd of Jan 2024 and blogged and studied it for 365. Here is a summary.

FULL BLOG POST AND MORE INFO IN THE FIRST COMMENT :) Edit in title: 365 days\* (and spelling) Coming from a background in accounting and data analysis, my familiarity with AI was minimal. Prior to this, my understanding was limited to linear regression, R-squared, the power rule in differential calculus, and working experience using Python and SQL for data manipulation. I studied free online lectures, courses, read books. \Time Spent on Theory vs Practice\ At the end it turns out I spent almost the same amount of time on theory and practice. While reviewing my year, I found that after learning something from a course/lecture in one of the next days I immediately applied it - either through exercises, making a Kaggle notebook or by working on a project. \2024 Learning Journey Topic Breakdown\ One thing I learned is that \fundamentals\ matter. I discovered that anyone can make a model, but it's important to make models that add business value. In addition, in order to properly understand the inner-workings of models I wanted to do a proper coverage of stats & probability, and the math behind AI. I also delved into 'traditional' ML (linear models, trees), and also deep learning (NLP, CV, Speech, Graphs) which was great. It's important to note that I didn't start with stats & math, I was guiding myself and I started with traditional and some GenAI but soon after I started to ask a lot of 'why's as to why things work and this led me to study more about stats&math. Soon I also realised \Data is King\ so I delved into data engineering and all the practices and ideas it covers. In addition to Data Eng, I got interested in MLOps. I wanted to know what happens with models after we evaluate them on a test set - well it turns out there is a whole field behind it, and I was immediately hooked. Making a model is not just taking data from Kaggle and doing train/test eval, we need to start with a business case, present a proper case to add business value and then it is a whole lifecycle of development, testing, maintenance and monitoring. \Wordcloud\ After removing some of the generically repeated words, I created this work cloud from the most used works in my 365 blog posts. The top words being:- model and data - not surprising as they go hand in hand- value - as models need to deliver value- feature (engineering) - a crucial step in model development- system - this is mostly because of my interest in data engineering and MLOps I hope you find my summary and blog interesting. https://preview.redd.it/pxohznpy4dae1.png?width=2134&format=png&auto=webp&s=03c16bb3535d75d1f009b44ee5164cc3e6483ac4 https://preview.redd.it/0y47rrpy4dae1.png?width=1040&format=png&auto=webp&s=f1fdf7764c7151ff0a05ae92777c5bb7d52f4359 https://preview.redd.it/e59inppy4dae1.png?width=1566&format=png&auto=webp&s=2566033777a90410277350947617d3ce8406be15

#reddit#started#knowledge
500MRR.com
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0
Disastrous_Expert_22•This week

500MRR.com

500MRR.com A few days ago, while browsing Hacker News, I came across a series of stories titled "Those making $500/month on side projects in 20xx - Show and tell," covering the years from 2017 to 2024. There were quite a few interesting projects, and on a whim, I pulled the data to create a website for visual exploration. The project URLs, income details, project overviews, and summaries from the comments section were extracted and summarized using a large language model. I spent about a day writing a Python script to process data, adjust LLM's prompt., using Nextra to generate a static website, and then deploying it on Vercel. 500MRR.com

#reddit#500mrr.com
How me and my team made 15+ apps and not made a single sale in 2023
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.818
Michaelbetterecycle•This week

How me and my team made 15+ apps and not made a single sale in 2023

Hey, my name is Michael, I am in Auckland NZ. This year was the official beginning of my adult life. I graduated from university and started a full-time job. I’ve also really dug into indiehacking/bootstrapping and started 15 projects (and it will be at least 17 before the year ends). I think I’ve learned a lot but I consciously repeated mistakes. Upto (Nov) Discord Statuses + Your Location + Facebook Poke https://preview.redd.it/4nqt7tp2tf5c1.png?width=572&format=png&auto=webp&s=b0223484bc54b45b5c65e0b1afd0dc52f9c02ad1 This was the end of uni, I often messaged (and got messaged) requests of status and location to (and from my) friends. I thought, what if we make a social app that’s super basic and all it does is show you where your friends are? To differentiate from snap maps and others we wanted something with more privacy where you select the location. However, never finished the codebase or launched it. This is because I slowly started to realize that B2C (especially social networks) are way too hard to make into an actual business and the story with Fistbump would repeat itself. However, this decision not to launch it almost launched a curse on our team. From that point, we permitted ourselves to abandon projects even before launching. Lessons: Don’t do social networks if your goal is 10k MRR ASAP. If you build something to 90% competition ship it or you will think it’s okay to abandon projects Insight Bites (Nov) Youtube Summarizer Extension &#x200B; https://preview.redd.it/h6drqej4tf5c1.jpg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0f211456c390ac06f4fcb54aa51f9d50b0826658 Right after Upto, we started ideating and conveniently the biggest revolution in the recent history of tech was released → GPT. We instantly began ideating. The first problem we chose to use AI for is to summarize YouTube videos. Comical. Nevertheless, I am convinced we have had the best UX because you could right-click on a video to get a slideshow of insights instead of how everyone else did it. We dropped it because there was too much competition and unit economics didn’t work out (and it was a B2C). PodPigeon (Dec) Podcast → Tweet Threads https://preview.redd.it/0ukge245tf5c1.png?width=2498&format=png&auto=webp&s=23303e1cab330578a3d25cd688fa67aa3b97fb60 Then we thought, to make unit economics work we need to make this worthwhile for podcasters. This is when I got into Twitter and started seeing people summarize podcasts. Then I thought, what if we make something that converts a podcast into tweets? This was probably one of the most important projects because it connected me with Jason and Jonaed, both of whom I regularly stay in contact with and are my go-to experts on ideas related to content creation. Jonaed was even willing to buy Podpigeon and was using it on his own time. However, the unit economics still didn’t work out (and we got excited about other things). Furthermore, we got scared of the competition because I found 1 - 2 other people who did similar things poorly. This was probably the biggest mistake we’ve made. Very similar projects made 10k MRR and more, launching later than we did. We didn’t have a coherent product vision, we didn’t understand the customer well enough, and we had a bad outlook on competition and a myriad of other things. Lessons: I already made another post about the importance of outlook on competition. Do not quit just because there are competitors or just because you can’t be 10x better. Indiehackers and Bootstrappers (or even startups) need to differentiate in the market, which can be via product (UX/UI), distribution, or both. Asking Ace Intro.co + Crowdsharing &#x200B; https://preview.redd.it/0hu2tt16tf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3d397568ef2331e78198d64fafc1a701a3e75999 As I got into Twitter, I wanted to chat with some people I saw there. However, they were really expensive. I thought, what if we made some kind of crowdfunding service for other entrepreneurs to get a private lecture from their idols? It seemed to make a lot of sense on paper. It was solving a problem (validated via the fact that Intro.co is a thing and making things cheaper and accessible is a solid ground to stand on), we understood the market (or so we thought), and it could monetize relatively quickly. However, after 1-2 posts on Reddit and Indiehackers, we quickly learned three things. Firstly, no one cares. Secondly, even if they do, they think they can get the same information for free online. Thirdly, the reasons before are bad because for the first point → we barely talked to people, and for the second people → we barely talked to the wrong people. However, at least we didn’t code anything this time and tried to validate via a landing page. Lessons Don’t give up after 1 Redditor says “I don’t need this” Don’t be scared to choose successful people as your audience. Clarito Journaling with AI analyzer https://preview.redd.it/8ria2wq6tf5c1.jpg?width=1108&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=586ec28ae75003d9f71b4af2520b748d53dd2854 Clarito is a classic problem all amateur entrepreneurs have. It’s where you lie to yourself that you have a real problem and therefore is validated but when your team asks you how much you would pay you say I guess you will pay, maybe, like 5 bucks a month…? Turns out, you’d have to pay me to use our own product lol. We sent it off to a few friends and posted on some forums, but never really got anything tangible and decided to move away. Honestly, a lot of it is us in our own heads. We say the market is too saturated, it’ll be hard to monetize, it’s B2C, etc. Lessons: You use the Mom Test on other people. You have to do it yourself as well. However, recognizing that the Mom Test requires a lot of creativity in its investigation because knowing what questions to ask can determine the outcome of the validation. I asked myself “Do I journal” but I didn’t ask myself “How often do I want GPT to chyme in on my reflections”. Which was practically never. That being said I think with the right audience and distribution, this product can work. I just don’t know (let alone care) about the audience that much (and I thought I was one of them)/ Horns & Claw Scrapes financial news texts you whether you should buy/sell the stock (news sentiment analysis) &#x200B; https://preview.redd.it/gvfxdgc7tf5c1.jpg?width=1287&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=63977bbc33fe74147b1f72913cefee4a9ebec9c2 This one we didn’t even bother launching. Probably something internal in the team and also seemed too good to be true (because if this works, doesn’t that just make us ultra-rich fast?). I saw a similar tool making 10k MRR so I guess I was wrong. Lessons: This one was pretty much just us getting into our heads. I declared that without an audience it would be impossible to ship this product and we needed to start a YouTube channel. Lol, and we did. And we couldn’t even film for 1 minute. I made bold statements like “We will commit to this for at least 1 year no matter what”. Learnery Make courses about any subject https://preview.redd.it/1nw6z448tf5c1.jpg?width=1112&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f2c73e8af23b0a6c3747a81e785960d4004feb48 This is probably the most “successful” project we’ve made. It grew from a couple of dozen to a couple of hundred users. It has 11 buy events for $9.99 LTD (we couldn’t be bothered connecting Stripe because we thought no one would buy it anyway). However what got us discouraged from seriously pursuing it more is, that this has very low defensibility, “Why wouldn’t someone just use chatGPT?” and it’s B2C so it’s hard to monetize. I used it myself for a month or so but then stopped. I don’t think it’s the app, I think the act of learning a concept from scratch isn’t something you do constantly in the way Learnery delivers it (ie course). I saw a bunch of similar apps that look like Ass make like 10k MRR. Lessons: Don’t do B2C, or if you do, do it properly Don’t just Mixpanel the buy button, connect your Stripe otherwise, it doesn’t feel real and you won’t get momentum. I doubt anyone (even me) will make this mistake again. I live in my GPT bubble where I make assumptions that everyone uses GPT the same way and as much as I do. In reality, the argument that this has low defensibility against GPT is invalid. Platforms that deliver a differentiated UX from ChatGPT to audiences who are not tightly integrated into the habit of using ChatGPT (which is like - everyone except for SOME tech evangelists). CuriosityFM Make podcasts about any subject https://preview.redd.it/zmosrcp8tf5c1.jpg?width=638&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d04ddffabef9050050b0d87939273cc96a8637dc This was our attempt at making Learnery more unique and more differentiated from chatGPT. We never really launched it. The unit economics didn’t work out and it was actually pretty boring to listen to, I don’t think I even fully listened to one 15-minute episode. I think this wasn’t that bad, it taught us more about ElevenLabs and voice AI. It took us maybe only 2-3 days to build so I think building to learn a new groundbreaking technology is fine. SleepyTale Make children’s bedtime stories https://preview.redd.it/14ue9nm9tf5c1.jpg?width=807&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=267e18ec6f9270e6d1d11564b38136fa524966a1 My 8-year-old sister gave me that idea. She was too scared of making tea and I was curious about how she’d react if she heard a bedtime story about that exact scenario with the moral that I wanted her to absorb (which is that you shouldn’t be scared to try new things ie stop asking me to make your tea and do it yourself, it’s not that hard. You could say I went full Goebbels on her). Zane messaged a bunch of parents on Facebook but no one really cared. We showed this to one Lady at the place we worked from at Uni and she was impressed and wanted to show it to her kids but we already turned off our ElevenLabs subscription. Lessons: However, the truth behind this is beyond just “you need to be able to distribute”. It’s that you have to care about the audience. I don’t particularly want to build products for kids and parents. I am far away from that audience because I am neither a kid anymore nor going to be a parent anytime soon, and my sister still asked me to make her tea so the story didn’t work. I think it’s important to ask yourself whether you care about the audience. The way you answer that even when you are in full bias mode is, do you engage with them? Are you interested in what’s happening in their communities? Are you friends with them? Etc. User Survey Analyzer Big User Survey → GPT → Insights Report Me and my coworker were chatting about AI when he asked me to help him analyze a massive survey for him. I thought that was some pretty decent validation. Someone in an actual company asking for help. Lessons Market research is important but moving fast is also important. Ie building momentum. Also don’t revolve around 1 user. This has been a problem in multiple projects. Finding as many users as possible in the beginning to talk to is key. Otherwise, you are just waiting for 1 person to get back to you. AutoI18N Automated Internationalization of the codebase for webapps This one I might still do. It’s hard to find a solid distribution strategy. However, the idea came from me having to do it at my day job. It seems a solid problem. I’d say it’s validated and has some good players already. The key will be differentiation via the simplicity of UX and distribution (which means a slightly different audience). In the backlog for now because I don’t care about the problem or the audience that much. Documate - Part 1 Converts complex PDFs into Excel https://preview.redd.it/8b45k9katf5c1.jpg?width=1344&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=57324b8720eb22782e28794d2db674b073193995 My mom needed to convert a catalog of furniture into an inventory which took her 3 full days of data entry. I automated it for her and thought this could have a big impact but there was no distribution because there was no ICP. We tried to find the ideal customers by talking to a bunch of different demographics but I flew to Kazakhstan for a holiday and so this kind of fizzled out. I am not writing this blog post linearity, this is my 2nd hour and I am tired and don’t want to finish this later so I don’t even know what lessons I learned. Figmatic Marketplace of high-quality Figma mockups of real apps https://preview.redd.it/h13yv45btf5c1.jpg?width=873&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=aaa2896aeac2f22e9b7d9eed98c28bb8a2d2cdf1 This was a collab between me and my friend Alex. It was the classic Clarito where we both thought we had this problem and would pay to fix it. In reality, this is a vitamin. Neither I, nor I doubt Alex have thought of this as soon as we bought the domain. We posted it on Gumroad, sent it to a bunch of forums, and called it a day. Same issue as almost all the other ones. No distribution strategy. However, apps like Mobin show us that this concept is indeed profitable but it takes time. It needs SEO. It needs a community. None of those things, me and Alex had or was interested in. However shortly after HTML → Figma came out and it’s the best plugin. Maybe that should’ve been the idea. Podcast → Course Turns Podcaster’s episodes into a course This one I got baited by Jason :P I described to him the idea of repurposing his content for a course. He told me this was epic and he would pay. Then after I sent him the demo, he never checked it out. Anyhow during the development, we realized that doesn’t actually work because A podcast doesn’t have the correct format for the course, the most you can extract are concepts and ideas, seldom explanations. Most creators want video-based courses to be hosted on Kajabi or Udemy Another lesson is that when you pitch something to a user, what you articulate is a platform or a process, they imagine an outcome. However, the end result of your platform can be a very different outcome to what they had in mind and there is even a chance that what they want is not possible. You need to understand really well what the outcome looks like before you design the process. This is a classic problem where we thought of the solution before the problem. Yes, the problem exists. Podcasters want to make courses. However, if you really understand what they want, you can see how repurposing a podcast isn’t the best way to get there. However I only really spoke to 1-2 podcasters about this so making conclusions is dangerous for this can just be another asking ace mistake with the Redditor. Documate Part 2 Same concept as before but now I want to run some ads. We’ll see what happens. https://preview.redd.it/xb3npj0ctf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3cd4884a29fd11d870d010a2677b585551c49193 In conclusion https://preview.redd.it/2zrldc9dtf5c1.jpg?width=1840&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2b3105073e752ad41c23f205dbd1ea046c1da7ff It doesn’t actually matter that much whether you choose to do a B2C, or a social network or focus on growing your audience. All of these can make you successful. What’s important is that you choose. If I had to summarize my 2023 in one word it’s indecision. Most of these projects succeeded for other people, nothing was as fundamentally wrong about them as I proclaimed. In reality that itself was an excuse. New ideas seduce, and it is a form of discipline to commit to a single project for a respectful amount of time. https://preview.redd.it/zy9a2vzdtf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=901c621227bba0feb4efdb39142f66ab2ebb86fe Distribution is not just posting on Indiehackers and Reddit. It’s an actual strategy and you should think of it as soon as you think of the idea, even before the Figma designs. I like how Denis Shatalin taught me. You have to build a pipeline. That means a reliable way to get leads, launch campaigns at them, close deals, learn from them, and optimize. Whenever I get an idea now I always try to ask myself “Where can I find 1000s leads in one day?” If there is no good answer, this is not a good project to do now. &#x200B; https://preview.redd.it/2boh3fpetf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1c0d5d7b000716fcbbb00cbad495e8b61e25be66 Talk to users before doing anything. Jumping on designing and coding to make your idea a reality is a satisfying activity in the short term. Especially for me, I like to create for the sake of creation. However, it is so important to understand the market, understand the audience, understand the distribution. There are a lot of things to understand before coding. https://preview.redd.it/lv8tt96ftf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6c8735aa6ad795f216ff9ddfa2341712e8277724 Get out of your own head. The real reason we dropped so many projects is that we got into our own heads. We let the negative thoughts creep in and kill all the optimism. I am really good at coming up with excuses to start a project. However, I am equally as good at coming up with reasons to kill a project. And so you have this yin and yang of starting and stopping. Building momentum and not burning out. I can say with certainty my team ran out of juice this year. We lost momentum so many times we got burnt out towards the end. Realizing that the project itself has momentum is important. User feedback and sales bring momentum. Building also creates momentum but unless it is matched with an equal force of impact, it can stomp the project down. That is why so many of our projects died quickly after we launched. The smarter approach is to do things that have a low investment of momentum (like talking to users) but result in high impact (sales or feedback). Yes, that means the project can get invalidated which makes it more short-lived than if we built it first, but it preserves team life energy. At the end of 2023 here is a single sentence I am making about how I think one becomes a successful indiehacker. One becomes a successful Indiehacker when one starts to solve pain-killer problems in the market they understand, for an audience they care about and consistently engage with for a long enough timeframe. Therefore an unsuccessful Indiehacker in a single sentence is An unsuccessful Indiehacker constantly enters new markets they don’t understand to build solutions for people whose problems they don’t care about, in a timeframe that is shorter than than the time they spent thinking about distribution. However, an important note to be made. Life is not just about indiehacking. It’s about learning and having fun. In the human world, the best journey isn’t the one that gets you the fastest to your goals but the one you enjoy the most. I enjoyed making those silly little projects and although I do not regret them, I will not repeat the same mistakes in 2024. But while it’s still 2023, I have 2 more projects I want to do :) EDIT: For Devs, frontend is always react with vite (ts) and backend is either node with express (ts) or python. For DB either Postgres or mongo (usually Prisma for ORM). For deployment all of it is on AWS (S3, EC2). In terms of libraries/APIs Whisper.cpp is best open source for transcription Obviously the gpt apis Eleven labs for voice related stuff And other random stuff here and there

#reddit#team#made
How I built my SaaS and earned $273 MRR in the first month
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
Ok_Damage_1764•This week

How I built my SaaS and earned $273 MRR in the first month

Hi everyone! I’m Alex Varga, an indie developer. Last year, I focused on accelerating my development speed and launched 10 projects in 12 months. One of them called Bulk Image Generation started growing through SEO, so I decided to focus on it. After one month of SEO efforts, it’s generating $273 MRR. I hope my experience will be useful to others. Concept bulkimagegeneration.com website helps to generate up to 100 images in 15 seconds using AI I was using Google, started with keywords like "Bulk Image ..." a lot of them are Bulk Image Resizer, Downloader etc. But there was no Bulk Image Generator. I thought: yeah, this domain is available, let's buy. So I bought bulkimagegeneration.com and bulkimagegenerator.com So, the app concept is to help people generate images with AI at scale: let\`s say 100 images in 15 seconds. Marketing Gap https://preview.redd.it/4luzib02bbie1.png?width=1905&format=png&auto=webp&s=cbe845107aca46ae5729dfe121fefd5e9cdab9ac Most builders create a product first and figure out how to sell it later. I took a completely different approach with Bulk Image Generator. I identified a market gap and secured a domain name that matched exactly what people were searching for and launched app. https://preview.redd.it/h6vwur34bbie1.png?width=1905&format=png&auto=webp&s=9a163ff6f503be4c175c6e5e82e2003b32df1fe0 Growth Strategy SEO has become the main acquisition channel, so I’ve decided to focus even more on it with this experiment. Almost every day, I publish either a new article or a free micro-app (as a lead magnet) for Bulk Image Generator. I also tried Google Ads, spent $20, and got a $0.35 CPC. https://preview.redd.it/3rhnzvs6bbie1.png?width=1905&format=png&auto=webp&s=f9819d1e82d3e2429d6ccb7b00dcac86a7a351c2 In comparison, the Free Image to Text Prompt Converter (one of the lead magnets) has a $0.011 CPC, which is more than 30 times cheaper than Google Ads. So I decided not to focus now on paid ads. https://preview.redd.it/p333fyl9bbie1.png?width=1905&format=png&auto=webp&s=2e96532d7709b44b7459e7ccf37ef9a0fa784728 After using our free tools, some users explore our main product - a bulk image generation service. Users pay a monthly subscription to get credits, which they can spend on image generation, face swaps, and bulk background removal. Currently, this app generates around $250 in Monthly Recurring Revenue: https://preview.redd.it/9wcm0tjfbbie1.png?width=1905&format=png&auto=webp&s=41bcdd4f7594b09087c51cc5044e4b9c94c129c8 SEO Keyword Research I use Semrush or similar tools to find keywords with a search volume greater than 300 and then write articles targeting those keywords. If the topic has enough potential, I might create a free tool (e.g., a Free Image to Text Prompt Converter) to attract more users. Occasions matter. For instance, I wrote an article about creating images for Super Bowl ads, which led to one paying user who replicated the exact creatives showcased in the article https://preview.redd.it/shpax6mlbbie1.png?width=1905&format=png&auto=webp&s=d491385761df126424c2f9ba14c5da15f8cbb603 AI Tools Aggregators This can be an excellent acquisition channel. When BulkImageGeneration.com was featured in an article on Toolify.ai, I immediately gained three paying users (\~$60). I took 2 more AI Aggregators, and on average I had CPC = $0.2, which is a fair price and usually it has ROAs > 100%. However, some major aggregators are expensive ($300–400 per placement). I want to try it once I reach $500+ MRR. Next Steps bulkimagegeneration.com currently ranks #1 in search results for relevant keywords (e.g., “bulk image generation,” “bulk image generator”). I plan to keep producing content targeting niche keywords and timely occasions. buy more places in AI Aggregators I also want to reach out to YouTubers and ask them to include Bulk in their reviews for free

#reddit#built#saas
Just completed a new type of language learning website - read popular stories scaled to different reading levels
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
creedaaron•This week

Just completed a new type of language learning website - read popular stories scaled to different reading levels

As a language learner and software developer, I bootstrapped my project superlang.com over the past year working on the side. There is a mobile friendly web app now, and iOS/Android apps coming in a few months. A year ago I discovered the concept of "comprehensible input" as a way to help me learn German. Even if it's not a silver bullet, it sounded pretty great. Rather than drilling vocab or looking at grammar charts, I could "just read" and acquire the language. I picked up some fairy tales in German, and stories like Alice in Wonderland. Unfortunately, I couldn't really read them. I had to stop every sentence to look up words and try and decipher sentence constructions. Then I turned to some purpose built simple stories for German beginners. But there was a different problem... these were not really stories with any real plot. I could only read so many "Hans goes to the market" type stories before losing interest. My idea was to try to get the best of both worlds somehow. What if I could take a real story, say Alice in Wonderland (or even War and Peace), and dial the difficulty down to my level without losing the plotline. That way, beginners can start right away with something basically comprehensible. Then, you could also re-read the same story at increasing difficulty levels as you gain confidence. As a cherry on top, more illustrations would help with comprehension so each page could have a picture. Is it revolutionary? Maybe, maybe not. I am building off a well established idea of "graded readers" which are simplified stories meant for learning languages. And there are somewhat similar ideas out there now that AI is good at simplifying text, but none that really take this idea where it needs to be with many preloaded stories, multiple difficulty levels, high quality human verified text, and all the bells and whistles. I spent a year building Superlang and it is ready to put out there. Some quick notes: There are 3 languages so far, intended for native English speakers: German, French, and Spanish There are 3 difficulty levels you can set on each story: beginner (roughly A1-A2), intermediate (roughly A2-B1), and advanced (the same level as the original story, but typically B2+) There is premium version as producing the content was somewhat expensive. You can still do a lot of reading on the free version. I have done no marketing yet, except for this post :) The implementation is a combination of AI, and human proofreading and reviewing. In particular, the simplification of stories is very heavily AI driven. The illustrations for each page are AI as well. For translation, as many of you may be aware new LLM models are typically better than Google translate, but still far from perfect. I am very much a proponent of keeping real people in the loop, and so I have real people proofread the translations. That's why there are only about 700 pages of content so far and not tens of thousands. Let me know what you think, and if you find it helpful! Alice in Wonderland - beginner level German Romeo and Juliet - beginner level Spanish

#reddit#just#completed
Running and selling multiple side projects alongside a 9-5
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
leanpreneur1•This week

Running and selling multiple side projects alongside a 9-5

My current side project started 56 days ago when I started writing 1,000 words per day. My core businesses are an agency and job board, and I just needed a creative outlet. The likes of Chris Guillebeau and Nathan Barry attribute their progression to writing so I thought I’d see if it might do the same for me. At first I was just vomiting words onto the screen, I made a blog and wrote mainly technical guides related to my skills. Over time I realised I was writing more and more about running a business as a solopreneur, or lean operator. There is tons of content out there giving you the Birds Eye of going from 0 to £10m. Inspiring stuff, but I think there is a void in real content, explaining the nuts and bolts of the how.  What is the day-to-day like for the solopreneurs who make a good living and have plenty of free time? That’s what I’m striving for anyway. I’m not talking about the 7-figure outliers. Or the ones teaching you to make content so you can have a business teaching others how to make content, and so on. I’m also sick of the ‘I made $X in 5 minutes and how you can too’  So, I started chatting to people in my network who run lean businesses and/or side hustles. I ask them a bit about their journey and ask them to teach something - how they operate, or a skill/process/system/tool that other people like you/me will find useful. One of my first chats was with Sam Dickie, who runs multiple side projects so thought I’d share here, see if others find it useful and get some feedback. I’ve removed all links as I’ve never posted on Reddit before so conscious of not being promotional, I’m posting this stuff to a tiny email list of friends with no upsells. Just finding my feet on whether others find it useful or not: — Sam is a serial entrepreneur who builds projects in his spare time whilst working a 9-5. He’s scaled and sold multiple ventures and currently runs one of the best newsletters out there for builders and entrepreneurs. Building audience through newsletters has always been a cornerstone strategy for him, so, along with sharing his advice on solopreneurism, he’s also generously shared his lean newsletter writing process. About Sam Sam is a Senior Product Manager who has spent the last 15 years working in the tech sector after starting his career as a town planner. In addition to his job he spends some of his spare time building side projects. These have included a 3D printing startup, a tech directory, a newsletter, a beta product directory, and consultancy. Sam is the epitome of making a success out of following your interest and curiosity. It’s clear he enjoys his business ventures and builds in a risk-free way.   It’s often touted by business gurus to avoid building around your interests, but Sam bucks the trend successfully. I think he’s someone who has already found his 1,000 true fans.  Descending rabbit holes, Sam’s journey of invention and curation 3D printing Sam’s first foray into launching a startup was with Fiilo, a 3D printing business. This was at the height of the 3D printing craze and he self-admits that he used the launch as an excuse to buy a 3D printer. He ended up with two and launching a product called GrowGo. GrowGo is a sustainable 3D-printed product that turns any bottle into somewhere that you can grow plants and herbs. He eventually sold this business and the printers, making around £10k. Along the way, he was exposed to various business tasks, including building a website in Weebly, the biggest nocode website builder of the time, and built an API that enabled print on demand for his product. NoCode.Tech The experiences of building as someone non-technical led to numerous friends asking how he built all of this tech. Back then, nocode wasn’t popular, and it had almost zero search volume, so Sam created a basic directory. A quick landing page on Weebly with a basic value prop, a short explanation and a list of the tools he had used before. It hit the top spot on Product Hunt, and he landed 2,000 subscribers in the first 48 hours. But, he hadn’t built it at this point, so he set about getting to work. He built the directory and list to 30,000 subs and monetised the site through advertising. At its peak with Sam, it was receiving about £2,000 per month in ad revenue. He was still working his 9-5 at this point, so thought it might be a good time to exit. The site was still growing, but it was becoming anxiety inducing whilst he was still working full-time. So, he ended up selling the site and making friend’s with the buyer. Fast forwarding a bit, Nocode.tech was eventually acquired by Stackr, a nocode app. Sam was working for their competitor at the time and ended up being offered a job by his friend who acquired the site. All of this from a side project in his area of passion. Creator Club After selling the directory, Sam lost his outlet for sharing his tools and learnings.  Being fascinated with curation and loving sifting through for nuggets, he invested more time into his personal website and launched Creator Club newsletter. Sam writes monthly and currently has over 8,000 subs. It’s one of the few newsletters that I let bypass my email filters and land in my main inbox. Life as a Part-Time Multipreneur Side Hustler If it’s not obvious already Sam is a curiosity led business creator. He’s found that the products without a revenue focus or intention have ironically outperformed those created for the sole purpose of creating money. He enjoys working on his side hustles. He could have run the Nocode.Tech for 10 more years and wouldn’t have tired of it as it’s a byproduct of his interest. For this reason, he has also created the Beta Directory, simply because he loves unearthing early-stage products. He admits he gets the fear when he thinks about quitting his 9-5, although he suspects if he devoted the same energy to one of his projects it could replace his income (no doubts from me here). This same fear means that he can run his ventures with less fear. This way, he can experiment with freedom and isn’t risking the ranch with a young family to consider. For example, recently he stopped paid sponsors on his newsletter as it was more stress than the value of the income to him. Sam divides his time on evenings and weekends (unequally) between the following: Creator Club Validation Co Beta directory Consultancy The pure side hustle status magnifies the need to run lean, let’s jump into his process…. Sam’s lean newsletter curation and creation process Starting out publishing his personal newsletter Going against his expertise, Sam originally over-engineered his process.  He curated with Feedly and tried to automate the full writing process with Zapier. The trouble is that there are too many points of failure which can lead the whole  chain to break down, and you spend more time fixing the system. For a 200 subscriber newsletter, he needed to pare things back. His set-up now Sam scaled back and now simple builds automations when he needs them. He keeps the process simple, right down to the design and any welcome automations. Keeping things real We touched on the trend that keeping things raw is better. Content has come full circle with the advent of AI. Everything looks too perfect and consequently, people’s tastes are changing. Sam mentioned watermarks that show content isn’t AI written, and we referenced content such as Greg Isenberg’s sketches, and Chris Donnelly’s image posts. \\Step by Step Process:\\ Using Stoop Inbox to manage sources Curation with Pocket Managing content with Airtable and Zapier Using Bearly to summarise Substack for writing Monitoring content sources Sam uses Stoop Inbox, an RSS curation tool, to manage his content sources. It gives him a dedicated email address for newsletters and he follows an Inbox Zero methodology. He checks in daily in Stoop, and on X, Reddit and IndieHackers. With X, he just uses the standard interface but has been careful to curate his feed, sometimes adding in extra notifications to hear from interesting people. Highlighting content When curating links, Sam uses Arc browser and the Pocket extension to save links. It’s super simple and lightweight. He creates tags which trigger an automation that curates the link to Airtable. If you watch the video, here’s a shoutout to Alice, the AI interface I use which has recently featured on Product Hunt. It’s a fantastic tool with bags of potential to enhance a solopreneur’s life. Ranking and sorting content He sends the links indexed using Pocket to a basic Airtable base via Zapier. From there, he grades the content and sets aside some time to read it in more depth. Pocket pulls through the title, metadata, and URL link. Review Sam does this manually but has used a tool as a shortcut for digesting long form content — Bearly.ai. Bearly.ai was created by Trung Phan and linking back to raw content, Trung is 1/3 of the hosts on the Not Investment Advice podcast. Its irreverent style and thumbnail are an example of a successful podcast that doesn’t over polish. Writing it all up Being a huge Notion fan (check out the free templates on his site), Sam originally used Notion for writing and linked it into Revue. When Elon sunsetted Revue, he switched to Substack. He loves the Substack interface so drafts in Substack based on a duplication of last month’s edition. Before publishing, Sam runs through a 10-point Notion checklist, which he shared with me. Parting Advice Keep your tool stack as lean as possible. Avoid tool switching to the shiny new object. Getting launched quickly is key. Don’t think that you have to be everywhere for distribution, Sam sticks with what he knows on X and LinkedIn. Overall, he advises just keeping things simple and therefore minimising risk. Resources He says they’re cliche, but I don’t agree; they’re timeless. Paul Graham of Y Combinator is someone Sam recommends following. He doesn’t write much, which is great as Sam gets anxiety when someone good often writes and he can’t keep up with the writing. His content is well thought out and distills complex concepts in entrepreneurship and startups. In addition, Sam loves Naval Ravikant’s approach. He mentions checking out the Almanac of Naval Ravikant for collected wisdom. Follow Sam’s Journey Again, not going to link here but you can find Sam’s stuff easily enough if you want to. His personal website is beautiful and contains loads of free downloads. He has also curated personal websites he admires if you need some inspiration. Sam is a super nice guy so reach out to him, I did before I started my personal blog recently, and he gave me some great advice. Also, worth keeping an eye on Validation Co, where he aims to help early-stage makers and creators validate their ideas. He’s building super slow — trying to enjoy the process without unachievable deadlines. Maintaining his stamina and passion. Amazing, I hope he writes more about that soon! -- That’s my second shot at an interview, hope you enjoyed it and found something useful in it. I’m talking to a marketplace founder who spends 2–3 hours per month his project, a multiple job board owner with a 9-5 and a leading book designer next. As this is my side project, should I keep going?

#reddit#running#selling
How I Built a $6k/mo Business with Cold Email
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
Afraid-Astronomer130•This week

How I Built a $6k/mo Business with Cold Email

I scaled my SaaS to a $6k/mo business in under 6 months completely using cold email. However, the biggest takeaway for me is not a business that’s potentially worth 6-figure. It’s having a glance at the power of cold emails in the age of AI. It’s a rapidly evolving yet highly-effective channel, but no one talks about how to do it properly. Below is the what I needed 3 years ago, when I was stuck with 40 free users on my first app. An app I spent 2 years building into the void. Entrepreneurship is lonely. Especially when you are just starting out. Launching a startup feel like shouting into the dark. You pour your heart out. You think you have the next big idea, but no one cares. You write tweets, write blogs, build features, add tests. You talk to some lukewarm leads on Twitter. You do your big launch on Product Hunt. You might even get your first few sales. But after that, crickets... Then, you try every distribution channel out there. SEO Influencers Facebook ads Affiliates Newsletters Social media PPC Tiktok Press releases The reality is, none of them are that effective for early-stage startups. Because, let's face it, when you're just getting started, you have no clue what your customers truly desire. Without understanding their needs, you cannot create a product that resonates with them. It's as simple as that. So what’s the best distribution channel when you are doing a cold start? Cold emails. I know what you're thinking, but give me 10 seconds to change your mind: When I first heard about cold emailing I was like: “Hell no! I’m a developer, ain’t no way I’m talking to strangers.” That all changed on Jan 1st 2024, when I actually started sending cold emails to grow. Over the period of 6 months, I got over 1,700 users to sign up for my SaaS and grew it to a $6k/mo rapidly growing business. All from cold emails. Mastering Cold Emails = Your Superpower I might not recommend cold emails 3 years ago, but in 2024, I'd go all in with it. It used to be an expensive marketing channel bootstrapped startups can’t afford. You need to hire many assistants, build a list, research the leads, find emails, manage the mailboxes, email the leads, reply to emails, do meetings. follow up, get rejected... You had to hire at least 5 people just to get the ball rolling. The problem? Managing people sucks, and it doesn’t scale. That all changed with AI. Today, GPT-4 outperforms most human assistants. You can build an army of intelligent agents to help you complete tasks that’d previously be impossible without human input. Things that’d take a team of 10 assistants a week can now be done in 30 minutes with AI, at far superior quality with less headaches. You can throw 5000 names with website url at this pipeline and you’ll automatically have 5000 personalized emails ready to fire in 30 minutes. How amazing is that? Beyond being extremely accessible to developers who are already proficient in AI, cold email's got 3 superpowers that no other distribution channels can offer. Superpower 1/3 : You start a conversation with every single user. Every. Single. User. Let that sink in. This is incredibly powerful in the early stages, as it helps you establish rapport, bounce ideas off one another, offer 1:1 support, understand their needs, build personal relationships, and ultimately convert users into long-term fans of your product. From talking to 1000 users at the early stage, I had 20 users asking me to get on a call every week. If they are ready to buy, I do a sales call. If they are not sure, I do a user research call. At one point I even had to limit the number of calls I took to avoid burnout. The depth of the understanding of my customers’ needs is unparalleled. Using this insight, I refined the product to precisely cater to their requirements. Superpower 2/3 : You choose exactly who you talk to Unlike other distribution channels where you at best pick what someone's searching for, with cold emails, you have 100% control over who you talk to. Their company Job title Seniority level Number of employees Technology stack Growth rate Funding stage Product offerings Competitive landscape Social activity (Marital status - well, technically you can, but maybe not this one…) You can dial in this targeting to match your ICP exactly. The result is super low CAC and ultra high conversion rate. For example, My competitors are paying $10 per click for the keyword "HARO agency". I pay $0.19 per email sent, and $1.92 per signup At around $500 LTV, you can see how the first means a non-viable business. And the second means a cash-generating engine. Superpower 3/3 : Complete stealth mode Unlike other channels where competitors can easily reverse engineer or even abuse your marketing strategies, cold email operates in complete stealth mode. Every aspect is concealed from end to end: Your target audience Lead generation methods Number of leads targeted Email content Sales funnel This secrecy explains why there isn't much discussion about it online. Everyone is too focused on keeping their strategies close and reaping the rewards. That's precisely why I've chosen to share my insights on leveraging cold email to grow a successful SaaS business. More founders need to harness this channel to its fullest potential. In addition, I've more or less reached every user within my Total Addressable Market (TAM). So, if any competitor is reading this, don't bother trying to replicate it. The majority of potential users for this AI product are already onboard. To recap, the three superpowers of cold emails: You start a conversation with every single user → Accelerate to PMF You choose exactly who you talk to → Super-low CAC Complete stealth mode → Doesn’t attract competition By combining the three superpowers I helped my SaaS reach product-marketing-fit quickly and scale it to $6k per month while staying fully bootstrapped. I don't believe this was a coincidence. It's a replicable strategy for any startup. The blueprint is actually straightforward: Engage with a handful of customers Validate the idea Engage with numerous customers Scale to $5k/mo and beyond More early-stage founders should leverage cold emails for validation, and as their first distribution channel. And what would it do for you? Update: lots of DM asking about more specifics so I wrote about it here. https://coldstartblueprint.com/p/ai-agent-email-list-building

#reddit#built#$6k/mo
Most Startup Ideas Die Before They Even Start—Here’s Why (And How I Solved It)
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
AzizBelAbed•This week

Most Startup Ideas Die Before They Even Start—Here’s Why (And How I Solved It)

Hey all 👋 Last year, I had an idea I was excited about. I spent weeks brainstorming, validating it, searching for the perfect name, and struggling to create even a decent landing page. By the time I was ready to launch, I’d already lost momentum. Sound familiar? The reality is, many great ideas never see the light of day—not because they’re bad, but because the process of getting started is overwhelming. You get stuck on validation, spend way too much time searching for a name, and designing a logo or building a landing page becomes a huge roadblock. That got me thinking… What if there was a way to make this 10x easier? That’s why I built StarterPilot—an AI-powered tool designed to help entrepreneurs like us go from idea to launch effortlessly. 1-Validates your idea – Get instant feedback on demand, feasibility, and risks. 2-Generates unique names – AI finds names and checks domain/social media availability. 3-Creates logos – Build a custom logo with just a few clicks. 4-Builds landing pages – Generate a professional landing page in minutes. I built this to eliminate the friction that keeps good ideas from ever becoming real businesses. Would love to hear your thoughts, or if you’ve run into any of these challenges, feel free to share! Also, if you’re curious, check out StarterPilot here: link.

