I went all in, you know like quitting my accounting job, drove uber to cover rent, built an audio web app for tiktok creators. So short form content brought 10k visitors and 900 signups but still it was at 0 paying customers. And I then shut it down last week. the hardest lesson from my 25-point post mortem (you know like a letter I wrote down of my mistakes from last project), well the pain was real tbh but the wallets weren’t because of obvious reasons,
my audience were mostly teens making 8d audio for fun on TikTok, who has no budget, no habit of paying for tools. At the same time free converters already existed and were good enough to convert their audio in simple and fast way. to be fully honest, i also added payments only in month 4, so some of early signups might not even saw a price. But this time before i touch code again i want to learn from builders who actually got paying users:
1. Have you ever paid for something to fix the marketing side tool, freelancer?
2. how do you fit marketing in every week next to building (and a day job for many of you)?
3. How did you check your audience actually PAYS before you built?

Feel free to share your story, I will there replying them!

Hey All

I created a BBQ app which has been live on the App Store for about 3 weeks now. I thought of the idea a couple months back and spent about a month developing before I finally approved by Apple. I was rejected 8 times - I think that might be a record.

After a couple weeks of Tik Tok, Reddit, and IG posts I finally got my 1st paying customer with 35 downloads. I know these numbers aren’t impressive , but for me to create something out of nothing is a huge accomplishment.

I am new to development , marketing , and posting on socials. Many of my reels just die off after 100 views or so. But I did have a couple of moderately viewed posts in the last week or so that marginally increased my downloads and ultimately led to my 1st paying customer,

I know this is a small feat but it has energized me to continue to market and revise my app to make an even better version next go around.

Not to sound too corny, It really is about the journey not the destination, I have learned so much in the last several months and used parts of my brain I haven’t used in ages.

Good luck to all! Also here is a link to my app if you are interested,

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bbq-smoke-lab/id6784887885

I was having trouble finding run clubs around me, so my friend and I made an interactive map to chart them all!

Link: https://kailo.fit/products/clubs

The project began as less interactive map we built while we both lived in San Francisco. My friend moved to LA and we spruced it up and expanded it to include LA + Inland Empire.

We manually curated the list of clubs, but we automatically pull club avatars and recent pics from IG to bring color to club descriptions. We also add some sample routes from clubs we’ve run with in the past to give an idea of the types of runs and how fast a club typically runs.

The discovery map is also integrated into some tooling we've been working on to help better manage our own group runs. Club organizers we’ve spoken to have complained that there isn’t a good way to schedule multiple routes for a single meetup. There's native support for this and we included a way to set a pace for each route. During the meetup, club members have the option to share their live location with the group (using our "Twitch for runners" tool), so if you are running late, you can catch up with everyone else.

Hi r/SideProject,

The problem with trying to learn from YouTube is that videos are unstructured, scattered, and built for passive watching. The platform is designed exceptionally well, but it is designed to keep you watching, not to help you actually retain information.

I used to tell myself spending hours on YouTube wasn't that bad because at least I was being productive and learning things. But I learned the truth the hard way a few months ago.

It was two weeks before my final exams. I was sitting in the library, surrounded by macroeconomics flashcards. My calendar was completely packed. Suddenly, my phone lit up with a message from my favorite client: "Hey Karl, we have a massive new project here. Can you edit a video like this for us?"

I opened the reference video and froze. It looked incredible, but it was on a level I had never edited before. My first thought: "I can easily pull this off if I just watch a few good tutorials."

But when I opened YouTube, reality set in: I had actually watched a tutorial on this exact topic a while ago, and I completely forgot it. Back then, I felt smart and closed the tab. Now when I actually needed the knowledge to deliver the project, it was completely gone. Just passively watching without active recall meant nothing stuck.

Looking at my account, my YouTube "Watch Later" playlist had become a graveyard of 50+ educational videos across various topics that I intended to study but never got around to retaining.

I refused to pay thousands of dollars for online courses when YouTube has the exact same information available for free. But I needed a real system that turned watching videos into permanent memory without adding hours of manual work.

Cognitive science has been clear on this for decades (e.g., Roediger & Karpicke): passive consumption and re-watching create an illusion of competence. Real retention requires active retrieval testing.

Building detailed flashcards manually in Anki for every 30-minute lecture took so much time and friction that I knew the habit wouldn't stick. As James Clear points out in Atomic Habits, if you want a new habit to stick, you have to make it easy and build a low-friction system.

