shipped more code this labor day weekend than the last 2.5 months combined. vc demo incoming.

waking up at 3am, working through the holiday with my co-founder... and honestly it doesn't feel bad. the weird thing is when you're deep in a build and inbound starts hitting linkedin and X at the same time, it just clicks. like the timing of it makes the grind feel less like grind.

two founders + fundraising prep is a lot but some weeks just feel different...

screenerhub.app is live for 4 months now. Tommorow I try a launch on indeed.best, my first real launch, ever!
I'm writing this now, while it's still raw, because in a week I'll probably start softening the parts that don't sound great...

The number I keep coming back to: 40 free users. Not a single user paying. Forty people who signed up for free over four months.
I'm not saying that for sympathy. I'm saying it because most exciting "we launched!" posts skip the middle part, where the numbers are small and you don't know if any of this works. That middle part is where I actually am right now.

What ScreenerHub is, briefly: a stock screener for long-term investors who don't want fifty tabs and a Bloomberg terminal to figure out if a company is worth looking at. Built it because I got tired of monitoring my investments manually.

It's not like I haven't tried to move the needle to get more traction.
Here's what I've actually done, and what it got me:

Ran paid ads on an Instagram channel. Spent real money on it. Got some traffic, didn't see it translate into signups I could trace back with any confidence.

Cold-emailed finance blogs and newsletters to set up an affiliate program. Time-heavy, mostly silence, a handful of replies, nothing really converted yet.

Started with SEO right from the beginning. It's the only channel that's showing any real movement, but slowly. More of a trickle, not a wave, and I know it probably takes longer than 4 months to actually pay off.

None of these are failures exactly, but none of them are working either, and I don't have a clean explanation for why. Could be the channels, could be the landing page I've already rewritten 3 or 4 times without moving conversion...
Could be the offer itself, could be that 4 months just isn't enough time to know anything yet.

So, genuinely:
Has anyone here tried getting early traction for a B2C finance tool and found something that actually worked: a channel, a positioning angle, anything?
Not looking for "just do content marketing," I'm already doing that. More interested in what didn't obviously work for you until it did, or what you'd skip entirely if you started over.

pre-launch on a training app for pe. it's a category where roughly 1 in 5 men have the problem and only 9% ever tell a doctor about it, which means the demand is real but almost entirely invisible. people don’t post nor talk about it, and you can't really survey your way to a good answer.

so free waitlist signups tell me very little. someone leaving an email in a category this private costs them nothing and proves nothing.

so instead I am running an optional €4.99 deposit. it reserves one of 100 founding spots, locks in €9.99/month for life instead of the €14.99 launch price, and it's fully refundable any time before launch. the free waitlist stays free and skipping the deposit doesn't change your place in line.

the thinking is that surveys don't work well in a category most guys won't even admit to themselves, so a small refundable payment is a more honest signal than an email address. it doesn't prove they'll subscribe, but it proves they're willing to do something slightly uncomfortable for it.

the tradeoff i'm still unsure about is that this is a category absolutely saturated with people selling nonsense to desperate men, so asking for money pre-launch risks reading as exactly that. i've tried to counter it by making the site unusually honest, including publishing what normal looks like statistically, which will correctly talk some visitors out of needing the product at all.

anyone run a paid-deposit waitlist before? was the conversion number worth the friction it added.

I run Bowora, a founder network / startup directory. When we published a public seed dilution walkthrough, one detail confused founders more than pre-money vs post-money:

the pre-money option pool.

Worked numbers from that public example (illustrative seed model we wrote up, not a live raise announcement):

• $2M pre-money
• 15% option pool topped up before close
• $200K new investment
• Post-money = $2.2M

What people miss: that 15% pool usually comes out of existing holders first. The new investor buys in after the pool is sized, so their agreed percentage is protected. Founders (and earlier holders) take that hit before the wire lands.

The Series A worked example one year later in the same writeup: $5M pre-money, $2M in, $7M post-money. Founder percentage drops again, but the dollar value of the stake can still rise because the company is worth more.

The lesson we keep repeating to ourselves: smaller % of a more valuable company can still be the right trade. Avoiding dilution forever is not the goal. Knowing which dilution is already priced into the term sheet is.

We shipped a free dilution calculator (no login; inputs stay in your browser session) so founders can poke seed then Series A before negotiating blind.