#reddit#most#startup
How me and my team made 15+ apps and not made a single sale in 2023
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.818
Michaelbetterecycle•This week

How me and my team made 15+ apps and not made a single sale in 2023

Hey, my name is Michael, I am in Auckland NZ. This year was the official beginning of my adult life. I graduated from university and started a full-time job. I’ve also really dug into indiehacking/bootstrapping and started 15 projects (and it will be at least 17 before the year ends). I think I’ve learned a lot but I consciously repeated mistakes. Upto (Nov) Discord Statuses + Your Location + Facebook Poke https://preview.redd.it/4nqt7tp2tf5c1.png?width=572&format=png&auto=webp&s=b0223484bc54b45b5c65e0b1afd0dc52f9c02ad1 This was the end of uni, I often messaged (and got messaged) requests of status and location to (and from my) friends. I thought, what if we make a social app that’s super basic and all it does is show you where your friends are? To differentiate from snap maps and others we wanted something with more privacy where you select the location. However, never finished the codebase or launched it. This is because I slowly started to realize that B2C (especially social networks) are way too hard to make into an actual business and the story with Fistbump would repeat itself. However, this decision not to launch it almost launched a curse on our team. From that point, we permitted ourselves to abandon projects even before launching. Lessons: Don’t do social networks if your goal is 10k MRR ASAP. If you build something to 90% competition ship it or you will think it’s okay to abandon projects Insight Bites (Nov) Youtube Summarizer Extension &#x200B; https://preview.redd.it/h6drqej4tf5c1.jpg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0f211456c390ac06f4fcb54aa51f9d50b0826658 Right after Upto, we started ideating and conveniently the biggest revolution in the recent history of tech was released → GPT. We instantly began ideating. The first problem we chose to use AI for is to summarize YouTube videos. Comical. Nevertheless, I am convinced we have had the best UX because you could right-click on a video to get a slideshow of insights instead of how everyone else did it. We dropped it because there was too much competition and unit economics didn’t work out (and it was a B2C). PodPigeon (Dec) Podcast → Tweet Threads https://preview.redd.it/0ukge245tf5c1.png?width=2498&format=png&auto=webp&s=23303e1cab330578a3d25cd688fa67aa3b97fb60 Then we thought, to make unit economics work we need to make this worthwhile for podcasters. This is when I got into Twitter and started seeing people summarize podcasts. Then I thought, what if we make something that converts a podcast into tweets? This was probably one of the most important projects because it connected me with Jason and Jonaed, both of whom I regularly stay in contact with and are my go-to experts on ideas related to content creation. Jonaed was even willing to buy Podpigeon and was using it on his own time. However, the unit economics still didn’t work out (and we got excited about other things). Furthermore, we got scared of the competition because I found 1 - 2 other people who did similar things poorly. This was probably the biggest mistake we’ve made. Very similar projects made 10k MRR and more, launching later than we did. We didn’t have a coherent product vision, we didn’t understand the customer well enough, and we had a bad outlook on competition and a myriad of other things. Lessons: I already made another post about the importance of outlook on competition. Do not quit just because there are competitors or just because you can’t be 10x better. Indiehackers and Bootstrappers (or even startups) need to differentiate in the market, which can be via product (UX/UI), distribution, or both. Asking Ace Intro.co + Crowdsharing &#x200B; https://preview.redd.it/0hu2tt16tf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3d397568ef2331e78198d64fafc1a701a3e75999 As I got into Twitter, I wanted to chat with some people I saw there. However, they were really expensive. I thought, what if we made some kind of crowdfunding service for other entrepreneurs to get a private lecture from their idols? It seemed to make a lot of sense on paper. It was solving a problem (validated via the fact that Intro.co is a thing and making things cheaper and accessible is a solid ground to stand on), we understood the market (or so we thought), and it could monetize relatively quickly. However, after 1-2 posts on Reddit and Indiehackers, we quickly learned three things. Firstly, no one cares. Secondly, even if they do, they think they can get the same information for free online. Thirdly, the reasons before are bad because for the first point → we barely talked to people, and for the second people → we barely talked to the wrong people. However, at least we didn’t code anything this time and tried to validate via a landing page. Lessons Don’t give up after 1 Redditor says “I don’t need this” Don’t be scared to choose successful people as your audience. Clarito Journaling with AI analyzer https://preview.redd.it/8ria2wq6tf5c1.jpg?width=1108&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=586ec28ae75003d9f71b4af2520b748d53dd2854 Clarito is a classic problem all amateur entrepreneurs have. It’s where you lie to yourself that you have a real problem and therefore is validated but when your team asks you how much you would pay you say I guess you will pay, maybe, like 5 bucks a month…? Turns out, you’d have to pay me to use our own product lol. We sent it off to a few friends and posted on some forums, but never really got anything tangible and decided to move away. Honestly, a lot of it is us in our own heads. We say the market is too saturated, it’ll be hard to monetize, it’s B2C, etc. Lessons: You use the Mom Test on other people. You have to do it yourself as well. However, recognizing that the Mom Test requires a lot of creativity in its investigation because knowing what questions to ask can determine the outcome of the validation. I asked myself “Do I journal” but I didn’t ask myself “How often do I want GPT to chyme in on my reflections”. Which was practically never. That being said I think with the right audience and distribution, this product can work. I just don’t know (let alone care) about the audience that much (and I thought I was one of them)/ Horns & Claw Scrapes financial news texts you whether you should buy/sell the stock (news sentiment analysis) &#x200B; https://preview.redd.it/gvfxdgc7tf5c1.jpg?width=1287&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=63977bbc33fe74147b1f72913cefee4a9ebec9c2 This one we didn’t even bother launching. Probably something internal in the team and also seemed too good to be true (because if this works, doesn’t that just make us ultra-rich fast?). I saw a similar tool making 10k MRR so I guess I was wrong. Lessons: This one was pretty much just us getting into our heads. I declared that without an audience it would be impossible to ship this product and we needed to start a YouTube channel. Lol, and we did. And we couldn’t even film for 1 minute. I made bold statements like “We will commit to this for at least 1 year no matter what”. Learnery Make courses about any subject https://preview.redd.it/1nw6z448tf5c1.jpg?width=1112&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f2c73e8af23b0a6c3747a81e785960d4004feb48 This is probably the most “successful” project we’ve made. It grew from a couple of dozen to a couple of hundred users. It has 11 buy events for $9.99 LTD (we couldn’t be bothered connecting Stripe because we thought no one would buy it anyway). However what got us discouraged from seriously pursuing it more is, that this has very low defensibility, “Why wouldn’t someone just use chatGPT?” and it’s B2C so it’s hard to monetize. I used it myself for a month or so but then stopped. I don’t think it’s the app, I think the act of learning a concept from scratch isn’t something you do constantly in the way Learnery delivers it (ie course). I saw a bunch of similar apps that look like Ass make like 10k MRR. Lessons: Don’t do B2C, or if you do, do it properly Don’t just Mixpanel the buy button, connect your Stripe otherwise, it doesn’t feel real and you won’t get momentum. I doubt anyone (even me) will make this mistake again. I live in my GPT bubble where I make assumptions that everyone uses GPT the same way and as much as I do. In reality, the argument that this has low defensibility against GPT is invalid. Platforms that deliver a differentiated UX from ChatGPT to audiences who are not tightly integrated into the habit of using ChatGPT (which is like - everyone except for SOME tech evangelists). CuriosityFM Make podcasts about any subject https://preview.redd.it/zmosrcp8tf5c1.jpg?width=638&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d04ddffabef9050050b0d87939273cc96a8637dc This was our attempt at making Learnery more unique and more differentiated from chatGPT. We never really launched it. The unit economics didn’t work out and it was actually pretty boring to listen to, I don’t think I even fully listened to one 15-minute episode. I think this wasn’t that bad, it taught us more about ElevenLabs and voice AI. It took us maybe only 2-3 days to build so I think building to learn a new groundbreaking technology is fine. SleepyTale Make children’s bedtime stories https://preview.redd.it/14ue9nm9tf5c1.jpg?width=807&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=267e18ec6f9270e6d1d11564b38136fa524966a1 My 8-year-old sister gave me that idea. She was too scared of making tea and I was curious about how she’d react if she heard a bedtime story about that exact scenario with the moral that I wanted her to absorb (which is that you shouldn’t be scared to try new things ie stop asking me to make your tea and do it yourself, it’s not that hard. You could say I went full Goebbels on her). Zane messaged a bunch of parents on Facebook but no one really cared. We showed this to one Lady at the place we worked from at Uni and she was impressed and wanted to show it to her kids but we already turned off our ElevenLabs subscription. Lessons: However, the truth behind this is beyond just “you need to be able to distribute”. It’s that you have to care about the audience. I don’t particularly want to build products for kids and parents. I am far away from that audience because I am neither a kid anymore nor going to be a parent anytime soon, and my sister still asked me to make her tea so the story didn’t work. I think it’s important to ask yourself whether you care about the audience. The way you answer that even when you are in full bias mode is, do you engage with them? Are you interested in what’s happening in their communities? Are you friends with them? Etc. User Survey Analyzer Big User Survey → GPT → Insights Report Me and my coworker were chatting about AI when he asked me to help him analyze a massive survey for him. I thought that was some pretty decent validation. Someone in an actual company asking for help. Lessons Market research is important but moving fast is also important. Ie building momentum. Also don’t revolve around 1 user. This has been a problem in multiple projects. Finding as many users as possible in the beginning to talk to is key. Otherwise, you are just waiting for 1 person to get back to you. AutoI18N Automated Internationalization of the codebase for webapps This one I might still do. It’s hard to find a solid distribution strategy. However, the idea came from me having to do it at my day job. It seems a solid problem. I’d say it’s validated and has some good players already. The key will be differentiation via the simplicity of UX and distribution (which means a slightly different audience). In the backlog for now because I don’t care about the problem or the audience that much. Documate - Part 1 Converts complex PDFs into Excel https://preview.redd.it/8b45k9katf5c1.jpg?width=1344&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=57324b8720eb22782e28794d2db674b073193995 My mom needed to convert a catalog of furniture into an inventory which took her 3 full days of data entry. I automated it for her and thought this could have a big impact but there was no distribution because there was no ICP. We tried to find the ideal customers by talking to a bunch of different demographics but I flew to Kazakhstan for a holiday and so this kind of fizzled out. I am not writing this blog post linearity, this is my 2nd hour and I am tired and don’t want to finish this later so I don’t even know what lessons I learned. Figmatic Marketplace of high-quality Figma mockups of real apps https://preview.redd.it/h13yv45btf5c1.jpg?width=873&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=aaa2896aeac2f22e9b7d9eed98c28bb8a2d2cdf1 This was a collab between me and my friend Alex. It was the classic Clarito where we both thought we had this problem and would pay to fix it. In reality, this is a vitamin. Neither I, nor I doubt Alex have thought of this as soon as we bought the domain. We posted it on Gumroad, sent it to a bunch of forums, and called it a day. Same issue as almost all the other ones. No distribution strategy. However, apps like Mobin show us that this concept is indeed profitable but it takes time. It needs SEO. It needs a community. None of those things, me and Alex had or was interested in. However shortly after HTML → Figma came out and it’s the best plugin. Maybe that should’ve been the idea. Podcast → Course Turns Podcaster’s episodes into a course This one I got baited by Jason :P I described to him the idea of repurposing his content for a course. He told me this was epic and he would pay. Then after I sent him the demo, he never checked it out. Anyhow during the development, we realized that doesn’t actually work because A podcast doesn’t have the correct format for the course, the most you can extract are concepts and ideas, seldom explanations. Most creators want video-based courses to be hosted on Kajabi or Udemy Another lesson is that when you pitch something to a user, what you articulate is a platform or a process, they imagine an outcome. However, the end result of your platform can be a very different outcome to what they had in mind and there is even a chance that what they want is not possible. You need to understand really well what the outcome looks like before you design the process. This is a classic problem where we thought of the solution before the problem. Yes, the problem exists. Podcasters want to make courses. However, if you really understand what they want, you can see how repurposing a podcast isn’t the best way to get there. However I only really spoke to 1-2 podcasters about this so making conclusions is dangerous for this can just be another asking ace mistake with the Redditor. Documate Part 2 Same concept as before but now I want to run some ads. We’ll see what happens. https://preview.redd.it/xb3npj0ctf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3cd4884a29fd11d870d010a2677b585551c49193 In conclusion https://preview.redd.it/2zrldc9dtf5c1.jpg?width=1840&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2b3105073e752ad41c23f205dbd1ea046c1da7ff It doesn’t actually matter that much whether you choose to do a B2C, or a social network or focus on growing your audience. All of these can make you successful. What’s important is that you choose. If I had to summarize my 2023 in one word it’s indecision. Most of these projects succeeded for other people, nothing was as fundamentally wrong about them as I proclaimed. In reality that itself was an excuse. New ideas seduce, and it is a form of discipline to commit to a single project for a respectful amount of time. https://preview.redd.it/zy9a2vzdtf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=901c621227bba0feb4efdb39142f66ab2ebb86fe Distribution is not just posting on Indiehackers and Reddit. It’s an actual strategy and you should think of it as soon as you think of the idea, even before the Figma designs. I like how Denis Shatalin taught me. You have to build a pipeline. That means a reliable way to get leads, launch campaigns at them, close deals, learn from them, and optimize. Whenever I get an idea now I always try to ask myself “Where can I find 1000s leads in one day?” If there is no good answer, this is not a good project to do now. &#x200B; https://preview.redd.it/2boh3fpetf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1c0d5d7b000716fcbbb00cbad495e8b61e25be66 Talk to users before doing anything. Jumping on designing and coding to make your idea a reality is a satisfying activity in the short term. Especially for me, I like to create for the sake of creation. However, it is so important to understand the market, understand the audience, understand the distribution. There are a lot of things to understand before coding. https://preview.redd.it/lv8tt96ftf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6c8735aa6ad795f216ff9ddfa2341712e8277724 Get out of your own head. The real reason we dropped so many projects is that we got into our own heads. We let the negative thoughts creep in and kill all the optimism. I am really good at coming up with excuses to start a project. However, I am equally as good at coming up with reasons to kill a project. And so you have this yin and yang of starting and stopping. Building momentum and not burning out. I can say with certainty my team ran out of juice this year. We lost momentum so many times we got burnt out towards the end. Realizing that the project itself has momentum is important. User feedback and sales bring momentum. Building also creates momentum but unless it is matched with an equal force of impact, it can stomp the project down. That is why so many of our projects died quickly after we launched. The smarter approach is to do things that have a low investment of momentum (like talking to users) but result in high impact (sales or feedback). Yes, that means the project can get invalidated which makes it more short-lived than if we built it first, but it preserves team life energy. At the end of 2023 here is a single sentence I am making about how I think one becomes a successful indiehacker. One becomes a successful Indiehacker when one starts to solve pain-killer problems in the market they understand, for an audience they care about and consistently engage with for a long enough timeframe. Therefore an unsuccessful Indiehacker in a single sentence is An unsuccessful Indiehacker constantly enters new markets they don’t understand to build solutions for people whose problems they don’t care about, in a timeframe that is shorter than than the time they spent thinking about distribution. However, an important note to be made. Life is not just about indiehacking. It’s about learning and having fun. In the human world, the best journey isn’t the one that gets you the fastest to your goals but the one you enjoy the most. I enjoyed making those silly little projects and although I do not regret them, I will not repeat the same mistakes in 2024. But while it’s still 2023, I have 2 more projects I want to do :) EDIT: For Devs, frontend is always react with vite (ts) and backend is either node with express (ts) or python. For DB either Postgres or mongo (usually Prisma for ORM). For deployment all of it is on AWS (S3, EC2). In terms of libraries/APIs Whisper.cpp is best open source for transcription Obviously the gpt apis Eleven labs for voice related stuff And other random stuff here and there

#reddit#team#made
I’ve Compiled the Best AI Side Project Playbooks and Tested Them Myself—Anyone Interested?
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
williezx•This week

I’ve Compiled the Best AI Side Project Playbooks and Tested Them Myself—Anyone Interested?

I’ve spent the past year diving deep into AI-powered side projects, testing out all the best playbooks I could find. Some worked amazingly well, some flopped, and I learned a ton along the way. Now, I’ve compiled everything—only the most effective, step-by-step playbooks that actually work. These cover everything from idea validation to scaling, and I’ve tested them all myself to make sure they’re legit. Some of the things I’ve successfully built with AI: ✅ Automated content businesses ✅ Niche websites that generate passive income ✅ AI-powered digital product businesses ✅ Simple AI tools that people actually pay for ✅ AI-assisted freelancing strategies Would anyone be interested in checking these out? Just trying to see if there’s demand before I share more! Let me know what kind of AI side hustle you’d want to try.

#reddit#i’ve#compiled
Built an AI to stop me from procrastinating on Reddit, it actually spies on my browser tabs & it's kinda freaking me out (but it works)
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score-0.2
sameed_a•This week

Built an AI to stop me from procrastinating on Reddit, it actually spies on my browser tabs & it's kinda freaking me out (but it works)

hey guys, So, I have a problem. A major procrastination problem. You know the type? I start all good, like, "ok, I'm gonna spend the next 2 hrs REALLY researching this specific Reddit thread about optimizing workflow automation for small businesses." (That's literally what I'm supposed to be doing rn, lol) And then... BAM. Suddenly I'm 15 posts deep into r/aww looking at baby sloths, or somehow I've ended up on Wikipedia reading about competitive hot dog eating. It's like my brain has a mind of its own, seriously. I've tried everything. Cold Turkey, Freedom, all those blocker apps. And honestly? They kinda suck. They're so... blunt. Like, "NO REDDIT FOR U!!" But I need Reddit for my actual research! It is my research, ffs. The problem is those apps just see a URL and block it. They don't understand context. They're just digital bouncers, and terrible ones. Total roadblocks, and a complete pain. That's why I got desperate. I even spent, like, 3 solid hrs one night just chatting with an AI cuz I was too embarrassed to admit to my friends how bad I was at staying on track. Pathetic, I know. But that's when it hit me. I needed something that understood what I was supposed to be doing, and then actively, intelligently, stopped me when I got sidetracked. Something that, like, gets that this is what I meant to use, so it blocks other posts or subs. So, I built it. It's a Chrome extension, and it's basically like having a tiny, hyper-observant AI therapist/drill sergeant living in my browser. Here's the freaky part: it actually watches what I'm doing. Like, it learns my specific task. If I tell it I'm researching on Reddit, it lets me use Reddit, but only for that specific research. If I try to sneak off to r/funny or check my notifs, it knows. It's not just blocking URLs; it's analyzing the content of the pages I'm on and comparing it to what I'm supposed to be doing. It even has these lil "achievement" things, which sound cheesy, but seeing "Focused for 90 mins straight!" pop up is weirdly motivating. And it has this brutal feature that shows u, in plain numbers, how much time you've wasted. Ouch. It's been working, which is amazing, and scary at the same time! Like, the scary part is, it feels weird sharing my own edge over procrastination. I mean, if u use my lil tool too! It also kinda gives off that creepy, AI overlord watching my thoughts vibe? Why I'm even posting this: I'm looking for a few (maybe 5?) people who are as desperate as I was. People who've tried every productivity hack, app, and technique, and are still staring at the ceiling at 3 am, filled with regret. If this sounds familiar, DM "DM me". Tell me your worst procrastination story. The winner (loser?) gets a copy. I need honest, brutally honest, feedback. Does this actually work for anyone else, or am I just fooling myself? Edit: shared the extension with some of you, and for others you can give it a spin here i made it live to the chrome store: https://getfocusai.com/

#reddit#built#stop
How me and my team made 15+ apps and not made a single sale in 2023
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.818
Michaelbetterecycle•This week

How me and my team made 15+ apps and not made a single sale in 2023

Hey, my name is Michael, I am in Auckland NZ. This year was the official beginning of my adult life. I graduated from university and started a full-time job. I’ve also really dug into indiehacking/bootstrapping and started 15 projects (and it will be at least 17 before the year ends). I think I’ve learned a lot but I consciously repeated mistakes. Upto (Nov) Discord Statuses + Your Location + Facebook Poke https://preview.redd.it/4nqt7tp2tf5c1.png?width=572&format=png&auto=webp&s=b0223484bc54b45b5c65e0b1afd0dc52f9c02ad1 This was the end of uni, I often messaged (and got messaged) requests of status and location to (and from my) friends. I thought, what if we make a social app that’s super basic and all it does is show you where your friends are? To differentiate from snap maps and others we wanted something with more privacy where you select the location. However, never finished the codebase or launched it. This is because I slowly started to realize that B2C (especially social networks) are way too hard to make into an actual business and the story with Fistbump would repeat itself. However, this decision not to launch it almost launched a curse on our team. From that point, we permitted ourselves to abandon projects even before launching. Lessons: Don’t do social networks if your goal is 10k MRR ASAP. If you build something to 90% competition ship it or you will think it’s okay to abandon projects Insight Bites (Nov) Youtube Summarizer Extension &#x200B; https://preview.redd.it/h6drqej4tf5c1.jpg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0f211456c390ac06f4fcb54aa51f9d50b0826658 Right after Upto, we started ideating and conveniently the biggest revolution in the recent history of tech was released → GPT. We instantly began ideating. The first problem we chose to use AI for is to summarize YouTube videos. Comical. Nevertheless, I am convinced we have had the best UX because you could right-click on a video to get a slideshow of insights instead of how everyone else did it. We dropped it because there was too much competition and unit economics didn’t work out (and it was a B2C). PodPigeon (Dec) Podcast → Tweet Threads https://preview.redd.it/0ukge245tf5c1.png?width=2498&format=png&auto=webp&s=23303e1cab330578a3d25cd688fa67aa3b97fb60 Then we thought, to make unit economics work we need to make this worthwhile for podcasters. This is when I got into Twitter and started seeing people summarize podcasts. Then I thought, what if we make something that converts a podcast into tweets? This was probably one of the most important projects because it connected me with Jason and Jonaed, both of whom I regularly stay in contact with and are my go-to experts on ideas related to content creation. Jonaed was even willing to buy Podpigeon and was using it on his own time. However, the unit economics still didn’t work out (and we got excited about other things). Furthermore, we got scared of the competition because I found 1 - 2 other people who did similar things poorly. This was probably the biggest mistake we’ve made. Very similar projects made 10k MRR and more, launching later than we did. We didn’t have a coherent product vision, we didn’t understand the customer well enough, and we had a bad outlook on competition and a myriad of other things. Lessons: I already made another post about the importance of outlook on competition. Do not quit just because there are competitors or just because you can’t be 10x better. Indiehackers and Bootstrappers (or even startups) need to differentiate in the market, which can be via product (UX/UI), distribution, or both. Asking Ace Intro.co + Crowdsharing &#x200B; https://preview.redd.it/0hu2tt16tf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3d397568ef2331e78198d64fafc1a701a3e75999 As I got into Twitter, I wanted to chat with some people I saw there. However, they were really expensive. I thought, what if we made some kind of crowdfunding service for other entrepreneurs to get a private lecture from their idols? It seemed to make a lot of sense on paper. It was solving a problem (validated via the fact that Intro.co is a thing and making things cheaper and accessible is a solid ground to stand on), we understood the market (or so we thought), and it could monetize relatively quickly. However, after 1-2 posts on Reddit and Indiehackers, we quickly learned three things. Firstly, no one cares. Secondly, even if they do, they think they can get the same information for free online. Thirdly, the reasons before are bad because for the first point → we barely talked to people, and for the second people → we barely talked to the wrong people. However, at least we didn’t code anything this time and tried to validate via a landing page. Lessons Don’t give up after 1 Redditor says “I don’t need this” Don’t be scared to choose successful people as your audience. Clarito Journaling with AI analyzer https://preview.redd.it/8ria2wq6tf5c1.jpg?width=1108&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=586ec28ae75003d9f71b4af2520b748d53dd2854 Clarito is a classic problem all amateur entrepreneurs have. It’s where you lie to yourself that you have a real problem and therefore is validated but when your team asks you how much you would pay you say I guess you will pay, maybe, like 5 bucks a month…? Turns out, you’d have to pay me to use our own product lol. We sent it off to a few friends and posted on some forums, but never really got anything tangible and decided to move away. Honestly, a lot of it is us in our own heads. We say the market is too saturated, it’ll be hard to monetize, it’s B2C, etc. Lessons: You use the Mom Test on other people. You have to do it yourself as well. However, recognizing that the Mom Test requires a lot of creativity in its investigation because knowing what questions to ask can determine the outcome of the validation. I asked myself “Do I journal” but I didn’t ask myself “How often do I want GPT to chyme in on my reflections”. Which was practically never. That being said I think with the right audience and distribution, this product can work. I just don’t know (let alone care) about the audience that much (and I thought I was one of them)/ Horns & Claw Scrapes financial news texts you whether you should buy/sell the stock (news sentiment analysis) &#x200B; https://preview.redd.it/gvfxdgc7tf5c1.jpg?width=1287&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=63977bbc33fe74147b1f72913cefee4a9ebec9c2 This one we didn’t even bother launching. Probably something internal in the team and also seemed too good to be true (because if this works, doesn’t that just make us ultra-rich fast?). I saw a similar tool making 10k MRR so I guess I was wrong. Lessons: This one was pretty much just us getting into our heads. I declared that without an audience it would be impossible to ship this product and we needed to start a YouTube channel. Lol, and we did. And we couldn’t even film for 1 minute. I made bold statements like “We will commit to this for at least 1 year no matter what”. Learnery Make courses about any subject https://preview.redd.it/1nw6z448tf5c1.jpg?width=1112&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f2c73e8af23b0a6c3747a81e785960d4004feb48 This is probably the most “successful” project we’ve made. It grew from a couple of dozen to a couple of hundred users. It has 11 buy events for $9.99 LTD (we couldn’t be bothered connecting Stripe because we thought no one would buy it anyway). However what got us discouraged from seriously pursuing it more is, that this has very low defensibility, “Why wouldn’t someone just use chatGPT?” and it’s B2C so it’s hard to monetize. I used it myself for a month or so but then stopped. I don’t think it’s the app, I think the act of learning a concept from scratch isn’t something you do constantly in the way Learnery delivers it (ie course). I saw a bunch of similar apps that look like Ass make like 10k MRR. Lessons: Don’t do B2C, or if you do, do it properly Don’t just Mixpanel the buy button, connect your Stripe otherwise, it doesn’t feel real and you won’t get momentum. I doubt anyone (even me) will make this mistake again. I live in my GPT bubble where I make assumptions that everyone uses GPT the same way and as much as I do. In reality, the argument that this has low defensibility against GPT is invalid. Platforms that deliver a differentiated UX from ChatGPT to audiences who are not tightly integrated into the habit of using ChatGPT (which is like - everyone except for SOME tech evangelists). CuriosityFM Make podcasts about any subject https://preview.redd.it/zmosrcp8tf5c1.jpg?width=638&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d04ddffabef9050050b0d87939273cc96a8637dc This was our attempt at making Learnery more unique and more differentiated from chatGPT. We never really launched it. The unit economics didn’t work out and it was actually pretty boring to listen to, I don’t think I even fully listened to one 15-minute episode. I think this wasn’t that bad, it taught us more about ElevenLabs and voice AI. It took us maybe only 2-3 days to build so I think building to learn a new groundbreaking technology is fine. SleepyTale Make children’s bedtime stories https://preview.redd.it/14ue9nm9tf5c1.jpg?width=807&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=267e18ec6f9270e6d1d11564b38136fa524966a1 My 8-year-old sister gave me that idea. She was too scared of making tea and I was curious about how she’d react if she heard a bedtime story about that exact scenario with the moral that I wanted her to absorb (which is that you shouldn’t be scared to try new things ie stop asking me to make your tea and do it yourself, it’s not that hard. You could say I went full Goebbels on her). Zane messaged a bunch of parents on Facebook but no one really cared. We showed this to one Lady at the place we worked from at Uni and she was impressed and wanted to show it to her kids but we already turned off our ElevenLabs subscription. Lessons: However, the truth behind this is beyond just “you need to be able to distribute”. It’s that you have to care about the audience. I don’t particularly want to build products for kids and parents. I am far away from that audience because I am neither a kid anymore nor going to be a parent anytime soon, and my sister still asked me to make her tea so the story didn’t work. I think it’s important to ask yourself whether you care about the audience. The way you answer that even when you are in full bias mode is, do you engage with them? Are you interested in what’s happening in their communities? Are you friends with them? Etc. User Survey Analyzer Big User Survey → GPT → Insights Report Me and my coworker were chatting about AI when he asked me to help him analyze a massive survey for him. I thought that was some pretty decent validation. Someone in an actual company asking for help. Lessons Market research is important but moving fast is also important. Ie building momentum. Also don’t revolve around 1 user. This has been a problem in multiple projects. Finding as many users as possible in the beginning to talk to is key. Otherwise, you are just waiting for 1 person to get back to you. AutoI18N Automated Internationalization of the codebase for webapps This one I might still do. It’s hard to find a solid distribution strategy. However, the idea came from me having to do it at my day job. It seems a solid problem. I’d say it’s validated and has some good players already. The key will be differentiation via the simplicity of UX and distribution (which means a slightly different audience). In the backlog for now because I don’t care about the problem or the audience that much. Documate - Part 1 Converts complex PDFs into Excel https://preview.redd.it/8b45k9katf5c1.jpg?width=1344&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=57324b8720eb22782e28794d2db674b073193995 My mom needed to convert a catalog of furniture into an inventory which took her 3 full days of data entry. I automated it for her and thought this could have a big impact but there was no distribution because there was no ICP. We tried to find the ideal customers by talking to a bunch of different demographics but I flew to Kazakhstan for a holiday and so this kind of fizzled out. I am not writing this blog post linearity, this is my 2nd hour and I am tired and don’t want to finish this later so I don’t even know what lessons I learned. Figmatic Marketplace of high-quality Figma mockups of real apps https://preview.redd.it/h13yv45btf5c1.jpg?width=873&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=aaa2896aeac2f22e9b7d9eed98c28bb8a2d2cdf1 This was a collab between me and my friend Alex. It was the classic Clarito where we both thought we had this problem and would pay to fix it. In reality, this is a vitamin. Neither I, nor I doubt Alex have thought of this as soon as we bought the domain. We posted it on Gumroad, sent it to a bunch of forums, and called it a day. Same issue as almost all the other ones. No distribution strategy. However, apps like Mobin show us that this concept is indeed profitable but it takes time. It needs SEO. It needs a community. None of those things, me and Alex had or was interested in. However shortly after HTML → Figma came out and it’s the best plugin. Maybe that should’ve been the idea. Podcast → Course Turns Podcaster’s episodes into a course This one I got baited by Jason :P I described to him the idea of repurposing his content for a course. He told me this was epic and he would pay. Then after I sent him the demo, he never checked it out. Anyhow during the development, we realized that doesn’t actually work because A podcast doesn’t have the correct format for the course, the most you can extract are concepts and ideas, seldom explanations. Most creators want video-based courses to be hosted on Kajabi or Udemy Another lesson is that when you pitch something to a user, what you articulate is a platform or a process, they imagine an outcome. However, the end result of your platform can be a very different outcome to what they had in mind and there is even a chance that what they want is not possible. You need to understand really well what the outcome looks like before you design the process. This is a classic problem where we thought of the solution before the problem. Yes, the problem exists. Podcasters want to make courses. However, if you really understand what they want, you can see how repurposing a podcast isn’t the best way to get there. However I only really spoke to 1-2 podcasters about this so making conclusions is dangerous for this can just be another asking ace mistake with the Redditor. Documate Part 2 Same concept as before but now I want to run some ads. We’ll see what happens. https://preview.redd.it/xb3npj0ctf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3cd4884a29fd11d870d010a2677b585551c49193 In conclusion https://preview.redd.it/2zrldc9dtf5c1.jpg?width=1840&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2b3105073e752ad41c23f205dbd1ea046c1da7ff It doesn’t actually matter that much whether you choose to do a B2C, or a social network or focus on growing your audience. All of these can make you successful. What’s important is that you choose. If I had to summarize my 2023 in one word it’s indecision. Most of these projects succeeded for other people, nothing was as fundamentally wrong about them as I proclaimed. In reality that itself was an excuse. New ideas seduce, and it is a form of discipline to commit to a single project for a respectful amount of time. https://preview.redd.it/zy9a2vzdtf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=901c621227bba0feb4efdb39142f66ab2ebb86fe Distribution is not just posting on Indiehackers and Reddit. It’s an actual strategy and you should think of it as soon as you think of the idea, even before the Figma designs. I like how Denis Shatalin taught me. You have to build a pipeline. That means a reliable way to get leads, launch campaigns at them, close deals, learn from them, and optimize. Whenever I get an idea now I always try to ask myself “Where can I find 1000s leads in one day?” If there is no good answer, this is not a good project to do now. &#x200B; https://preview.redd.it/2boh3fpetf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1c0d5d7b000716fcbbb00cbad495e8b61e25be66 Talk to users before doing anything. Jumping on designing and coding to make your idea a reality is a satisfying activity in the short term. Especially for me, I like to create for the sake of creation. However, it is so important to understand the market, understand the audience, understand the distribution. There are a lot of things to understand before coding. https://preview.redd.it/lv8tt96ftf5c1.jpg?width=1456&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6c8735aa6ad795f216ff9ddfa2341712e8277724 Get out of your own head. The real reason we dropped so many projects is that we got into our own heads. We let the negative thoughts creep in and kill all the optimism. I am really good at coming up with excuses to start a project. However, I am equally as good at coming up with reasons to kill a project. And so you have this yin and yang of starting and stopping. Building momentum and not burning out. I can say with certainty my team ran out of juice this year. We lost momentum so many times we got burnt out towards the end. Realizing that the project itself has momentum is important. User feedback and sales bring momentum. Building also creates momentum but unless it is matched with an equal force of impact, it can stomp the project down. That is why so many of our projects died quickly after we launched. The smarter approach is to do things that have a low investment of momentum (like talking to users) but result in high impact (sales or feedback). Yes, that means the project can get invalidated which makes it more short-lived than if we built it first, but it preserves team life energy. At the end of 2023 here is a single sentence I am making about how I think one becomes a successful indiehacker. One becomes a successful Indiehacker when one starts to solve pain-killer problems in the market they understand, for an audience they care about and consistently engage with for a long enough timeframe. Therefore an unsuccessful Indiehacker in a single sentence is An unsuccessful Indiehacker constantly enters new markets they don’t understand to build solutions for people whose problems they don’t care about, in a timeframe that is shorter than than the time they spent thinking about distribution. However, an important note to be made. Life is not just about indiehacking. It’s about learning and having fun. In the human world, the best journey isn’t the one that gets you the fastest to your goals but the one you enjoy the most. I enjoyed making those silly little projects and although I do not regret them, I will not repeat the same mistakes in 2024. But while it’s still 2023, I have 2 more projects I want to do :) EDIT: For Devs, frontend is always react with vite (ts) and backend is either node with express (ts) or python. For DB either Postgres or mongo (usually Prisma for ORM). For deployment all of it is on AWS (S3, EC2). In terms of libraries/APIs Whisper.cpp is best open source for transcription Obviously the gpt apis Eleven labs for voice related stuff And other random stuff here and there

#reddit#team#made
Acquired our first 10 customer for Trustty Reporter - an AI first Business Intelligence Platform.
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
Longjumping-Buddy501•This week

Acquired our first 10 customer for Trustty Reporter - an AI first Business Intelligence Platform.

Hi All, My co founder and I have built Trustty Reporter (www.trusttyreporter.com).  We spent the last couple of months working on launch our AI powered BI platform and gain our first 10 users. We wanted to reach out the community to get your feedback on the platform and how we can take it to the next level. Below is a brief introduction of the platform: Trustty Reporter – your AI-first business intelligence partner that transforms data into actionable insights in minutes! Imagine turning complex data and documents into easy-to-understand reports with clear recommendations, all at the click of a button. No more BI complexities—Trustty Reporter makes business insights accessible to everyone, from business owners to CXOs. Here’s Why You’ll Love Trustty Reporter: Instant Insight Generation – Convert raw data into insights in just 5-15 minutes. No expertise needed! Easy Reporting Access – Persistent reports that let you track, compare, and build strategies over time. Tailored Solutions for Business Problems – Just describe your challenge, and Trustty Reporter delivers custom insights. Interactive Reports – Dive deeper with a chat interface that offers further clarification and recommendations. By now you would have realized that this aces any traditional BI tools. That aside, it’s better than the likes of ChatGPT and Claude since you don’t have to supply multiple prompts to get context specific insights catering to your business! File Requirements: For Excel files with multiple sheets/tabs: Please save each sheet as a separate file Upload them as individual files for processing File Format: The first row must contain your column headers Remove any empty rows above the headers https://preview.redd.it/olmk6lfmwuzd1.png?width=3024&format=png&auto=webp&s=aa2bbc8edb4a299dbeee67b692cd4acf1704c2be

#reddit#acquired#first
What I learn from my $200 MRR App I built 4 months ago
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.857
ricky0603•This week

What I learn from my $200 MRR App I built 4 months ago

4 month ago, I am just a 10-years experienced product manager without any software development experience. I have an $3K/month job, but I am so tired, I don’t like my life, don’t like my boss, don’t like my daily work, that make me feeling I already died however I am still living. I yearn for freedom and want to live each day the way I want to. So I quit my job, and become a Indie developer to build my own business, my own app, even my own life. I am so grateful for this time and experience, now my app reach $200 MRR, still very little compared to my previous salary, but I never regret. I have learned lots of things from this time and experience, more than I had in last 10 years. Here is the time-line of my App: &#x200B; Sep 2023: Launch first version to iOS App store Oct 2023: Release in-app-purchase features and have first subscriber, the revenue in October is $154 Nov 2023: Change from subscription to pay per use, and I did lots of marketing jobs in November, however, the revenue reduced to only $40. Dec 2023: Change back to subscription, and stop some invalid marketing jobs, only keep the ones that actually work. I almost did nothing in December, and the revenue come to $243. During this process, I have learned lots of things, there are some of them that I think could help you as well. Web or App My App is an iOS app that only can running on Apple’s device such like iPhone/iPad or Mac with Apple silicon. Many people ask me why my product is an iOS app not a website, because they don’t have any Apple device. It's true that promoting an app is much harder than promoting a website. However I am now very glad I made an App and not a website! If I make a website, I don't think it's possible to make $100 in the first month. My App is about keyword research, to help people find some ideas from search keyword, because every keyword people searched in Google are representing a real need of them, also can be used in SEO field. However there are a lot of website tools about keyword research, some of them are famous like Ahrefs, SEMrush… I have no intention of competing with them. Actually I don’t have any chance. While in app store, there are little apps about keyword research, each of them have terrible data and user experience, that means if my app has better data and experience that could be my chance. In fact, the App store brings me 20 organic installs a day that Google would never have been able to bring me if I had a website, at least for the first few months. Furthermore, Apple nearly did everything for developer, I don’t need to care about user login, payment and so on, Apple did everything, I just need to call their API, that save lots of time, if I build a website, I need to implement login and payment by myself, that would add some extra work. Not to mention I'd need to buy servers and domains, that would cost me a lot of money. Although Apple will take 30% of the revenue, I can live with that in the early stages because the most important thing for me is to get the product to market as soon as possible. Actually thought Apple’s SMB program, the take rate is 15% now. So Web or App is not important in the early stage, time is important, if people need my product, it's easy to make a website one. More Users or More Valuable Users In November, I notice some users would like use my app, and they were meet paywall, but they never subscribe. I provided 7 day free trail, but it seem that they don’t like it. So I decide to change subscription to pay per use. Because as a user, I don’t like subscription as well, pay per use seem like more friendly. So I change from subscription to pay per use. People can afford $9.99 to subscribe monthly for unlimited use or pay $1.99 for each data they want(First purchase is $0.99 then $1.99). I was expecting more user to pay, but it was the complete opposite! Some users who would have paid a higher subscription fee are switching to a lower priced single payment. Users are encountering paywalls more often, and each time they need to make a decision about whether or not to pay, which increases the probability that they will abandon payment. This resulted in a 75% decrease in revenue in November. In fact, the mostly of my revenue comes from a handful of long-cycle subscribers, such as annual subscription. Few bring in most of the revenue, that is the most important thing I learned. You don't need a lot of customers, you just need more valuable ones. That's why it's only right to design a mechanism to filter out high-value customers and focus on them, all the things you want do is just let more people into the filter, and from that point of view, subscription with free trial period is the best way, even if most people don't like it. The rule of 20/80 will always be there. The most important thing is always focus on the 20 percent things and people. Effort does not always guarantee rewards. Unless one engages in deep thinking, or most efforts are invalid. I have been working very hard to promote my product for a period of time. It’s about in November. I did a lot of job, such as write script to send message to my potential clients on Fiverr, post and write comments on others post on Reddit, find related questions and answer them on Quora, post and comments on Twitte, etc. During that period, I was exhausted every day, but the outcome did not meet my expectations. There is only little growth on App installation, even less revenue than before. That make me frustrated. I finally realized that If I need to put in a tremendous amount of effort just to make a little progress, there is must something wrong. So I stop 80% of promote work I have ever did, only keep app store search ad, which will bring a installation with less than $0.5 cost. Then I dive into long time and deeply thinking, I spent more time on reading books, investigate other product with great MRR, watch interviews with people who are already living the kind of life I aspire to live, for example, u/levelsio. These things have given me great inspiration, and my life has become easier. It seems that the life I anticipated when I resigned is getting closer. I also have a clearer understanding of my app. Meanwhile, MRR has been growing. This experience let me learn that effort does not always guarantee results. Many times, our efforts are just wishful thinking, they are invalid, do the right thing after deeply thinking is more important. What Next? My goal is reach $3K MRR, as same as my job payment, I will never stop to building things, and I will keep my currently lifestyle. I still don't know how to get more people to use my app, but levelsio's interviews give me some inspiration that I can verified something by manually instead of build a software. I plan to launch a trend analysis product based on the keyword data provided by my current app. I have always wanted to combine AI to build such a product, but I didn't know how to do it. Now I intend to manually complete it first and start software development once there are paying users. If you are interested to my App, you could try it. Gotrends

#reddit#learn#$200
I acquired a SaaS for ~5 figures to solve my content problem
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
Either_Discussion635•This week

I acquired a SaaS for ~5 figures to solve my content problem

In 2023 I bought a SaaS called Cuppa AI. I actually found the product on twitter, run by a very talented engineer in the UK.  I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on content for various media companies. In one consumer health company, it cost us around $200-$500 for each SEO optimized article. This adds up pretty quickly. Not forgetting the 20 hours of edits! This isn’t just an isolated problem for a single company. It’s industry wide and affects small business + agency owners alike. I spent over a decade in media, and have seen many agency founders complain about long lead times and high costs for low output.  This is an issue. Large swathes of would-be customers that prefer to consume content before buying are being ignored - either because it takes too long or costs too much for founders to scale this channel.   I eventually became tired of the media content game in 2022 and looked into using SaaS to solve my previous life’s challenges. I started building, acquiring and scaling a portfolio of products that I found useful in my day to day. But the content issue was still there.  So I started to look for ways to reduce the time + cost content burden for my own portfolio.   I initially discovered Cuppa using it for my own personal pains of content research, editing, publishing, and scaling. But then I saw potential. I wanted to turn it into an end to end solution for the content gap that myself and other business owners weren’t taking advantage of because of time, cost, or other priorities.  I sent a DM. Then a few calls later, I acquired it in June 2023.  I chose cuppa vs other competing products for a few reasons:  The founder gave excellent support during and post acquisition  It already had a large, loyal existing user base I’d personally used it and solved a pain with it. I saw the potential to solve many others for more people like me  The founder has put a ton of quality and care into it. There wasn’t a risk of picking up a patchy product, plus it already had great social distribution  It naturally fits my expertise from the ‘other side’. I was the original customer of it, so I knew I could evolve it with features that could create content at scale without losing the human touch  Since then we’ve added a lot of new stuff: Chat with articles Image generation for articles API keys to reduce cost Brand / persona voice custom prompts  Month on month iterative content improvement  Full stack content team that blends AI and human editors for agencies I’m still in full build mode with the team. I want to take it to a place where agencies and SMB owners can trust the AI + human content model enough to see this product as a no-brainer for their biz. I don’t believe in AI slop - there’s enough of that out there - I DO believe in using AI to do the grunt work, but to always have that human element a machine can’t quite mimic.  We have a lot more to get through, but I’m very excited about it. View of the done for you content workflow

#reddit#acquired#saas
[P] Building an Reinforcement Learning Agent to play The Legend of Zelda
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
DarkAutumn•This week

[P] Building an Reinforcement Learning Agent to play The Legend of Zelda

A year go I started trying to use PPO to play the original Legend of Zelda, and I was able to train a model to beat the first boss after a few months of work. I wanted to share the project just for show and tell. I'd love to hear feedback and suggestions as this is just a hobby project. I don't do this for a living. The code for that lives in the original-design branch of my Triforce repo. I'm currently tinkering with new designs so the main branch is much less stable. Here's a video of the agent beating the first dungeon, which was trained with 5,000,000+ steps. At 38 seconds, you can see it learned that it's invulnerable at the screen edge, and it exploits that to avoid damage from a projectile. At 53 seconds it steps up to avoid damage from an unblockable projectile, even though it takes a -0.06 penalty for moving the wrong way (taking damage would be a larger penalty.) At 55 seconds it walks towards the rock projectile to block it. And so on, lots of little things the model does is easy to miss if you don't know the game inside and out. As a TLDR, here's an early version of my new (single) model. This doesn't make it quite as far, but if you watch closely it's combat is already far better, and is only trained on 320,000 steps (~6% of the steps the first model was trained on). This is pretty far along from my very first model. Original Design I got the original project working using stable-baselines's PPO and default neural network (Shared NatureCNN, I believe). SB was great to get started but ultimately stifling. In the new version of the project I've implemented PPO from scratch with torch with my own simple neural network similar to stable-baseline's default. I'm playing with all kinds of changes and designs now that I have more flexibility and control. Here is my rough original design: Overall Strategy My first pass through this project was basically "imagine playing Zelda with your older sibling telling you where to go and what to do". I give the model an objective vector which points to where I want it to go on the screen (as a bird flies, the agent still had to learn path finding to avoid damage and navigate around the map). This includes either point at the nearest enemy I want it to kill or a NSEW vector if it's supposed to move to the next room. Due a few limitations with stable-baselines (especially around action masking), I ended up training unique models for traversing the overworld vs the dungeon (since they have entirely different tilesets). I also trained a different model for when we have sword beams vs not. In the video above you can see what model is being used onscreen. In my current project I've removed this objective vector as it felt too much like cheating. Instead I give it a one-hot encoded objective (move north to the next room, pickup items, kill enemies, etc). So far it's working quite well without that crutch. The new project also does a much better job of combat even without multiple models to handle beams vs not. Observation/Action Space Image - The standard neural network had a really tough time being fed the entire screen. No amount of training seemed to help. I solved this by creating a viewport around Link that keeps him centered. This REALLY helped the model learn. I also had absolutely zero success with stacking frames to give Link a way to see enemy/projectile movement. The model simply never trained with stable-baselines when I implemented frame stacking and I never figured out why. I just added it to my current neural network and it seems to be working... Though my early experiments show that giving it 3 frames (skipping two in between, so frames curr, curr-3, curr-6) doesn't really give us that much better performance. It might if I took away some of the vectors. We'll see. Vectors - Since the model cannot see beyond its little viewport, I gave the model a vector to the closest item, enemy, and projectile onscreen. This made it so the model can shoot enemies across the room outside of its viewport. My new model gives it multiple enemies/items/projectiles and I plan to try to use an attention mechanism as part of the network to see if I can just feed it all of that data. Information - It also gets a couple of one-off datapoints like whether it currently has sword beams. The new model also gives it a "source" room (to help better understand dungeons where we have to backtrack), and a one-hot encoded objective. Action Space My original project just has a few actions, 4 for moving in the cardinal directions and 4 for attacking in each direction (I also added bombs but never spent any time training it). I had an idea to use masking to help speed up training. I.E. if link bumps into a wall, don't let him move in that direction again until he moves elsewhere, as the model would often spend an entire memory buffer running headlong straight into a wall before an update...better to do it once and get a huge negative penalty which is essentially the same result but faster. Unfortunately SB made it really annoying architecturally to pass that info down to the policy layer. I could have hacked it together, but eventually I just reimplemented PPO and my own neural network so I could properly mask actions in the new version. For example, when we start training a fresh model, it cannot attack when there aren't enemies on screen and I can disallow it from leaving certain areas. The new model actually understands splitting swinging the sword short range vs firing sword beams as two different actions, though I haven't yet had a chance to fully train with the split yet. Frameskip/Cooldowns - In the game I don't use a fixed frame skip for actions. Instead I use the internal ram state of game to know when Link is animation locked or not and only allow the agent to take actions when it's actually possible to give meaningful input to the game. This greatly sped up training. We also force movement to be between tiles on the game map. This means that when the agent decides to move it loses control for longer than a player would...a player can make more split second decisions. This made it easier to implement movement rewards though and might be something to clean up in the future. Other interesting details Pathfinding - To facilitate rewards, the original version of this project used A* to pathfind from link to what he should be doing. Here's a video of it in action. This information wasn't giving to the model directly but instead the agent would only be given the rewards if it exactly followed that path or the transposed version of it. It would also pathfind around enemies and not walk through them. This was a nightmare though. The corner cases were significant, and pushing Link towards enemies but not into them was really tricky. The new verison just uses a wavefront algorithm. I calculate a wave from the tiles we want to get to outwards, then make sure we are following the gradient. Also calculating the A* around enemies every frame (even with caching) was super slow. Wavefront was faster, especially because I give the new model no special rewards for walking around enemies...faster to compute and it has to learn from taking damage or not. Either way, the both the old and new models successfully learned how to pathfind around danger and obstacles, with or without the cheaty objective vector. Rewards - I programmed very dense rewards in both the old and new model. At basically every step, the model is getting rewarded or punished for something. I actually have some ideas I can't wait to try out to make the rewards more sparse. Or maybe we start with dense rewards for the first training, then fine-tune the model with sparser rewards. We'll see. Predicting the Future - Speaking of rewards. One interesting wrinkle is that the agent can do a lot of things that will eventually deal damage but not on that frame. For example, when Link sets a bomb it takes several seconds before it explodes, killing things. This can be a massive reward or penalty since he spent an extremely valuable resource, but may have done massive damage. PPO and other RL propagates rewards backwards, of course, but that spike in reward could land on a weird frame where we took damage or moved in the wrong direction. I probably could have just not solved that problem and let it shake out over time, but instead I used the fact that we are in an emulator to just see what the outcome of every decision is. When planting a bomb, shooting sword beams, etc, we let the game run forward until impact, then rewind time and reward the agent appropriately, continuing on from when we first paused. This greatly speeds up training, even if it's expensive to do this savestate, play forward, restore state. Neural Networks - When I first started this project (knowing very little about ML and RL), I thought most of my time would be tuning the shape of the neural network that we are using. In reality, the default provided by stable-baselines and my eventual reimplemnentation has been enough to make massive progress. Now that I have a solid codebase though, I really want to revisit this. I'd like to see if trying CoordConvs and similar networks might make the viewport unncessary. Less interesting details/thoughts Hyperparameters - Setting the entropy coefficinet way lower helped a TON in training stable models. My new PPO implementation is way less stable than stable-baselines (ha, imagine that), but still converges most of the time. Infinite Rewards - As with all reinforcement learning, if you give some way for the model to get infinite rewards, it will do just that and nothing else. I spent days, or maybe weeks tweaking reward functions to just get it to train and not find a spot on the wall it could hump for infinite rewards. Even just neutral rewards, like +0.5 moving forward and -0.5 for moving backwards, would often result in a model that just stepped left, then right infinitely. There has to be a real reward or punishment (non-neutral) for forward progress. Debugging Rewards - In fact, building a rewards debugger was the only way I made progress in this project. If you are tackling something this big, do that very early. Stable-Retro is pretty great - Couldn't be happier with the clean design for implementing emulation for AI. Torch is Awesome - My early versions heavily used numpy and relied on stable-baselines, with its multiproc parallelization support. It worked great. Moving the project over to torch was night and day though. It gave me so much more flexibility, instant multithreading for matrix operations. I have a pretty beefy computer and I'm almost at the same steps per second as 20 proc stable-retro/numpy. Future Ideas This has already gone on too long. I have some ideas for future projects, but maybe I'll just make them another post when I actually do them. Special Thanks A special thanks to Brad Flaugher for help with the early version of this, Fiskbit from the Zelda1 speedrunning community for help pulling apart the raw assembly to build this thing, and MatPoliquin for maintaining Stable-Retro. Happy to answer any questions, really I just love nerding out about this stuff.

#reddit#building#reinforcement
[R] Analysis of 400+ ML competitions in 2024
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
hcarlens•This week

[R] Analysis of 400+ ML competitions in 2024

I run mlcontests.com, a website that lists ML competitions from across multiple platforms - Kaggle, DrivenData, AIcrowd, Zindi, etc… I’ve just spent a few months looking through all the info I could find on last year’s competitions, as well as winning solutions.  I found over 400 competitions that happened last year, plus info on the #1 winning solution for 70 of those.  Some highlights: Kaggle is still the biggest platform by total prize money, and also has a much bigger user base than the other platforms - though there are well over a dozen other platforms worth keeping track of, with regular interesting competitions and meaningful prize money. An increase in competitions with $1m+ prize pools (ARC Prize, AI Mathematical Olympiad, Vesuvius Challenge, AI Cyber Challenge) compared to previous years. Python continues to be the language of choice among competition winners, with almost everyone using Python as their main language. One winner used Rust, two used R.  Convolutional neural nets continue to do well in computer vision competitions, and are still more common among competition winners than transformer-based vision models.  PyTorch is still used a lot more than TensorFlow, roughly 9:1. Didn’t find any competition winners implementing neural nets in JAX or other libraries.  There were a few competition winners using AutoML packages, which seem to be getting increasingly useful. Any claims of generalist autonomous grandmaster-level agents seem premature though.  In language/text/sequence-related competitions, quantisation was key for making use of limited resources effectively. Usually 4-, 5-, or 8-bit. LoRA/QLoRA was also used quite often, though not always.  Gradient-boosted decision trees continue to win a lot of tabular/time-series competitions. They’re often ensembled with deep learning models. No tabular/time-series pre-trained foundation models were used by winners in 2024, as far as I can tell.  Starting to see more uptake of Polars for dataframes, with 7 winners using Polars in 2024 (up from 3 in 2023) vs 58 using Pandas. All those who used Polars also still used Pandas in some parts of their code.  In terms of hardware, competition winners almost entirely used NVIDIA GPUs to train their models. Some trained on CPU-only, or used a TPU through Colab. No AMD GPUs. The NVIDIA A100 was the most commonly used GPU among winners. Two of the $1m+ prize pool competitions were won by teams using 8xH100 nodes for training. A lot of other GPUs too though: T4/P100 (through Kaggle Notebooks), or consumer GPUs like RTX 3090/4090/3080/3060. Some spent hundreds of dollars on cloud compute to train their solutions.  An emerging pattern: using generative models to create additional synthetic training data to augment the training data provided.  There’s way more detail in the full report, which you can read here (no paywall): https://mlcontests.com/state-of-machine-learning-competitions-2024?ref=mlcr Processing img xmm4ywg9h9le1... The full report also features: A deep dive into the ARC Prize and the AI Mathematical Olympiad An overview of winning solutions to NLP/sequence competitions A breakdown of Python packages used in winning solutions (e.g. relative popularity of various gradient-boosted tree libraries) If you’d like to support this research, I’d really appreciate it if you could share it with anyone else who might find it interesting. You can also check out my newly-launched online magazine, Jolt ML \- featuring news from top ML conferences as well as long-read articles (just one so far, more to come!).  Thanks to the competition winners who shared info on their solutions, and also to the competition platforms who shared high-level data on their competitions.

#reddit#analysis#400+
[D] I don't really trust papers out of "Top Labs" anymore
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.333
MrAcurite•This week

[D] I don't really trust papers out of "Top Labs" anymore

I mean, I trust that the numbers they got are accurate and that they really did the work and got the results. I believe those. It's just that, take the recent "An Evolutionary Approach to Dynamic Introduction of Tasks in Large-scale Multitask Learning Systems" paper. It's 18 pages of talking through this pretty convoluted evolutionary and multitask learning algorithm, it's pretty interesting, solves a bunch of problems. But two notes. One, the big number they cite as the success metric is 99.43 on CIFAR-10, against a SotA of 99.40, so woop-de-fucking-doo in the grand scheme of things. Two, there's a chart towards the end of the paper that details how many TPU core-hours were used for just the training regimens that results in the final results. The sum total is 17,810 core-hours. Let's assume that for someone who doesn't work at Google, you'd have to use on-demand pricing of $3.22/hr. This means that these trained models cost $57,348. Strictly speaking, throwing enough compute at a general enough genetic algorithm will eventually produce arbitrarily good performance, so while you can absolutely read this paper and collect interesting ideas about how to use genetic algorithms to accomplish multitask learning by having each new task leverage learned weights from previous tasks by defining modifications to a subset of components of a pre-existing model, there's a meta-textual level on which this paper is just "Jeff Dean spent enough money to feed a family of four for half a decade to get a 0.03% improvement on CIFAR-10." OpenAI is far and away the worst offender here, but it seems like everyone's doing it. You throw a fuckton of compute and a light ganache of new ideas at an existing problem with existing data and existing benchmarks, and then if your numbers are infinitesimally higher than their numbers, you get to put a lil' sticker on your CV. Why should I trust that your ideas are even any good? I can't check them, I can't apply them to my own projects. Is this really what we're comfortable with as a community? A handful of corporations and the occasional university waving their dicks at everyone because they've got the compute to burn and we don't? There's a level at which I think there should be a new journal, exclusively for papers in which you can replicate their experimental results in under eight hours on a single consumer GPU.

#reddit#don't#really
[D] Why can't you guys comment your fucking code?
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0
didntfinishhighschoo•This week

[D] Why can't you guys comment your fucking code?

Seriously. I spent the last few years doing web app development. Dug into DL a couple months ago. Supposedly, compared to the post-post-post-docs doing AI stuff, JavaScript developers should be inbred peasants. But every project these peasants release, even a fucking library that colorizes CLI output, has a catchy name, extensive docs, shitloads of comments, fuckton of tests, semantic versioning, changelog, and, oh my god, better variable names than ctxh or langhs or fuckyoufortryingto_understand. The concepts and ideas behind DL, GANs, LSTMs, CNNs, whatever – it's clear, it's simple, it's intuitive. The slog is to go through the jargon (that keeps changing beneath your feet - what's the point of using fancy words if you can't keep them consistent?), the unnecessary equations, trying to squeeze meaning from bullshit language used in papers, figuring out the super important steps, preprocessing, hyperparameters optimization that the authors, oops, failed to mention. Sorry for singling out, but look at this - what the fuck? If a developer anywhere else at Facebook would get this code for a review they would throw up. Do you intentionally try to obfuscate your papers? Is pseudo-code a fucking premium? Can you at least try to give some intuition before showering the reader with equations? How the fuck do you dare to release a paper without source code? Why the fuck do you never ever add comments to you code? When naming things, are you charged by the character? Do you get a bonus for acronyms? Do you realize that OpenAI having needed to release a "baseline" TRPO implementation is a fucking disgrace to your profession? Jesus christ, who decided to name a tensor concatenation function cat?

#reddit#can't#guys
[D] The current and future state of AI/ML is shockingly demoralizing with little hope of redemption
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
Flaky_Suit_8665•This week

[D] The current and future state of AI/ML is shockingly demoralizing with little hope of redemption

I recently encountered the PaLM (Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways) paper from Google Research and it opened up a can of worms of ideas I’ve felt I’ve intuitively had for a while, but have been unable to express – and I know I can’t be the only one. Sometimes I wonder what the original pioneers of AI – Turing, Neumann, McCarthy, etc. – would think if they could see the state of AI that we’ve gotten ourselves into. 67 authors, 83 pages, 540B parameters in a model, the internals of which no one can say they comprehend with a straight face, 6144 TPUs in a commercial lab that no one has access to, on a rig that no one can afford, trained on a volume of data that a human couldn’t process in a lifetime, 1 page on ethics with the same ideas that have been rehashed over and over elsewhere with no attempt at a solution – bias, racism, malicious use, etc. – for purposes that who asked for? When I started my career as an AI/ML research engineer 2016, I was most interested in two types of tasks – 1.) those that most humans could do but that would universally be considered tedious and non-scalable. I’m talking image classification, sentiment analysis, even document summarization, etc. 2.) tasks that humans lack the capacity to perform as well as computers for various reasons – forecasting, risk analysis, game playing, and so forth. I still love my career, and I try to only work on projects in these areas, but it’s getting harder and harder. This is because, somewhere along the way, it became popular and unquestionably acceptable to push AI into domains that were originally uniquely human, those areas that sit at the top of Maslows’s hierarchy of needs in terms of self-actualization – art, music, writing, singing, programming, and so forth. These areas of endeavor have negative logarithmic ability curves – the vast majority of people cannot do them well at all, about 10% can do them decently, and 1% or less can do them extraordinarily. The little discussed problem with AI-generation is that, without extreme deterrence, we will sacrifice human achievement at the top percentile in the name of lowering the bar for a larger volume of people, until the AI ability range is the norm. This is because relative to humans, AI is cheap, fast, and infinite, to the extent that investments in human achievement will be watered down at the societal, educational, and individual level with each passing year. And unlike AI gameplay which superseded humans decades ago, we won’t be able to just disqualify the machines and continue to play as if they didn’t exist. Almost everywhere I go, even this forum, I encounter almost universal deference given to current SOTA AI generation systems like GPT-3, CODEX, DALL-E, etc., with almost no one extending their implications to its logical conclusion, which is long-term convergence to the mean, to mediocrity, in the fields they claim to address or even enhance. If you’re an artist or writer and you’re using DALL-E or GPT-3 to “enhance” your work, or if you’re a programmer saying, “GitHub Co-Pilot makes me a better programmer?”, then how could you possibly know? You’ve disrupted and bypassed your own creative process, which is thoughts -> (optionally words) -> actions -> feedback -> repeat, and instead seeded your canvas with ideas from a machine, the provenance of which you can’t understand, nor can the machine reliably explain. And the more you do this, the more you make your creative processes dependent on said machine, until you must question whether or not you could work at the same level without it. When I was a college student, I often dabbled with weed, LSD, and mushrooms, and for a while, I thought the ideas I was having while under the influence were revolutionary and groundbreaking – that is until took it upon myself to actually start writing down those ideas and then reviewing them while sober, when I realized they weren’t that special at all. What I eventually determined is that, under the influence, it was impossible for me to accurately evaluate the drug-induced ideas I was having because the influencing agent the generates the ideas themselves was disrupting the same frame of reference that is responsible evaluating said ideas. This is the same principle of – if you took a pill and it made you stupider, would even know it? I believe that, especially over the long-term timeframe that crosses generations, there’s significant risk that current AI-generation developments produces a similar effect on humanity, and we mostly won’t even realize it has happened, much like a frog in boiling water. If you have children like I do, how can you be aware of the the current SOTA in these areas, project that 20 to 30 years, and then and tell them with a straight face that it is worth them pursuing their talent in art, writing, or music? How can you be honest and still say that widespread implementation of auto-correction hasn’t made you and others worse and worse at spelling over the years (a task that even I believe most would agree is tedious and worth automating). Furthermore, I’ve yet to set anyone discuss the train – generate – train - generate feedback loop that long-term application of AI-generation systems imply. The first generations of these models were trained on wide swaths of web data generated by humans, but if these systems are permitted to continually spit out content without restriction or verification, especially to the extent that it reduces or eliminates development and investment in human talent over the long term, then what happens to the 4th or 5th generation of models? Eventually we encounter this situation where the AI is being trained almost exclusively on AI-generated content, and therefore with each generation, it settles more and more into the mean and mediocrity with no way out using current methods. By the time that happens, what will we have lost in terms of the creative capacity of people, and will we be able to get it back? By relentlessly pursuing this direction so enthusiastically, I’m convinced that we as AI/ML developers, companies, and nations are past the point of no return, and it mostly comes down the investments in time and money that we’ve made, as well as a prisoner’s dilemma with our competitors. As a society though, this direction we’ve chosen for short-term gains will almost certainly make humanity worse off, mostly for those who are powerless to do anything about it – our children, our grandchildren, and generations to come. If you’re an AI researcher or a data scientist like myself, how do you turn things back for yourself when you’ve spent years on years building your career in this direction? You’re likely making near or north of $200k annually TC and have a family to support, and so it’s too late, no matter how you feel about the direction the field has gone. If you’re a company, how do you standby and let your competitors aggressively push their AutoML solutions into more and more markets without putting out your own? Moreover, if you’re a manager or thought leader in this field like Jeff Dean how do you justify to your own boss and your shareholders your team’s billions of dollars in AI investment while simultaneously balancing ethical concerns? You can’t – the only answer is bigger and bigger models, more and more applications, more and more data, and more and more automation, and then automating that even further. If you’re a country like the US, how do responsibly develop AI while your competitors like China single-mindedly push full steam ahead without an iota of ethical concern to replace you in numerous areas in global power dynamics? Once again, failing to compete would be pre-emptively admitting defeat. Even assuming that none of what I’ve described here happens to such an extent, how are so few people not taking this seriously and discounting this possibility? If everything I’m saying is fear-mongering and non-sense, then I’d be interested in hearing what you think human-AI co-existence looks like in 20 to 30 years and why it isn’t as demoralizing as I’ve made it out to be. &#x200B; EDIT: Day after posting this -- this post took off way more than I expected. Even if I received 20 - 25 comments, I would have considered that a success, but this went much further. Thank you to each one of you that has read this post, even more so if you left a comment, and triply so for those who gave awards! I've read almost every comment that has come in (even the troll ones), and am truly grateful for each one, including those in sharp disagreement. I've learned much more from this discussion with the sub than I could have imagined on this topic, from so many perspectives. While I will try to reply as many comments as I can, the sheer comment volume combined with limited free time between work and family unfortunately means that there are many that I likely won't be able to get to. That will invariably include some that I would love respond to under the assumption of infinite time, but I will do my best, even if the latency stretches into days. Thank you all once again!

#reddit#current#future
[P] I built an open SotA image tagging model to do what CLIP won't
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
fpgaminer•This week

[P] I built an open SotA image tagging model to do what CLIP won't

I'm a hobbyist ML researcher and finally, after a year of work, built a state of the art machine vision model from scratch. It's ViT-B/16 based, 448x448x3 input, 91M parameters, trained for 660M samples, with multi-label classification as the target task, on over 5000 unique tags. All the big foundation vision models today were trained on heavily filtered datasets, greatly limiting the concepts they can represent, in line with arbitrary sets of rules for what is deemed "wholesome" by leading tech companies. Everything from innocuous to spicy is on the chopping block of those filters. And because CLIP pervades the industry, from StableDiffusion to LLaVA, so does OpenAI's sensibilities. My goal was to build a vision model for tagging images, mainly for labelling images for SD finetunes, but which wasn't as heavily filtered and handicapped as CLIP/BLIP/LLaVA. Something more inclusive, diverse, and sex positive. Starting from the wonderful work of SmilingWolf (https://github.com/SmilingWolf/SW-CV-ModelZoo) and the Danbooru2021 dataset, I iterated for a year on the model, training, and manually labeling a thousand images to help the model generalize beyond the danbooru domain. I'm releasing the first version of this model, dubbed JoyTag, today: https://github.com/fpgaminer/joytag It achieves a mean F1 score of 0.578 across all of its over 5000 tags and across both the anime/manga styled images of the original danbooru dataset, but also photographs and other mediums thanks to the auxiliary training data I provided to it. It was quite the struggle getting to this point, and I probably spent more time and money than any sane person should have. I learned a lot about dealing with datasets as large as danbooru2021, training models at scale, and how to keep yourself awake all night so your 8xA100 rental doesn't crash and blow all your money. In my manual testing outside of even the validation set, the model has generalized well to unseen images, so I'm quite happy with the results thus far. There's plenty more work to do expanding its dataset to improve that F1 score further, and roundout its weak points. With inclusivity and diversity being a major goal of this project, I'm disappointed by some of its remaining limitations (as documented in the GitHub README). But I'm already busy manually tagging more images using my model-augmented workflow. I'm happy to answer questions about the project, the training procedure, anything. All the training parameters are documented on GitHub, but there are so many little details that were hard won over the year. Like that damned loss multiplier. Ugh. Github: https://github.com/fpgaminer/joytag Model download: https://huggingface.co/fancyfeast/joytag/tree/main Demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/fancyfeast/joytag

#reddit#built#open
Tech founders -- you're being lied to
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
Saskjimbo•This week

Tech founders -- you're being lied to

I've been meaning to post this for a while. I saw a video recently that put me over the edge. You guys need to know what's up. Venture capitalists, angels, and accelerators all want you to build fast and fail faster. They want to you get your mvp buult in as little as a couple weeks. I'm a software dev and I own SaaS company. I'm here to tell you that you're being lied to. It's 2023. Unless some customer is about to drown because of their problem, they are not going to respect, or consider your trashy looking mvp. People these days expect a certain level of polish and professionalism when it comes to software before they give it more than 3s of their time. If your software took 80 hours to build, good chance that even customers from your target market will disregard it unless you're solving some insanely painful problem. And if you're using you're mvp for market research, people aren't going to talk to you if they believe that they spent more time getting dressed that morning than you put into your product. Build things that you can be proud of. Time boxing your first dev cycle into a few days or even weeks limits the scope of what you can build. I've spent more time than this figuring out a single api. Its this time boxing that leads 1000s of people to build the same shit. It's low quality work and exists in a super saturated market. And given the small scope of the product, the amount you'll be able to charge means the LTV of a customer will be lower than you CAC. Meaning your company will always lose money. The negative reception from your pre alpha product will have you think that people don't like you or your work. It's simply not the case. Few on this planet could produce something captivating in 100 hours. VCs tell you to ship your garbage MVP asap because of the following reason. They view every product that ships as a lotto ticket. If they like the look of it, they'll buy a ticket. And the more products there are and the shittier they are, it means a) they have more ticket numbers to select from and b) the cost of the ticket is a lot cheaper than it would otherwise be if the product was nice. VCs are not your friends and often, don't know how to build or market products. They are in it for the money and any advice they give to you or the community will be self serving. The indie community needs to wake up and realize that quality software built by a small team that people will pay for in this saturated market often takes months if not years to build. The idea of building a product and putting it in front of customers in 2 weeks is dumb. I've used some of these products and they are so limited in scope, broken and poorly designed that I don't give them anymore than a minute or two of my time. Note: validate your ideas before writing code. I'm not advocating spending a year writing software for an unproven market or problem. Yes, there are exceptions and stories of people shipping in no time and getting traction, but these are not the norm. Lastly, this philosophy is why you have and will continue to see a million products centered around AI. For those of you who aren't devs, Open AI made chatgpt accessible to developers and it's like 3 lines of code to ask it a question, get a response and save that response within your program. It's super low effort to integrate and that's why everyone will be building the same types of products with it. Tl;dr: Investors and gurus have agendas. Be logical about the level of effort required to build a software company and put forth only work that you're proud of. Being able to code doesn't give you a magical ability to create massive value with only a few weeks of work. You have to grind like pretty much every other successful business owner. I'll likely be banned for this, but fuck it. Ive got a sub where I'll share more insight and ban bullshit and idiotic posts with zero warning. It's not for everyone and I'll usually let you know pretty quick if our relationship isn't going to work. 6000 people and growing. r/cutthebull I'll write a post on that sub in the next few mins on how to guarentee accountability from top level management at your company.

#reddit#tech#founders
tools I use to not have to hire anyone
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
Pio_Sce•This week

tools I use to not have to hire anyone

I’ve spent unreasonable amount of time with AI tools and here’s curated list of ones I recommend for productivity (honestly, some of them can replace an employee): General assistants ChatGPT \- You probably know it. It’s a great tool for ideating, brainstorming, document summarization and quick question-answer work. There’s a desktop app available so you can quickly pop it up by pressing control + space, which makes it even better for productivity. Claude \- Another chat interface, similar to ChatGPT. It’s a different model provider so the answers and behavior might be different. From my experience, Claude 3.5 Sonnet is performing better than GPT-4o (but not o1) in tasks that focus on reasoning, code writing and copywriting. There’s also a desktop app available. Gemini \- Honestly, I’m not even sure where to put it. It’s Google’s model, one of the most powerful in terms of multimodal capabilities (text, image, audio). And it’s tailored for your Google Workspace. Email, docs, spreadsheets, meets, presentation. Anything. Research Perplexity \- Perplexity is an AI search engine that provides answers to questions with up-to-date information. So, forget Google. Use Perplexity to get answers to questions and dive down the rabbit hole. Exa AI \- Exa is another advanced search engine that combines AI-driven neural search with traditional keyword search. It understands the semantic meaning of queries and documents. And you can also choose what you want to search: academic articles, news, reports, tweets etc. Meetings, calendar and email Granola \- Great AI notepad for meetings. It’s a desktop app, so there’s no bot joining your meetings. It automatically transcribes and enhances meeting notes, helping organize and summarize key takeaways and generates action items, follow-up emails, etc. It also allows you to ask questions about the transcript and get answers. Reclaim \- AI-powered calendar that optimizes for productivity. Essentially, it automates meetings, tracks tasks, and protects deep work time. Cool thing is that it syncs with Google Calendar and Slack. Cora \- Batch processing emails is one of the main productivity tactics. Cora enables that. You only see emails that you need to respond to. And it generates automatic replies for you. All other emails are summarized twice a day. Knowledge summarization Particle News \- Short summaries of the daily news. Pretty straightforward. Notebook LM \- Notebook LM helps process and summarize various types of content, such as PDFs, websites, videos, and more. The cool thing is that it provides insights and connections between topics, cites sources and offers audio summaries. I use it when the content to read is too long and I’m on the go. Napkin \- For creating visuals from text. You can easily generate and customize infographics, diagrams etc. So, if you’re brainstorming, writing or preparing for a presentation, Napkin will work well. Writing and brainstorming Grammarly \- Well known grammar checker. It helps improve writing by focusing on clarity and tone. Sometimes the Grammarly icon popping up is annoying though. Flow \- Flow helps you write and edit notes by speaking. And it integrates across all the apps you use, adapts to your tone and style. Cool tool for just yapping! Automations Gumloop \- Think AI-first Zapier, but 100x more powerful. It's is a platform for automating complex work using AI via a no-code drag and drop interface. It’s very easy to automate work without needing engineers. And they have loads of templates. Wordware \- A platform for building AI agents with natural language. Honestly, for folks who are a bit more technical. You simply prompt LLM to perform a task for you. And you can build any integration you want. If you’re a builder, you can later on connect the agent via API. I strongly believe that technology is leverage. And with AI we can be in top 0.1% of people. If you want bit deeper dive into the topic, I shared that on my substack (available via link in my profile) Any other recommendations for apps I could use? What works if you want to keep the team super lean in early days?

#reddit#tools#have
If only someone told me this before my first startup
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.625
johnrushx•This week

If only someone told me this before my first startup

If only someone told me this before my first startup: Validate idea first. I wasted a decade building stuff nobody needed. Incubators and VCs served to me as a validation, but I was so wrong. Kill my EGO. It’s not about me, but the user. I must want what the user wants, not what I want. My taste isn't important. The user has expectations, and I must fulfill them. Don’t chaise investors. Chase users, and then investors will be chasing me. I've never had more incoming interest from VC than now when I'm the least interested in them. Never hire managers. Only hire doers until PMF. So many people know how to manage people and so few can actually get sh\*t done barehand. Landing page is the least important thing in a startup. Pick a simple template, edit texts with a no-code website builder in less than an hour and that's it! At the early stage, I win traffic outside of my website, people are already interested, so don't make them search for the signup button among the texts! Focus on conversion optimization only when the traffic is consistent. Keep it to one page. Nobody gonna browse this website. Hire only fullstack devs. There is nothing less productive in this world than a team of developers for an early-stage product. One full stack dev building the whole product. That’s it. Chase global market from day 1. If the product and marketing are good, it will work on the global market too, if it’s bad, it won’t work on the local market too. So better go global from day 1, so that if it works, the upside is 100x bigger. I launched all startups for the Norwegian market, hoping we will scale to international at some point. I wish I launched to international from day 1 as I do now. The size of the market is 10000x bigger. I can validate and grow products in days, not in years as it used to be. Do SEO from day 2. As early as I can. I ignored this for 14 years. It’s my biggest regret. It takes just 5 minutes to get it done on my landing page. I go to Google Keyword Planner, enter a few keywords around my product, sort them by traffic, filter out high competition kws, pick the top 10, and place them natively on my home page and meta tags. Add one blog article every week. Either manually or by paying for an AI blogging tool. Sell features, before building them. Ask existing users if they want this feature. I run DMs with 10-20 users every day, where I chat about all my ideas and features I wanna add. I clearly see what resonates with me most and only go build those. If I don't have followers, try HN, Reddit, or just search on X for posts and ask it in the replies. People are helpful, they will reply if the question is easy to understand. Hire only people I would wanna hug. My cofounder, an old Danish man said this to me in 2015. And it was a big shift. I realized that if I don’t wanna hug the person, it means I dislike them on a chemical/animal level. Even if I can’t say why, but that’s the fact. Sooner or later, we would have a conflict and eventually break up. It takes up to 10 years to build a startup, make sure I do it with people I have this connection with. Invest all money into my startups and friends. Not crypt0, not stockmarket, not properties. I did some math, if I kept investing all my money into all my friends’ startups, that would be about 70 investments. 3 of them turned into unicorns eventually. Even 1 would have made the bank. Since 2022, I have invested all my money into my products, friends, and network. If I don't have friends who do startups, invest it in myself. Post on Twitter daily. I started posting here in March last year. It’s my primary source of new connections and growth. I could have started it earlier, I don't know why I didn't. Don’t work/partner with corporates. Corporations always seem like an amazing opportunity. They’re big and rich, they promise huge stuff, millions of users, etc. But every single time none of this happens. Because I talk to a regular employees there. They waste my time, destroy focus, shift priorities, and eventually bring in no users/money. Don’t get ever distracted by hype e.g. crypt0. I lost 1.5 years of my life this way. I met the worst people along the way. Fricks, scammers, thieves. Some of my close friends turned into thieves along the way, just because it was so common in that space. I wish this didn’t happen to me. I wish I was stronger and stayed on my mission. Don’t build consumer apps. Only b2b. Consumer apps are so hard, like a lottery. It’s just 0.00001% who make it big. The rest don’t. Even if I got many users, then there is a monetization challenge. I’ve spent 4 years in consumer apps and regret it. Don’t hold on bad project for too long, max 1 year. Some projects just don’t work. In most cases, it’s either the idea that’s so wrong that I can’t even pivot it or it’s a team that is good one by one but can’t make it as a team. Don’t drag this out for years. Tech conferences are a waste of time. They cost money, take energy, and time and I never really meet anyone there. Most people there are the “good” employees of corporations who were sent there as a perk for being loyal to the corporation. Very few fellow makers. Scrum is a Scam. For small teams and bootstrapped teams. If I had a team that had to be nagged every morning with questions as if they were children in kindergarten, then things would eventually fail. The only good stuff I managed to do happened with people who were grownups and could manage their stuff on their own. We would just do everything over chat as a sync on goals and plans. Outsource nothing at all until PMF. In a startup, almost everything needs to be done in a slightly different way, more creative, and more integrated into the vision. When outsourcing, the external members get no love and no case for the product. It’s just yet another assignment in their boring job. Instead of coming up with great ideas for my project they will be just focusing on ramping up their skills to get a promotion or a better job offer. Bootstrap. I spent way too much time raising money. I raised more than 10 times, preseed, seeded, and series A. But each time it was a 3-9 month project, meetings every week, and lots of destruction. I could afford to bootstrap, but I still went the VC-funded way, I don’t know why. To be honest, I didn’t know bootstrapping was a thing I could do or anyone does. It may take a decade. When I was 20, I was convinced it takes a few years to build and succeed with a startup. So I kept pushing my plans forward, to do it once I exited. Family, kids. I wish I married earlier. I wish I had kids earlier. No Free Tier. I'd launch a tool with a free tier, and it'd get sign-ups, but very few would convert. I'd treat free sign-ups as KPIs and run on it for years. I'd brag about signups and visitors. I'd even raise VC money with these stats. But eventually, I would fail to reach PMF. Because my main feedback would come from free users and the product turned into a perfect free product. Once I switched to "paid only" until I validated the product, things went really well. Free and paid users often need different products. Don't fall into this trap as I did. Being To Cheap. I always started by checking all competitors and setting the lowest price. I thought this would be one of the key advantages of my product. But no, I was wrong. The audience on $5 and $50 are totally different. $5: pain in the \*ss, never happy, never recommend me to a friend, leave in 4 months. $50: polite, give genuine feedback, happy, share with friends, become my big fan if I solve their request. I will fail. When I started my first startup. I thought if I did everything right, it would work out. But it turned out that almost every startup fails. I wish I knew that and I tried to fail faster, to get to the second iteration, then to the third, and keep going on, until I either find out nothing works or make it work. Use boilerplates. I wasted years of dev time and millions of VC money to pay for basic things. To build yet another sidebar, yet another dashboard, and payment integration... I had too much pride, I couldn't see myself taking someone else code as a basis for my product. I wanted it to be 100% mine, original, from scratch. Because my product seems special to me. Spend more time with Family & Friends. I missed the weddings of all my best friends and family. I was so busy. I thought if I didn't do it on time, the world would end. Looking back today, it was so wrong. I meet my friends and can't share those memories with them, which makes me very sad. I realized now, that spending 10% of my time with family and friends would practically make no negative impact on my startups. Build Products For Audiences I Love. I never thought of this. I'd often build products either for corporates, consumers, or for developers. It turns out I have no love for all 3. But I deeply love indie founders. Because they are risk-takers and partly kids in their hearts. Once I switched the focus to indie makers on my products, my level of joy increased by 100x for me. Ignore Badges and Awards I was chasing those awards just like everyone else. Going to ceremonies, signing up for events and stuff. I've won tons of awards, but none of those were eventually useful to my business. I better focused on my business and users. Write Every Single Day. When I was a kid, I loved writing stories. In school, they would give an assignment, and I'd often write a long story for it, however, the teacher would put an F on it. The reason was simple, I had an issue with the direction of the letters and the sequence of letters in the words. I still have it, it's just the Grammarly app helping me to correct these issues. So the teacher would fail my stories because almost every sentence had a spelling mistake that I couldn't even see. It made me think I'm made at writing. So I stopped, for 15 years. But I kept telling stories all these years. Recently I realized that in any group, the setup ends up turning into me telling stories to everyone. So I tried it all again, here on X 10 months ago. I love it, the process, the feedback from people. I write every day. I wish I had done it all these years. The End. \ this is an updated version of my post on the same topic from 2 months ago. I've edited some of the points and added 9 new ones.* \\ This is not advice, it's my self-reflection that might help you avoid same mistakes if you think those were mistakes