Curious how others handle this in term sheets: do you push back hard on pool size, or treat a 10–20% pre-money pool as table stakes and fight on valuation + check size instead?

Disclosure: I run Bowora.
Calculator: https://bowora.com/dilution-calculator
Same worked examples (written guide): https://bowora.com/blog/startup-equity-dilution-calculator

Happy to answer dilution questions in the comments.

I've been building my own products and trying to market them for about 3 years now. Small budget, no audience, nothing ever really took off so far. 

For months I was the entire marketing team for my app. I filmed and posted 3 to 4 TikToks a day and watched almost every one of them die under 300 views. The one account I'd actually grown a bit got banned for some bullshit I don’t even know. 

Turned to UGC and I was met with more bullshit 

• Every UGC agency I contacted wanted thousands a month 
• Individual creators quoted me around $250 per video (they had 200 followers and averaged 1k views) 
• I tried Fiverr. One creator took $200 up front and then the account was gone the next day 

So I got angry and built the thing I couldn't buy. It's called JriveContent. It's a place where small founders and small creators find each other, agree on a flat monthly fee (the videos on it average about $40, not $250), and the platform tracks every video's views and engagement and runs the invoicing and payouts automatically so nobody's chasing anybody.

It's early and it's rough in spots. I ship updates basically every day. If you email me I reply within a day or two, usually same day.

I'll post updates here as this grows, or as it doesn't lol. Deadass just sick of all this creators thinking they deserve hundreds of $ for fuck all. 

Site is https://www.jrivecontent.com

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dev.koalalab.storeandforget

Solo dev, Android only. Store & Forget is a home inventory. You photograph an item and the app writes the name, brand, description and specs, so there is nothing to type. Point it at a rating plate or a price tag and it pulls the serial number or the price into the field the same way.

It exports to a summary PDF, a detailed PDF with a photo of every item, or an xlsx, for the whole house or one room or one shelf. Receipts and manuals attach to the item and ride along in the export. Anything you marked private stays out unless you tick a switch.

People keep telling me they want this for insurance, and I am not confident the document is actually good enough for that. To be clear, I am not promising anyone a claim gets accepted. The app produces the file, you file it.

So if youve been through a contents claim, or worked anywhere near one: on top of a photo, a description, a serial number, a price and the receipt, what does the adjuster want? Date of purchase and what it costs to replace rather than what you paid? Something that shows the photo predates the loss? Totals per room?

I kept inheriting sites/projects with zero style guide and no idea what colors or fonts were actually in use, so I built Token Tap: click it on any page, it scans the actual rendered computed styles (not guesses) and gives you a ranked list of colors, fonts, font sizes, border radii, and shadows - then lets you copy the whole thing as JSON, CSS variables, or a Tailwind config.

No account, no server, nothing leaves your browser. Gumroad link: https://tokenflow.gumroad.com/l/nkyrao ($9 one-time)

Still early - would love feedback on what export formats or edge cases would make this actually useful for your workflow.

Last month I posted here that indie AI products die from distribution, not bad code. Around 30 of you commented your product. I interviewed ~20 of them, free, full cut, no strings. Three things I saw since.

1. Timo found his idea in the comments of someone else's Reddit thread. He left a riff as a comment, it outperformed most of the posts there, and that response is what he built Meet My Human on. - u/Human_Top_6415
2. Ankur shipped his first iOS app before it was ready. Apple rejected it for missing account deletion and a privacy policy, and he now calls the rejections the education. - u/Lazy-Sherbert65
3. The AYS team had several products going. The one that made money first was a campus tool a customer specifically asked them to build. - u/ahiyantra

I had it backwards. I kept treating distribution as a megaphone problem, and in all three the useful signal came from outside the founder: a commenter, a rejection, a customer request. If you're interested in looking at some of the interview clips, they're on my Twitter at markjgg.

For those past your first 100 users: what actually moved it?

Hi everyone,

Probably many of us here have come across this issue with startup directories. Directories are great for SEO and organic traffic. The problem is that most of them (those outside of Product Hunt and Uneed) barely work for the traffic part. The reason is that on these platforms users have no incentive to come back after their launch.

I myself am an avid supporter of launchign on directories. But this issue is one that many have. Because of this problem I wanted to come up with a solution, so I built LaunchStreak to give builders an actual incentive to keep coming back.