#reddit#only#someone
The delicate balance of building an online community business
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.895
matthewbarby•This week

The delicate balance of building an online community business

Hey /r/Entrepreneur 👋 Just under two years ago I launched an online community business called Traffic Think Tank with two other co-founders, Nick Eubanks and Ian Howells. As a Traffic Think Tank customer you (currently) pay $119 a month to get access to our online community, which is run through Slack. The community is focused on helping you learn various aspects of marketing, with a particular focus on search engine optimization (SEO). Alongside access to the Slack community, we publish new educational video content from outside experts every week that all customers have access to. At the time of writing, Traffic Think Tank has around 650 members spanning across 17 of the 24 different global time zones. I was on a business trip over in Sydney recently, and during my time there I met up with some of our Australia-based community members. During dinner I was asked by several of them how the idea for Traffic Think Tank came about and what steps we took to validate that the idea was worth pursuing.  This is what I told them… How it all began It all started with a personal need. Nick, an already successful entrepreneur and owner of a marketing agency, had tested out an early version Traffic Think Tank in early 2017. He offered real-time consulting for around ten customers that he ran from Slack. He would publish some educational videos and offer his advice on projects that the members were running. The initial test went well, but it was tough to maintain on his own and he had to charge a fairly high price to make it worth his time. That’s when he spoke to me and Ian about turning this idea into something much bigger. Both Ian and I offered something slightly different to Nick. We’ve both spent time in senior positions at marketing agencies, but currently hold senior director positions in 2,000+ public employee companies (HubSpot and LendingTree). Alongside this, as a trio we could really ramp up the quality and quantity of content within the community, spread out the administrative workload and just generally have more resources to throw at getting this thing off the ground. Admittedly, Nick was much more optimistic about the potential of Traffic Think Tank – something I’m very thankful for now – whereas Ian and I were in the camp of “you’re out of your mind if you think hundreds of people are going to pay us to be a part of a Slack channel”. To validate the idea at scale, we decided that we’d get an initial MVP of the community up and running with a goal of reaching 100 paying customers in the first six months. If we achieved that, we’d validated that it was a viable business and we would continue to pursue it. If not, we’d kill it. We spent the next month building out the initial tech stack that enabled us to accept payments, do basic user management to the Slack channel, and get a one-page website up and running with information on what Traffic Think Tank was all about.  After this was ready, we doubled down on getting some initial content created for members – I mean, we couldn’t have people just land in an empty Slack channel, could we? We created around ten initial videos, 20 or so articles and then some long threads full of useful information within the Slack channel so that members would have some content to pour into right from the beginning.  Then, it was time to go live. The first 100 customers Fortunately, both Nick and I had built a somewhat substantial following in the SEO space over the previous 5-10 years, so we at least had a large email list to tap into (a total of around 40,000 people). We queued up some launch emails, set an initial price of $99 per month and pressed send. [\[LINK\] The launch email I sent to my subscribers announcing Traffic Think Tank](https://mailchi.mp/matthewbarby/future-of-marketing-1128181) What we didn’t expect was to sell all of the initial 100 membership spots in the first 72 hours. “Shit. What do we do now? Are we ready for this many people? Are we providing them with enough value? What if something breaks in our tech stack? What if they don’t like the content? What if everyone hates Slack?” All of these were thoughts running through my head. This brings me to the first great decision we made: we closed down new membership intake for 3 months so that we could focus completely on adding value to the first cohort of users. The right thing at the right time SEO is somewhat of a dark art to many people that are trying to learn about it for the first time. There’s hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of articles and videos online that talk about how to do SEO.  Some of it’s good advice; a lot of it is very bad advice.  Add to this that the barrier to entry of claiming to be an “expert” in SEO is practically non-existent and you have a recipe for disaster. This is why, for a long time, individuals involved in SEO have flocked in their masses to online communities for information and to bounce ideas off of others in the space. Forums like SEObook, Black Hat World, WickedFire, Inbound.org, /r/BigSEO, and many more have, at one time, been called home by many SEOs.  In recent times, these communities have either been closed down or just simply haven’t adapted to the changing needs of the community – one of those needs being real-time feedback on real-world problems.  The other big need that we all spotted and personally had was the ability to openly share the things that are working – and the things that aren’t – in SEO within a private forum. Not everyone wanted to share their secret sauce with the world. One of the main reasons we chose Slack as the platform to run our community on was the fact that it solved these two core needs. It gave the ability to communicate in real-time across multiple devices, and all of the information shared within it was outside of the public domain. The other problem that plagued a lot of these early communities was spam. Most of them were web-based forums that were free to access. That meant they became a breeding ground for people trying to either sell their services or promote their own content – neither of which is conducive to building a thriving community. This was our main motivation for charging a monthly fee to access Traffic Think Tank. We spent a lot of time thinking through pricing. It needed to be enough money that people would be motivated to really make use of their membership and act in a way that’s beneficial to the community, but not too much money that it became cost prohibitive to the people that would benefit from it the most. Considering that most of our members would typically spend between $200-800 per month on SEO software, $99 initially felt like the perfect balance. Growing pains The first three months of running the community went by without any major hiccups. Members were incredibly patient with us, gave us great feedback and were incredibly helpful and accommodating to other members. Messages were being posted every day, with Nick, Ian and myself seeding most of the engagement at this stage.  With everything going smoothly, we decided that it was time to open the doors to another intake of new members. At this point we’d accumulated a backlog of people on our waiting list, so we knew that simply opening our doors would result in another large intake. Adding more members to a community has a direct impact on the value that each member receives. For Traffic Think Tank in particular, the value for members comes from three areas: The ability to have your questions answered by me, Nick and Ian, as well as other members of the community. The access to a large library of exclusive content. The ability to build connections with the wider community. In the early stages of membership growth, there was a big emphasis on the first of those three points. We didn’t have an enormous content library, nor did we have a particularly large community of members, so a lot of the value came from getting a lot of one-to-one time with the community founders. [\[IMAGE\] Screenshot of engagement within the Traffic Think Tank Slack community](https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/client/qglossy,retimg,w_1322/https://www.matthewbarby.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Community-Engagement-in-Traffic-Think-Tank.png) The good thing about having 100 members was that it was just about feasible to give each and every member some one-to-one time within the month, which really helped us to deliver those moments of delight that the community needed early on. Two-and-a-half months after we launched Traffic Think Tank, we opened the doors to another 250 people, taking our total number of members to 350. This is where we experienced our first growing pains.  Our original members had become used to being able to drop us direct messages and expect an almost instant response, but this wasn’t feasible anymore. There were too many people, and we needed to create a shift in behavior. We needed more value to come from the community engaging with one another or we’d never be able to scale beyond this level. We started to really pay attention to engagement metrics; how many people were logging in every day, and of those, how many were actually posting messages within public channels.  We asked members that were logging in a lot but weren’t posting (the “lurkers”) why that was the case. We also asked the members that engaged in the community the most what motivated them to post regularly. We learned a lot from doing this. We found that the large majority of highly-engaged members had much more experience in SEO, whereas most of the “lurkers” were beginners. This meant that most of the information being shared in the community was very advanced, with a lot of feedback from the beginners in the group being that they “didn’t want to ask a stupid question”.  As managers of the community, we needed to facilitate conversations that catered to all of our members, not just those at a certain level of skill. To tackle this problem, we created a number of new channels that had a much deeper focus on beginner topics so novice members had a safe place to ask questions without judgment.  We also started running live video Q&As each month where we’d answer questions submitted by the community. This gave our members one-on-one time with me, Nick and Ian, but spread the value of these conversations across the whole community rather than them being hidden within private messages. As a result of these changes, we found that the more experienced members in the community were really enjoying sharing their knowledge with those with less experience. The number of replies within each question thread was really starting to increase, and the community started to shift away from just being a bunch of threads created by me, Nick and Ian to a thriving forum of diverse topics compiled by a diverse set of individuals. This is what we’d always wanted. A true community. It was starting to happen. [\[IMAGE\] Chart showing community engagement vs individual member value](https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/client/qglossy,retimg,w_1602/https://www.matthewbarby.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Community-Engagement-Balance-Graph.jpg) At the same time, we started to realize that we’ll eventually reach a tipping point where there’ll be too much content for us to manage and our members to engage with. When we reach this point, the community will be tough to follow and the quality of any given post will go down. Not only that, but the community will become increasingly difficult to moderate. We’re not there yet, but we recognize that this will come, and we’ll have to adjust our model again. Advocating advocacy As we started to feel more comfortable about the value that members were receiving, we made the decision to indefinitely open for new members. At the same time, we increased the price of membership (from $99 a month to $119) in a bid to strike the right balance between profitability as a business and to slow down the rate at which we were reaching the tipping point of community size. We also made the decision to repay all of our early adopters by grandfathering them in to the original pricing – and committing to always do this in the future. Despite the price increase, we saw a continued flow of new members come into the community. The craziest part about this was that we were doing practically no marketing activities to encourage new members– this was all coming from word of mouth. Our members were getting enough value from the community that they were recommending it to their friends, colleagues and business partners.  The scale at which this was happening really took us by surprise and it told us one thing very clearly: delivering more value to members resulted in more value being delivered to the business. This is a wonderful dynamic to have because it perfectly aligns the incentives on both sides. We’d said from the start that we wouldn’t sacrifice value to members for more revenue – this is something that all three of us felt very strongly about. First and foremost, we wanted to create a community that delivered value to its members and was run in a way that aligned with our values as people. If we could find a way to stimulate brand advocacy, while also tightening the bonds between all of our individual community members, we’d be boosting both customer retention and customer acquisition in the same motion. This became our next big focus. [\[TWEET\] Adam, one of our members wore his Traffic Think Tank t-shirt in the Sahara desert](https://twitter.com/AdamGSteele/status/1130892481099382784) We started with some simple things: We shipped out Traffic Think Tank branded T-shirts to all new members. We’d call out each of the individuals that would submit questions to our live Q&A sessions and thank them live on air. We set up a new channel that was dedicated to sharing a quick introduction to who you are, what you do and where you’re based for all new members. We’d created a jobs channel and a marketplace for selling, buying and trading services with other members. Our monthly “blind dates” calls were started where you’d be randomly grouped with 3-4 other community members so that you could hop on a call to get to know each other better. The Traffic Think Tank In Real Life (IRL)* channel was born, which enabled members to facilitate in-person meetups with each other. In particular, we saw that as members started to meet in person or via calls the community itself was feeling more and more like a family. It became much closer knit and some members started to build up a really positive reputation for being particularly helpful to other members, or for having really strong knowledge in a specific area. [\[TWEET\] Dinner with some of the Traffic Think Tank members in Brighton, UK](https://twitter.com/matthewbarby/status/1117175584080134149) Nick, Ian and I would go out of our way to try and meet with members in real life wherever we could. I was taken aback by how appreciative people were for us doing this, and it also served as an invaluable way to gain honest feedback from members. There was another trend that we’d observed that we didn’t really expect to happen. More and more members were doing business with each another. We’ve had people find new jobs through the community, sell businesses to other members, launch joint ventures together and bring members in as consultants to their business. This has probably been the most rewarding thing to watch, and it was clear that the deeper relationships that our members were forming were resulting in an increased level of trust to work with each other. We wanted to harness this and take it to a new level. This brought us to arguably the best decision we’ve made so far running Traffic Think Tank… we were going to run a big live event for our members. I have no idea what I’m doing It’s the first week of January 2019 and we’re less than three weeks away from Traffic Think Tank LIVE, our first ever in-person event hosting 150 people, most of which are Traffic Think Tank members. It's like an ongoing nightmare I can’t wake up from. That was Nick’s response in our private admin channel to myself and Ian when I asked if they were finding the run-up to the event as stressful as I was. I think that all three of us were riding on such a high from how the community was growing that we felt like we could do anything. Running an event? How hard can it be? Well, turns out it’s really hard. We had seven different speakers flying over from around the world to speak at the event, there was a pre- and after event party, and we’d planned a charity dinner where we would take ten attendees (picked at random via a raffle) out for a fancy meal. Oh, and Nick, Ian and I were hosting a live Q&A session on stage. It wasn’t until precisely 48 hours before the event that we’d realized we didn’t have any microphones, nor had a large amount of the swag we’d ordered arrived. Plus, a giant storm had hit Philly causing a TON of flight cancellations. Perfect. Just perfect. This was honestly the tip of the iceberg. We hadn’t thought about who was going to run the registration desk, who would be taking photos during the event and who would actually field questions from the audience while all three of us sat on stage for our live Q&A panel. Turns out that the answer to all of those questions were my wife, Laura, and Nick’s wife, Kelley. Thankfully, they were on hand to save our asses. The weeks running up to the event were honestly some of the most stressful of my life. We sold around 50% of our ticket allocation within the final two weeks before the event. All of the event organizers told us this would happen, but did we believe them? Hell no!  Imagine having two weeks until the big day and as it stood half of the room would be completely empty. I was ready to fly most of my extended family over just to make it look remotely busy. [\[IMAGE\] One of our speakers, Ryan Stewart, presenting at Traffic Think Tank LIVE](https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/client/qglossy,retimg,w_1920/https://www.matthewbarby.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Traffic-Think-Tank-LIVE-Ryan-Presenting.jpg) Thankfully, if all came together. We managed to acquire some microphones, the swag arrived on the morning of the event, all of our speakers were able to make it on time and the weather just about held up so that our entire allocation of ticket holders was able to make it to the event. We pooled together and I’m proud to say that the event was a huge success. While we made a substantial financial loss on the event itself, January saw a huge spike in new members, which more than recouped our losses. Not only that, but we got to hang out with a load of our members all day while they said really nice things about the thing we’d built. It was both exhausting and incredibly rewarding. Bring on Traffic Think Tank LIVE 2020! (This time we’re hiring an event manager...)   The road ahead Fast forward to today (August 2019) and Traffic Think Tank has over 650 members. The biggest challenges that we’re tackling right now include making sure the most interesting conversations and best content surfaces to the top of the community, making Slack more searchable (this is ultimately one of its flaws as a platform) and giving members a quicker way to find the exclusive content that we create. You’ll notice there’s a pretty clear theme here. In the past 30 days, 4,566 messages were posted in public channels inside Traffic Think Tank. If you add on any messages posted inside private direct messages, this number rises to 21,612. That’s a lot of messages. To solve these challenges and enable further scale in the future, we’ve invested a bunch of cash and our time into building out a full learning management system (LMS) that all members will get access to alongside the Slack community. The LMS will be a web-based portal that houses all of the video content we produce. It will also  provide an account admin section where users can update or change their billing information (they have to email us to do this right now, which isn’t ideal), a list of membership perks and discounts with our partners, and a list of links to some of the best threads within Slack – when clicked, these will drop you directly into Slack. [\[IMAGE\] Designs for the new learning management system (LMS)](https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/client/qglossy,retimg,w_2378/https://www.matthewbarby.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Traffic-Think-Tank-LMS.png) It’s not been easy, but we’re 95% of the way through this and I’m certain that it will have a hugely positive impact on the experience for our members. Alongside this we hired a community manager, Liz, who supports with any questions that our members have, coordinates with external experts to arrange webinars for the community, helps with new member onboarding, and has tightened up some of our processes around billing and general accounts admin. This was a great decision. Finally, we’ve started planning next year’s live event, which we plan to more than double in size to 350 attendees, and we decided to pick a slightly warmer location in Miami this time out. Stay tuned for me to have a complete meltdown 3 weeks from the event. Final thoughts When I look back on the journey we’ve had so far building Traffic Think Tank, there’s one very important piece to this puzzle that’s made all of this work that I’ve failed to mention so far: co-founder alignment. Building a community is a balancing act that relies heavily on those in charge being completely aligned. Nick, Ian and I completely trust each other and more importantly, are philosophically aligned on how we want to run and grow the community. If we didn’t have this, the friction between us could tear apart the entire community. Picking the right people to work with is important in any company, but when your business is literally about bringing people together, there’s no margin for error here.  While I’m sure there will be many more challenges ahead, knowing that we all trust each other to make decisions that fall in line with each of our core values makes these challenges dramatically easier to overcome. Finally, I’d like to thank all of our members for making the community what it is today – it’d be nothing without you and I promise that we’ll never take that for granted. &#x200B; I originally posted this on my blog here. Welcoming all of your thoughts, comments, questions and I'll do my best to answer them :)

#reddit#delicate#balance
Started a content marketing agency 6 years ago - $0 to $5,974,324 (2023 update)
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
mr_t_forhire•This week

Started a content marketing agency 6 years ago - $0 to $5,974,324 (2023 update)

Hey friends, My name is Tyler and for the past 6 years, I’ve been documenting my experience building a content marketing agency called Optimist. Year 1 - 0 to $500k ARR Year 2 - $500k to $1MM ARR Year 3 - $1MM ARR to $1.5MM(ish) ARR Year 4 - $3,333,686 Revenue Year 5 - $4,539,659 Revenue How Optimist Works First, an overview/recap of the Optimist business model: We operate as a “collective” of full time/professional freelancers Everyone aside from me is a contractor Entirely remote/distributed team Each freelancer earns $65-85/hour Clients pay us a flat monthly fee for full-service content marketing (research, strategy, writing, editing, design/photography, reporting and analytics, targeted linkbuilding, and more) We recently introduced hourly engagements for clients who fit our model but have some existing in-house support Packages range in price from $10-20k/mo We offer profit share to everyone on our core team as a way to give everyone ownership in the company In 2022, we posted $1,434,665 in revenue. It was our highest revenue year to date and brings our lifetime total to $5,974,324. Here’s our monthly revenue from January 2017 to December of 2022. But, like every year, it was a mix of ups and downs. Here’s my dispatch for 2023. — Running a business is like spilling a drink. It starts as a small and simple thing. But, if you don’t clean it up, the spill will spread and grow — taking up more space, seeping into every crack. There’s always something you could be doing. Marketing you could be working on. Pitches you could be making. Networking you could be doing. Client work you could help with. It can be all-consuming. And it will be — if you don’t clean up the spill. I realized this year that I had no containment for the spill that I created. Running an agency was spilling over into nearly every moment of my life. When I wasn’t working, I was thinking about work. When I wasn’t thinking about work, I was dreaming about it. Over the years, I’ve shared about a lot of my personal feelings and experience as an entrepreneur. And I also discussed my reckoning with the limitations of running the business we’ve built. My acceptance that it was an airplane but not a rocket. And my plan to try to compartmentalize the agency to make room in my life for other things — new business ideas, new revenue streams, and maybe some non-income-producing activity. 🤷 What I found in 2022 was that the business wasn’t quite ready for me to make that move. It was still sucking up too much of my time and attention. There were still too many gaps to fill and I was the one who was often filling them. So what do you do? Ultimately you have two choices on the table anytime you run a business and it’s not going the way you want it: Walk away Turn the ship — slowly For a huge number of reasons (personal, professional, financial, etc), walking away from Optimist was not really even an option or the right move for me. But it did feel like things needed to change. I needed to keep turning the ship to get it to the place where it fit into my life — instead of my life fitting around the business. This means 2022 was a year of transition for the agency. (Again?) Refocusing on Profit Some money is better than no money. Right? Oddly, this was one of the questions I found myself asking in 2022. Over the years, we’ve been fortunate to have many clients who have stuck with us a long time. In some cases, we’ve had clients work with us for 2, 3, or even 4 years. (That’s over half of our existence!) But, things have gotten more expensive — we’ve all felt it. We’ve had to increase pay to remain competitive for top talent. Software costs have gone up. It’s eaten into our margin. Because of our increasing costs and evolving scope, many of our best, most loyal clients were our least profitable. In fact, many were barely profitable — if at all. We’ve tried to combat that by increasing rates on new, incoming clients to reflect our new costs and try to make up for shrinking margin on long-term clients. But we didn’t have a good strategy in place for updating pricing for current clients. And it bit us in the ass. Subsidizing lower-profit, long-term clients with new, higher-margin clients ultimately didn’t work out. Our margins continued to dwindle and some months we were barely breaking even while posting six-figures of monthly revenue. 2022 was our highest revenue year but one of our least profitable. It only left one option. We had to raise rates on some of our long-term clients. But, of course, raising rates on a great, long-term client can be delicate. You’ve built a relationship with these people over the years and you’re setting yourself up for an ultimatum — are you more valuable to the client or is the client more valuable to you? Who will blink first? We offered all of these clients the opportunity to move to updated pricing. Unfortunately, some of them weren’t on board. Again, we had 2 options: Keep them at a low/no profit rate Let them churn It seems intuitive that having a low-profit client is better than having no client. But we’ve learned an important lesson many times over the years. Our business doesn’t scale infinitely and we can only handle so many clients at a time. That means that low-profit clients are actually costing us money in some cases. Say our average client generates $2,500 per month in profit — $30,000 per year. If one of our clients is only generating $500/mo in profit, working with them means missing out on bringing on a more profitable client (assuming our team is currently at capacity). Instead of $30,000/year, we’re only making $6,000. Keeping that client costs us $24,000. That’s called opportunity cost. So it’s clear: We had to let these clients churn. We decided to churn about 25% of our existing clients. On paper, the math made sense. And we had a pretty consistent flow of new opportunities coming our way. At the time, it felt like a no-brainer decision. And I felt confident that we could quickly replace these low-profit clients with higher-margin ones. I was wrong. Eating Shit Right after we initiated proactively churning some of our clients, other clients — ones we planned to keep — gave us notice that they were planning to end the engagement. Ouch. Fuck. We went from a 25% planned drop in revenue to a nearly 40% cliff staring us right in the face. Then things got even worse. Around Q3 of this year, talk of recession and layoffs really started to intensify. We work primarily with tech companies and startups. And these were the areas most heavily impacted by the economic news. Venture funding was drying up. Our leads started to slow down. This put us in a tough position. Looking back now, I think it’s clear that I made the wrong decision. We went about this process in the wrong way. The reality sinks in when you consider the imbalance between losing a client and gaining a client. It takes 30 days for someone to fire us. It’s a light switch. But it could take 1-3 months to qualify, close, and onboard a new client. We have lots of upfront work, research, and planning that goes into the process. We have to learn a new brand voice, tone, and style. It’s a marathon. So, for every client we “trade”, there’s a lapse in revenue and work. This means that, in retrospect, I would probably have made this transition using some kind of staggered schedule rather than a cut-and-dry approach. We could have gradually off-boarded clients when we had more definitive work to replace them. I was too confident. But that’s a lesson I had to learn the hard way. Rebuilding & Resetting Most of the voluntary and involuntary churn happened toward the end of 2022. So we’re still dealing with the fall out. Right now, it feels like a period of rebuilding. We didn’t quite lose 50% of our revenue, but we definitely saw a big hit heading into 2023. To be transparent: It sucks. It feels like a gigantic mistake that I made which set us back significantly from our previous high point. I acted rashly and it cost us a lot of money — at least on the surface. But I remind myself of the situation we were in previously. Nearly twice the revenue but struggling to maintain profitability. Would it have been better to try to slowly fix that situation and battle through months of loss or barely-break-even profits? Or was ripping off the bandaid the right move after all? I’m an optimist. (Heh, heh) Plus, I know that spiraling over past decisions won’t change them or help me move forward. So I’m choosing to look at this as an opportunity — to rebuild, reset, and refocus the company. I get to take all of the tough lessons I’ve learned over the last 6 years and apply them to build the company in a way that better aligns with our new and current goals. It’s not quite a fresh, clean start, but by parting ways with some of our oldest clients, we’ve eliminated some of the “debt” that’s accumulated over the years. We get a chance to fully realize the new positioning that we rolled out last year. Many of those long-term clients who churned had a scope of work or engagement structure that didn’t fit with our new positioning and focus. So, by losing them, we’re able to completely close up shop on the SOWs that no longer align with the future version of Optimist. Our smaller roster of clients is a better fit for that future. My job is to protect that positioning by ensuring that while we’re rebuilding our new roster of clients we don’t get desperate. We maintain the qualifications we set out for future clients and only take on work that fits. How’s that for seeing the upside? Some other upside from the situation is that we got an opportunity to ask for candid feedback from clients who were leaving. We asked for insight about their decision, what factors they considered, how they perceived us, and the value of our work. Some of the reasons clients left were obvious and possibly unavoidable. Things like budget cuts, insourcing, and uncertainty about the economy all played at least some part of these decisions. But, reading between the lines, where was one key insight that really struck me. It’s one of those, “oh, yeah — duh — I already knew that,” things that can be difficult to learn and easy to forget…. We’re in the Relationship Business (Plan Accordingly) For all of our focus on things like rankings, keywords, content, conversions, and a buffet of relevant metrics, it can be easy to lose the forest for the trees. Yes, the work itself matters. Yes, the outcomes — the metrics — matter. But sometimes the relationship matters more. When you’re running an agency, you can live or die by someone just liking you. Admittedly, this feels totally unfair. It opens up all kinds of dilemmas, frustration, opportunity for bias and prejudice, and other general messiness. But it’s the real world. If a client doesn’t enjoy working with us — even if for purely personal reasons — they could easily have the power to end of engagement, regardless of how well we did our actual job. We found some evidence of this in the offboarding conversations we had with clients. In some cases, we had clients who we had driven triple- and quadruple-digital growth. Our work was clearly moving the needle and generating positive ROI and we had the data to prove it. But they decided to “take things in another direction” regardless. And when we asked about why they made the decision, it was clear that it was more about the working relationship than anything we could have improved about the service itself. The inverse is also often true. Our best clients have lasting relationships with our team. The work is important — and they want results. But even if things aren’t quite going according to plan, they’re patient and quick to forgive. Those relationships feel solid — unshakeable. Many of these folks move onto new roles or new companies and quickly look for an opportunity to work with us again. On both sides, relationships are often more important than the work itself. We’ve already established that we’re not building a business that will scale in a massive way. Optimist will always be a small, boutique service firm. We don’t need 100 new leads per month We need a small, steady roster of clients who are a great fit for the work we do and the value we create. We want them to stick around. We want to be their long-term partner. I’m not built for churn-and-burn agency life. And neither is the business. When I look at things through this lens, I realize how much I can cut from our overall business strategy. We don’t need an ultra-sophisticated, multi-channel marketing strategy. We just need strong relationships — enough of them to make our business work. There are a few key things we can take away from this as a matter of business strategy: Put most of our effort into building and strengthening relationships with our existing clients Be intentional about establishing a strong relationship with new clients as part of onboarding Focus on relationships as the main driver of future business development Embracing Reality: Theory vs Practice Okay, so with the big learnings out the way, I want to pivot into another key lesson from 2022. It’s the importance of understanding theory vs practice — specifically when it comes to thinking about time, work, and life. It all started when I was considering how to best structure my days and weeks around running Optimist, my other ventures, and my life goals outside of work. Over the years, I’ve dabbled in many different ways to block time and find focus — to compartmentalize all of the things that are spinning and need my attention. As I mapped this out, I realized that I often tried to spread myself too thin throughout the week. Not just that I was trying to do too much but that I was spreading that work into too many small chunks rather than carving out time for focus. In theory, 5 hours is 5 hours. If you have 5 hours of work to get done, you just fit into your schedule whenever you have an open time slot. In reality, a single 5-hour block of work is 10x more productive and satisfying than 10, 30-minute blocks of work spread out across the week. In part, this is because of context switching. Turning your focus from one thing to another thing takes time. Achieving flow and focus takes time. And the more you jump from one project to another, the more time you “lose” to switching. This is insightful for me both in the context of work and planning my day, but also thinking about my life outside of Optimist. One of my personal goals is to put a finite limit on my work time and give myself more freedom. I can structure that in many different ways. Is it better to work 5 days a week but log off 1 hour early each day? Or should I try to fit more hours into each workday so I can take a full day off? Of course, it’s the latter. Both because of the cost of context switching and spreading work into more, smaller chunks — but also because of the remainder that I end up with when I’m done working. A single extra hour in my day probably means nothing. Maybe I can binge-watch one more episode of a new show or do a few extra chores around the house. But it doesn’t significantly improve my life or help me find greater balance. Most things I want to do outside of work can’t fit into a single extra hour. A full day off from work unlocks many more options. I can take the day to go hiking or biking. I can spend the day with my wife, planning or playing a game. Or I can push it up against the weekend and take a 3-day trip. It gives me more of the freedom and balance that I ultimately want. So this has become a guiding principle for how I structure my schedule. I want to: Minimize context switching Maximize focused time for work and for non-work The idea of embracing reality also bleeds into some of the shifts in business strategy that I mentioned above. In theory, any time spent on marketing will have a positive impact on the company. In reality, focusing more on relationships than blasting tweets into the ether is much more likely to drive the kind of growth and stability that we’re seeking. As I think about 2023, I think this is a recurring theme. It manifests in many ways. Companies are making budget cuts and tough decisions about focus and strategy. Most of us are looking for ways to rein in the excess and have greater impact with a bit less time and money. We can’t do everything. We can’t even do most things. So our #1 priority should be to understand the reality of our time and our effort to make the most of every moment (in both work and leisure). That means thinking deeply about our strengths and our limitations. Being practical, even if it feels like sacrifice. Update on Other Businesses Finally, I want to close up by sharing a bit about my ventures outside of Optimist. I shared last year how I planned to shift some of my (finite) time and attention to new ventures and opportunities. And, while I didn’t get to devote as much as I hoped to these new pursuits, they weren’t totally in vain. I made progress across the board on all of the items I laid out in my post. Here’s what happened: Juice: The first Optimist spin-out agency At the end of 2021, we launched our first new service business based on demand from Optimist clients. Focused entirely on building links for SEO, we called the agency Juice. Overall, we made strong progress toward turning this into a legitimate standalone business in 2022. Relying mostly on existing Optimist clients and a few word-of-mouth opportunities (no other marketing), we built a team and set up a decent workflow and operations. There’s still many kinks and challenges that we’re working through on this front. All told, Juice posted almost $100,000 in revenue in our first full year. Monetizing the community I started 2022 with a focus on figuring out how to monetize our free community, Top of the Funnel. Originally, my plan was to sell sponsorships as the main revenue driver. And that option is still on the table. But, this year, I pivoted to selling paid content and subscriptions. We launched a paid tier for content and SEO entrepreneurs where I share more of my lessons, workflows, and ideas for building and running a freelance or agency business. It’s gained some initial traction — we reached \~$1,000 MRR from paid subscriptions. In total, our community revenue for 2022 was about $2,500. In 2023, I’m hoping to turn this into a $30,000 - $50,000 revenue opportunity. Right now, we’re on track for \~$15,000. Agency partnerships and referrals In 2022, we also got more serious about referring leads to other agencies. Any opportunity that was not a fit for Optimist or we didn’t have capacity to take on, we’d try to connect with another partner. Transparently, we struggled to operationalize this as effectively as I would have liked. In part, this was driven by my lack of focus here. With the other challenges throughout the year, I wasn’t able to dedicate as much time as I’d like to setting goals and putting workflows into place. But it wasn’t a total bust. We referred out several dozen potential clients to partner agencies. Of those, a handful ended up converting into sales — and referral commission. In total, we generated about $10,000 in revenue from referrals. I still see this as a huge opportunity for us to unlock in 2023. Affiliate websites Lastly, I mentioned spending some time on my new and existing affiliate sites as another big business opportunity in 2022. This ultimately fell to the bottom of my list and didn’t get nearly the attention I wanted. But I did get a chance to spend a few weeks throughout the year building this income stream. For 2022, I generated just under $2,000 in revenue from affiliate content. My wife has graciously agreed to dedicate some of her time and talent to these projects. So, for 2023, I think this will become a bit of a family venture. I’m hoping to build a solid and consistent workflow, expand the team, and develop a more solid business strategy. Postscript — AI, SEO, OMG As I’m writing this, much of my world is in upheaval. If you’re not in this space (and/or have possibly been living under a rock), the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 has sparked an arms race between Google, Bing, OpenAI, and many other players. The short overview: AI is likely to fundamentally change the way internet search works. This has huge impact on almost all of the work that I do and the businesses that I run. Much of our focus is on SEO and understanding the current Google algorithm, how to generate traffic for clients, and how to drive traffic to our sites and projects. That may all change — very rapidly. This means we’re standing at a very interesting point in time. On the one hand, it’s scary as hell. There’s a non-zero chance that this will fundamentally shift — possibly upturn — our core business model at Optimist. It could dramatically change how we work and/or reduce demand for our core services. No bueno. But it’s also an opportunity (there’s the optimist in me, again). I certainly see a world where we can become leaders in this new frontier. We can pivot, adjust, and capitalize on a now-unknown version of SEO that’s focused on understanding and optimizing for AI-as-search. With that, we may also be able to help others — say, those in our community? — also navigate this tumultuous time. See? It’s an opportunity. I wish I had the answers right now. But, it’s still a time of uncertainty. I just know that there’s a lot of change happening and I want to be in front of it rather than trying to play catch up. Wish me luck. — Alright friends — that's my update for 2023! I’ve always appreciated sharing these updates with the Reddit community, getting feedback, being asked tough questions, and even battling it out with some of my haters (hey!! 👋) As usual, I’m going to pop in throughout the next few days to respond to comments or answer questions. Feel free to share thoughts, ideas, and brutal takedowns in the comments. If you're interested in following the Optimist journey and the other projects I'm working on in 2023, you can follow me on Twitter. Cheers, Tyler P.S. - If you're running or launching a freelance or agency business and looking for help figuring it out, please DM me. Our subscription community, Middle of the Funnel, was created to provide feedback, lessons, and resources for other entrepreneurs in this space.

#reddit#started#content
Secret behind Airbnb's Billion-Dollar Empire? Spamming Craigslist
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
deadcoder0904•This week

Secret behind Airbnb's Billion-Dollar Empire? Spamming Craigslist

Silicon Valley wants you to believe that their unicorn startups succeeded doing things legally. But that couldn't be far from truth. For starters, Airbnb used multiple Gmail accounts to spam Craigslist. "They posted unrealistically (fake) cheap rentals of beautiful apartments in places where normal rent should be 10x more. Once people replied, they auto-responded that the unit has been rented, but they should be looking for another unit on AirBnB." The Game of Blackhat is a cat-and-mouse game. You need a lot of guardrails to protect yourself from people using your Social Site by spamming their products. Craigslist is a team of 30 people. There's stuff AI can automate now with such a small team but back then, it wasn't possible. Airbnb used Craigslist as its playground to spam Craigslist visitors to grow their supply-side. In a 2-sided marketplace, growing both supply and demand is very important. And both must grow at the same time for the marketplace to work. A Blackhat Marketer created a new test site to get vacation rental owners to sign-up so that he can test his Airbnb theory. He grabbed their real email-addresses (not Craigslist anonymous addresses) via Craigslist by specifically targeting those who were advertising their vacation rentals on Craigslist. He skipped over the other categories that were directly related to AirBnB's business model because they didn't fit with the test site he built. Once he got 1000+ sign-ups, he then took it upon himself to post it to the advertising section on Craigslist. The email said this: I am emailing you because you have one of the nicest listings on Craigslist in Idaho and I want to recommend you feature it (for free) on one of the largest Idaho housing sites on the web, Airbnb. The site already has 3,000,000 pages views a month. Check it out here to list now: airbnb(dot)com Sarah Surpisingly, all emails were by ladies. He did the same in Week 2 and Week 3 to test if it wasn't a one-time thing. Surely, it wasn't a fluke. After posting 4 ads on Craigslist in 3 weeks, he received 5 identical emails from 2 ladies who were raving fans of AirBnB and spent their days emailing Craigslist advertisers. This is one of the greatest blackhat strategies used in the real world to build a billion-dollar marketplace by growing the supply-side with pure blackhat. These strategies are not mentioned in Press Interviews, Media, or any Founder stories but this is probably the most important piece of the puzzle. Without it, Airbnb probably wouldn't have survived. "Some very famous investors have alluded to the fact that they look for a dangerous streak in the entrepreneurs they invest in…and while those investors will never come out and tell you what they mean, this kind of thing is probably what they mean." It definitely violates CAN-SPAM act. Some comments from Hacker News: "CAN-SPAM, sending from a fake address (illegal headers). CA has a specific law that pre-empts CAN-SPAM that definitely makes this illegal if sent from CA." But I guess it worked in Airbnb's favour lol as they were never caught or fined until after. "It's commercial email 100%. Probably a fake sender name (illegal), against gmail ToS, against CL ToS and no unsubscribe link and no one even subscribed in the first place. 100% against CAN-SPAM." Thanks for reading. If you'd like to learn more blackhat tactics like this, check this site which is a growth hacking newsletter with real-world blackhat examples. PS: Actual emails & screenshots from the Airbnb x Craigslist spam can be found here.

#reddit#secret#behind
I need 10 agencies doing $1K+ MRR looking for new clients
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
JohanTHEDEV•This week

I need 10 agencies doing $1K+ MRR looking for new clients

For the past year, we've been building Surfkey. It started as a Reddit keyword alert tool focused on helping SaaS get new users from Reddit by jumping into relevant conversations, providing value, and plugging their product when it makes sense. We spent the last 3 months implementing AI to find relevant conversations without noise and once again made the beginner mistake of building for way too long. After the release, it's clear it's hard for product founders to attribute new customers to being part of Reddit conversations. But an interesting pattern appeared - agencies, freelancers, and productized services started subscribing and sending us their success stories. They got new leads from Reddit ranging from $2-$10k deals. I realized it's very hard for a product owner to see the impact of commenting on Reddit, but it's easy to connect your new lead to the conversation you were part of yesterday. And there are so many people on Reddit asking for help, looking for a new hire or just being stuck. But at the right stage of becoming a client. We are mid-pivot looking for 10 agencies that will be happy to test-drive Surfkey with us. It's fairly simple, it serves you all the posts where it makes sense to jump in, share your knowledge and then offer your service.Happy to answer any Q's!

#reddit#need#agencies
I got fired due to automation — lessons learned. Two-month overview.
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
WebsterPepster•This week

I got fired due to automation — lessons learned. Two-month overview.

UPD: Guys, I'm not promoting myself as some of the redditors decided. That's why to deal with contradictions I'll do next things: make additional post with short review and description of the general tools and processes you could apply. help only those who have already written me. So I won't answer on new offers or DMs. As mentioned, damn robots have taken my job. PRE-HISTORY During Covid times, I found myself without my offline job, and since I was interested in marketing and SMM, I began searching for a job there. Completed free Google and Udemy courses and finally landed my first SMM manager position with a business owner. He had several projects so, finally, I started managing three Twitter accounts, two Facebook accs, two IGs, and one TikTok. I handled posting, content editing and responding routine, while freelancers usually took care of video creation for IG and TT. THE STORY ITSELF Things took a turn for the worse in April when my employer introduced ChatGPT and Midjourney, tools I was already using. The owner insisted on integrating them into the workflow, and my wages took a 20% hit. I thought I could roll with it, but it was just the beginning. By midsummer, the owner implemented second-layer AI tools like Visla, Pictory, and Woxo for video (bye freelancers, lol), as well as TweetHunter, Jasper, and Perplexity for content. Midjourney and Firefly joined for image generation. All together, my paycheck was slashed by 50%. Finally, at the end of October, my boss told me he automated stuff with Zapier, cutting costs that way. Additionally, he adopted MarketOwl, autoposting tool for Twitter, and SocialBee for Facebook. He stated that he didn’t need me, as by now he could manage the social media accounts himself. I feel so pissed then and even thought that there's no point in searching for similar jobs. HOW I SPENT TWO MONTHS Well, for the first two weeks, I did nothing but being miserable, drinking and staring at the wall. My gf said it's unbearable and threatened to leave if I not pull myself together. It was not the final push, but definitely made me rethink things. So I decided to learn more about the capabilities of these automation covers and eventually became an AI adviser for small businesses. It's ironic that now I sometimes earn money advising on how to optimize marketing, possibly contributing to other people's job loss. FINAL THOUGHTS I am fully aware of the instability of such a job and have invested my last savings in taking an online marketing course at Columbia to gain more marketing experience and got something more stable afterwards. Message for mods: I'm not promoting myself or anything mentioned here; just sharing the experience that someone might find helpful.

#reddit#fired#automation
Started a content marketing agency 8 years ago - $0 to $7,863,052 (2025 update)
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.882
mr_t_forhire•This week

Started a content marketing agency 8 years ago - $0 to $7,863,052 (2025 update)

Hey friends, My name is Tyler and for the past 8 years, I’ve been documenting my experience building a content marketing agency called Optimist. Year 1 — 0 to $500k ARR Year 2 — $500k to $1MM ARR Year 3 — $1MM ARR to $1.5MM(ish) ARR Year 4 — $3,333,686 Revenue Year 5 — $4,539,659 Revenue Year 6 — $5,974,324 Revenue Year 7 - $6,815,503 Revenue (Edit: Seems like links are banned now. You can check my post history for all of my previous updates with lessons and learnings.) How Optimist Works First, an overview/recap of the Optimist business model: We operate as a “collective” of full time/professional freelancers Everyone aside from me is a contractor Entirely remote/distributed team We pay freelancers a flat fee for most work, working out to roughly $65-100/hour. Clients pay us a flat monthly fee for full-service content marketing (research, strategy, writing, editing, design/photography, reporting and analytics, targeted linkbuilding, and more)\ Packages range in price from \~$10-20k/mo \This is something we are revisiting now* The Financials In 2024, we posted $1,032,035.34 in revenue. This brings our lifetime revenue to $7,863,052. Here’s our monthly revenue from January 2017 to December of 2024. (Edit: Seems like I'm not allowed to link to the chart.) The good news: Revenue is up 23% YoY. EBITDA in Q4 trending up 1-2 points. We hosted our first retreat in 4 years, going to Ireland with about half the team. The bad news: Our revenue is still historically low. At $1MM for the year, we’re down about 33% from our previous years over $1.5MM. Revenue has been rocky. It doesn’t feel like we’ve really “recovered” from the bumps last year. The trend doesn’t really look great. Even though, anecdotally, it feels like we are moving in a good direction. EBITDA is still hovering at around 7%. Would love to get that closer to 20%. (For those who may ask: I’m calculating EBITDA after paying taxes and W2 portion of my income.) — Almost every year, my update starts the same way: This has been a year of growth and change. Both for my business—and me personally. 2024 was no different. I guess that tells you something about entrepreneurship. It’s a lot more like sailing a ship than driving a car. You’re constantly adapting, tides are shifting, and any blip of calm is usually just a moment before the next storm. As with past years, there’s a lot to unpack from the last 12 months. Here we go again. Everything is Burning In the last 2 years, everything has turned upside down in the world of content and SEO. Back in 2020, we made a big decision to re-position the agency. (See post history) We decided to narrow our focus to our most successful, profitable, and consistent segment of clients and re-work our entire operation to focus on serving them. We defined our ICP as: \~Series A ($10mm+ funding) with 6-12 months runway to scale organic as a channel Product-led company with “simple” sales cycle involving fewer stakeholders Demonstrable opportunity to use SEO to drive business growth Our services: Content focused on growing organic search (SEO) Full-service engagements that included research, planning, writing, design, reporting And our engagement structure: Engaged directly with an executive; ownership over strategy and day-to-day execution 1-2 points of contact or stakeholders Strategic partner that drives business growth (not a service vendor who makes content) Most importantly, we decided that we were no longer going to offer a broader range of content that we used to sell. That included everything from thought leadership content to case studies and ebooks. We doubled-down on “SEO content” for product-led SaaS companies. And this worked phenomenally for us. We started bringing on more clients than ever. We developed a lot of internal system and processes that helped us scale and take on more work than we’ve ever had and drive great outcomes for our ideal clients. But in 2023 and 2024, things started going awry. One big change, of course, was the rise of AI. Many companies and executives (and writers) feel that AI can write content just as well as an agency like ours. That made it a lot harder to sell a $10,000 per month engagement when they feel like the bulk of the work could be “done for free.” (Lots of thoughts on this if you want my opinions.) But it wasn’t just that. Google also started tinkering with their algorithm, introducing new features like AI Overviews, and generally changing the rules of the game. This created 3 big shifts in our world: The perceived value of content (especially “SEO content”) dropped dramatically in many people’s minds because of AI’s writing capabilities SEO became less predictable as a source of traffic and revenue It’s harder than ever for startups and smaller companies to rank for valuable keywords (let alone generate any meaningful traffic or revenue from them) The effect? The middle of the content market has hollowed out. People—like us—providing good, human-crafted content aimed on driving SEO growth saw a dramatic decline in demand. We felt it all year. Fewer and fewer leads. The leads we did see usually scoffed at our prices. They were indexing us against the cost of content mills and mass-produced AI articles. It was a time of soul-searching and looking for a way forward. I spent the first half of the year convinced that the only way to survive was to run toward the fire. We have to build our own AI workflows. We have to cut our rates internally. We have to get faster and cheaper to stay competitive with the agencies offering the same number of deliverables for a fraction of our rates. It’s the only way forward. But then I asked myself a question… Is this the game I actually want to play? As an entrepreneur, do I want to run a business where I’m competing mostly on price and efficiency rather than quality and value? Do I want to hop into a race toward cheaper and cheaper content? Do I want to help people chase a dwindling amount of organic traffic that’s shrinking in value? No. That’s not the game I want to play. That’s not a business I want to run. I don’t want to be in the content mill business. So I decided to turn the wheel—again. Repositioning Part II: Electric Boogaloo What do you do when the whole world shifts around you and the things that used to work aren’t working anymore? You pivot. You re-position the business and move in another direction. So that’s what we decided to do. Again. There was only one problem: I honestly wasn’t sure what opportunities existed in the content marketing industry outside of what we were already doing. We lived in a little echo chamber of startups and SEO. It felt like the whole market was on fire and I had fight through the smoke to find an escape hatch. So I started making calls. Good ol’ fashioned market research. I reached out to a few dozen marketing and content leaders at a bunch of different companies. I got on the phone and just asked lots of questions about their content programs, their goals, and their pain points. I wanted to understand what was happening in the market and how we could be valuable. And, luckily, this process really paid off. I learned a lot about the fragmentation happening across content and how views were shifting. I noticed key trends and how our old target market really wasn’t buying what we were selling. Startups and small companies are no longer willing to invest in an agency like ours. If they were doing content and SEO at all, they were focused entirely on using AI to scale output and minimize costs. VC money is still scarce and venture-backed companies are more focused on profitability than pure growth and raising another round. Larger companies (\~500+ employees) are doing more content than ever and drowning in content production. They want to focus on strategy but can barely tread water keeping up with content requests from sales, demand gen, the CEO, and everyone else. Many of the companies still investing in content are looking at channels and formats outside of SEO. Things like thought leadership, data reports, interview-driven content, and more. They see it as a way to stand out from the crowd of “bland SEO content.” Content needs are constantly in flux. They range from data reports and blog posts to product one-pagers. The idea of a fixed-scope retainer is a total mismatch for the needs of most companies. All of this led to the logical conclusion: We were talking to the wrong people about the wrong things\.\ Many companies came to one of two logical conclusions: SEO is a risky bet, so it’s gotta be a moonshot—super-low cost with a possibility for a big upside (i.e., use AI to crank out lots of content. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, then at least we aren’t out much money.) SEO is a risky bet, so we should diversify into other strategies and channels to drive growth (i.e., shift our budget from SEO and keyword-focused content to video, podcasts, thought leadership, social, etc) Unless we were going to lean into AI and dramatically cut our costs and rates, our old buyers weren’t interested. And the segment of the market that needs our help most are looking primarily for production support across a big range of content types. They’re not looking for a team to run a full-blown program focused entirely on SEO. So we had to go back to the drawing board. I’ve written before about our basic approach to repositioning the business. But, ultimately it comes down to identifying our unique strengths as a team and then connecting them to needs in the market. After reviewing the insights from my discussions and taking another hard look at our business and our strengths, I decided on a new direction: Move upmarket: Serve mid-size to enterprise businesses with \~500-5,000 employees instead of startups Focus on content that supports a broader range of business goals instead of solely on SEO and organic growth (e.g., sales, demand gen, brand, etc) Shift back to our broader playbook of content deliverables, including thought leadership, data studies, and more Focus on content execution and production to support an internally-directed content strategy across multiple functions In a way, it’s sort of a reverse-niche move. Rather than zooming in specifically on driving organic growth for startups, we want to be more of an end-to-end content production partner that solves issues of execution and operations for all kinds of content teams. It’s early days, but the response here has been promising. We’ve seen an uptick in leads through Q4. And more companies in our pipeline fit the new ICP. They’re bigger, often have more budget. (But they move more slowly). We should know by the end of the quarter if this maneuver is truly paying off. Hopefully, this will work out. Hopefully our research and strategy are right and we’ll find a soft landing serving a different type of client. If it doesn’t? Then it will be time to make some harder decisions. As I already mentioned, I’m not interested in the race to the bottom of AI content. And if that’s the only game left in town, then it might be time to think hard about a much bigger change. — To be done: Build new content playbooks for expanded deliverables Build new showcase page for expanded deliverables Retooling the Operation It’s easy to say we’re doing something new. It’s a lot harder to actually do it—and do it well. Beyond just changing our positioning, we have to do open-heart surgery on the entire content operation behind the scenes. We need to create new systems that work for a broader range of content types, formats, and goals. Here’s the first rub: All of our workflows are tooled specifically for SEO-focused content. Every template, worksheet, and process that we’ve built and scaled in the last 5 years assumes that the primary goal of every piece of content is SEO. Even something as simple as requiring a target keyword is a blocker in a world where we’re not entirely focused on SEO. This is relatively easy to fix, but it requires several key changes: Update content calendars to make keywords optional Update workflows to determine whether we need an optimization report for each deliverable Next, we need to break down the deliverables into parts rather than a single line item. In our old system, we would plan content as a single row in a Content Calendar spreadsheet. It was a really wide sheet with lots of fields where we’d define the dimensions of each individual article. This was very efficient and simple to follow. But every article had the same overall scope when it came to the workflow. In Asana (our project management tool), all of the steps in the creation were strung together in a single task. We would create a few basic templates for each client, and then each piece would flow through the same steps: Briefing Writing Editing Design etc. If we had anything that didn’t fit into the “standard” workflow, we’d just tag it in the calendar with an unofficial notation \[USING BRACKETS\]. It worked. But it wasn’t ideal. Now we need the steps to be more modular. Imagine, for example, a client asks us to create a mix of deliverables: 1 article with writing + design 1 content brief 1 long-form ebook with an interview + writing + design Each of these would require its own steps and its own workflow. We need to break down the work to accommodate for a wider variety of workflows and variables. This means we need to update the fields and structure of our calendar to accommodate for the new dimensions—while also keeping the planning process simple and manageable. This leads to the next challenge: The number of “products” that we’re offering could be almost infinite. Just looking at the example scope above, you can mix and match all of these different building blocks to create a huge variety of different types of work, each requiring its own workflow. This is part of the reason we pivoted away from this model to focus on a productized, SEO-focused content service back in 2020. Take something as simple as a case study. On the surface, it seems like one deliverable that can be easily scoped and priced, right? Well, unpack what goes into a case study: Is there already source material from the customer or do we need to conduct an interview? How long is it? Is it a short overview case study or a long-form narrative? Does it need images and graphics? How many? Each of these variables opens up 2-3 possibilities. And when you combine them, we end up with something like 10 possible permutations for this single type of deliverable. It gets a bit messy. But not only do we have to figure out how to scope and price all for all of these variables, we also have to figure out how to account for these variables in the execution. We have to specify—for every deliverable—what type it is, how long, which steps are involved and not involved, the timeline for delivery, and all of the other factors. We’re approaching infinite complexity, here. We have to figure out a system that allows for a high level of flexibility to serve the diverse needs of our clients but is also productized enough that we can build workflows, process, and templates to deliver the work. I’ve spent the last few months designing that system. Failed Attempt #1: Ultra-Productization In my first pass, I tried to make it as straight forward as possible. Just sit down, make a list of all of the possible deliverables we could provide and then assign them specific scopes and services. Want a case study? Okay that’ll include an interview, up to 2,000 words of content, and 5 custom graphics. It costs $X. But this solution quickly fell apart when we started testing it against real-world scenarios. What if the client provided the brief instead of us creating one? What if they didn’t want graphics? What if this particular case study really needs to be 3,000 words but all of the others should be 2,000? In order for this system to work, we’d need to individual scope and price all of these permutations of each productized service. Then we’d need to somehow keep track of all of these and make sure that we accurately scope, price, and deliver them across dozens of clients. It’s sort of like a restaurant handling food allergies by creating separate versions of every single dish to account for every individual type of allergy. Most restaurants have figured out that it makes way more sense to have a “standard” and an “allergy-free” version. Then you only need 2 options to cover 100% of the cases. Onto the next option. Failed Attempt #2: Deliverable-Agnostic Services Next, I sat down with my head of Ops, Katy, to try to map it out. We took a big step back and said: Why does the deliverable itself even matter? At the end of the day, what we’re selling is just a few types of work (research, writing, editing, design, etc) that can be packaged up in an infinite number of ways. Rather than try to define deliverables, shouldn’t we leave it open ended for maximum flexibility? From there, we decided to break down everything into ultra-modular building blocks. We started working on this super complex system of modular deliverables where we would have services like writing, design, editing, etc—plus a sliding scale for different scopes like the length of writing or the number of images. In theory, it would allow us to mix and match any combination of services to create custom deliverables for the client. In fact, we wanted the work to be deliverable-agnostic. That way we could mold it to fit any client’s needs and deliver any type of content, regardless of the format or goal. Want a 5,000-word case study with 15 custom graphics? That’ll be $X. Want a 2,000-word blog post with an interview and no visuals? $Y. Just want us to create 10 briefs, you handle the writing, and we do design? It’s $Z. Again, this feels like a reasonable solution. But it quickly spiraled out of amuck. (That’s an Office reference.) For this to work, we need to have incredibly precise scoping process for every single deliverable. Before we can begin work (or even quote a price), we need to know pretty much the exact word count of the final article, for example. In the real world? This almost never happens. The content is as long as the content needs to be. Clients rarely know if the blog post should be 2,000 words or 3,000 words. They just want good content. We have a general ballpark, but we can rarely dial it in within just 1,000 words until we’ve done enough research to create the brief. Plus, from a packaging and pricing perspective, it introduces all kind of weird scenarios where clients will owe exactly $10,321 for this ultra-specific combination of services. We were building an open system that could accommodate any and all types of potential deliverables. On the face that seems great because it makes us incredibly flexible. In reality, the ambiguity actually works against us. It makes it harder for us to communicate to clients clearly about what they’ll get, how much it will cost, and how long it will take. That, of course, also means that it hurts our client relationships. (This actually kind of goes back to my personal learnings, which I’ll mention in a bit. I tend to be a “let’s leave things vague so we don’t have to limit our options” kind of person. But I’m working on fixing this to be more precise, specific, and clear in everything that we do.) Dialing It In: Building a Closed System We were trying to build an open system. We need to build a closed system. We need to force clarity and get specific about what we do, what we don’t do, and how much it all costs. Then we need a system to expand on that closed system—add new types of deliverables, new content playbooks, and new workflows if and when the need arises. With that in mind, we can start by mapping out the key dimensions of any type of deliverable that we would ever want to deliver. These are the universal dimensions that determine the scope, workflow, and price of any deliverable—regardless of the specific type output. Dimensions are: Brief scope Writing + editing scope Design scope Interview scope Revision (rounds) Scope, essentially, just tells us how many words, graphics, interviews, etc are required for the content we’re creating. In our first crack at the system, we got super granular with these scopes. But to help force a more manageable system, we realized that we didn’t need tiny increments for most of this work. Instead, we just need boundaries—you pay $X for up to Y words. We still need some variability around the scope of these articles. Obviously, most clients won’t be willing to pay the same price for a 1,000-word article as a 10,000-word article. But we can be smarter about the realistic break points. We boiled it down to the most common ranges: (Up to) 250 words 1,000 words 3,000 words 6,000 words 10,000 words This gives us a much more manageable number of variables. But we still haven’t exactly closed the system. We need one final dimension: Deliverable type. This tells us what we’re actually building with these building blocks. This is how we’ll put a cap on the potentially infinite number of combinations we could offer. The deliverable type will define what the final product should look like (e.g., blog post, case study, ebook, etc). And it will also give us a way to put standards and expectations around different types of deliverables that we want to offer. Then we can expand on this list of deliverables to offer new services. In the mean time, only the deliverables that we have already defined are, “on the menu,” so to speak. If a client comes to us and asks for something like a podcast summary article (which we don’t currently offer), we’ll have to either say we can’t provide that work or create a new deliverable type and define the dimensions of that specific piece. But here’s the kicker: No matter the deliverable type, it has to still fit within the scopes we’ve already defined. And the pricing will be the same. This means that if you’re looking for our team to write up to 1,000 words of content, it costs the same amount—whether it’s a blog post, an ebook, a LinkedIn post, or anything else. Rather than trying to retool our entire system to offer this new podcast summary article deliverable, we’ll just create the new deliverable type, add it to the list of options, and it’s ready to sell with the pre-defined dimensions we’ve already identified. To do: Update onboarding workflow Update contracts and scope documents Dial in new briefing process Know Thyself For the last year, I’ve been going through personal therapy. (Huge shout out to my wife, Laura, for her support and encouragement throughout the process.) It’s taught me a lot about myself and my tendencies. It’s helped me find some of my weaknesses and think about how I can improve as a person, as a partner, and as an entrepreneur. And it’s forced me to face a lot of hard truths. For example, consider some of the critical decisions I’ve made for my business: Unconventional freelance “collective” model No formal management structure Open-ended retainers with near-infinite flexibility General contracts without defined scope “Take it or leave it” approach to sales and marketing Over the years, I’ve talked about almost everything on this list as a huge advantage. I saw these things as a reflection of how I wanted to do things differently and better than other companies. But now, I see them more as a reflection of my fears and insecurities. Why did I design my business like this? Why do I want so much “flexibility” and why do I want things left open-ended rather than clearly defined? One reason that could clearly explain it: I’m avoidant. If you’re not steeped in the world of therapy, this basically means that my fight or flight response gets turned all the way to “flight.” If I’m unhappy or uncomfortable, my gut reaction is usually to withdraw from the situation. I see commitment and specificity as a prelude to future conflict. And I avoid conflict whenever possible. So I built my business to minimize it. If I don’t have a specific schedule of work that I’m accountable for delivering, then we can fudge the numbers a bit and hope they even out in the end. If I don’t set a specific standard for the length of an article, then I don’t have to let the client know when their request exceeds that limit. Conflict….avoided? Now, that’s not to say that everything I’ve built was wrong or bad. There is a lot of value in having flexibility in your business. For example, I would say that our flexible retainers are, overall, an advantage. Clients have changing needs. Having flexibility to quickly adapt to those needs can be a huge value add. And not everything can be clearly defined upfront (at least not without a massive amount of time and work just to decide how long to write an article). Overly-rigid structures and processes can be just as problematic as loosey-goosey ones. But, on the whole, I realized that my avoidant tendencies and laissez faire approach to management have left a vacuum in many areas. The places where I avoided specificity were often the places where there was the most confusion, uncertainty, and frustration from the team and from clients. People simply didn’t know what to expect or what was expected of them. Ironically, this often creates the conflict I’m trying to avoid. For example, if I don’t give feedback to people on my team, then they feel uneasy about their work. Or they make assumptions about expectations that don’t match what I’m actually expecting. Then the client might get upset, I might get upset, and our team members may be upset. Conflict definitely not avoided. This happens on the client side, too. If we don’t define a specific timeline when something will be delivered, the client might expect it sooner than we can deliver—creating frustration when we don’t meet their expectation. This conflict actually would have been avoided if we set clearer expectations upfront. But we didn’t do that. I didn’t do that. So it’s time to step up and close the gaps. Stepping Up and Closing the Gaps If I’m going to address these gaps and create more clarity and stability, I have to step up. Both personally and professionally. I have to actually face the fear and uncertainty that drives me to be avoidant. And then apply that to my business in meaningful ways that aren’t cop-out ways of kinda-sorta providing structure without really doing it. I’ve gotta be all in. This means: Fill the gaps where I rely on other people to do things that aren’t really their job but I haven’t put someone in place to do it Set and maintain expectations about our internal work processes, policies, and standards Define clear boundaries on things like roles, timelines, budgets, and scopes Now, this isn’t going to happen overnight. And just because I say that I need to step up to close these gaps doesn’t mean that I need to be the one who’s responsible for them (at least not forever). It just means that, as the business leader, I need to make sure the gaps get filled—by me or by someone else who has been specifically charged with owning that part of the operation. So, this is probably my #1 focus over the coming quarter. And it starts by identifying the gaps that exist. Then, step into those gaps myself, pay someone else to fill that role, or figure out how to eliminate the gap another way. This means going all the way back to the most basic decisions in our business. One of the foundational things about Optimist is being a “different kind” of agency. I always wanted to build something that solved for the bureaucracy, hierarchy, and siloed structure of agencies. If a client has feedback, they should be able to talk directly to the person doing the work rather than going through 3 layers of account management and creative directors. So I tried to be clever. I tried to design all kinds of systems and processes that eliminated these middle rungs. (In retrospect, what I was actually doing was designing a system that played into my avoidant tendencies and made it easy to abdicate responsibility for lots of things.) Since we didn’t want to create hierarchy, we never implemented things like Junior and Senior roles. We never hired someone to manage or direct the individual creatives. We didn’t have Directors or VPs. (Hell, we barely had a project manager for the first several years of existence.) This aversion to hierarchy aligned with our values around elevating ownership and collective contribution. I still believe in the value a flat structure. But a flat structure doesn’t eliminate the complexity of a growing business. No one to review writers and give them 1:1 feedback? I guess I’ll just have to do that….when I have some spare time. No Content Director? Okay, well someone needs to manage our content playbooks and roll out new ones. Just add it to my task list. Our flat structure didn’t eliminate the need for these roles. It just eliminated the people to do them. All of those unfilled roles ultimately fell back on me or our ops person, Katy. Of course, this isn’t the first time we’ve recognized this. We’ve known there were growing holes in our business as it’s gotten bigger and more complex. Over the years, we’ve experimented with different ways to solve for it. The Old Solution: Distributed Ops One system we designed was a “distributed ops” framework. Basically, we had one person who was the head of ops (at the time, we considered anything that was non-client-facing to be “ops”). They’d plan and organize all of the various things that needed to happen around Optimist. Then they’d assign out the work to whoever was able to help. We had a whole system for tying this into the our profit share and even gave people “Partner” status based on their contributions to ops. It worked—kinda. One big downfall is that all of the tasks and projects were ad hoc. People would pick up jobs, but they didn’t have much context or expertise to apply. So the output often varied. Since we were trying to maintain a flat structure, there was minimal oversight or management of the work. In other words, we didn’t always get the best results. But, more importantly, we still didn’t close all of the gaps entirely. Because everything was an ad-hoc list of tasks and projects, we never really had the “big picture” view of everything that needed to be done across the business. This also meant we rarely had clarity on what was important, what was trivial, and what was critical. We need a better system. Stop Reinventing the Wheel (And Create a Damn Org Chart) It’s time to get serious about filling the gaps in our business. It can’t be a half-fix or an ad hoc set of projects and tasks. We need clarity on the roles that need to be filled and then fill them. The first step here is to create an org chart. A real one. Map out all of the jobs that need to be done for Optimist to be successful besides just writers and designers. Roles like: Content director Design director SEO manager Reporting Finance Account management Business development Sales Marketing Project management It feels a bit laughable listing all of these roles. Because most are either empty or have my name attached to them. And that’s the problem. I can’t do everything. And all of the empty roles are gaps in our structure—places where people aren’t getting the direction, feedback, or guidance they need to do their best work. Or where things just aren’t being done consistently. Content director, for example, should be responsible for steering the output of our content strategists, writers, and editors. They’re not micromanaging every deliverable. But they give feedback, set overall policy, and help our team identify opportunities to get better. Right now we don’t have anyone in that role. Which means it’s my job—when I have time. Looking at the org chart (a real org chart that I actually built to help with this), it’s plain as day how many roles look like this. Even if we aren’t going to implement a traditional agency structure and a strict hierarchy, we still need to address these gaps. And the only way for that to happen is face the reality and then create a plan to close the gaps. Now that we have a list of theoretical roles, we need to clearly define the responsibilities and boundaries of those roles to make sure they cover everything that actually needs to happen. Then we can begin the process of delegating, assigning, hiring, and otherwise addressing each one. So that’s what I need to do. To be done: Create job descriptions for all of the roles we need to fill Hire Biz Dev role Hire Account Lead role(s) Hire Head of Content Playing Offense As we move into Q1 of 2025 and I reflect on the tumultuous few years we’ve had, one thought keeps running through my head. We need to play offense. Most of the last 1-2 years was reacting to changes that were happening around us. Trying to make sense and chart a new path forward. Reeling. But what I really want—as a person and as an entrepreneur—is to be proactive. I want to think and plan ahead. Figure out where we want to go before we’re forced to change course by something that’s out of our control. So my overarching focus for Q1 is playing offense. Thinking longer term. Getting ahead of the daily deluge and creating space to be more proactive, innovative, and forward thinking. To do: Pilot new content formats Audit and update our own content strategy Improve feedback workflows Build out long-term roadmap for 1-2 years for Optimist Final Note on Follow-Through and Cadence In my reflection this year, one of the things I’ve realized is how helpful these posts are for me. I process by writing. So I actually end up making a lot of decisions and seeing things more clearly each time I sit down to reflect and write my yearly recap. It also gives me a space to hold myself accountable for the things I said I would do. So, I’m doing two things a bit differently from here on out. First: I’m identifying clear action items that I’m holding myself accountable for getting done in the next 3 months (listed in the above sections). In each future update, I’ll do an accounting of what I got done and what wasn’t finished (and why). Second: I’m going to start writing shorter quarterly updates. This will gives me more chances each year to reflect, process, and make decisions. Plus it gives me a shorter feedback loop for the action items that I identified above. (See—playing offense.) — Okay friends, enemies, and frenemies. This is my first update for 2025. Glad to share with y’all. And thanks to everyone who’s read, commented, reached out, and shared their own experiences over the years. We are all the accumulation of our connections and our experiences. As always, I will pop in to respond to comments and answer questions. Feel free to share your thoughts, questions, and general disdain down below. Cheers, Tyler

#reddit#started#content
I built a Word Ladder game using AI only - ZERO coding
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
eibrahim•This week

I built a Word Ladder game using AI only - ZERO coding

Hey fellow devs!!! I'm excited to share a unique project I've just completed: an online Word Ladder game built entirely using AI assistance, specifically Claude.ai. The kicker? I wrote zero lines of code myself! 🔗 Check it out: https://www.wordladdergame.com Why this matters: AI-Driven Development: This project showcases the potential of AI in software development. Everything from architecture decisions to actual code implementation was guided by AI. Zero Manual Coding: As someone with a product background but limited coding experience, I was able to bring a full-fledged web app to life without writing a single line of code myself. Rapid Prototyping: The entire process, from ideation to deployment, was incredibly fast compared to traditional development methods. I did the whole thing in under 4 hours and spent another 4 hours tweaking it (also using AI) Learning Opportunity: This approach allowed me to understand modern web development practices and technologies without getting bogged down in syntax and debugging. Tech Stack (all implemented through AI guidance): Next.js TypeScript Prisma (with PostgreSQL) Tailwind CSS Vercel for deployment The game features randomly generated word pairs, a solve button, and a clean, responsive UI. But more than the game itself, I'm excited about what this development process represents for the future of software creation. I'd love to hear your thoughts: Have you experimented with AI-assisted development? How do you see this changing the landscape for entrepreneurs and non-technical founders? What potential challenges or limitations do you foresee with this approach? Feel free to try the game and ask any questions about the development process. I'm here to discuss and learn from your insights!

#reddit#built#word
10 Side Projects in 10 Years: Lessons from Failures and a $700 Exit
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
TheValueProvider•This week

10 Side Projects in 10 Years: Lessons from Failures and a $700 Exit

Hey folks, I'm sharing my journey so far in case it can help others. Entrepreneurship can sometimes be demotivating. In my case, I've always been involved in side projects and what I've realized is that every time you crash a project, the next one makes it a bit further. So this is a long-term game and consistency ends up paying off The $1 Android Game (2015, age 18) What Happened: 500 downloads, 1€ in ad revenue Ugly UI, performance issues Key Lessons: Don’t be afraid of launching. Delaying for “perfection” is often a sign that you fear being ignored. I was trying to perfect every aspect of the game. In reality, I was delaying the launch because I feared no one would download the app. Commit to the project or kill it. At some point, this project was no longer fun (it was just about fixing device responsiveness). Most importantly, I wasn't learning anything new so I moved to smth else. The Forex Bot Regret (2016, age 19) What Happened: Lost months identifying inexistent chart patterns Created a Trading bot that was never profitable Key Lessons: Day trading’s real winners are usually brokers. There are plenty of guys selling a bot or systems that are not making money trading, why would they sell a “money-printing machine” otherwise... Develop an unfair advantage. With these projects, I developed a strong coding foundation that gave me an edge when dealing with non-technical business people. Invest countless hours to create a skills gap between you and others, one that becomes increasingly difficult for them to close (coding, public speaking, networking, etc.) The $700 Instagram Exit (2018, age 21) What Happened: Grew a motivational account to 60k followers Sold it for $700 90% of followers were in low-income countries (hard to monetize) Key Lessons: Follower quality > quantity. I focused on growth and ended up with an audience I couldn’t truly define. If brands don’t see value, you won’t generate revenue. Also, if you do not know who you are creating content for, you'll end up demotivated and stop posting. Great 3rd party product + domain authority = Affiliate marketing works. In this case, I could easily promote an IG growing service because my 50k+ followers conveyed trust. Most importantly, the service I was promoting worked amazingly. The Illegal Amazon Review Marketplace (2020, age 23) What Happened: Sellers were reimbursing buyers for positive reviews Built a WordPress marketplace to facilitate “free products for reviews” Realized it violated Amazon’s terms Key Lessons: Check for “red flags” when doing idea assessment. There will always be red and orange flags. It’s about learning to differentiate between them (e.g. illegality, 100% dependence on a platform, etc.) If there’s competition, it’s good, if they are making money it’s even better. I was thrilled when I saw no competition for my “unique idea”. Later, I discovered the obvious reason. Copying a “Proven” Business Model (2020, age 23) What Happened: Tried recreating an Instagram “comment for comment” growth tool Instagram changed the algorithm and killed the growth strategy that the product used. Key Lessons: Do not build a business that depends 100% on another business, it is too risky. Mr. Musk can increase Twitter on API pricing to $42,000 monthly without notice and Tik Tok can be banned in the US. Due to the IG algorithm change, we had built a product that was not useful, and worse, now we had no idea how to grow an IG account. Consider future project synergies before selling. I regret having sold the 60k follower IG account since it could have saved me a lot of time when convincing users to try the service. NFT Marathon Medals (2021, age 24) What Happened: Created NFT race medals Sold 20 for 5€ each, but spent 95% of meetings explaining “what is an NFT?” Key Lessons: Market timing is crucial. As with every new technology, it is only useful as long as society is ready to adopt it. No matter how promising the tech is in the eyes of SV, society will end up dictating its success (blockchain, AI, etc). In this case, the runner community was not ready to adopt blockchain (it is not even prepared today). Race organizers did not know what they were selling, and runners did not know what they were buying. The 30-day rule in Fanatical Prospecting. Do not stop prospecting. I did prospecting and closed deals 3 months after the outbound efforts. Then I was busy executing the projects and had no clients once the projects were finished. AI Portal & Co-Founder Misalignment (2023, age 26) What Happened: Built a portal for SMEs to find AI use cases Co-founders disagreed on vision and execution Platform still gets \~1 new user/day Key Lessons: Define roles and equity clearly. Our biggest strength ended up killing us. Both founders had strong strategic skills and we were constantly arguing about decisions. NextJS + Vercel + Supabase: Great stack to create a SaaS MVP. (but do not use AI with frameworks unless you know how they work conceptually) SEO is king. One of our users creates a use case on “Changing Song Lyrics with AI.” Not being our target use case, it brings 90% of our traffic. Building an AI Tool & Getting Ghosted (2024, age 27) What Happened: SEO agency wanted to automate rewriting product descriptions Built it in 3 weeks, but the client vanished Key Lessons: Validate manually first. Don’t code a full-blown solution for a problem you haven’t tested in real-world workflows. I kept rewriting code only to throw it away. Jumping straight into building a solution ended up costing more time than it saved. Use templates, no-code, and open-source for prototyping. In my case, using a Next.js template saved me about four weeks of development only to hit the same dead end, but much faster. Fall in love with your ICP or walk away. I realized I didn’t enjoy working with SEO agencies. Looking back, I should have been honest with myself and admitted that I wasn’t motivated enough by this type of customer. Ignoring Code Perfection Doubled Traffic (2025, age 28) What Happened: Partnered with an ex-colleague to build an AI agents directory Focused on content & marketing, not endless bug fixes Traffic soared organically Key Lessons: Measure the impact of your actions and double down on what works. We set up an analytics system with PostHog and found wild imbalances (e.g. 1 post about frameworks outperformed 20 promotional posts). You have to start somewhere. For us, the AI agents directory is much more than just a standalone site, it's a strategic project that will allow us to discover new products, gain domain authority, and boost other projects. It builds the path for bigger opportunities. Less coding, more traction. Every day I have to fight against myself not to code “indispensable features”. Surprisingly, the directory keeps gaining consistent traffic despite being far from perfect Quitting My Job & Looking Ahead (2025, age 28) What Happened: Left full-time work to go all-in Plan to build vertical AI agents that handle entire business workflows (support, marketing, sales) Key Lessons: Bet on yourself. The opportunity cost of staying in my full-time job outweighed the benefits. It might be your case too I hope this post helps anyone struggling with their project and inspires those considering quitting their full-time job to take the leap with confidence.

#reddit#side#projects
Where Do I Find Like-Minded, Unorthodox Co-founders? [Tech]
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.6
madscholar•This week

Where Do I Find Like-Minded, Unorthodox Co-founders? [Tech]

After more than 20 years in the tech industry I'm pretty fed up. I've been at it non-stop, so the burnout was building up for a while. Eventually, it's gotten so bad that it was no longer a question whether I need to take a break; I knew that I had to, for the sake of myself and loved ones. A few months ago I quit my well-paying, mid-level mgmt job to have some much-needed respite. I can't say that I've fully recovered, but I'm doing a bit better, so I'm starting to think about what's next. That said, the thoughts of going back into the rat race fill me with dread and anxiety. I've had an interesting career - I spent most of it in startups doing various roles from an SWE to a VP Eng, including having my own startup adventures for a couple of years. The last 4.5 years of my career have been in one of the fastest growing tech companies - it was a great learning experience, but also incredibly stressful, toxic and demoralizing. It's clear to me that I'm not cut out for the corporate world -- the ethos contradicts with my personality and beliefs -- but it's not just. I've accumulated "emotional scars" from practically every place I worked at and it made me loathe the industry to the degree that if I ever have another startup, it'd have to be by my own -- unorthodox -- ideals, even if it means a premature death due to lack of funding. I was young, stupid and overly confident when I had my first startup. I tried to do it "by the book" and dance to the tune of investors. While my startup failed for other, unrelated reasons, it gave me an opportunity to peak behind the curtain, experience the power dynamics, and get a better understanding to how the game is played - VCs and other person of interest have popularized the misconception that if a company doesn't scale, it would stagnate and eventually regress and die. This is nonsense. This narrative was created because it would make the capitalist pigs obsolete - they need companies to go through the entire alphabet before forcing them to sell or IPO. The sad reality is that the most entrepreneurs still believe in this paradigm and fall into the VC's honeypot traps. It's true that many businesses cannot bootstrap or scale without VC money, but it's equally true that far too many companies pivot/scale prematurely (and enshitify their product in the process) due to external pressures fueled by pure greed. This has a top-bottom effect - enshitification doesn't only effect users, but it also heavily effects the processes and structrures of companies, which can explain why the average tenure in tech is only \~2 years. I think that we live in an age where self-starting startups are more feasible than ever. It's not just the rise of AI and automation, but also the plethora of tools, services, and open-source projects that are available to all for free. On the one hand, this is fantastic, but on the other, the low barrier-to-entry creates oversaturation of companies which makes research & discovery incredibly hard - it is overwhelming to keep up with the pace and distill the signal from the noise, and there's a LOT of noise - there's not enough metaphorical real-estate for the graveyard of startups that will be defunct in the very near future. I'd like to experiment with startups again, but I don't want to navigate through this complex mine field all by myself - I want to find a like-minded co-founder who shares the same ideals as I do. It goes without saying that being on the same page isn't enough - I also want someone who's experienced, intelligent, creative, productive, well-rounded, etc. At the moment, I don't have anyone in my professional network who has/wants what it takes. I can look into startup bootcamps/accelerators like YC et al., and sure enough, I'll find talented individuals, but it'd be a mismatch from the get-go. For shits and giggles, this is (very roughly) how I envision the ideal company: Excellent work life balance: the goal is not to make a quick exit, become filthy rich, and turn into a self-absorbed asshole bragging about how they got so succesful. The goal is to generate a steady revenue stream while not succumbing to social norms that encourage greed. The entire purpose is to reach humble financial indepedence while maintaining a stress-free (as one possibly can) work environment. QOL should always be considered before ARR. Bootstraping: no external money. Not now, not later. No quid pro quo. No shady professionals or advisors. Company makes it or dies trying. Finances: very conservative to begin with - the idea is to play it safe and build a long fucking runaway before hiring. Spend every penny mindfully and frugally. Growth shouldn't be too quick & reckless. The business will be extremely efficient in spending. The only exception to the rule is crucial infrastructure and wages to hire top talent and keep salaries competitive and fair. Hiring: fully remote. Global presence, where applicable. Headcount will be limited to the absolute bare minimum. The goal is to run with a skeleton crew of the best generalists out there - bright, self-sufficient, highly motivated, autodidact, and creative individuals. Hiring the right people is everything and should be the company's top priority. Compensation & Perks: transperent and fair, incentivizing exceptional performance with revenue sharing bonuses. The rest is your typical best-in-class perks: top tier health/dental/vision insurance, generous PTO with mandatory required minimum, parental leave, mental wellness, etc. Process: processes will be extremely efficient, automated to the max, documented, unbloated, and data-driven through and through. Internal knowledge & data metrics will be accessible and transparent to all. Employees get full autonomy of their respective areas and are fully in charge of how they spend their days as long as they have agreed-upon, coherent, measurable metrics of success. Meetings will be reduced to the absolute minimum and would have to be justified and actionable - the ideal is that most communications will be done in written form, while face-to-face will be reserved for presentations/socializing. I like the Kaizen philosophy to continuously improve and optimize processes. Product: As previously stated, "data-driven through and through". Mindful approach to understand cost/benefit. Deliberate and measured atomic improvements to avoid feature creep and slow down the inevitable entropy. Most importantly, client input should be treated with the utmost attention but should never be the main driver for the product roadmap. This is a very controversial take, but sometimes it's better to lose a paying customer than to cave to their distracting/unreasonable/time-consuming demands. People Culture: ironicaly, this would be what most companies claim to have, but for realsies. Collaborative, open, blameless environment. People are treated like actual grown ups with flat structure, full autonomy, and unwavering trust. Socializing and bonding is highly encourged, but never required. Creativity and ingenuity is highly valued - people are encouraged to work on side projects one day of the week. Values: I can write a lot about it, but it really boils down to being kind and humble. We all know what happened with "don't be evil". It's incredibly hard to retain values over time, esp. when there are opposing views within a company. I don't know how to solve it, but I believe that there should be some (tried and true) internal checks & balances from the get go to ensure things are on track. I never mentioned what this hypothetical startup does. Sure, there's another very relevant layer of domain experience fit, but this mindset allows one to be a bit more fluid because the goal is not to disrupt an industry or "make the world a better place"; it's to see work for what it truly is - a mean to an end. It's far more important for me to align with a co-founder on these topics than on an actual idea or technical details. Pivoting and rebranding are so common that many VCs outweigh the make up and chemistry of the founding team (and their ability to execute) over the feasibility of their ideas.  To wrap this long-winded post, I'm not naive or disillusioned - utopias aren't real and profitable companies who operate at a 70-80% rate of what I propose are the real unicorns, but despite them being a tiny minority, I think they are the real forward thinkers of the industry. I might be wrong, but I hope that I'm right and that more and more startups will opt towards long-term sustainability over the promise of short-term gains because the status quo really stinks for most people. What do you folks think? Does anyone relate? Where can I find others like me? P.S I thought about starting a blog writing about these topics in length (everything that is wrong with tech & what can be done to improve it), but I have the Impostor Syndrom and I'm too self-conscious about how I come off. If you somehow enjoyed reading through that and would love to hear more of my thoughts and experiences in greater detail, please let me know. P.P.S If you have a company that is close to what I'm describing and you're hiring, let me know!