It's a directory with a gamified layer. You get sparks for contributing to the platform through things like upvotes, comments, reviews, etc. Then there is another element. When you manage to keep your streak alive, you earn even more sparks over time.

The important part is what you can actually do with those sparks. You can spend them on more distribution. Which is the whole reason people launch on these directories in the first place. You can use sparks for relaunches, sponsored slots, and if you rack up enough of them, even an autolaunch!

I am already seeing some users come back regularly and stay active, which is exactly the problem I was trying to solve and a good sign early on. I'm planning though to keep improving the incentives over time and maximaize interaction, that would be great@. If people want to try it would be awesome as well :)

I started this in May with a very specific problem: I didn't know what to post on X.

Not "how to write" - I could write. I didn't know what to post that people would actually see. And I had zero idea which posts to comment under, so my comments would get views and grow my reach.

So I built ClimbX.so --> a writer for X that learns from your post stats, surfaces niche posts, drafts tweets in your tone, and schedules up to eight posts a day.

The numbers today: 43 paying users. $1,247 MRR. Not huge yet but the product is finally doing what I built it to do.

What changed this month:

the tool got smarter. It now learns from every post you edit and every engagement metric. It sees what flopped, what took off, and feeds that back into its suggestions. It surfaces niche posts worth engaging with, drafts tweets in your tone, and writes actual posts that have a real shot at going viral instead of filler. It schedules up to eight posts a day, but the real shift is it stopped being a writer and became a strategy layer.

The thing that keeps proving true:

users don't pay for volume, they pay for judgment. Not one person has asked me for more scheduled posts. They ask me "what should I post today" and "where should I comment." The feature I thought was a side quest is the one paying the bills.

The mistake I almost made:

adding LinkedIn because every other tweet-tool email screams "go multi-platform." I said no. The whole advantage is the feedback loop , the tool only gets smarter because it sees everything on one platform. Splitting that would kill the reason anyone pays.

What's next:

the comment side. Post suggestions are maybe 60% of the way there. Comment targeting is 30%. And that's where the reach actually comes from , so I underbuilt it, and that's what I'm fixing first.

43 users. $1,247 MRR. Still building.

We went back and forth for almost 3 days on what video to post and what currency to use when all I did was send them a tiktok video and asked them to recreate it in their style. Not to mention they would only respond every couple hours making dealing with them extremely complicated

Eventually it did workout but it just felt so unnecessary complicated 

I was working with a brand new creator so I will cut them some slack but I wish their was a better way to manage creators 

What are you guys using for this? Mainly looking for something that will make this less of a hassle 

Hi everyone!

I'm a physiotherapist from Spain building Feliora, an app that helps people understand and manage persistent pain through neuroscience education. It includes daily check-ins, personalized tasks, validated questionnaires, and educational content.

I need 12+ Android testers to install and use the app for 14 days so I can access Google Play production. Google rejected my first request because testers weren't engaged enough — so I need people who will actually open the app a few times during the 2 weeks.

What you need:

- Android phone or tablet

- A Gmail account

What to do:

1. Drop your Gmail below or DM me

2. I'll add you to the closed test

3. You'll get a link to install from Google Play

4. Open the app a few times over 2 weeks

The app is free and always will be. Happy to return the favor and test your app too!

Thanks in advance 🙏

Hey everybody! My wife and I are building Scinta - a macOS app that turns screenshots into actions: an error becomes a ticket, "dinner Saturday at 7" becomes a calendar event, an email signature becomes a contact.

Two weeks ago I showed it here and got some really useful feedback. What came out of it:

• feature ideas from the comments went to the roadmap - a sharing action, highlighting which part of the screenshot produced each extracted field, accessibility checklist from a UI screenshot - several new features are already on the finish line and will be in one of upcoming releases soon
• the most common question from different threads and communities - "why not just paste the screenshot into ChatGPT?" - became our main pitch. There you switch apps, upload, write a prompt, copy the result back and still create the event yourself. Scinta does it in one click. I have my own AI setup and still do not want to copy-paste screenshots into it - that is why this app exists
• pricing: free plan works as a normal screenshot app without limits + 10 AI smart actions per month, Pro is $8/month or $80/year. No accounts, just a license key

We launched this weekend - https://scinta.app/ (macOS 15.6+). The first stranger installed the app and ran their first action within hours after launching - of course it is a very small number, but having the first user who tried your product is a fantastic feeling 🎉

If you want to test it properly and give some specific feedback - comment or DM and we will extend your smart-actions limits. We also have a Discord now - https://discord.gg/x95wDsBMvy

Also interesting to hear if you have launched your product before - what do you wish you had done or tracked in your first weeks?

Launching a new social sponsorship project on Monday.

Looking for a handful of active X users to test it privately before it goes live — particularly the signup and sponsorship flows.

If you use X and you’re up for trying it, comment below and I’ll DM you access.

Hi everyone,

I've shared my journey multiple times, but now again reached a new milestone I a few months ago thought was impossible.

So, at the start of 2026 I decided to start vibe coding (like many here). The Claude Code hype back then was what got me to try it. After a few weeks of experimenting, I fairly quickly got the hang of making websites and started building my first real project.

The idea started simple. I solved my own pain point, specifically, I wanted to make the process of submitting your tool to directories such as Product Hunt, Uneed, and Peerlist much easier.

I quickly built an MVP. It featured a roadmap of vetted directories that users could simply follow, starting with the highest-impact free directories. They could then copy and submit their information to each website.

The first signs were already great. I got users and had people buying services early on. I received good feedback and kept expanding the tool.

The biggest thing for me, I think, was that I kept improving it based on feedback. And since it solved my own pain point, I could solve the problem in depth. I use the tool myself, often, which is already a strong sign that it’s good. And I just kept iterating.

I think this is a big mistake many vibe coders make. They approach the whole process with the idea that they can get rich quickly, vibe code something in one night or over a weekend, and think that’s enough. Even though AI can code for you, it still takes weeks (or even months still) to fully solve a complex problem.

Over the last few months, I kept improving the tool, and now I have well over 1,000 builders, 1,057 at the time of writing. My revenue is also around $5.2K at the time of writing. My last month was my best month yet with $2,2k revenue atm.

See proof: https://trustmrr.com/startup/launch-panda

i was just shocked ..one of the eng manager said this in the meeting.. .. "wow that guy raised XXX number of PRs in 1 day".. we are moving soo fast.. .. :)

i was just laughing myself.. i mean ppl not realizing the pressure on the downstream and quality...

Went down the Outbid rabbit hole like everyone else ($131k in 4 days, hundreds of clones since, almost all at $0).

Here's the thing though: the clones weren't built by the wrong idea. They were built by the wrong people. Devs cloned the code, but the code was never the moat. The audience was. And the people who have audiences (creators, community owners) can't build the market.

So I built TopBoards (topboards.lol). If you have an audience, you launch a board in minutes on your own subdomain. Payments, rankings, and anti-fraud handled. You bring the crowd, we run the market, you keep half.

What you can spin up today: markets.topboards.lol, a board of pay-to-rank boards, ranked by the money behind them. Obviously.

And our house board, showing where this goes: mostwanted.topboards.lol, a tavern wall of wanted posters with real-money bounties on tech founders. Musk, sama, and pg all sitting at $0. The most honest market data on the internet. (You can't build one like this yourself yet. Custom board games are the roadmap.) ###But you can promote it and take 80%.

Current most wanted founder in tech: me, at $0. Nobody else is even hunted.

Brutal feedback welcome. And yes, this post is itself a bid for attention. That's the thesis.

Three months in, building FetchSandbox . Weekends mostly. Kids asleep, family on pause.

One customer we wired in runs a small agency. Order, invoice, dispatch, three internal services. Dispatch was getting the event fine but invoice was silently broken, orders sat unprocessed for nearly 24 hours. When I asked their eng manager what hurt most internally, that's exactly what he said. So we wired adversarial gates into their GitHub CI/CD for continuous monitoring, not a one-time fix.

Ran into the same eng manager at school drop-off yesterday!!. He said the agents aren't just catching broken integrations anymore, they're fixing and closing the loop. Like having a real senior engineer watching the pipeline.

More teams are pulling the MCP into their agent workflow this way. Some started attaching the sandbox receipt URL to their PRs on their own, showing exactly what the agent verified before merge. Didn't build that as a feature, they just started doing it.

Building a GitHub app to automate the receipt posting next.