#reddit#find#like-minded,
I Watched My Startup Slowly Dying Over Two Years: Mistakes and Lessons Learned
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.429
Personal-Expression3•This week

I Watched My Startup Slowly Dying Over Two Years: Mistakes and Lessons Learned

If you are tired of reading successful stories, you may want to listen to my almost failure story. Last year in April, I went full-time on my startup. Nearly two years later, I’ve seen my product gradually dying. I want to share some of the key mistakes I made and the lessons I’ve taken from them so you don't have to go through them. Some mistakes were very obvious in hindsight; others, I’m still not sure if they were mistakes or just bad luck. I’d love to hear your thoughts and advice as well. Background I built an English-learning app, with both web and mobile versions. The idea came from recognizing how expensive it is to hire an English tutor in most countries, especially for practicing speaking skills. With the rise of AI, I saw an opportunity in the education space. My target market was Japan, though I later added support for multiple languages and picked up some users from Indonesia and some Latin American countries too. Most of my users came from influencer marketing on Twitter. The MVP for the web version launched in Japan and got great feedback. People were reposting it on Twitter, and growth was at its peak in the first few weeks. After verifying the requirement with the MVP, I decided to focus on the mobile app to boost user retention, but for various reasons, the mobile version didn’t launch until December 2023— 8 months after the web version. Most of this year has been spent iterating on the mobile app, but it didn’t make much of an impact in the end. Key Events and Lessons Learned Here are some takeaways: Find co-founders as committed as you are I started with two co-founders—both were tech people and working Part-Time. After the web version launched, one dropped out due to family issues. Unfortunately, we didn’t set clear rules for equity allocation, so even after leaving, they still retained part of the equity. The other co-founder also effectively dropped out this year, contributing only minor fixes here and there. So If you’re starting a company with co-founders, make sure they’re as committed as you are. Otherwise, you might be better off going solo. I ended up teaching myself programming with AI tools, starting with Flutter and eventually handling both front-end and back-end work using Windsurf. With dev tools getting more advanced, being a solo developer is becoming a more viable option. Also, have crystal-clear rules for equity—especially around what happens if someone leaves. Outsourcing Pitfalls Outsourcing development was one of my biggest mistakes. I initially hired a former colleague from India to build the app. He dragged the project on for two months with endless excuses, and the final output was unusable. Then I hired a company, but they didn’t have enough skilled Flutter developers. The company’s owner scrambled to find people, which led to rushed work and poor-quality code which took a lot of time revising myself. Outsourcing is a minefield. If you must do it, break the project into small tasks, set clear milestones, and review progress frequently. Catching issues early can save you time and money. Otherwise, you’re often better off learning the tools yourself—modern dev tools are surprisingly beginner-friendly. Trust, but Verify I have a bad habit of trusting people too easily. I don’t like spending time double-checking things, so I tend to assume people will do what they say they’ll do. This mindset is dangerous in a startup. For example, if I had set up milestones and regularly verified the progress of my first outsourced project, I would’ve realized something was wrong within two weeks instead of two months. That would’ve saved me a lot of time and frustration. Like what I mentioned above, set up systems to verify their work—milestones, deliverables, etc.—to minimize risk. Avoid red ocean if you are small My team was tiny (or non-existent, depending on how you see it), with no technical edge. Yet, I chose to enter Japan’s English-learning market, which is incredibly competitive. It’s a red ocean, dominated by big players who’ve been in the game for years. Initially, my product’s AI-powered speaking practice and automatic grammar correction stood out, but within months, competitors rolled out similar features. Looking back, I should’ve gone all-in on marketing during the initial hype and focused on rapidly launching the mobile app. But hindsight is 20/20. 'Understanding your user' helps but what if it's not what you want? I thought I was pretty good at collecting user feedback. I added feedback buttons everywhere in the app and made changes based on what users said. But most of these changes were incremental improvements—not the kind of big updates that spark excitement. Also, my primary users were from Japan and Indonesia, but I’m neither Japanese nor Indonesian. That made it hard to connect with users on social media in an authentic way. And in my opinion, AI translations can only go so far—they lack the human touch and cultural nuance that builds trust. But honestly I'm not sure if the thought is correct to assume that they will not get touched if they recognize you are a foreigner...... Many of my Japanese users were working professionals preparing for the TOEIC exam. I didn’t design any features specifically for that; instead, I aimed to build a general-purpose English-learning tool since I dream to expand it to other markets someday. While there’s nothing wrong with this idealistic approach, it didn’t give users enough reasons to pay for the app. Should You Go Full-Time? From what I read, a lot of successful indie developers started part-time, building traction before quitting their jobs. But for me, I jumped straight into full-time mode, which worked for my lifestyle but might’ve hurt my productivity. I value work-life balance and refused to sacrifice everything for the startup. The reason I chose to leave the corp is I want to escape the 996 toxic working environment in China's internet companies. So even during my most stressful periods, I made time to watch TV with my partner and take weekends off. Anyways, if you’re also building something or thinking about starting a business, I hope my story helps. If I have other thoughts later, I will add them too. Appreciate any advice.

#reddit#watched#startup
how I built a $6k/mo business with cold email
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
Afraid-Astronomer130•This week

how I built a $6k/mo business with cold email

I scaled my SaaS to a $6k/mo business in under 6 months completely using cold email. However, the biggest takeaway for me is not a business that’s potentially worth 6-figure. It’s having a glance at the power of cold emails in the age of AI. It’s a rapidly evolving yet highly-effective channel, but no one talks about how to do it properly. Below is the what I needed 3 years ago, when I was stuck with 40 free users on my first app. An app I spent 2 years building into the void. Entrepreneurship is lonely. Especially when you are just starting out. Launching a startup feel like shouting into the dark. You pour your heart out. You think you have the next big idea, but no one cares. You write tweets, write blogs, build features, add tests. You talk to some lukewarm leads on Twitter. You do your big launch on Product Hunt. You might even get your first few sales. But after that, crickets... Then, you try every distribution channel out there. SEO Influencers Facebook ads Affiliates Newsletters Social media PPC Tiktok Press releases The reality is, none of them are that effective for early-stage startups. Because, let's face it, when you're just getting started, you have no clue what your customers truly desire. Without understanding their needs, you cannot create a product that resonates with them. It's as simple as that. So what’s the best distribution channel when you are doing a cold start? Cold emails. I know what you're thinking, but give me 10 seconds to change your mind: When I first heard about cold emailing I was like: “Hell no! I’m a developer, ain’t no way I’m talking to strangers.” That all changed on Jan 1st 2024, when I actually started sending cold emails to grow. Over the period of 6 months, I got over 1,700 users to sign up for my SaaS and grew it to a $6k/mo rapidly growing business. All from cold emails. Mastering Cold Emails = Your Superpower I might not recommend cold emails 3 years ago, but in 2024, I'd go all in with it. It used to be an expensive marketing channel bootstrapped startups can’t afford. You need to hire many assistants, build a list, research the leads, find emails, manage the mailboxes, email the leads, reply to emails, do meetings. follow up, get rejected... You had to hire at least 5 people just to get the ball rolling. The problem? Managing people sucks, and it doesn’t scale. That all changed with AI. Today, GPT-4 outperforms most human assistants. You can build an army of intelligent agents to help you complete tasks that’d previously be impossible without human input. Things that’d take a team of 10 assistants a week can now be done in 30 minutes with AI, at far superior quality with less headaches. You can throw 5000 names with website url at this pipeline and you’ll automatically have 5000 personalized emails ready to fire in 30 minutes. How amazing is that? Beyond being extremely accessible to developers who are already proficient in AI, cold email's got 3 superpowers that no other distribution channels can offer. Superpower 1/3 : You start a conversation with every single user. Every. Single. User. Let that sink in. This is incredibly powerful in the early stages, as it helps you establish rapport, bounce ideas off one another, offer 1:1 support, understand their needs, build personal relationships, and ultimately convert users into long-term fans of your product. From talking to 1000 users at the early stage, I had 20 users asking me to get on a call every week. If they are ready to buy, I do a sales call. If they are not sure, I do a user research call. At one point I even had to limit the number of calls I took to avoid burnout. The depth of the understanding of my customers’ needs is unparalleled. Using this insight, I refined the product to precisely cater to their requirements. Superpower 2/3 : You choose exactly who you talk to Unlike other distribution channels where you at best pick what someone's searching for, with cold emails, you have 100% control over who you talk to. Their company Job title Seniority level Number of employees Technology stack Growth rate Funding stage Product offerings Competitive landscape Social activity (Marital status - well, technically you can, but maybe not this one…) You can dial in this targeting to match your ICP exactly. The result is super low CAC and ultra high conversion rate. For example, My competitors are paying $10 per click for the keyword "HARO agency". I pay $0.19 per email sent, and $1.92 per signup At around $500 LTV, you can see how the first means a non-viable business. And the second means a cash-generating engine. Superpower 3/3 : Complete stealth mode Unlike other channels where competitors can easily reverse engineer or even abuse your marketing strategies, cold email operates in complete stealth mode. Every aspect is concealed from end to end: Your target audience Lead generation methods Number of leads targeted Email content Sales funnel This secrecy explains why there isn't much discussion about it online. Everyone is too focused on keeping their strategies close and reaping the rewards. That's precisely why I've chosen to share my insights on leveraging cold email to grow a successful SaaS business. More founders need to harness this channel to its fullest potential. In addition, I've more or less reached every user within my Total Addressable Market (TAM). So, if any competitor is reading this, don't bother trying to replicate it. The majority of potential users for this AI product are already onboard. To recap, the three superpowers of cold emails: You start a conversation with every single user → Accelerate to PMF You choose exactly who you talk to → Super-low CAC Complete stealth mode → Doesn’t attract competition By combining the three superpowers I helped my SaaS reach product-marketing-fit quickly and scale it to $6k per month while staying fully bootstrapped. I don't believe this was a coincidence. It's a replicable strategy for any startup. The blueprint is actually straightforward: Engage with a handful of customers Validate the idea Engage with numerous customers Scale to $5k/mo and beyond More early-stage founders should leverage cold emails for validation, and as their first distribution channel. And what would it do for you? Update: lots of DM asking about more specifics so I wrote about it here. https://coldstartblueprint.com/p/ai-agent-email-list-building

#reddit#built#$6k/mo
Secret behind Airbnb's Billion-Dollar Empire? Spamming Craigslist
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
deadcoder0904•This week

Secret behind Airbnb's Billion-Dollar Empire? Spamming Craigslist

Silicon Valley wants you to believe that their unicorn startups succeeded doing things legally. But that couldn't be far from truth. For starters, Airbnb used multiple Gmail accounts to spam Craigslist. "They posted unrealistically (fake) cheap rentals of beautiful apartments in places where normal rent should be 10x more. Once people replied, they auto-responded that the unit has been rented, but they should be looking for another unit on AirBnB." The Game of Blackhat is a cat-and-mouse game. You need a lot of guardrails to protect yourself from people using your Social Site by spamming their products. Craigslist is a team of 30 people. There's stuff AI can automate now with such a small team but back then, it wasn't possible. Airbnb used Craigslist as its playground to spam Craigslist visitors to grow their supply-side. In a 2-sided marketplace, growing both supply and demand is very important. And both must grow at the same time for the marketplace to work. A Blackhat Marketer created a new test site to get vacation rental owners to sign-up so that he can test his Airbnb theory. He grabbed their real email-addresses (not Craigslist anonymous addresses) via Craigslist by specifically targeting those who were advertising their vacation rentals on Craigslist. He skipped over the other categories that were directly related to AirBnB's business model because they didn't fit with the test site he built. Once he got 1000+ sign-ups, he then took it upon himself to post it to the advertising section on Craigslist. The email said this: I am emailing you because you have one of the nicest listings on Craigslist in Idaho and I want to recommend you feature it (for free) on one of the largest Idaho housing sites on the web, Airbnb. The site already has 3,000,000 pages views a month. Check it out here to list now: airbnb(dot)com Sarah Surpisingly, all emails were by ladies. He did the same in Week 2 and Week 3 to test if it wasn't a one-time thing. Surely, it wasn't a fluke. After posting 4 ads on Craigslist in 3 weeks, he received 5 identical emails from 2 ladies who were raving fans of AirBnB and spent their days emailing Craigslist advertisers. This is one of the greatest blackhat strategies used in the real world to build a billion-dollar marketplace by growing the supply-side with pure blackhat. These strategies are not mentioned in Press Interviews, Media, or any Founder stories but this is probably the most important piece of the puzzle. Without it, Airbnb probably wouldn't have survived. "Some very famous investors have alluded to the fact that they look for a dangerous streak in the entrepreneurs they invest in…and while those investors will never come out and tell you what they mean, this kind of thing is probably what they mean." It definitely violates CAN-SPAM act. Some comments from Hacker News: "CAN-SPAM, sending from a fake address (illegal headers). CA has a specific law that pre-empts CAN-SPAM that definitely makes this illegal if sent from CA." But I guess it worked in Airbnb's favour lol as they were never caught or fined until after. "It's commercial email 100%. Probably a fake sender name (illegal), against gmail ToS, against CL ToS and no unsubscribe link and no one even subscribed in the first place. 100% against CAN-SPAM." Thanks for reading. If you'd like to learn more blackhat tactics like this, check this site which is a growth hacking newsletter with real-world blackhat examples. PS: Actual emails & screenshots from the Airbnb x Craigslist spam can be found here.

#reddit#secret#behind
Changing Careers, changing products? Age 38, Direction needed, investment advice too.
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.667
Salad-Bandit•This week

Changing Careers, changing products? Age 38, Direction needed, investment advice too.

Hello, At one point in my life I had a set plan that I had been following in which to design a life that fit my values, but during 2020 the viability was called into question and I have been on bad footing, unable to find stability, since. Though I currently have stable housing without roommate, and enough in savings for a year without any income and three more years in a mutual fund. The question I need help with is about utilizing approximately $40,000 that I would like to invest into a new or existing business venture, or possibly start investing my own hand in selecting stocks. To give context about the parameters of concepts that pertain to me, back in 2005 I graduated highschool and immediately was an entrepreneur, started a sports clothing company, was selling WoW bot accounts, ghillie suits on ebay, and graphic design commissions, and I was proficient in MX Flash. Although the first part of my life plan to start farming three years before 2012 for what I thought would be a peak oil economic collapse, and while watching 2008 unfold, along with my career in MX Flash falling flat, I started farming 2009. From that point I spent a total of 15 years farming, the majority of that was for my own LLC, where I was situated with leases on million dollar properties as Ag tax write off, on an elite island outside a major city, serving local high price wholesale, mainly salad mix and mushrooms, because they are fast turn around. That was truly the best 20s I could have asked for, working mainly for myself, very healthy and was putting away $10-20k in savings/investments per year, plus was earning about $3-5k more per year, while living in a cargo trailer on dirt cheap leases. But it all came to a slow end starting in 2020 when I lost all of my wholesale overnight, and my retail exploded, which burnt me out to the point I couldnt walk, as the sole worker in my LLC. So I do not fully trust the volatility of the wholesale food industry, from a small grower’s perspective, since i don't own land. SO now I am trying to figure out a way forward, because I can always farm in the future, and have taught myself hydroponics, and flat packed farm equipment, so my business is very agile and now I can grow in parking lots closer to the city for more sales opportunities, but I am not sure that is what I want to do in this current moment, because tech is exploding, and we have never had so much information available to us, it's a shame not to spend a moment in life to discover what new opportunities might be out there. I was laid off twice last year, so I've been out of work the past four months, doing thriftstore routes twice a week while making about $500+/wk, really just trying to understand what people still buy and break even, while I continue to study 3d design blender, as well as 2d digital art in the hopes that I can reconnect with my tech art past, because that is what I told myself when I was 18, that I would put off art and computers until I was past 30 and needed to do less with my body. But over the past three years, the better I get at digital art, the better Ai has been getting too. I have some mentors who might give me work and a foot in the door, but most of them are laid off, and scrounging for work if they are not on their own funded indie project. I've thought about continuing to learn 3d modeling despite Ai, and despite seeing Flash, computer program I was proficient in get removed from existence before I could really earn my money back. I assume there will always be a need for Ai models to get cleaned up, mapped and rigged, especially with AR technology coming to consumers soon, but more over it would help if I decided to go to a community college to do CNC certificates, so I can have that as a backup job on CAD at a machining warehouse and do my farm and digital art on the side, but CNC mechanics don't make a crazy amount of money and have a boss. BUT I am an inventor, and have two inventions so far, plus my ultimate goal is to one day have automated hydroponic greenhouses, using all CNC+3d printed parts to create a low time investment agriculture income, with Ai monitored greenhouse, seed to salad product that i can sell to other people, which would tie into my desire to teach people about farming too, as well as do something I enjoy, but it is not a proven concept yet. Anyways if you've read this far I appreciate it, I ultimately would like 3rd party feedback about how I should spend my $40k surplus cash. I originally had it saved and accessible in case I was going to lease land and start my full farm business again from scratch, but I think using the equipment and space I have, and exploring non-perishable products is a smart move for me right now. Should I invest in inventory of products to arbitrage online? Should I invest in the top index funds? Should I buy Silver? Should I invest in inventory of a new product line? Should I spend some money insuring and equipment for a landscaping company? I want to future proof myself the best I can as Ai unfolds, I am pretty set with an income for the rest of my life as long as I can grow food and sell it, but there are currently so many changing opportunities, I want to cast out my net and see what works with my temperment. I’ve thought about getting into cyber security, or maybe be an electrician, or less staple jobs like Landscape Architech (can use art/modeling) and CNC engineer/modeler, but honestly I prefer to make a product and sell it without client service related interaction, and particularly no boss. Thank you for reading

#reddit#changing#careers,
This is why most of AI wrappers will die
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
ecommerce_it•This week

This is why most of AI wrappers will die

We began building our AI product in public as a tool to help people quickly build online stores using AI during June of 2023. It was quite a hot AI time. The tool was using ChatGPT to create a fully-functinal eCommerce store with a demo products from Amazon. And we managed to get such impression among people so they started to share it with words: "Look, I made my own store in 20 seconds." We got about 2,000 users that way, mainly people telling their friends to try it out. We built a toy Back in 2023, this idea was exciting. It was great for getting people to talk about us and for getting random people to check us out. We burned \~2k$ on various API we used then with an expectations: people will start to pay. Nobody paid. It was a train called AI and we all were the passengers, but not all of us were able to understand how to monitize this and in reality most of AI wrappers have the lack of this. Most of AI wrappers would be eaten by a bigger players, other will be not able to proceed due to fact of investment. We had a few benefits: 1) We are developers with skills in design and a bit in marketing 2) We spent years in development of eCommerce products So to keep things going it was important to focus on: 1) Longer game, there is no quick wins, unfortunatelly or fortunatelly 2) Narrower niche and smaller auditory 3) Patience 4) Building network and product authority The road to actual product So to attract real users, we had to start solving a real problem for them, to offer them something valuable. We do this already 5 months since October. We made like 5 pivots... Today our product proposition "Marketsy allows busy people to own a business: a simple in management store of digital products as a source of income" So all AI thing right now is hidden under "busy", AI helps to automate the process, but not the primary thing in the product anymore. Even eCommerce SaaS market is huge and comeptition is hight. We are going to test this approach upcoming weeks, we believe it will be a right step. Anyway we are sure we will find the right proposition and our audience, one way or another. All the best to other product builders here!

#reddit#most#wrappers
AI Content Campaign Got 4M impressions, Thousands of Website Views, Hundreds of Customers for About $100 — This is the future of marketing
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.857
adamkstinson•This week

AI Content Campaign Got 4M impressions, Thousands of Website Views, Hundreds of Customers for About $100 — This is the future of marketing

Alright. So, a few months ago I tested a marketing strategy for a client that I’ve sense dedicated my life to developing on. The Idea was to take the clients Pillar content (their YouTube videos) and use AI to rewrite the content for all the viable earned media channels (mainly Reddit). The campaign itself was moderately successful. To be specific, after one month it became their 2nd cheapest customer acquisition cost (behind their organic YouTube content). But there is a lot to be done to improve the concept. I will say, having been in growth marketing for a decade, I felt like I had hit something big with the concept. I’m going to detail how I built that AI system, and what worked well and what didn’t here. Hopefully you guys will let me know what you think and whether or not there is something here to keep working on. DEFINING THE GOAL Like any good startup, their marketing budget was minimal. They wanted to see results, fast and cheap. Usually, marketers like me hate to be in this situation because getting results usually either takes time or it takes money. But you can get results fast and cheap if you focus on an earned media strategy - basically getting featured in other people’s publication. The thing is these strategies are pretty hard to scale or grow over time. That was a problem for future me though. I looked through their analytics and saw they were getting referral traffic from Reddit - it was their 5th or 6th largest source of traffic - and they weren’t doing any marketing on the platform. It was all digital word of mouth there. It kind of clicked for me there, that Reddit might be the place to start laying the ground work. So with these considerations in mind the goal became pretty clear: Create content for relevant niche communities on Reddit with the intent of essentially increasing brand awareness. Use an AI system to repurpose their YouTube videos to keep the cost of producing unique content for each subreddit really low. THE HIGH-LEVEL STRATEGY I knew that there are huge amounts of potential customers on Reddit (About 12M people in all the relevant communities combined) AND that most marketers have a really tough time with the platform. I also knew that any earned media strategy, Reddit or not, means Click Through Rates on our content would be extremely low. A lot of people see this as a Reddit specific problem because you can’t self-promote on the platform, but really you have to keep self-promotion to a minimum with any and all earned media. This basically meant we had to get a lot of impressions to make up for it. The thing about Reddit is if your post absolutely crushes it, it can get millions of views. But crushing it is very specific to what the expectations are of that particular subreddit. So we needed to make content that was specifically written for that Subreddit. With that I was able to essentially design how this campaign would work: We would put together a list of channels (specifically subreddits to start) that we wanted to create content for. For each channel, we would write a content guideline that details out how to write great content for this subreddit. These assets would be stored in an AirTable base, along with the transcripts of the YouTube videos that were the base of our content. We would write and optimize different AI Prompts that generated different kinds of posts (discussion starters about a stock, 4-5 paragraph stock analysis, Stock update and what it means, etc…) We would build an automation that took the YouTube transcripts, ran each prompt on it, and then edited each result to match the channel writing guidelines. And then we would find a very contextual way to leave a breadcrumb back to the client. Always as part of the story of the content. At least, this is how I originally thought things would go. CHOOSING THE RIGHT SUBREDDITS Picking the right communities was vital. Here’s the basic rubric we used to pick and prioritize them: • Relevance: We needed communities interested in stock analysis, personal finance, or investing. • Subreddit Size vs. Engagement: Large subreddits offer more potential impressions but can be less focused. Smaller subreddits often have higher engagement rates. • Content Feasibility: We had to ensure we could consistently create high-value posts for each chosen subreddit. We started with about 40 possibilities, then narrowed it down to four or five that consistently delivered upvotes and user signups. CREATING CHANNEL-SPECIFIC GUIDES By the end, creating channel specific writing guidelines looked like a genius decision. Here’s how we approached it and used AI to get it done quickly: Grabbed Top Posts: We filtered the subreddit’s top posts (change filter to “Top” and then “All Time”) of all time to see the kinds of content that performed best Compiled The Relevant Posts: We took the most relevant posts to what we were trying to do and put them all on one document (basically created one document per subreddit that just had the top 10 posts in that subreddit). Had AI Create Writing Guideline Based On Posts: For each channel, we fed the document with the 10 posts with the instructions “Create a writing guideline for this subreddit based on these high performing posts. I had to do some editing on each guideline but this worked pretty well and saved a lot of time. Each subreddit got a custom guideline, and we put these inside the “Channels” table of the AirTable base we were developing with these assets. BUILDING THE AI PROMPTS THAT GENERATED CONTENT Alright this is probably the most important section so I’ll be detailed. Essentially, we took all the assets we developed up until this point, and used them to create unique posts for each channel. This mean each AI prompt was about 2,000 words of context and produced about a 500-word draft. There was a table in our AirTable where we stored the prompts, as I alluded to earlier. And these were basically the instructions for each prompt. More specifically, they detailed out our expectations for the post. In other words, there were different kinds of posts that performed well on each channel. For example, you can write a post that’s a list of resources (5 tools we used to…), or a how to guide (How we built…), etc.. Those weren’t the specific ones we used, but just wanted to really explain what I meant there. That actual automation that generated the content worked as follows: New source content (YouTube video transcript) was added to the Source Content table. This triggered the Automation. The automation grabbed all the prompts in the prompt table. For each prompt in the prompt table, we sent a prompt to OpenAI (gpt-4o) that contained first the prompt and also the source content. Then, for each channel that content prompt could be used on, we sent another prompt to OpenAI that revised the result of the first prompt based on the specific channel guidelines. The output of that prompt was added to the Content table in AirTable. To be clear, our AirTable had 4 tables: Content Channels Prompts Source Content The Source Content, Prompts, and Channel Guidelines were all used in the prompt that generated content. And the output was put in the Content table. Each time the automation ran, the Source Content was turned into about 20 unique posts, each one a specific post type generated for a specific channel. In other words, we were create a ton of content. EDITING & REFINING CONTENT The AI drafts were never perfect. Getting them Reddit-ready took editing and revising The main things I had to go in and edit for were: • Tone Adjustments: We removed excessively cliche language. The AI would say silly things like “Hello fellow redditors!” which sound stupid. • Fact-Checking: Financial data can be tricky. We discovered AI often confused figures, so we fact check all stock related metrics. Probably something like 30-40% error rate here. Because the draft generation was automated, that made the editing and getting publish ready the human bottleneck. In other words, after creating the system I spent basically all my time reviewing the content. There were small things I could do to make this more efficient, but not too much. The bigger the model we used, the less editing the content needed. THE “BREADCRUMB” PROMOTION STRATEGY No where in my prompt to the AI did I mention that we were doing any marketing. I just wanted the AI to focus on creating content that would do well on the channel. So in the editing process I had to find a way to promote the client. I called it a breadcrumb strategy once and that stuck. Basically, the idea was to never overtly promote anything. Instead find a way to leave a breadcrumb that leads back to the client, and let the really interested people follow the trail. Note: this is supposed to be how we do all content marketing. Some examples of how we did this were: Shared Visuals with a Subtle Watermark: Because our client’s product offered stock data, we’d often include a chart or graph showing a company’s financial metric with the client’s branding in the corner. Added Supporting Data from Client’s Website: If we mentioned something like a company’s cash flow statement, we could link to that company’s cash flow statement on the client’s website. It worked only because there was a lot of data on the client’s website that wasn’t gated. These tactics were really specific to the client. Which is should be. For other companies I would rethink what tactics I use here. THE RESULTS I’m pretty happy with the results • Impressions: – Early on posts averaged \~30,000 apiece, but after about a month of optimization, we hit \~70,000 impressions average. Over about two months, we reached 4 million total impressions. • Signups: – In their signups process there was one of those “Where did you find us?” questions and the amount of people who put Reddit jumped into the few hundred a month. Precise tracking of this is impossible. • Cost Efficiency (This is based on what I charged, and not the actual cost of running the campaign which is about $100/mo): – CPM (cost per thousand impressions) was about $0.08, which is far better than most paid channels. – Cost per free user: \~$8-10. After about a 10% conversion rate to a paid plan, our cost per paying user was $80–$100—well below the client’s previous $300–$400. HIGHLIGHTS: WHAT WORKED Subreddit-Specific Content: – Tailoring each post’s format and length to the audience norms boosted engagement. Worked out really well. 1 post got over 1M views alone. We regularly had posts that had hundreds of thousands. Breadcrumbs: – We never had anyone call us out for promoting. And really we weren’t. Our first priority was writing content that would crush on that subreddit. Using the Founder’s Existing Material: – The YouTube transcripts grounded the AI’s content in content we already made. This was really why we were able to produce so much content. CHALLENGES: WHAT DIDN’T WORK AI is still off: – Maybe it’s expecting too much, but still I wish the AI had done a better job. I editing a lot of content. Human oversight was critical. Scheduling all the content was a pain: – Recently I automated this pretty well. But at first I was scheduling everything manually and scheduling a hundred or so posts was a hassle. Getting Data and Analytics: – Not only did we have not very good traffic data, but the data from reddit had to be collected manually. Will probably automate this in the future. COST & TIME INVESTMENT Setup: The setup originally took me a couple weeks. I’ve since figured out how to do much faster (about 1 week). AirTable Setup here was easy and the tools costs $24/mo so not bad. ChatGPT costs were pretty cheap. Less than $75 per month. I’ve sense switched to using o1 which is much more expensive but saves me a lot of editing time Human Editing: Because this is the human part of the process and everything else was automated it mean by default all my time was spent editing content. Still this was a lot better than creating content from scratch probably by a factor of 5 or 10. The main expense was paying an editor (or using your own time) to refine posts. Worth it? Yes even with the editing time I was able to generate way more content that I would have otherwise. LESSONS & ACTIONABLE TAKEAWAYS Reddit as a Growth Channel: – If you genuinely respect each subreddit’s culture, you can achieve massive reach on a tight budget. AI + Human Collaboration: – AI excels at first drafts, but human expertise is non-negotiable for polishing and ensuring factual integrity. Soft Promotion Wins: – The “breadcrumb” approach paid off. It might feel like too light a touch, but is crucial for Reddit communities. Create once, repurpose as many times as possible: – If you have blog posts, videos, podcasts, or transcripts, feed them into AI to keep your message accurate and brand-consistent. CONCLUSION & NEXT STEPS If you try a similar approach: • Begin with smaller tests in a few niches to learn what resonates. • Create a clear “channel guide” for each community. • Carefully fact-check AI-generated posts. • Keep brand mentions low-key until you’ve established credibility.

#reddit#content#campaign
I’ve Compiled the Best AI Side Hustle Playbooks and Tested Them Myself—Anyone Interested?
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
williezx•This week

I’ve Compiled the Best AI Side Hustle Playbooks and Tested Them Myself—Anyone Interested?

I’ve spent the past year diving deep into AI-powered side hustles, testing out all the best playbooks I could find. Some worked amazingly well, some flopped, and I learned a ton along the way. Now, I’ve compiled everything—only the most effective, step-by-step playbooks that actually work. These cover everything from idea validation to scaling, and I’ve tested them all myself to make sure they’re legit. Some of the things I’ve successfully built with AI: ✅ Automated content businesses ✅ Niche websites that generate passive income ✅ AI-powered digital product businesses ✅ Simple AI tools that people actually pay for ✅ AI-assisted freelancing strategies Would anyone be interested in checking these out? Just trying to see if there’s demand before I share more! Let me know what kind of AI side hustle you’d want to try.

#reddit#i’ve#compiled
I’ve professionalized the family business. Now I feel stuck
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
2Lobsters•This week

I’ve professionalized the family business. Now I feel stuck

I wrote the post below in my own words and then sent to ChatGPT for refinement/clarity. So if it reads like AI, it's because it is, but it's conveying the message from my own words a bit better than my original with a few of my own lines written back in. Hope that's not an issue here. I’m 33, married with two young kids. I have a bachelor’s from a well-regarded public university (though in an underwhelming field—economics adjacent). I used that degree to land a job at a mid-sized distribution company (\~$1B annual revenue), where I rose quickly to a project management role and performed well. In 2018, after four years there, I returned to my family's $3M/yr residential service and repair plumbing business. I saw my father withdrawing from leadership, responsibilities being handed to underqualified middle managers, and overall employee morale declining. I’d worked in the business from a young age, had all the necessary licenses, and earned a degree of respect from the team—not just as “the boss’s kid,” but as someone who had done the work. I spent my first year back in the field, knocking off the rust. From there, I started chipping away at process issues and inefficiencies, without any formal title. In 2020, I became General Manager. Since then, we’ve grown to over $5M in revenue, improved profitability, and automated many of the old pain points. The business runs much smoother and requires less day-to-day oversight from me. That said—I’m running out of motivation. I have no equity in the business. And realistically, I won’t for a long time. The family dynamic is... complicated. There are relatives collecting large salaries despite zero involvement in the business. Profits that should fuel growth get drained, and we can’t make real accountability stick because we rely too heavily on high-producing employees—even when they underperform in every other respect. I want to be clear—this isn’t a sob story. I know how lucky I am. The business supports my family, and for that I’m grateful. But I’ve gone from showing up every day with fresh ideas and energy to slowly becoming the guy who upholds the status quo. I’ve hit most of the goals I set for myself, but I’m stagnating—and that scares me. The safe move is to keep riding this out. My wife also works and has strong earning potential. We’re financially secure, and with two small kids, I’m not eager to gamble that away. But I’m too young to coast for the next decade while I wait for a possible ownership shakeup. At this point, the job isn’t mentally stimulating. One hour I’m building dynamic pricing models; the next, I’m literally dealing with whether a plumber is wiping his ass properly because I've had multiple complaints about his aroma. I enjoy the challenging, high-level work—marketing, systems, strategy—but I’m worn down by the drama, the legacy egos I can’t fire, and the petty dysfunction I’m forced to manage. I'm working on building a middle management gap, but there's something lost in not being as hands-on in a small business like this. I fear that by isolating myself from the bullshit, I'll also be isolating myself from some of the crucial day-to-day that keep us who we are. Hope that makes sense. (To be fair, most of our team is great. We have an outstanding market reputation and loyal employees—but the garbage still hits my desk when it shows up.) I’ve toyed with starting a complementary business or launching a consulting gig for similar-sized companies outside our market. I’ve taken some Udemy and Maven Analytics courses (digital marketing, advanced Excel/Power BI, etc.) to keep learning, but I rarely get to apply that knowledge here. So here I am. Is this burnout? A premature midlife crisis? A motivation slump? I’m not sure what I’m looking for—but if you’ve been here, or have any hard-earned advice, I’d be grateful to hear it.

#reddit#i’ve#professionalized
Secret behind Airbnb's Billion-Dollar Empire? Spamming Craigslist
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
deadcoder0904•This week

Secret behind Airbnb's Billion-Dollar Empire? Spamming Craigslist

Silicon Valley wants you to believe that their unicorn startups succeeded doing things legally. But that couldn't be far from truth. For starters, Airbnb used multiple Gmail accounts to spam Craigslist. "They posted unrealistically (fake) cheap rentals of beautiful apartments in places where normal rent should be 10x more. Once people replied, they auto-responded that the unit has been rented, but they should be looking for another unit on AirBnB." The Game of Blackhat is a cat-and-mouse game. You need a lot of guardrails to protect yourself from people using your Social Site by spamming their products. Craigslist is a team of 30 people. There's stuff AI can automate now with such a small team but back then, it wasn't possible. Airbnb used Craigslist as its playground to spam Craigslist visitors to grow their supply-side. In a 2-sided marketplace, growing both supply and demand is very important. And both must grow at the same time for the marketplace to work. A Blackhat Marketer created a new test site to get vacation rental owners to sign-up so that he can test his Airbnb theory. He grabbed their real email-addresses (not Craigslist anonymous addresses) via Craigslist by specifically targeting those who were advertising their vacation rentals on Craigslist. He skipped over the other categories that were directly related to AirBnB's business model because they didn't fit with the test site he built. Once he got 1000+ sign-ups, he then took it upon himself to post it to the advertising section on Craigslist. The email said this: I am emailing you because you have one of the nicest listings on Craigslist in Idaho and I want to recommend you feature it (for free) on one of the largest Idaho housing sites on the web, Airbnb. The site already has 3,000,000 pages views a month. Check it out here to list now: airbnb(dot)com Sarah Surpisingly, all emails were by ladies. He did the same in Week 2 and Week 3 to test if it wasn't a one-time thing. Surely, it wasn't a fluke. After posting 4 ads on Craigslist in 3 weeks, he received 5 identical emails from 2 ladies who were raving fans of AirBnB and spent their days emailing Craigslist advertisers. This is one of the greatest blackhat strategies used in the real world to build a billion-dollar marketplace by growing the supply-side with pure blackhat. These strategies are not mentioned in Press Interviews, Media, or any Founder stories but this is probably the most important piece of the puzzle. Without it, Airbnb probably wouldn't have survived. "Some very famous investors have alluded to the fact that they look for a dangerous streak in the entrepreneurs they invest in…and while those investors will never come out and tell you what they mean, this kind of thing is probably what they mean." It definitely violates CAN-SPAM act. Some comments from Hacker News: "CAN-SPAM, sending from a fake address (illegal headers). CA has a specific law that pre-empts CAN-SPAM that definitely makes this illegal if sent from CA." But I guess it worked in Airbnb's favour lol as they were never caught or fined until after. "It's commercial email 100%. Probably a fake sender name (illegal), against gmail ToS, against CL ToS and no unsubscribe link and no one even subscribed in the first place. 100% against CAN-SPAM." Thanks for reading. If you'd like to learn more blackhat tactics like this, check this site which is a growth hacking newsletter with real-world blackhat examples. PS: Actual emails & screenshots from the Airbnb x Craigslist spam can be found here.

#reddit#secret#behind
Only 2 months of cash in the Bank for my business but was able to save it with the help of AI.
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
CALLIRDAN90•This week

Only 2 months of cash in the Bank for my business but was able to save it with the help of AI.

Hi there! I’m excited to share something very personal with you. We needed to book at least 2 appointments per day in the next 60 days, or my business would fail. We were already trying two acquisition channels, LinkedIn and email. The problem with these channels was that the positive response rate was very low in both. So I decided to focus on LinkedIn and get the attention of the lead by sending videos directly to them via LinkedIn messages. (You can send videos to your connections on LinkedIn if you use your cell phone.) This wasn’t new, but I added a small twist to get the lead’s attention. All the covers of the videos had a picture of me holding a sign with the person’s name and an interesting phrase. This showed some okay results, but the rest of the video was not personalized. Only the picture on the cover was. I even developed a Chrome extension for this because I thought this would be the answer and that I would book tons of appointments.  But after more trial and outreach, my leads responded, telling me that because the video itself wasn’t personalized for them, they felt like I didn’t put enough effort in, so they would not book a call with me. So after investing time and effort into my “new bright idea” and getting developers to make the Chrome extension, I was back to square one with no results. A few weeks went by, and after researching online, I found an online course from a guy who promised to teach me how to book 30+ appointments per month, guaranteed (at the time, I was making 2 or 3 appointments per week, maximum). He promised that I would only pay if he actually booked appointments for me and even offered to give me money if his course didn’t work for me. I never paid attention to internet gurus, but the offer was actually not bad, so I looked into this guy’s website. I found out he had hundreds of reviews from people who had taken his course and were talking amazing things about it. The more I read, the more excited I got. I booked a call that day and talked to a salesperson. The call was very short, and he promised I would get at least 2 appointments per day, easily. He seemed a bit cocky and told me that I just needed to trust him and the 100+ reviews from people who had taken the course. He didn’t share details, a proposal, or anything. I asked the price, and he told me it was close to $10k. (Not kidding, this was the price.) Then he told me that I would make the money back in no time with the clients I would get following his course, and that if it didn’t work, he would give me the money back. But I needed to follow everything the course said for at least 6 months. I had never paid $10k for anything in my life; it was extremely expensive for me. Also, my salary from my business was not in dollars but in a currency that was worth much less than the dollar. I continued to research more and more, but no other course was close to the number of reviews and promises that this guy had. I got desperate and told myself that I would bet everything on this course. If it worked for so many others, surely it would work for me. I got a loan from the bank and paid for the course. You might read this and think it was the most stupid thing ever, but the reality is that after 2 months in the course (I did the course as fast as I could), I learned a lot. The course was not bad; it was very extensive—probably more than 200 hours or so—and they taught a lot of things. I don’t think it was worth $10k for me, but I can see how for other people it might be worth that. Now, to the question you’re all thinking: did it get me the 2 appointments I needed per day? The answer is no. Here’s the thing: most of the techniques they taught were innovative and disruptive, but the focus was always on personalization, and they didn’t teach any way to automate the personalization. (I think, at the time they made the course, the tools didn’t exist yet.) So they taught how to do everything manually, and it took a lot—a lot of time and effort. And most annoyingly: an incredible amount of time doing operational things. I did get 2 appointments on some days, but it wasn’t consistent, and I didn’t have the time to spend 14 hours a day doing everything manually or the money to hire someone to do this for me. (I needed to also spend time delivering our service to our current clients; otherwise, they would leave.) I told them this, and they were very reasonable. After some negotiation, they gave me part of the money back. (To be fair, there was a lot of value in the course, so asking for the full $10k back would have been excessive because, in the end, it really taught me a lot of things I didn’t know.) So in the end, I spent $10k and 200+ hours on an online course, spent time and effort developing a Chrome extension, and was still not able to hit the meetings I needed. Money in the business was running out, and I needed to do something fast, or I was doomed. After investing time and effort in tools, research, and spending $10k and over 200 hours on a course that didn’t deliver the consistent results I needed, I was at a crossroads. My businesses were running out of money, and I knew I needed to find a solution quickly, or everything I had worked for would collapse. It was during this time of desperation that I started exploring other options. One night, while scrolling through the internet, I stumbled upon a 2024 article about how AI was being used to revolutionize various industries. It wasn’t directly related to appointment booking, but it sparked an idea in my mind. What if I could use AI to automate the personalization process that I had learned in the course? It seemed like a long shot, but I had nothing to lose. I started researching AI tools and technologies—YouTube videos, podcasts, pretty much everything related to AI—desperate to find something that could help me scale my outreach without investing too much time, while still maintaining the personalization that was so important. After a lot of trial and error, I found a few tools that showed promise. All of these tools were extremely new. Some of them had just launched the versions I needed just weeks ago. I can say I researched and tested more than 50 AI startups, experimenting with them, testing different approaches, checking prices (the problem was that most of them were cheap but became very expensive when applying the volume I needed to get results), and gradually refining my process. It wasn’t an overnight success, but for the first time, I felt like I was onto something that could truly work. The idea of combining AI personalization with volume was something new, and it gave me hope that I could finally book the meetings I needed without burning out. One day, I sent a video of myself talking—completely AI-generated—to my family chat group and waited for their response. None of them noticed it wasn’t actually me. At that moment, I said to myself: “Okay, I am ready to test this in the real world and see if it works.” Like everything in life, focus is key. As I mentioned earlier, we were already trying outbound strategies on LinkedIn and email, but I decided to narrow my focus to LinkedIn and specifically to video outreach. My goal was to stand out from the crowd, where most people were using text or sending generic videos. I knew that if my videos were 100% personalized, it would make a strong impression on my leads. I focused on two key metrics during my tests: Time spent on manual personalized outreach vs. AI-generated personalized outreach. Positive reply rate for non-personalized manual outreach vs. AI-generated personalized outreach. I ran a test using a sample of 50 one-minute videos sent to 50 leads, and here are the results: Time Spent to Make the Videos: Manual Process: It took me up to 10 hours to create and send 50 personalized videos. This included looking good on camera, brushing my hair, choosing appropriate clothing, ensuring proper lighting, not messing up the script, using a camera holder, recharging the phone, pausing to drink water, avoiding external sounds, being in an appropriate room, downloading the videos, deleting the videos that were not good, and sending the final ones. On average, it took me at least 12.5 minutes per one-minute video. AI Process: With AI, it took me just 32 seconds to create the exact same one-minute personalized video—without saying a word or recording a second of footage. In total, I could make and send the same 50 personalized videos in just 27 minutes. Result: The AI process was 24 times faster. Completely crazy! Positive Reply Rate: Non-Personalized Script (Manual): Using a good script without personalization (no name, job title, city, company, etc.) resulted in a positive reply rate of 4-6% on LinkedIn, including follow-ups. Personalized Script (AI): Using the same script but adding personalized details like the lead's name, company, city, and job title resulted in a positive reply rate of 15-20%, including follow-ups. Result: AI personalization led to 3x (three times) more replies. The best part was the responses. Almost everyone who replied thanked me for taking the time to research them, congratulated me on my speech, and appreciated the personalization and eloquence of my message.  These metrics were a complete breakthrough for me. I researched online to see if anyone else had done something similar, but I couldn’t find anything close. After achieving these metrics, booking the two appointments I desperately needed became easy. In fact, in the last 10 weeks, I’ve been able to consistently book 3-4 appointments per day. This success allowed me to train someone in my company to handle the process, freeing me up to focus on other aspects of the business and ultimately saving it. With the AI appointment machine we built, I even have free time now—time that I’ve been using to develop a methodology and tech tools that I now teach to others. I named the methodology Clip2Lead as a reference to the first Chrome extension I developed that didn’t work but ended up being the first step toward everything that followed. I’ve condensed everything I learned and throughout my experiences into a simple and short FREE training where I cover the entire AI appointment booking process. This includes how to find leads, create scripts, set up follow-up sequences, generate AI videos, clone your voice, compare non-AI metrics with AI metrics, and even navigate AI safety controls. I also offer Chrome extensions that helped me automate the process even further, so you can spend your time closing deals or focusing on other acquisition channels, while your AI machine for booking appointments runs with minimal effort from you. If you’re interested please get in touch with me and thank you for taking the time to read my personal story.