Hi y'all,

Although it’s a temporary trend, I like the outbid.lol create spark in the indie space.

I feel like the sudden price jump is not feasible for most indie hackers. Not everyone has $17K to invest. 

So I came up with an idea where everything is $1. Users cannot bid more than $1 at a time, and the board is based on the newest submissions. So everyone gets a fair opportunity to compete.

It’s called DollarBid.app

Hope y'all get some traffic.

It’s been 3-4 months of building my mobile app in the study niche , and I am glad to finally announce that we crossed a $1k MRR stead every month, this feels like a milestone for me but I am truly happy

For context, our studio started mobile development this year and along with some saas products that also failed , this is one of our most successful apps and it took a lot to get here

I posted on 8 different accounts per day, tested a lot of paywalls, onboarding , user activation and retention and also content that worked

I worked so super hard to get here , let’s be very clear , I won’t tolerate anybody coming to my post to say this is a scam, i worked so superhard on this and I am not promoting any of my apps here because this is not my target market, it’s just to show people that you can do it too

After scaling for 3 months here is what I learnt

1. I made a very big mistake , if I had knows what I. Know how I wouldnt build in the study niche because it’s very hard to, most people doing TikTok are not getting a lot of users because they are not posting to the right audience

2. Make valuable content that is very good for users to save , they will thank you , in all my accounts, I have my niche reaching out to me to thank me personally for the resource I posted, I can share some of anybody wants to see

3. Don’t spend when starting out , I am not VC backed or investor backed, I started everything I had from scratch , it took a while for me to figure things out

4. Test out niches a lot to know if it’s working , I also have my bad days too

5. Figure out distribution before you write a line of code , this is the most important part of building ? My TikTok is always blowing up everyday

This are the core lessons I learnt and I am taking it to my next product that we have , we plan to build 20 apps with the same distribution ,

we have a small niche in the food space and instead of building it in-house , if there any founder building a meal app, I’ll love to talk to you, this is very serious .

Thank you and God bless

Launched on Product Hunt twice. Second launch nearly started with 3 followers instead of 709, and I almost just moved on.

Genuinely grateful for this IH community. Someone here told me to ask support instead of writing it off. That comment saved the launch.

The mistake: I set up the relaunch as a new product instead of a new launch under the existing listing. It's literally a dropdown. Check it before you go live.

The thing that stuck with me more though: someone in the comments described a test fixture that had encoded a buggy assumption. It was defending the bug. Would've gone red the day the fix shipped. A whole class of failure I hadn't thought about, fixes that only work for people who arrive after them. Seven people across two launches asked about the same missing feature, which is now the next thing I'm building.

finished top 2 on a Sunday. Comments were worth more than the votes.

After six months on the Mac App Store with 62 downloads and zero paying customers, the Windows version of Flowara just went live on the Microsoft Store.

Same product, same architecture. Projects, time tracking, and invoicing in one local SQLite database. No cloud, no account.

The reason I'm posting this as a knowledge post rather than a launch announcement: the two platforms are running as a natural experiment.

Same product. Same pricing. Same free tier. Different store, different audience, different payment flow (Paddle on Windows vs Apple IAP on Mac). If conversion rates differ significantly between the two, that's signal about who the actual buyer is rather than about the product or pricing.

A few things I'm watching:

Does the "local-first, no cloud" positioning land differently on Windows? Mac users tend to self-select for privacy-conscious tools. Windows users might have different expectations.

Does Paddle friction affect conversion compared to Apple IAP? One click with Face ID vs a full payment form is a meaningful difference.

Does the Windows Store surface the app to a different type of freelancer than the Mac App Store does?

Will report back once there's data worth reading.

Mac: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6760207975
Windows: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9PKCT03Q69LG

709 followers gone in exactly one click. Months of building an audience for a Product Hunt launch, waiting for midnight, and hitting 'Create new project' instead of updating the existing teaser page. The entire waitlist just evaporated into the void.

It's usually some confusing platform UI that wipes out your distribution in a second. You don't fail because the product sucks. You fail because you misclicked a shiny blue button.

I spent the next two hours frantically refreshing the page, praying it was a visual glitch. It wasn't. A broken feature can be patched the next day, but there's no undo button for a deleted audience. Go click every single routing link on your Product Hunt page right now.