#reddit#only#months
Looking for Social Media Marketing Partner(s) for High-Potential AI App Business
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
Altruistic-Flan-8222•This week

Looking for Social Media Marketing Partner(s) for High-Potential AI App Business

Hello everyone! I am Mak, and I'm a software engineer and AI developer with a few years of experience. I'm pretty young like the most of you and have an amazing idea. I'm sure that some of you have heard of Rizz, Plug, Wigman and similar apps. Those are simple AI apps that generate pickup lines for people, and I worked as an AI developer for one of the above. I got this business idea after analyzing more about this industry and realizing that these apps make TONS of money—like the one I worked for, which is making about $50k per WEEK using my AI solutions. That's crazy. The point is that I took a pause from working as a software engineer for clients and researched how to do the same thing. It took me a few months to actually understand everything about this business model, and Rizz apps are just one example of this type of business. There is one 17 yo guy I found who made "Cal AI" I guess, basically a simple AI app that analyzes your meal and provides info like calories, etc. I also created AI solutions for a guy who made an AI app that analyzes your face, provides Sigma analytics, and suggests how to improve your face, etc. So the point is that there are tons of AI app ideas that you can create for this industry. And the important fact is that the AI market is growing. Some important AI analytics say that in 2024, there were 1.5B AI app downloads, and mobile AI app consumer spending was $1.8B. That's huge. So, what am I looking for? I need someone, hopefully from the US, or someone who knows how to post social media content for US users, to help me out with my business idea. I'm self-funded and have already spent a lot on important requirements and equipment, which is why I need someone interested in revenue sharing. We can come up with a deal such as capped/tiered revenue share, profit share, deferred model, etc. We could discuss this privately since everyone has different experience levels and thoughts about this. Also, since I'm talking about experience, you don't need huge experience at all. You can be 16-25 years old just like me and only have marketing skills. However, to make it easier for those who don't have marketing skills, I am planning to create code that will automatically generate content for you, and all you need to do is post the content. But this is only for posting content without creating it and is for interested people from the US since I need US customers. However, if you have marketing skills and an idea for getting organic US views, please let's talk. Short info about my app: It is an AI app like the previous examples, which doesn’t yet exist. There is pretty big potential for app growth (60% of Americans could use this app), and it should be pretty easy to market. Good niche, good idea and overall solid market for this app idea. TL;DR I need someone interested in marketing my AI app in exchange for revenue share. No huge experience is needed. I would prefer someone from the US. If you are interested, feel free to contact me here on Reddit via private messages or below. We can talk here, on Discord, LinkedIn, or anywhere you prefer. Thanks once again!

#reddit#looking#social
Looking for a business co-founder for my AI startup in manufacturing.
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0
shanumas•This week

Looking for a business co-founder for my AI startup in manufacturing.

I spent over a decade as a Senior Software Developer building manufacturing optimization products for global enterprises across the Americas and Europe. It’s a million-dollar industry, and I have strong connections with multinational clients. With AI advancements, there’s a huge opportunity to disrupt the market. My plan is to offer locally hosted AI-powered applications with an option for private cloud deployment. I already have 4–5 high-impact use cases, each of which can be built in a month. I’m looking for a business partner—ideally someone with deep expertise in manufacturing and strong connections in Europe, the USA, China, or India. I’ll handle the tech; you drive the business. Beyond optimization, I have additional solid use cases—some aligned with what YC-backed companies are doing. I found a YC company working on something similar, which I can share in DM.

#reddit#looking#business
This founder was about to shut down his startup and open a restaurant. He pivoted the business and grew it to $45m ARR in 12 months. What else have you seen grow that fast?
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
CountryPitiful•This week

This founder was about to shut down his startup and open a restaurant. He pivoted the business and grew it to $45m ARR in 12 months. What else have you seen grow that fast?

I heard that Jasper scaled to $45m ARR in 12 months...with a team of 8. For context, they are one of the fastest-growing companies ever. Grew from $0 to $45m ARR in 12 months (then raised $125m at a $1.5b valuation). As a fellow founder, their story is really inspiring to me (curious about what others think): In December 2020, Dave Rogenmoser and his co-founders were on the brink of shutting down their business. They'd spent 3+ years building a conversion optimization software called Proof...and it was flatlining. A few weeks prior they had to make the painful decision to let go of half their team. Competition and churn had completely eroded growth. Things were painful. 8 years of work left them with a string of startups that never quite made it: 2 failed software businesses (couldn't make money*) A SMB marketing agency (maxed out at $25k/mo*) An online course company (hard to get big*) The Pivot: In January 2021, they had an idea to use Chat GPT-3, the generative AI model released 6 months earlier, to write high-converting Facebook ads. Within 30 days, they launched the business. With the skeleton crew remaining from the last startup, they scaled the business to $45m ARR and 70,000+ customers without hiring a single new person. Soon after, they raised $125m at a $1.5b valuation. Dave Rogenmoser, CEO at Jasper, had some great one-liners in a few podcasts I listened to on the business. Here are some of his learnings: Right Skill, Wrong Vehicle: He spent 8 years building marketing businesses which gave this team the knowledge and confidence to spend $1m/mo on sales and marketing to scale the business to $45m ARR in year 1. Launch Fast & Iterate Quickly: The team agreed that if the business didn't work in 30 days, they'd shut it down. Dave says, "If you have been working on a problem for more than 18 months and haven't found Product market fit (PMF), odds are you won't...Make the hard pivot."* Ride A Big Wave: Generative AI technology is a new technology that is changing the way we work. But it's not just text. It's images, voice, etc. Identify new customer segments (e.g., Municipalities, Banks, Lawyers, etc.), learn their problems, and apply this novel technology to solve them. What other businesses have you seen scale like this? I've never seen a SaaS business grow that fast. I meet interesting founders 2x per week and share the learnings here.

#reddit#founder#about
This founder was about to shut down his business and open a restaurant. He pivoted the business and grew it to $45m ARR in 12 months. What other businesses can scale like this?
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
CountryPitiful•This week

This founder was about to shut down his business and open a restaurant. He pivoted the business and grew it to $45m ARR in 12 months. What other businesses can scale like this?

I heard that Jasper scaled to $45m ARR in 12 months...with a team of 8. For context, they are one of the fastest-growing companies ever. Grew from $0 to $45m ARR in 12 months (then raised $125m at a $1.5b valuation). As a fellow founder, their story is really inspiring to me (curious about what others think): In December 2020, Dave Rogenmoser and his co-founders were on the brink of shutting down their business. They'd spent 3+ years building a conversion optimization software called Proof...and it was flatlining. A few weeks prior they had to make the painful decision to let go of half their team. Competition and churn had completely eroded growth. Things were painful. 8 years of work left them with a string of startups that never quite made it: 2 failed software businesses (couldn't make money*) A SMB marketing agency (maxed out at $25k/mo*) An online course company (hard to get big*) The Pivot: In January 2021, they had an idea to use Chat GPT-3, the generative AI model released 6 months earlier, to write high-converting Facebook ads. Within 30 days, they launched the business. With the skeleton crew remaining from the last startup, they scaled the business to $45m ARR and 70,000+ customers without hiring a single new person. Soon after, they raised $125m at a $1.5b valuation. Dave Rogenmoser, CEO at Jasper, had some great one-liners in a few podcasts I listened to on the business. Here are some of his learnings: Right Skill, Wrong Vehicle: He spent 8 years building marketing businesses which gave this team the knowledge and confidence to spend $1m/mo on sales and marketing to scale the business to $45m ARR in year 1. Launch Fast & Iterate Quickly: The team agreed that if the business didn't work in 30 days, they'd shut it down. Dave says, "If you have been working on a problem for more than 18 months and haven't found Product market fit (PMF), odds are you won't...Make the hard pivot."* Ride A Big Wave: Generative AI technology is a new technology that is changing the way we work. But it's not just text. It's images, voice, etc. Identify new customer segments (e.g., Municipalities, Banks, Lawyers, etc.), learn their problems, and apply this novel technology to solve them. What other businesses have you seen scale like this? I've never seen a SaaS business grow that fast. I meet interesting founders 2x per week and share the learnings here.

#reddit#founder#about
The best (actually free to use) AI tools for day-to-day work + productivity
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.917
Tapedulema919•This week

The best (actually free to use) AI tools for day-to-day work + productivity

I've spent an ungodly amount of time ~~procrastinating~~ trying tons of new/free AI tools from Reddit and various lists of the best AI tools for different use cases. Frankly, most free AI tools (and even paid ones) are gimmicky ChatGPT wrappers with questionable utility in everyday tasks or overpriced enterprise software that don't use AI as anything more than a marketing buzzword. My last list of free AI tools got a good response here, and I wanted to make another with the best AI tools that I actually use day-to-day now that I've spent more time with them. All these tools can be used for free, though most of them have some kind of premium offering if you need more advanced stuff or a ton of queries. To make it easy to sort through, I've also added whether each tool requires signup. ChatPDF: Free Tool to Use ChatGPT on Your Own Documents/PDFs (free no signup) Put simply, ChatPDF lets you upload any PDF and interact with it like ChatGPT. I heard about this one from my nephew who used it to automatically generate flashcards and explain concepts based on class notes and readings. There are a few similar services out there, but I found ChatPDF the easiest to use of those that don't require payment/signup. If you're a student or someone who needs to read through long PDFs regularly, the possibilities to use this are endless. It's also completely free and doesn't require signup. Key Features: Free to upload up to 3 PDFs daily, with up to 120 pages in each PDF Can be used without signing up at all Taskade: AI Task Management, Scheduling, and Notetaking Tool with GPT-4 Built-In (free with signup) Taskade is an all-in-one notetaking, task management, and scheduling platform with built-in AI workflows and templates. Like Notion, Taskade lets you easily create workspaces, documents, and templates for your workflows. Unlike Notion’s GPT-3 based AI, Taskade has built-in GPT-4 based AI that’s trained to structure your documents, create content, and otherwise help you improve your productivity. Key Features: GPT-4 is built in to their free plan and trained to help with document formatting, scheduling, content creation and answering questions through a chat interface. Its AI seems specifically trained to work seamlessly with your documents and workspaces, and understands queries specific to their interface like asking it to turn (text) notes into a mind map. One of the highest usage limits of the free tools: Taskade’s free plan comes with 1000 monthly requests, which is one of the highest I’ve seen for a tool with built-in GPT-4. Because it’s built into a document editor with database, scheduling and chat capabilities, you can use it for pretty much anything you’d use ChatGPT for but without* paying for ChatGPT Premium. Free templates to get you started with actually integrating AI into your workflows: there are a huge number of genuinely useful free templates for workflows, task management, mind mapping, etc. For example, you can add a project and have Taskade automatically map out and schedule a breakdown of the tasks that make up that overall deliverable. Plus AI for Google Slides: AI-generated (and improved) slide decks (free with signup, addon for Google Slides) I've tried out a bunch of AI presentation/slide generating tools. To be honest, most of them leave a lot to be desired and aren't genuinely useful unless you're literally paid to generate a presentation vaguely related to some topic. Plus AI is a (free!) Google Slides addon that lets you describe the kind of slide deck you're making, then generate and fine-tune it based on your exact needs. It's still not at the point where you can literally just tell it one prompt and get the entire finished product, but it saves a bunch of time getting an initial structure together that you can then perfect. Similarly, if you have existing slides made you can tell it (in natural language) how you want it changed. For example, asking it to change up the layout of text on a page, improve the writing style, or even use external data sources. Key Features: Integrates seamlessly into Google Slides: if you’re already using Slides, using Plus AI is as simple as installing the plugin. Their tutorials are easy to follow and it doesn’t require learning some new slideshow software or interface like some other options. Create and* tweak slides using natural language: Plus AI lets you create whole slideshows, adjust text, or change layouts using natural language. It’s all fairly intuitive and the best of the AI slide tools I’ve tried. FlowGPT: Database of AI prompts and workflows (free without signup-though it pushes you to signup!) FlowGPT collects prompts and collections of prompts to do various tasks, from marketing, productivity, and coding to random stuff people find interesting. It uses an upvote system similar to Reddit that makes it easy to find interesting ways to use ChatGPT. It also lets you search for prompts if you have something in mind and want to see what others have done. It's free and has a lot of cool features like showing you previews of how ChatGPT responds to the prompts. Unfortunately, it's also a bit pushy with getting you to signup, and the design leaves something to be desired, but it's the best of these tools I've found. Key Features: Lots of users that share genuinely useful and interesting prompts Upvote system similar to Reddit’s that allows you to find interesting prompts within the categories you’re interested in Summarize.Tech: AI summaries of YouTube Videos (free no signup) Summarize generates AI summaries of YouTube videos, condensing them into relatively short written notes with timestamps. All the summaries I've seen have been accurate and save significant time. I find it especially useful when looking at longer tutorials where I want to find if: &#x200B; The tutorial actually tells me what I'm looking for, and See where in the video I can find that specific part. The one downside I've seen is that it doesn't work for videos that don't have subtitles, but hopefully, someone can build something with Whisper or a similar audio transcription API to solve that. Claude: ChatGPT Alternative with ~75k Word Limit (free with signup) If you've used ChatGPT, you've probably run into the issue of its (relatively low) token limit. Put simply, it can't handle text longer than a few thousand words. It's the same reason why ChatGPT "forgets" instructions you gave it earlier on in a conversation. Claude solves that, with a \~75,000 word limit that lets you input literal novels and do pretty much everything you can do with ChatGPT. Unfortunately, Claude is currently only free in the US or UK. Claude pitches itself as the "safer" AI, which can make it a pain to use for many use cases, but it's worth trying out and better than ChatGPT for certain tasks. Currently, I'm mainly using it to summarize long documents that ChatGPT literally cannot process as a single prompt. Key Features: Much longer word limit than even ChatGPT’s highest token models Stronger guardrails than ChatGPT: if you're into this, Claude focuses a lot more on "trust and safety" than even ChatGPT does. While an AI telling me what information I can and can't have is more of an annoyance for my use cases, it can be useful if you're building apps like customer support or other use cases where it's a top priority to keep the AI from writing something "surprising." Phind: AI Search Engine That Combines Google with ChatGPT (free no signup) Like a combination of Google and ChatGPT. Like ChatGPT, it can understand complex prompts and give you detailed answers condensing multiple sources. Like Google, it shows you the most up-to-date sources answering your question and has access to everything on the internet in real time (vs. ChatGPT's September 2021 cutoff). Unlike Google, it avoids spammy links that seem to dominate Google nowadays and actually answers your question. Key Features: Accesses the internet to get you real-time information vs. ChatGPT’s 2021 cutoff. While ChatGPT is great for content generation and other tasks that you don’t really need live information for, it can’t get you any information from past its cutoff point. Provides actual sources for its claims, helping you dive deeper into any specific points and avoid hallucinations. Phind was the first to combine the best of both worlds between Google and ChatGPT, giving you easy access to actual sources the way Google does while summarizing relevant results the way ChatGPT does. It’s still one of the best places for that, especially if you have technical questions. Bing AI: ChatGPT Alternative Based on GPT-4 (with internet access!) (free no signup) For all the hate Bing gets, they've done the best job of all the major search engines of integrating AI chat to answer questions. Bing's Chat AI is very similar to ChatGPT (it's based on GPT-4). Unlike ChatGPT's base model without plugins, it has access to the internet. It also doesn't require signing in, which is nice. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, Google has really dropped the ball lately in delivering non-spammy search results that actually answer the query, and it's nice to see other search engines like Bing and Phind providing alternatives. Key Features: Similar to Phind, though arguably a bit better for non-technical questions: Bing similarly provides sourced summaries, generates content and otherwise integrates AI and search nicely. Built on top of GPT-4: like Taskade, Bing has confirmed they use GPT-4. That makes it another nice option to get around paying for GPT-4 while still getting much of the same capabilities as ChatGPT. Seamless integration with a standard search engine that’s much better than I remember it being (when it was more of a joke than anything) Honorable Mentions: These are the “rest of the best” free AI tools I've found that are simpler/don't need a whole entry to explain: PdfGPT: Alternative to ChatPDF that also uses AI to summarize and let you interact with PDF documents. Nice to have options if you run into one site’s PDF or page limit and don’t want to pay to do so. Remove.bg: One of the few image AI tools I use regularly. Remove.bg uses simple AI to remove backgrounds from your images. It's very simple, but something I end up doing surprisingly often editing product images, etc. CopyAI and Jasper: both are AI writing tools primarily built for website marketing/blog content. I've tried both but don't use them enough regularly to be able to recommend one over the other. Worth trying if you do a lot of content writing and want to automate parts of it. Let me know if you guys recommend any other free AI tools that you use day-to-day and I can add them to the list. I’m also interested in any requests you guys have for AI tools that don’t exist yet, as I’m looking for new projects to work on at the moment! TL;DR: ChatPDF: Interact with any PDF using ChatGPT without signing up, great for students and anyone who needs to filter through long PDFs. Taskade: All-in-one task management, scheduling, and notetaking with built-in GPT-4 Chat + AI assistant for improving productivity. Plus AI for Google Slides: Addon for Google Slides that generates and fine-tunes slide decks based on your description(s) in natural language. FlowGPT: Database of AI prompts and workflows. Nice resource to find interesting ChatGPT prompts. Summarize.Tech: AI summaries of YouTube videos with timestamps that makes it easier to find relevant information in longer videos. Claude: ChatGPT alternative with a \~75k word limit, ideal for handling long documents and tasks that go above ChatGPT's token limit. Phind: AI search engine similar to a combination of Google and ChatGPT. Built in internet access and links/citations for its claims. Bing AI: Bing's ChatGPT alternative based on GPT-4. Has real-time internet access + integrates nicely with their normal search engine.

#reddit#best#(actually
How to increase the sales of my book
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
danonino80•This week

How to increase the sales of my book

In just 3 months, it generated over $100 in revenue. I wanted to share my journey for two reasons: to potentially assist others in self-publishing their own books and to receive feedback to enhance my marketing strategy. I envision that there are others facing similar challenges. Let's dive into the financials, time spent, Key takeaways and the Challenges to address behind this product. Finances First, let's take a look at the financial overview. 💳 Expenses 🔹 E-book creation: · Book cover: $ 0. I used Adobe Express with 30 days of free trial. · ChatGPT: 20 $ a month. I leveraged AI to generate the chapters of the book, ensuring that no critical topics were overlooked during the content creation process and to refine the English, as it's not my native language. I also used to help me with copywriting of the web. If anyone is interested, I can share my Python code for outlining the chapters calling the API, but you can also directly ask chatgpt. · Kindle KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing): order author copies: 10 $. 🔹 Web creation: Domain: I got a com) / .org /.net domain for just 1 $ the first year. Carrd.co subscription: 19 $ (1 year) 🔹 Marketing: Promoted post on reddit: $30 Paid ads with google ads: $30 💰 Revenue 🔸 Sales: $102 💸 Net Profit: \~- $ 18 I initially thought the sales for this e-book would be quite modest, maybe only 3 or 4 books. However, the fact that I've sold more than that so far is a pleasant surprise. Even though the overall numbers may still be considered "peanuts" in the grand scheme of book sales, it suggests there could be more demand for content on digital asset custody than I had originally anticipated. This is a good learning experience, and I'll look to refine my marketing approach to see if I can reach a wider audience interested in this topic 🔹 Time Spent Next, let's review the time invested. 📖 Writing the e-book: 40 hours 🌍 Website + Stripe integration: 10 hours 📣 Creating promotional content: 10 hours ⏱️ Additional marketing efforts: 5 hours Total time spent: 65 hours As you can see, I dedicated more time to writing the e-book itself than to marketing and distribution. I spent relevant time to marketing because I though that a successful product launch requires a robust marketing effort. Many e-book authors overlook this crucial aspect! I utilized three sales channels: · Amazon: I found that there were no books specifically about digital asset custody, resulting in strong positioning in Amazon searches. Additionally, my book immediately secured the top position in Google searches for "digital asset custody book." However, despite achieving 50% of sales in the UK, I have not received any reviews globally. Sales distribution for this channel: 20% physical book, 80% ebook. · Twitter: Daniel\_ZZ80. With only 46 followers, the performance on this platform has not been optimal. I am beginning to write posts related to digital assets to increase visibility. · Gumroad: Lockeyyy.gumroad.com. I offered a discounted version of the ebook, but have not yet made any sales through this channel. Key takeaways: · The process of creating this e-book was extremely fulfilling, and while it has garnered overwhelmingly positive feedback from friends and colleagues (not considered as sales), it has yet to receive any Amazon reviews ☹. · Kindle KDP proved to be ideal for a rapid go-to-market strategy. · AI is an excellent tool for generating ideas and providing access to global audiences with perfect grammar. Otherwise, I would need to hire a translator, which can be very expensive. · Despite offering a full 30-day money-back guarantee, leading me to believe that the quality of the content is indeed good. · I have gained valuable insights for future technical books. · Although the current financial balance may be negative, I anticipate reaching the break-even point within one month, and this has now become a passive income stream. However, I recognize the need to regularly update the content due to the rapidly changing nature of this field. Challenges to address: · Is the timing for launching this book appropriate? In other words, is the world of digital asset custody a trendy and interesting topic for the audience? · What is causing the lack of sales through Gumroad? · Should I seek assistance as my marketing efforts have not yielded results? · Why are there no reviews on Amazon? · Why are sales primarily concentrated in the EU with only one sale in the US, which is my main target market? Feedback is appreciated. If you're interested in learning more about my approach, feel free to send me a direct message. A bit about my background: After dedicating my entire career to the banking industry, I explored various side projects. As an IT professional, I have now transitioned into the digital asset realm. After three years of intensive study, I recently published my first book on digital asset custody. I hope you found this post informative. Cheers! P.S.: I'm currently in the process of launching two more books using this system. 😊

#reddit#increase#sales
From Setbacks to $20K Profit: My AI Influencer Earnings Breakdown (Jan 2025) 💰
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
benfromwhere•This week

From Setbacks to $20K Profit: My AI Influencer Earnings Breakdown (Jan 2025) 💰

(Monthly income breakdown is in the end) 📌 Introduction Hey everyone! 👋 Before I dive into this month’s breakdown, I just want to be upfront—English isn’t my first language, so I’ve used ChatGPT to refine this post for better readability. That said, everything here is 100% real—my personal experiences, struggles, and earnings as someone running a full-time AI influencer business. Since I get a lot of DMs asking about my AI models, here are their Instagram links: 📷 Emma – https://www.instagram.com/emmalauireal 📷 Jade – https://www.instagram.com/jadelaui (jadecasual is the second account) Also, if you’ve been wondering about the community I run, where I teach others how to build AI influencers from scratch, here’s the link (I got approval from mods for this link): 🔗 AI Winners Now, let’s get into what happened this month. 🚀 \------- First, a huge thank you! 🎉 Three months ago, I shared my journey of building an AI influencer business, and I was blown away by the response. That post got 263K+ views and was shared over 2.7K times—way more than I ever expected. If you’re new here or want to check out the full story of how I started, you can read it here: 🔗 Click Here (Reddit link) \------- 🔹 What I Did in January After the holiday rush in December, I knew January would be a slow month—people had already spent most of their money at the end of the year. So instead of pushing harder on monetization, I shifted my focus to tech development and optimization. Flux Character Loras: I spent a lot of time refining and testing different Flux-based character Loras for my models. This is still a work in progress, but the goal is to improve long-term consistency and make my workflow even more efficient. NSFW Content Expansion: On Emma’s side, I expanded her content library using a real model body double, making her content look more organic and natural. Jade, however, remains 100% AI-generated, keeping her workflow entirely digital. Social Media Wipeout (Thanks, VA 🙃): I had handed off both Twitter accounts to a virtual assistant to help with engagement and DMs. Big mistake. He ended up spamming DMs, which got both accounts banned—Emma (80K followers) and Jade (20K followers). 🤦‍♂️ Right now, I’m rebuilding Emma’s account from scratch and taking a much more cautious approach. Jade’s account is still offline for now. New Platform: Threads – I hadn’t touched Threads before, but since engagement on Instagram can be unpredictable, I decided to start accounts for both models. So far, they’re performing well, and I’ll continue experimenting. Launched AI Winners Community: After getting flooded with DMs (both here and on Instagram), I realized there was a massive demand for structured learning around AI influencers. So, I launched AI Winners, a paid community where I break down everything I’ve learned. It’s still early, but I see it turning into a solid, long-term community. Investment & Acquisition Talks: I’m still evaluating potential investors and acquisition offers for my AI models. There’s growing interest in buying or investing in Emma & Jade, so I’ve been having conversations to explore different options. Overall, January was about tech, rebuilding, and long-term planning—not immediate revenue. But that’s what keeps this business sustainable. 🚀 \------- ⚠️ Biggest Challenges This Month Lost Both Twitter Accounts (Massive Traffic Hit) 🚨 The biggest blow this month was losing my models’ Twitter accounts. Twitter was responsible for about 40% of my total traffic, meaning both free and paid subs took a direct hit. While Emma’s revenue took a slight dip, Jade’s income dropped significantly—partly due to the account loss and partly because January is naturally slow. (Full revenue breakdown at the end of the post.) Jade’s Instagram Tanked (Possible Shadow Ban?) 🤔 Jade’s Instagram completely lost momentum in early January. Engagement and reach dropped by over 80%, and I still haven’t figured out why. It feels like a shadow ban, but I have no clear confirmation. To counter this, I launched a second backup account, and things are starting to recover. \------- 🚀 Potential Improvements & What’s Next Locking in a Stable Workflow 🔄 Right now, Emma & Jade’s workflow is still evolving, but I’m aiming to fully stabilize it. As I’m writing this, content is generating on my second monitor—a sign that I’m close to achieving full automation without compromising quality. Boosting Jade’s Fanvue Revenue 💰 Jade’s income took a hit this month, and it’s 100% a traffic issue. The solution? More content, more reach. I’ll be increasing social media output to drive consistent traffic back to Fanvue and restore her earnings. Patreon is Done. All Focus on Fanvue 🚫 I shut down both Emma & Jade’s Patreon accounts. The goal is not to split revenue—I want everything funneled into Fanvue for higher engagement and bigger paydays. \------- 💰 January 2025 Earnings Breakdown Despite January being one of the slowest months for online creators, Emma and Jade still brought in over $29K in revenue, with a net profit exceeding $20K after all expenses. Emma Laui generated $20,206.77, with around $6,000 in expenses (chatter payments, NSFW designer fees, and other operational costs). Jade Laui earned $8,939.05, with $2,000 in expenses. Considering Twitter account losses, Instagram setbacks, and the usual January spending slump, this is still a solid outcome. The focus now is on scaling traffic and maximizing Fanvue revenue heading into February. 🚀🔥 That’s the full breakdown for January! If you have questions, feel free to drop a comment, and I’ll answer when I can. Happy to help, just like others helped me when I was starting out! 🚀🔥

#reddit#setbacks#$20k
How to increase the sales of my book
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
danonino80•This week

How to increase the sales of my book

In just 3 months, it generated over $100 in revenue. I wanted to share my journey for two reasons: to potentially assist others in self-publishing their own books and to receive feedback to enhance my marketing strategy. I envision that there are others facing similar challenges. Let's dive into the financials, time spent, Key takeaways and the Challenges to address behind this product. Finances First, let's take a look at the financial overview. 💳 Expenses 🔹 E-book creation: · Book cover: $ 0. I used Adobe Express with 30 days of free trial. · ChatGPT: 20 $ a month. I leveraged AI to generate the chapters of the book, ensuring that no critical topics were overlooked during the content creation process and to refine the English, as it's not my native language. I also used to help me with copywriting of the web. If anyone is interested, I can share my Python code for outlining the chapters calling the API, but you can also directly ask chatgpt. · Kindle KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing): order author copies: 10 $. 🔹 Web creation: Domain: I got a com) / .org /.net domain for just 1 $ the first year. Carrd.co subscription: 19 $ (1 year) 🔹 Marketing: Promoted post on reddit: $30 Paid ads with google ads: $30 💰 Revenue 🔸 Sales: $102 💸 Net Profit: \~- $ 18 I initially thought the sales for this e-book would be quite modest, maybe only 3 or 4 books. However, the fact that I've sold more than that so far is a pleasant surprise. Even though the overall numbers may still be considered "peanuts" in the grand scheme of book sales, it suggests there could be more demand for content on digital asset custody than I had originally anticipated. This is a good learning experience, and I'll look to refine my marketing approach to see if I can reach a wider audience interested in this topic 🔹 Time Spent Next, let's review the time invested. 📖 Writing the e-book: 40 hours 🌍 Website + Stripe integration: 10 hours 📣 Creating promotional content: 10 hours ⏱️ Additional marketing efforts: 5 hours Total time spent: 65 hours As you can see, I dedicated more time to writing the e-book itself than to marketing and distribution. I spent relevant time to marketing because I though that a successful product launch requires a robust marketing effort. Many e-book authors overlook this crucial aspect! I utilized three sales channels: · Amazon: I found that there were no books specifically about digital asset custody, resulting in strong positioning in Amazon searches. Additionally, my book immediately secured the top position in Google searches for "digital asset custody book." However, despite achieving 50% of sales in the UK, I have not received any reviews globally. Sales distribution for this channel: 20% physical book, 80% ebook. · Twitter: Daniel\_ZZ80. With only 46 followers, the performance on this platform has not been optimal. I am beginning to write posts related to digital assets to increase visibility. · Gumroad: Lockeyyy.gumroad.com. I offered a discounted version of the ebook, but have not yet made any sales through this channel. Key takeaways: · The process of creating this e-book was extremely fulfilling, and while it has garnered overwhelmingly positive feedback from friends and colleagues (not considered as sales), it has yet to receive any Amazon reviews ☹. · Kindle KDP proved to be ideal for a rapid go-to-market strategy. · AI is an excellent tool for generating ideas and providing access to global audiences with perfect grammar. Otherwise, I would need to hire a translator, which can be very expensive. · Despite offering a full 30-day money-back guarantee, leading me to believe that the quality of the content is indeed good. · I have gained valuable insights for future technical books. · Although the current financial balance may be negative, I anticipate reaching the break-even point within one month, and this has now become a passive income stream. However, I recognize the need to regularly update the content due to the rapidly changing nature of this field. Challenges to address: · Is the timing for launching this book appropriate? In other words, is the world of digital asset custody a trendy and interesting topic for the audience? · What is causing the lack of sales through Gumroad? · Should I seek assistance as my marketing efforts have not yielded results? · Why are there no reviews on Amazon? · Why are sales primarily concentrated in the EU with only one sale in the US, which is my main target market? Feedback is appreciated. If you're interested in learning more about my approach, feel free to send me a direct message. A bit about my background: After dedicating my entire career to the banking industry, I explored various side projects. As an IT professional, I have now transitioned into the digital asset realm. After three years of intensive study, I recently published my first book on digital asset custody. I hope you found this post informative. Cheers! P.S.: I'm currently in the process of launching two more books using this system. 😊

#reddit#increase#sales
Using AI to Streamline JTBD Interviews and Analysis
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
marcocello•This week

Using AI to Streamline JTBD Interviews and Analysis

Hello everyone! 👋 I wanted to share a personal project I have worked on in the last months that uses LLMs together with Jobs-to-be-Done to make product development easier and more efficient. The idea is to automate identifying key jobs, figuring out who performs them, creating synthetic users, and conducting interviews. By doing this, we cut down on the time and resources usually spent on manual user research, making it quicker and simpler to gather the insights needed for your product roadmap. Here’s how it works: Discovering Main Jobs and Job Performers: Starting with a rough vision, the code helps you identify and suggest potential main jobs and the people who typically perform them, based on your vision and skillset. Creating Synthetic Users: I use LLMs to build user archetypes that reflect real needs, goals, and pain points. Automated Interviews: Using GPT’s language capabilities, I’ve set up a system that runs interviews with these synthetic personas, pulling out key insights on customer motivations and needs. Analyzing Interviews and Extract Needs: Finally, we break down all the information from these interviews into actionable insights—covering everything from job steps to emotional and social jobs. This project lays the groundwork for a user-centered product design strategy, helping me make smarter decisions on what features to prioritize, how to improve user experience, and how to drive overall product development. Would love to hear your thoughts! 💬

#reddit#streamline#jtbd
How I Made $250.000+ in a Year: A Case Study of My AI Influencer Journey
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.778
benfromwhere•This week

How I Made $250.000+ in a Year: A Case Study of My AI Influencer Journey

Update on February 22th: I changed my AI influencer's names because it caused some problems on my business. One year, two AI-powered influencers, and $250K in revenue. Sounds unreal? It’s not. Today, I’m pulling back the curtain on the strategies, tools, and hard-won lessons that took me from concept to a six-figure success story in the AI influencer space. Hey, I'm Ben—a 32-year-old designer who spent the past year navigating the world of AI influencers. Let me clear up any confusion right from the start: I’m not here to sell you anything. This is purely a case study to share what worked, what didn’t, and what I’ve learned along the way. I’ll also make sure to answer all your questions in the comments for free whenever I can, so don’t hesitate to ask. Links to Past Topics: If you're curious about some of the groundwork I covered, check out a few of my earlier posts here: How I Make $10,000 Monthly | AI Influencer Management How I Earned $7000+ in 15 Days | AI Influencer Business Update These earlier posts cover a lot of the backstory, so feel free to explore them before diving into this one. So if you're ready, here is the full story: \---- The idea of creating an AI influencer was one of those “what if” moments that wouldn’t leave my mind. At first, it sounded futuristic—even a bit too ambitious. It all started when I stumbled upon an AI influencer on Instagram with the handle AnnaMaes2000. Her content blew me away—the quality, the detail, and just how real everything looked. I was instantly hooked and ended up going through every post, just trying to figure out how she was pulling this off. That’s when I knew I had to learn how this was done. The next step? YouTube. I dived into videos on Stable Diffusion, soaking up everything I could about creating AI-generated images. Those tutorials taught me the basics and got me up to speed. Then, I created my first AI influencer, let's call her Mel for now. Right after that, to complete the storyline and boost engagement, I introduced Mel's “mother,” Jess. Adding Jess gave the whole project depth and a narrative that drew people in, creating a unique family dynamic that instantly elevated traffic and interest. After thousands of bad photos, hundreds of deleted posts, and months of trial and error, you can now see the quality that defines my current accounts. Here’s a rundown of the tools and checkpoints I’ve used from day one, in order: Fooocus on RunDiffusion — Juggernaut V8 Fooocus on RunDiffusion — Juggernaut V9 Fooocus on PC (locally) — Juggernaut V9 Fooocus on PC (locally) —Lyuyang Mix + Juggernaut V9 Flux on PC (couple of photos only since it's so slow even on RTX 4090) Flux on Fal.ai. \---- There’s no magic Instagram hack that guarantees success, despite what everyone thinks and keeps asking me. Quality content, consistent uploads, and solid craftsmanship are what actually help your photos hit trends and show up on the Explore page. Unlike 95% of low-quality AI accounts out there, I don’t rely on faceswap videos, spam Reels, or go around liking comments on other accounts. My approach is fully organic, focused solely on creating my own unique content. By following Instagram's guidelines to the letter, I've managed to direct some of Mel and Jess' fans over to Patreon and Fanvue. There, for a small subscription fee, fans can access exclusive lingerie content. For those looking for more, higher-tier subscriptions give access to even more premium content. Some possible questions and their answers: No, you can't share hardcore NSFW content on Patreon. You can do that on Fanvue. Yes, you can create AI creators on Fanvue — OnlyFans doesn't allow it. Yes, you can use your own ID to get KYC. Yes, we're telling both Mel and Jess is (or use) AI to generate content. And yes, some people leave and some people still have fun with chatting, having a good time and get perfect content for their needs. And yes, we have a chatter team to work on these accounts. \---- This journey wasn’t all smooth sailing. I faced unexpected roadblocks, like platform restrictions that limited certain types of content, and managing fan expectations was more challenging than anticipated. Staying within guidelines while keeping fans engaged required constant adaptation. These hurdles forced me to get creative, adjust my approach, and learn fast. Once I saw Mel and Jess gaining traction, I knew it was time to scale up. Expanding meant finding new ways to keep content fresh, creating deeper narratives, and considering how to bring even more followers into the fold. My focus turned to building a sustainable model that could grow without sacrificing quality or authenticity. If you’re thinking about diving into AI content creation, here’s my advice: patience, consistency, and a focus on quality are key. Don’t cut corners or rely on quick-fix hacks. Invest time in learning the right tools, creating engaging stories, and building an audience that values what you bring to the table. This approach took me from zero to six figures, and it’s what makes the journey worth it. \---- And finally, here’s the income breakdown that everyone’s curious about: Mel on Fanvue: $82,331.58 (Gross earnings because we have chatter cuts like 15%) Mel on Patreon: $50,865.98 (Net earnings) Jess on Fanvue: $89,068.26 (Gross earnings because we have chatter cuts like 15%) Jess on Patreon: $39,040.70 And thanks to Reddit and my old posts, I got a perfect investor like after 5 months, so this is a "payback" for that. Like I said, I'll answer every question in the comments — take care and let me know.

#reddit#made#$250.000+
Looking for a co-founder for a B2B AI startup. I have a development team and funds for at least a year of operations.
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.5
cheech123456•This week

Looking for a co-founder for a B2B AI startup. I have a development team and funds for at least a year of operations.

Hello, As the title said I'm looking for a co-founder. I built with my team a few ventures that generate revenues but I don't believe that any of them has a future. I have 15 years of experience in Software Engineering and AI. Worked in various industries, but always in data-driven applications. I spent the last 3 years as an entrepreneur and raised successfully money from VCs. &#x200B; A few preconceptions I have: \- B2C is extremely hard. Very quickly you realize that you need to spend all your resources on marketing. \- B2B is extremely hard - but for different reasons. Sales cycles take months. If you want to reach serious buyers and decision-makers, you need to have an amazing network. Even then, companies will prioritize 90% of the time to do things internally rather than paying for anything. \- I hate when people say that "ideas are garbage", and I think that execution is overhyped. Execution is a matter of finding the right people, and paying them (I am confident to say that I can guarantee good execution). Ideas are not garbage, ideas need validation, and garbage "entrepreneurs" are too lazy to validate anything. &#x200B; Your ideal profile: \- You have a great idea, something that has been brewing for some time but you lack resources or technical experience to execute by yourself. \- You have domain expertise, experience, and a network. If we build an MVP in 3 months, you can get 20 interviews with industry people to validate the solution. Once the MVP is built you can put it in front of another 40 people. \- You are a product person. \- You can do efficient sales calls. (Bonus: You are a sales person) If you are an ideal profile, please reach out.

#reddit#looking#co-founder
How I Made $250.000+ in a Year: A Case Study of My AI Influencer Journey
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.778
benfromwhere•This week

How I Made $250.000+ in a Year: A Case Study of My AI Influencer Journey

Update on February 22th: I changed my AI influencer's names because it caused some problems on my business. One year, two AI-powered influencers, and $250K in revenue. Sounds unreal? It’s not. Today, I’m pulling back the curtain on the strategies, tools, and hard-won lessons that took me from concept to a six-figure success story in the AI influencer space. Hey, I'm Ben—a 32-year-old designer who spent the past year navigating the world of AI influencers. Let me clear up any confusion right from the start: I’m not here to sell you anything. This is purely a case study to share what worked, what didn’t, and what I’ve learned along the way. I’ll also make sure to answer all your questions in the comments for free whenever I can, so don’t hesitate to ask. Links to Past Topics: If you're curious about some of the groundwork I covered, check out a few of my earlier posts here: How I Make $10,000 Monthly | AI Influencer Management How I Earned $7000+ in 15 Days | AI Influencer Business Update These earlier posts cover a lot of the backstory, so feel free to explore them before diving into this one. So if you're ready, here is the full story: \---- The idea of creating an AI influencer was one of those “what if” moments that wouldn’t leave my mind. At first, it sounded futuristic—even a bit too ambitious. It all started when I stumbled upon an AI influencer on Instagram with the handle AnnaMaes2000. Her content blew me away—the quality, the detail, and just how real everything looked. I was instantly hooked and ended up going through every post, just trying to figure out how she was pulling this off. That’s when I knew I had to learn how this was done. The next step? YouTube. I dived into videos on Stable Diffusion, soaking up everything I could about creating AI-generated images. Those tutorials taught me the basics and got me up to speed. Then, I created my first AI influencer, let's call her Mel for now. Right after that, to complete the storyline and boost engagement, I introduced Mel's “mother,” Jess. Adding Jess gave the whole project depth and a narrative that drew people in, creating a unique family dynamic that instantly elevated traffic and interest. After thousands of bad photos, hundreds of deleted posts, and months of trial and error, you can now see the quality that defines my current accounts. Here’s a rundown of the tools and checkpoints I’ve used from day one, in order: Fooocus on RunDiffusion — Juggernaut V8 Fooocus on RunDiffusion — Juggernaut V9 Fooocus on PC (locally) — Juggernaut V9 Fooocus on PC (locally) —Lyuyang Mix + Juggernaut V9 Flux on PC (couple of photos only since it's so slow even on RTX 4090) Flux on Fal.ai. \---- There’s no magic Instagram hack that guarantees success, despite what everyone thinks and keeps asking me. Quality content, consistent uploads, and solid craftsmanship are what actually help your photos hit trends and show up on the Explore page. Unlike 95% of low-quality AI accounts out there, I don’t rely on faceswap videos, spam Reels, or go around liking comments on other accounts. My approach is fully organic, focused solely on creating my own unique content. By following Instagram's guidelines to the letter, I've managed to direct some of Mel and Jess' fans over to Patreon and Fanvue. There, for a small subscription fee, fans can access exclusive lingerie content. For those looking for more, higher-tier subscriptions give access to even more premium content. Some possible questions and their answers: No, you can't share hardcore NSFW content on Patreon. You can do that on Fanvue. Yes, you can create AI creators on Fanvue — OnlyFans doesn't allow it. Yes, you can use your own ID to get KYC. Yes, we're telling both Mel and Jess is (or use) AI to generate content. And yes, some people leave and some people still have fun with chatting, having a good time and get perfect content for their needs. And yes, we have a chatter team to work on these accounts. \---- This journey wasn’t all smooth sailing. I faced unexpected roadblocks, like platform restrictions that limited certain types of content, and managing fan expectations was more challenging than anticipated. Staying within guidelines while keeping fans engaged required constant adaptation. These hurdles forced me to get creative, adjust my approach, and learn fast. Once I saw Mel and Jess gaining traction, I knew it was time to scale up. Expanding meant finding new ways to keep content fresh, creating deeper narratives, and considering how to bring even more followers into the fold. My focus turned to building a sustainable model that could grow without sacrificing quality or authenticity. If you’re thinking about diving into AI content creation, here’s my advice: patience, consistency, and a focus on quality are key. Don’t cut corners or rely on quick-fix hacks. Invest time in learning the right tools, creating engaging stories, and building an audience that values what you bring to the table. This approach took me from zero to six figures, and it’s what makes the journey worth it. \---- And finally, here’s the income breakdown that everyone’s curious about: Mel on Fanvue: $82,331.58 (Gross earnings because we have chatter cuts like 15%) Mel on Patreon: $50,865.98 (Net earnings) Jess on Fanvue: $89,068.26 (Gross earnings because we have chatter cuts like 15%) Jess on Patreon: $39,040.70 And thanks to Reddit and my old posts, I got a perfect investor like after 5 months, so this is a "payback" for that. Like I said, I'll answer every question in the comments — take care and let me know.

#reddit#made#$250.000+
Looking For Tech-Savvy Business Partner
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
DesignedIt•This week

Looking For Tech-Savvy Business Partner

Hi! I'm looking for a business partner to help with one of my product lines or we could create a new product line together. I would like the product to be a digital asset where we can sell it on another website, where the other website brings customers to our product so we don't have to market it at first. Our short-term goal will be to publish a product one month after connecting and then make $1 by the following month. Our 4-month goal will be to generate $2,500 - $7,500 in passive income per year for one product line. I'm not trying to make a lot of money right away, but am looking to setup enough passive income so we can both retire early in a few years. For this year, I wrote down 100's of ideas, tried 30 ideas, have 14 ideas that work, and have only 6 ideas that would be profitable. So I'll bring with me only the best of the best ideas. I'm all about efficiency and doing things in bulk to maximize profit and decrease time spent, using AI to generate text/images/audio but adding on that manual touch to make all digital products high-quality and 5 stars, and using software like Python to automate repetitive processes to create digital products. My main skillset: running a business, project management, creating design and technical documentation, marketing, hiring, budgeting, business analysis, graphic design, software development, app development, web design/development, AI development, databases, data engineering, cloud/Azure, data analysis, and reporting. I know many other skills too and can pick up and learn a new business or technical skill pretty quickly. I also have a friend who's in IT/security/networking/servers if we need to bring him in. A clone of myself would be perfect to connect with, but working with anyone with a different skillset would open up the digital product possibilities. I might put tech-savvy at the top of the list so you could figure out how to create new digital products, while business-savvy might be #2, Other skills might be specific to individual products. If you're interested in working together, then feel free to post below or message me!

#reddit#looking#tech-savvy
From Setbacks to $20K Profit: My AI Influencer Earnings Breakdown (Jan 2025) 💰
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
benfromwhere•This week

From Setbacks to $20K Profit: My AI Influencer Earnings Breakdown (Jan 2025) 💰

(Monthly income breakdown is in the end) 📌 Introduction Hey everyone! 👋 Before I dive into this month’s breakdown, I just want to be upfront—English isn’t my first language, so I’ve used ChatGPT to refine this post for better readability. That said, everything here is 100% real—my personal experiences, struggles, and earnings as someone running a full-time AI influencer business. Since I get a lot of DMs asking about my AI models, here are their Instagram links: 📷 Emma – https://www.instagram.com/emmalauireal 📷 Jade – https://www.instagram.com/jadelaui (jadecasual is the second account) Also, if you’ve been wondering about the community I run, where I teach others how to build AI influencers from scratch, here’s the link (I got approval from mods for this link): 🔗 AI Winners Now, let’s get into what happened this month. 🚀 \------- First, a huge thank you! 🎉 Three months ago, I shared my journey of building an AI influencer business, and I was blown away by the response. That post got 263K+ views and was shared over 2.7K times—way more than I ever expected. If you’re new here or want to check out the full story of how I started, you can read it here: 🔗 Click Here (Reddit link) \------- 🔹 What I Did in January After the holiday rush in December, I knew January would be a slow month—people had already spent most of their money at the end of the year. So instead of pushing harder on monetization, I shifted my focus to tech development and optimization. Flux Character Loras: I spent a lot of time refining and testing different Flux-based character Loras for my models. This is still a work in progress, but the goal is to improve long-term consistency and make my workflow even more efficient. NSFW Content Expansion: On Emma’s side, I expanded her content library using a real model body double, making her content look more organic and natural. Jade, however, remains 100% AI-generated, keeping her workflow entirely digital. Social Media Wipeout (Thanks, VA 🙃): I had handed off both Twitter accounts to a virtual assistant to help with engagement and DMs. Big mistake. He ended up spamming DMs, which got both accounts banned—Emma (80K followers) and Jade (20K followers). 🤦‍♂️ Right now, I’m rebuilding Emma’s account from scratch and taking a much more cautious approach. Jade’s account is still offline for now. New Platform: Threads – I hadn’t touched Threads before, but since engagement on Instagram can be unpredictable, I decided to start accounts for both models. So far, they’re performing well, and I’ll continue experimenting. Launched AI Winners Community: After getting flooded with DMs (both here and on Instagram), I realized there was a massive demand for structured learning around AI influencers. So, I launched AI Winners, a paid community where I break down everything I’ve learned. It’s still early, but I see it turning into a solid, long-term community. Investment & Acquisition Talks: I’m still evaluating potential investors and acquisition offers for my AI models. There’s growing interest in buying or investing in Emma & Jade, so I’ve been having conversations to explore different options. Overall, January was about tech, rebuilding, and long-term planning—not immediate revenue. But that’s what keeps this business sustainable. 🚀 \------- ⚠️ Biggest Challenges This Month Lost Both Twitter Accounts (Massive Traffic Hit) 🚨 The biggest blow this month was losing my models’ Twitter accounts. Twitter was responsible for about 40% of my total traffic, meaning both free and paid subs took a direct hit. While Emma’s revenue took a slight dip, Jade’s income dropped significantly—partly due to the account loss and partly because January is naturally slow. (Full revenue breakdown at the end of the post.) Jade’s Instagram Tanked (Possible Shadow Ban?) 🤔 Jade’s Instagram completely lost momentum in early January. Engagement and reach dropped by over 80%, and I still haven’t figured out why. It feels like a shadow ban, but I have no clear confirmation. To counter this, I launched a second backup account, and things are starting to recover. \------- 🚀 Potential Improvements & What’s Next Locking in a Stable Workflow 🔄 Right now, Emma & Jade’s workflow is still evolving, but I’m aiming to fully stabilize it. As I’m writing this, content is generating on my second monitor—a sign that I’m close to achieving full automation without compromising quality. Boosting Jade’s Fanvue Revenue 💰 Jade’s income took a hit this month, and it’s 100% a traffic issue. The solution? More content, more reach. I’ll be increasing social media output to drive consistent traffic back to Fanvue and restore her earnings. Patreon is Done. All Focus on Fanvue 🚫 I shut down both Emma & Jade’s Patreon accounts. The goal is not to split revenue—I want everything funneled into Fanvue for higher engagement and bigger paydays. \------- 💰 January 2025 Earnings Breakdown Despite January being one of the slowest months for online creators, Emma and Jade still brought in over $29K in revenue, with a net profit exceeding $20K after all expenses. Emma Laui generated $20,206.77, with around $6,000 in expenses (chatter payments, NSFW designer fees, and other operational costs). Jade Laui earned $8,939.05, with $2,000 in expenses. Considering Twitter account losses, Instagram setbacks, and the usual January spending slump, this is still a solid outcome. The focus now is on scaling traffic and maximizing Fanvue revenue heading into February. 🚀🔥 That’s the full breakdown for January! If you have questions, feel free to drop a comment, and I’ll answer when I can. Happy to help, just like others helped me when I was starting out! 🚀🔥

#reddit#setbacks#$20k
Looking For Tech-Savvy Business Partner
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
DesignedIt•This week

Looking For Tech-Savvy Business Partner

Hi! I'm looking for a business partner to help with one of my product lines or we could create a new product line together. I would like the product to be a digital asset where we can sell it on another website, where the other website brings customers to our product so we don't have to market it at first. Our short-term goal will be to publish a product one month after connecting and then make $1 by the following month. Our 4-month goal will be to generate $2,500 - $7,500 in passive income per year for one product line. I'm not trying to make a lot of money right away, but am looking to setup enough passive income so we can both retire early in a few years. For this year, I wrote down 100's of ideas, tried 30 ideas, have 14 ideas that work, and have only 6 ideas that would be profitable. So I'll bring with me only the best of the best ideas. I'm all about efficiency and doing things in bulk to maximize profit and decrease time spent, using AI to generate text/images/audio but adding on that manual touch to make all digital products high-quality and 5 stars, and using software like Python to automate repetitive processes to create digital products. My main skillset: running a business, project management, creating design and technical documentation, marketing, hiring, budgeting, business analysis, graphic design, software development, app development, web design/development, AI development, databases, data engineering, cloud/Azure, data analysis, and reporting. I know many other skills too and can pick up and learn a new business or technical skill pretty quickly. I also have a friend who's in IT/security/networking/servers if we need to bring him in. A clone of myself would be perfect to connect with, but working with anyone with a different skillset would open up the digital product possibilities. I might put tech-savvy at the top of the list so you could figure out how to create new digital products, while business-savvy might be #2, Other skills might be specific to individual products. If you're interested in working together, then feel free to post below or message me!

#reddit#looking#tech-savvy
From Setbacks to $20K Profit: My AI Influencer Earnings Breakdown (Jan 2025) 💰
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
benfromwhere•This week

From Setbacks to $20K Profit: My AI Influencer Earnings Breakdown (Jan 2025) 💰

(Monthly income breakdown is in the end) 📌 Introduction Hey everyone! 👋 Before I dive into this month’s breakdown, I just want to be upfront—English isn’t my first language, so I’ve used ChatGPT to refine this post for better readability. That said, everything here is 100% real—my personal experiences, struggles, and earnings as someone running a full-time AI influencer business. Since I get a lot of DMs asking about my AI models, here are their Instagram links: 📷 Emma – https://www.instagram.com/emmalauireal 📷 Jade – https://www.instagram.com/jadelaui (jadecasual is the second account) Also, if you’ve been wondering about the community I run, where I teach others how to build AI influencers from scratch, here’s the link (I got approval from mods for this link): 🔗 AI Winners Now, let’s get into what happened this month. 🚀 \------- First, a huge thank you! 🎉 Three months ago, I shared my journey of building an AI influencer business, and I was blown away by the response. That post got 263K+ views and was shared over 2.7K times—way more than I ever expected. If you’re new here or want to check out the full story of how I started, you can read it here: 🔗 Click Here (Reddit link) \------- 🔹 What I Did in January After the holiday rush in December, I knew January would be a slow month—people had already spent most of their money at the end of the year. So instead of pushing harder on monetization, I shifted my focus to tech development and optimization. Flux Character Loras: I spent a lot of time refining and testing different Flux-based character Loras for my models. This is still a work in progress, but the goal is to improve long-term consistency and make my workflow even more efficient. NSFW Content Expansion: On Emma’s side, I expanded her content library using a real model body double, making her content look more organic and natural. Jade, however, remains 100% AI-generated, keeping her workflow entirely digital. Social Media Wipeout (Thanks, VA 🙃): I had handed off both Twitter accounts to a virtual assistant to help with engagement and DMs. Big mistake. He ended up spamming DMs, which got both accounts banned—Emma (80K followers) and Jade (20K followers). 🤦‍♂️ Right now, I’m rebuilding Emma’s account from scratch and taking a much more cautious approach. Jade’s account is still offline for now. New Platform: Threads – I hadn’t touched Threads before, but since engagement on Instagram can be unpredictable, I decided to start accounts for both models. So far, they’re performing well, and I’ll continue experimenting. Launched AI Winners Community: After getting flooded with DMs (both here and on Instagram), I realized there was a massive demand for structured learning around AI influencers. So, I launched AI Winners, a paid community where I break down everything I’ve learned. It’s still early, but I see it turning into a solid, long-term community. Investment & Acquisition Talks: I’m still evaluating potential investors and acquisition offers for my AI models. There’s growing interest in buying or investing in Emma & Jade, so I’ve been having conversations to explore different options. Overall, January was about tech, rebuilding, and long-term planning—not immediate revenue. But that’s what keeps this business sustainable. 🚀 \------- ⚠️ Biggest Challenges This Month Lost Both Twitter Accounts (Massive Traffic Hit) 🚨 The biggest blow this month was losing my models’ Twitter accounts. Twitter was responsible for about 40% of my total traffic, meaning both free and paid subs took a direct hit. While Emma’s revenue took a slight dip, Jade’s income dropped significantly—partly due to the account loss and partly because January is naturally slow. (Full revenue breakdown at the end of the post.) Jade’s Instagram Tanked (Possible Shadow Ban?) 🤔 Jade’s Instagram completely lost momentum in early January. Engagement and reach dropped by over 80%, and I still haven’t figured out why. It feels like a shadow ban, but I have no clear confirmation. To counter this, I launched a second backup account, and things are starting to recover. \------- 🚀 Potential Improvements & What’s Next Locking in a Stable Workflow 🔄 Right now, Emma & Jade’s workflow is still evolving, but I’m aiming to fully stabilize it. As I’m writing this, content is generating on my second monitor—a sign that I’m close to achieving full automation without compromising quality. Boosting Jade’s Fanvue Revenue 💰 Jade’s income took a hit this month, and it’s 100% a traffic issue. The solution? More content, more reach. I’ll be increasing social media output to drive consistent traffic back to Fanvue and restore her earnings. Patreon is Done. All Focus on Fanvue 🚫 I shut down both Emma & Jade’s Patreon accounts. The goal is not to split revenue—I want everything funneled into Fanvue for higher engagement and bigger paydays. \------- 💰 January 2025 Earnings Breakdown Despite January being one of the slowest months for online creators, Emma and Jade still brought in over $29K in revenue, with a net profit exceeding $20K after all expenses. Emma Laui generated $20,206.77, with around $6,000 in expenses (chatter payments, NSFW designer fees, and other operational costs). Jade Laui earned $8,939.05, with $2,000 in expenses. Considering Twitter account losses, Instagram setbacks, and the usual January spending slump, this is still a solid outcome. The focus now is on scaling traffic and maximizing Fanvue revenue heading into February. 🚀🔥 That’s the full breakdown for January! If you have questions, feel free to drop a comment, and I’ll answer when I can. Happy to help, just like others helped me when I was starting out! 🚀🔥

#reddit#setbacks#$20k
From Setbacks to $20K Profit: My AI Influencer Earnings Breakdown (Jan 2025) 💰
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
benfromwhere•This week

From Setbacks to $20K Profit: My AI Influencer Earnings Breakdown (Jan 2025) 💰

(Monthly income breakdown is in the end) 📌 Introduction Hey everyone! 👋 Before I dive into this month’s breakdown, I just want to be upfront—English isn’t my first language, so I’ve used ChatGPT to refine this post for better readability. That said, everything here is 100% real—my personal experiences, struggles, and earnings as someone running a full-time AI influencer business. Since I get a lot of DMs asking about my AI models, here are their Instagram links: 📷 Emma – https://www.instagram.com/emmalauireal 📷 Jade – https://www.instagram.com/jadelaui (jadecasual is the second account) Also, if you’ve been wondering about the community I run, where I teach others how to build AI influencers from scratch, here’s the link (I got approval from mods for this link): 🔗 AI Winners Now, let’s get into what happened this month. 🚀 \------- First, a huge thank you! 🎉 Three months ago, I shared my journey of building an AI influencer business, and I was blown away by the response. That post got 263K+ views and was shared over 2.7K times—way more than I ever expected. If you’re new here or want to check out the full story of how I started, you can read it here: 🔗 Click Here (Reddit link) \------- 🔹 What I Did in January After the holiday rush in December, I knew January would be a slow month—people had already spent most of their money at the end of the year. So instead of pushing harder on monetization, I shifted my focus to tech development and optimization. Flux Character Loras: I spent a lot of time refining and testing different Flux-based character Loras for my models. This is still a work in progress, but the goal is to improve long-term consistency and make my workflow even more efficient. NSFW Content Expansion: On Emma’s side, I expanded her content library using a real model body double, making her content look more organic and natural. Jade, however, remains 100% AI-generated, keeping her workflow entirely digital. Social Media Wipeout (Thanks, VA 🙃): I had handed off both Twitter accounts to a virtual assistant to help with engagement and DMs. Big mistake. He ended up spamming DMs, which got both accounts banned—Emma (80K followers) and Jade (20K followers). 🤦‍♂️ Right now, I’m rebuilding Emma’s account from scratch and taking a much more cautious approach. Jade’s account is still offline for now. New Platform: Threads – I hadn’t touched Threads before, but since engagement on Instagram can be unpredictable, I decided to start accounts for both models. So far, they’re performing well, and I’ll continue experimenting. Launched AI Winners Community: After getting flooded with DMs (both here and on Instagram), I realized there was a massive demand for structured learning around AI influencers. So, I launched AI Winners, a paid community where I break down everything I’ve learned. It’s still early, but I see it turning into a solid, long-term community. Investment & Acquisition Talks: I’m still evaluating potential investors and acquisition offers for my AI models. There’s growing interest in buying or investing in Emma & Jade, so I’ve been having conversations to explore different options. Overall, January was about tech, rebuilding, and long-term planning—not immediate revenue. But that’s what keeps this business sustainable. 🚀 \------- ⚠️ Biggest Challenges This Month Lost Both Twitter Accounts (Massive Traffic Hit) 🚨 The biggest blow this month was losing my models’ Twitter accounts. Twitter was responsible for about 40% of my total traffic, meaning both free and paid subs took a direct hit. While Emma’s revenue took a slight dip, Jade’s income dropped significantly—partly due to the account loss and partly because January is naturally slow. (Full revenue breakdown at the end of the post.) Jade’s Instagram Tanked (Possible Shadow Ban?) 🤔 Jade’s Instagram completely lost momentum in early January. Engagement and reach dropped by over 80%, and I still haven’t figured out why. It feels like a shadow ban, but I have no clear confirmation. To counter this, I launched a second backup account, and things are starting to recover. \------- 🚀 Potential Improvements & What’s Next Locking in a Stable Workflow 🔄 Right now, Emma & Jade’s workflow is still evolving, but I’m aiming to fully stabilize it. As I’m writing this, content is generating on my second monitor—a sign that I’m close to achieving full automation without compromising quality. Boosting Jade’s Fanvue Revenue 💰 Jade’s income took a hit this month, and it’s 100% a traffic issue. The solution? More content, more reach. I’ll be increasing social media output to drive consistent traffic back to Fanvue and restore her earnings. Patreon is Done. All Focus on Fanvue 🚫 I shut down both Emma & Jade’s Patreon accounts. The goal is not to split revenue—I want everything funneled into Fanvue for higher engagement and bigger paydays. \------- 💰 January 2025 Earnings Breakdown Despite January being one of the slowest months for online creators, Emma and Jade still brought in over $29K in revenue, with a net profit exceeding $20K after all expenses. Emma Laui generated $20,206.77, with around $6,000 in expenses (chatter payments, NSFW designer fees, and other operational costs). Jade Laui earned $8,939.05, with $2,000 in expenses. Considering Twitter account losses, Instagram setbacks, and the usual January spending slump, this is still a solid outcome. The focus now is on scaling traffic and maximizing Fanvue revenue heading into February. 🚀🔥 That’s the full breakdown for January! If you have questions, feel free to drop a comment, and I’ll answer when I can. Happy to help, just like others helped me when I was starting out! 🚀🔥

#reddit#setbacks#$20k
How I Made $250.000+ in a Year: A Case Study of My AI Influencer Journey
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.778
benfromwhere•This week

How I Made $250.000+ in a Year: A Case Study of My AI Influencer Journey

Update on February 22th: I changed my AI influencer's names because it caused some problems on my business. One year, two AI-powered influencers, and $250K in revenue. Sounds unreal? It’s not. Today, I’m pulling back the curtain on the strategies, tools, and hard-won lessons that took me from concept to a six-figure success story in the AI influencer space. Hey, I'm Ben—a 32-year-old designer who spent the past year navigating the world of AI influencers. Let me clear up any confusion right from the start: I’m not here to sell you anything. This is purely a case study to share what worked, what didn’t, and what I’ve learned along the way. I’ll also make sure to answer all your questions in the comments for free whenever I can, so don’t hesitate to ask. Links to Past Topics: If you're curious about some of the groundwork I covered, check out a few of my earlier posts here: How I Make $10,000 Monthly | AI Influencer Management How I Earned $7000+ in 15 Days | AI Influencer Business Update These earlier posts cover a lot of the backstory, so feel free to explore them before diving into this one. So if you're ready, here is the full story: \---- The idea of creating an AI influencer was one of those “what if” moments that wouldn’t leave my mind. At first, it sounded futuristic—even a bit too ambitious. It all started when I stumbled upon an AI influencer on Instagram with the handle AnnaMaes2000. Her content blew me away—the quality, the detail, and just how real everything looked. I was instantly hooked and ended up going through every post, just trying to figure out how she was pulling this off. That’s when I knew I had to learn how this was done. The next step? YouTube. I dived into videos on Stable Diffusion, soaking up everything I could about creating AI-generated images. Those tutorials taught me the basics and got me up to speed. Then, I created my first AI influencer, let's call her Mel for now. Right after that, to complete the storyline and boost engagement, I introduced Mel's “mother,” Jess. Adding Jess gave the whole project depth and a narrative that drew people in, creating a unique family dynamic that instantly elevated traffic and interest. After thousands of bad photos, hundreds of deleted posts, and months of trial and error, you can now see the quality that defines my current accounts. Here’s a rundown of the tools and checkpoints I’ve used from day one, in order: Fooocus on RunDiffusion — Juggernaut V8 Fooocus on RunDiffusion — Juggernaut V9 Fooocus on PC (locally) — Juggernaut V9 Fooocus on PC (locally) —Lyuyang Mix + Juggernaut V9 Flux on PC (couple of photos only since it's so slow even on RTX 4090) Flux on Fal.ai. \---- There’s no magic Instagram hack that guarantees success, despite what everyone thinks and keeps asking me. Quality content, consistent uploads, and solid craftsmanship are what actually help your photos hit trends and show up on the Explore page. Unlike 95% of low-quality AI accounts out there, I don’t rely on faceswap videos, spam Reels, or go around liking comments on other accounts. My approach is fully organic, focused solely on creating my own unique content. By following Instagram's guidelines to the letter, I've managed to direct some of Mel and Jess' fans over to Patreon and Fanvue. There, for a small subscription fee, fans can access exclusive lingerie content. For those looking for more, higher-tier subscriptions give access to even more premium content. Some possible questions and their answers: No, you can't share hardcore NSFW content on Patreon. You can do that on Fanvue. Yes, you can create AI creators on Fanvue — OnlyFans doesn't allow it. Yes, you can use your own ID to get KYC. Yes, we're telling both Mel and Jess is (or use) AI to generate content. And yes, some people leave and some people still have fun with chatting, having a good time and get perfect content for their needs. And yes, we have a chatter team to work on these accounts. \---- This journey wasn’t all smooth sailing. I faced unexpected roadblocks, like platform restrictions that limited certain types of content, and managing fan expectations was more challenging than anticipated. Staying within guidelines while keeping fans engaged required constant adaptation. These hurdles forced me to get creative, adjust my approach, and learn fast. Once I saw Mel and Jess gaining traction, I knew it was time to scale up. Expanding meant finding new ways to keep content fresh, creating deeper narratives, and considering how to bring even more followers into the fold. My focus turned to building a sustainable model that could grow without sacrificing quality or authenticity. If you’re thinking about diving into AI content creation, here’s my advice: patience, consistency, and a focus on quality are key. Don’t cut corners or rely on quick-fix hacks. Invest time in learning the right tools, creating engaging stories, and building an audience that values what you bring to the table. This approach took me from zero to six figures, and it’s what makes the journey worth it. \---- And finally, here’s the income breakdown that everyone’s curious about: Mel on Fanvue: $82,331.58 (Gross earnings because we have chatter cuts like 15%) Mel on Patreon: $50,865.98 (Net earnings) Jess on Fanvue: $89,068.26 (Gross earnings because we have chatter cuts like 15%) Jess on Patreon: $39,040.70 And thanks to Reddit and my old posts, I got a perfect investor like after 5 months, so this is a "payback" for that. Like I said, I'll answer every question in the comments — take care and let me know.

#reddit#made#$250.000+
An honest opinion about start-up idea
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
Comfortable_Mud1233•This week

An honest opinion about start-up idea

You will be helpful to us especially if you have worked with a lot of data (whether in a corporation or somewhere else). We aim to develop a document library platform that aggregates data from various storage services such as Amazon S3 (AWS) and Google Cloud Storage (GCP). The platform serves as a centralized interface or "panel" where users within an organization can access and display documents stored across different sources. Key features include: Data aggregation without storage: The platform pulls data from multiple sources but does not store it locally. This approach minimizes data redundancy and storage costs. AI-powered semantic search: Utilizes artificial intelligence to perform semantic searches across files, enabling users to find documents based on context and meaning rather than just keywords. Tagging and versioning: Supports the addition of tags for better categorization and tracking of different versions of files. The solution targets companies handling large volumes of data and documents dispersed across various storage services. Strengths we found: Non-invasive integration: Eliminates the need for data migration, reducing setup time and complexity. Enhanced search capabilities: AI-driven semantic search outperforms basic keyword searches, saving time. Cross-platform functionality: Provides a level of interoperability that competitors lack. Cost efficiency: Avoids additional storage costs and reduces time spent searching for documents. Weaknesses that we see: Limited feature set compared to ECMs: May lack some advanced features like workflow automation, collaboration tools, and compliance auditing provided by ECMs. We're new: so no trust. Is this something that companies would want to integrate and pay for? Thanks a lot, it can save us a lot of time :)

#reddit#honest#opinion
voicefilter
github
LLM Vibe Score0.496
Human Vibe Score0.029786815978503328
maum-ai•Mar 24, 2025

voicefilter

VoiceFilter Note from Seung-won (2020.10.25) Hi everyone! It's Seung-won from MINDs Lab, Inc. It's been a long time since I've released this open-source, and I didn't expect this repository to grab such a great amount of attention for a long time. I would like to thank everyone for giving such attention, and also Mr. Quan Wang (the first author of the VoiceFilter paper) for referring this project in his paper. Actually, this project was done by me when it was only 3 months after I started studying deep learning & speech separation without a supervisor in the relevant field. Back then, I didn't know what is a power-law compression, and the correct way to validate/test the models. Now that I've spent more time on deep learning & speech since then (I also wrote a paper published at Interspeech 2020 😊), I can observe some obvious mistakes that I've made. Those issues were kindly raised by GitHub users; please refer to the Issues and Pull Requests for that. That being said, this repository can be quite unreliable, and I would like to remind everyone to use this code at their own risk (as specified in LICENSE). Unfortunately, I can't afford extra time on revising this project or reviewing the Issues / Pull Requests. Instead, I would like to offer some pointers to newer, more reliable resources: VoiceFilter-Lite: This is a newer version of VoiceFilter presented at Interspeech 2020, which is also written by Mr. Quan Wang (and his colleagues at Google). I highly recommend checking this paper, since it focused on a more realistic situation where VoiceFilter is needed. List of VoiceFilter implementation available on GitHub: In March 2019, this repository was the only available open-source implementation of VoiceFilter. However, much better implementations that deserve more attention became available across GitHub. Please check them, and choose the one that meets your demand. PyTorch Lightning: Back in 2019, I could not find a great deep-learning project template for myself, so I and my colleagues had used this project as a template for other new projects. For people who are searching for such project template, I would like to strongly recommend PyTorch Lightning. Even though I had done a lot of effort into developing my own template during 2019 (VoiceFilter -> RandWireNN -> MelNet -> MelGAN), I found PyTorch Lightning much better than my own template. Thanks for reading, and I wish everyone good health during the global pandemic situation. Best regards, Seung-won Park Unofficial PyTorch implementation of Google AI's: VoiceFilter: Targeted Voice Separation by Speaker-Conditioned Spectrogram Masking. Result Training took about 20 hours on AWS p3.2xlarge(NVIDIA V100). Audio Sample Listen to audio sample at webpage: http://swpark.me/voicefilter/ Metric | Median SDR | Paper | Ours | | ---------------------- | ----- | ---- | | before VoiceFilter | 2.5 | 1.9 | | after VoiceFilter | 12.6 | 10.2 | SDR converged at 10, which is slightly lower than paper's. Dependencies Python and packages This code was tested on Python 3.6 with PyTorch 1.0.1. Other packages can be installed by: Miscellaneous ffmpeg-normalize is used for resampling and normalizing wav files. See README.md of ffmpeg-normalize for installation. Prepare Dataset Download LibriSpeech dataset To replicate VoiceFilter paper, get LibriSpeech dataset at http://www.openslr.org/12/. train-clear-100.tar.gz(6.3G) contains speech of 252 speakers, and train-clear-360.tar.gz(23G) contains 922 speakers. You may use either, but the more speakers you have in dataset, the more better VoiceFilter will be. Resample & Normalize wav files First, unzip tar.gz file to desired folder: Next, copy utils/normalize-resample.sh to root directory of unzipped data folder. Then: Edit config.yaml Preprocess wav files In order to boost training speed, perform STFT for each files before training by: This will create 100,000(train) + 1000(test) data. (About 160G) Train VoiceFilter Get pretrained model for speaker recognition system VoiceFilter utilizes speaker recognition system (d-vector embeddings). Here, we provide pretrained model for obtaining d-vector embeddings. This model was trained with VoxCeleb2 dataset, where utterances are randomly fit to time length [70, 90] frames. Tests are done with window 80 / hop 40 and have shown equal error rate about 1%. Data used for test were selected from first 8 speakers of VoxCeleb1 test dataset, where 10 utterances per each speakers are randomly selected. Update: Evaluation on VoxCeleb1 selected pair showed 7.4% EER. The model can be downloaded at this GDrive link. Run After specifying traindir, testdir at config.yaml, run: This will create chkpt/name and logs/name at base directory(-b option, . in default) View tensorboardX Resuming from checkpoint Evaluate Possible improvments Try power-law compressed reconstruction error as loss function, instead of MSE. (See #14) Author Seungwon Park at MINDsLab (yyyyy@snu.ac.kr, swpark@mindslab.ai) License Apache License 2.0 This repository contains codes adapted/copied from the followings: utils/adabound.py from https://github.com/Luolc/AdaBound (Apache License 2.0) utils/audio.py from https://github.com/keithito/tacotron (MIT License) utils/hparams.py from https://github.com/HarryVolek/PyTorchSpeakerVerification (No License specified) utils/normalize-resample.sh from https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/216475

#github#voicefilter
11 Make.com Automations You NEED To Start Using Every Day (steal these)
youtube
LLM Vibe Score0.437
Human Vibe Score0.76
Jono Catliff•Aug 30, 2024

11 Make.com Automations You NEED To Start Using Every Day (steal these)

🌍 COMMUNITY https://www.skool.com/automatable/about 📝 BLUEPRINTS • New leads automation → https://youtu.be/RGHKaXLPrTk • Automate contracts/invoices → https://youtu.be/hle_HtchLz8 • Automate recruitment → https://youtu.be/_xYJMW5yeUk • Automate lead web scraping & AI lead magnets → https://youtu.be/LLKI_cV7XI4 • Automate AI blog posts → https://youtu.be/FmXt26JY24I • Automate AI social media posting → https://youtu.be/97U8kFkzjYQ • Automate accounting → https://youtu.be/QBuGQaLNFfc • Automate scraping viral content ideas → https://youtu.be/5Wi7fqJwh6s • Automate project management → https://youtu.be/nyoiFHzH1Hw • Automate analytics → https://youtu.be/dRLHT_B-uKg 📚 SUMMARY In this video we walk through the 11 best Make.com automations I use on a daily basis (and you should too). These automations literally changed my life. I went from working 14 hours per day on my business to ultimately replacing my job. There's obviously more to it than just 11, but this is a great start 📺 RELATED VIDEOS • Full crash course on Make.com → https://youtu.be/hinLebdX8aM • Full crash course on Apify & web scraping →https://youtu.be/pKgup8tsPv8 • How I made 507K last year with Bark.com → https://youtu.be/oCaGVACutdE • How I generate 1,000+ blog posts instantly → https://youtu.be/FmXt26JY24I • How I scraped 10,000+ leads & sent lead magnets → https://youtu.be/qwsB72PhM3E 🎯 1:1 CONSULTING Book a time → https://jonocatliff.com/consultation 🚀 AUTOMATION AGENCY Get help with your business → https://www.automatable.co 🔗 LINKS (some of these make me money - thanks in advance!) • Apify → https://jonocatliff.com/apify • Zapier → https://jonocatliff.com/zapier • PandaDoc → https://jonocatliff.com/pandadoc • Make.com → https://jonocatliff.com/make • Go High Level → https://jonocatliff.com/gohighlevel 👋 ABOUT ME Hey everyone, my name is Jono. I run a 7-figure service business that offers DJ, photo, video services (#1 largest in Canada), and spent years figuring out how to automate every part of it (and hired the roles that I couldn't). Conservatively, I used to work 80+ hours per week, before sunrise till long after sunset; missing gatherings, family events and everything in between. Through automation though, I was able to replace my job. My goal is to help share what worked for me, in a dream of helping others find true success with their passion. Please subscribe, like and comment below if you have any questions! Thank you 😊 ⌛ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 1:12 New leads automation 2:50 Automate contracts/invoices 5:12 Automate accounting 7:31 Automate recruitment 9:23 Automate lead web scraping & AI lead magnets 11:42 Automate AI blog posts 13:58 Automate AI social media posting 14:48 Automate scraping viral content ideas 15:44 Automate project management 16:55 Automate analytics 19:01 Automate your database #make #automation #workflowautomation #workflow #automationmastery

#1#make#automation
How To Service Your First AI Automation Agency Client In 2024 (Make.com)
youtube
LLM Vibe Score0.368
Human Vibe Score0.48
Nick Saraev•Aug 13, 2024

How To Service Your First AI Automation Agency Client In 2024 (Make.com)

GET THE FREE GAMMA + TEMPLATES HERE 🙏 https://gamma.app/docs/How-to-Successfully-Service-Your-First-Automation-Client-in-2024-3xpyq1tyhppm1jv JOIN MY AUTOMATION COMMUNITY & GET YOUR FIRST CUSTOMER, GUARANTEED 👑 https://www.skool.com/makerschool/about SUMMARY ⤵️ Complete guide on servicing your first AI automation agency client in 2024. I run you through the workflow from end-to-end, including pre-project, kickoff, onboarding, progress updates, delivery emails, and upsells. WHAT TO WATCH NEXT 🍿 How I Hit $25K/Mo Selling Automation: https://youtube.com/watch?v=T7qAiuWDwLw My $21K/Mo Make.com Proposal System: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UVLeX600irk Generate Content Automatically With AI: https://youtube.com/watch?v=P2Y_DVW1TSQ MY SOFTWARE, TOOLS, & DEALS (some of these give me kickbacks—thank you!) 🚀 INSTANTLY: https://link.nicksaraev.com/instantly-short 📧 ANYMAIL FINDER: https://link.nicksaraev.com/amf-short 👻 PHANTOMBUSTER: https://link.nicksaraev.com/pb-short ✅ CLICKUP: https://link.nicksaraev.com/clickup-short 📈 RIZE: https://link.nicksaraev.com/rize-short (use promo code NICK for addn 25% off) WHAT TO WATCH NEXT 🍿 HOW I HIT $25K/MO SELLING AUTOMATION: https://youtube.com/watch?v=T7qAiuWDwLw MY $21K/MO MAKE.COM PROPOSAL SYSTEM: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UVLeX600irk GENERATE CONTENT AUTOMATICALLY WITH AI: https://youtube.com/watch?v=P2Y_DVW1TSQ FOLLOW ME ✍🏻 My content writing agency: https://1secondcopy.com 🦾 My automation agency: https://leftclick.ai 🕊️ My Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/nicksaraev 🤙 My blog (followed by the founder of HubSpot!): https://nicksaraev.com WHY ME? If this is your first watch—hi, I’m Nick! TLDR: I spent five years building automated businesses with Make.com (most notably 1SecondCopy, a content company that hit 7 figures). Today a lot of people talk about automation, but I’ve noticed that very few have practical, real world success making money with it. So this channel is me chiming in and showing you what real systems that make real revenue look like! Hopefully I can help you improve your business, and in doing so, the rest of your life :-) Please like, subscribe, and leave me a comment if you have a specific request! Thanks. Timestamps 0:00 Introduction to Servicing Your Automation Client 0:39 The Importance of Client Retention 2:03 Understanding Your Role as a Service Provider 2:54 The Significance of Client Acquisition Time 8:06 Setting Expectations with the Client 14:53 Implementing a Structured Onboarding Process 16:11 Testing the Flow of the Project 18:18 Delivering Progress Updates to Clients 19:13 Utilizing Templates for Project Efficiency 22:32 Utilizing Project Update and Delivery Templates 25:46 Enhancing Client Relationships with Delivery Templates 28:12 Importance of Service in Service Provider Role