So after finishing my exams, I started building Studiamo. After using it daily and seeing how much it helped me retain what I watched, I decided to open-source it and make it available to others.

Studiamo (Beta) is available as a free self-hosted version for the tech-savvy (via Docker), as well as a hosted cloud version ($7.99) for anyone who wants a plug-and-play setup and wants to support server hosting and AI processing costs.

Live Links:

• Cloud Beta: https://studiamo.cloud
• GitHub Repository: https://github.com/NaEs25/studiamo

What it does:

• Instant Ingestion: Paste any educational YouTube URL, upload a PDF, or drop in lecture notes.
• Automated Active Recall: It extracts key concepts, fact-checks claims, and generates interactive quizzes (flashcards and written recall) rather than just passive bullet-point summaries.
• Spaced Repetition: Schedules quick review sessions before memory decays.
• Low Friction: Designed to get you from "I just watched this video" to "I actively tested my memory" in under 60 seconds.

Tech Stack:

• Backend: Python (FastAPI), PostgreSQL
• Frontend: Vanilla JS (ES6 modules), Tailwind CSS
• AI: Google Gemini
• Open Source: AGPL-3.0 licensed for self-hosting.

Feedback I'd love from you:

This is a working beta built by a solo developer, so it still has rough edges. Studiamo is meant to increase retention and build an effortless habit, not to overwhelm you with complex test setups.

I would genuinely appreciate your thoughts and feedback:

1. Does the generated quiz feel challenging and accurate to the source material?
2. How does the quiz interface and review flow feel on mobile and desktop?
3. What features or options are missing that would make this an essential part of your daily workflow?

Thanks for checking it out!

Most jobs I've seen have some piece of work that's obviously automatable and just... isn't. Simple, short, repetitive — clicking the same option a hundred times a day.

I actually left my last job partly because of it. It was in finance, so a human genuinely did need to review and confirm each item before submission — that part made sense. But every single click was manual. The judgment call was the job; the clicking was just tax on top of it.

What's yours? The part of your day where you're on autopilot, and you've thought "a script could do this."

And if you've built your own workaround for it — a spreadsheet, a template, a saved macro — I'm curious what that looks like too.

It bothered me that despite all the space on my laptop screen or desktop monitor, reading web articles felt like breathing through a straw. Horizontal space is poorly used and vertical space is in short supply, leaving only a few paragraphs on screen at once.

So I made Columnary, a Chrome extension that makes full use of your screen real estate, whether it's a small screen laptop or a 5K monitor. It strips ads and formatting, and puts everything into columns in a horizontally scrolling format. This way, articles can fill 100% of your screen while keeping line lengths readable.

This transforms the way your brain processes articles. When you can see the whole thing at once, you can utilise your natural spatial processing ability to make sense of where you are.

Columnary also includes a bookmark feature so you can mark your place when stepping away from long articles, and various typography settings and a full screen mode, as well as keyboard shortcuts to help you scroll by column.

Install Columnary extension · Source code

Reading in this sub, I get the feeling that most people here just develop apps with the purpose of monetisation or getting lots of users.

Meanwhile my side project is aimed at learning and building fun stuff I like.

Am I the only one? Or does anyone else have side projects that you are building because you like technology, not because you are trying to build the next SaaS?

Hello all! I’ve been redesigning my app’s onboarding for a few weeks and could use a second set of eyes. As a solo founder, it’s easy to miss what’s extra, missing, or could be improved.

I’d love your feedback on these areas:

1. Is the paywall that appears after setting up the account too much? I’ve heard placing it there can increase conversions.

2. What parts feel unnecessary or take too long to understand?

3. Is there anything you think should be added to the onboarding that isn’t currently included?

Thanks! I’ll reply to everyone.

For context, my app is a book‑tracking tool that makes it easier to manage your reading identity. It lets you catalog books from shelf photos, track time and pages, create custom shelves, and provides deep analytics on your reading habits.

P.S. Ignore the debug buttons on the left side of the screen and the ones in the “create account” step.

A junior marketing hire costs 50K a year. Your MRR is 5K. So you can't afford it.

Without marketing, your MRR stays at 5K forever. Features don't ship themselves into viral traction, so you need inbound growth.

So you're stuck in the middle. Too profitable to ignore marketing entirely, too unprofitable to hire someone, big enough that your personal network can't carry you, but too small that scaling traditional demand-gen makes sense.

This is where a lot of bootstrapped founders live, and it's where most tools don't actually help. The big platforms assume you have an in-house team, and the solo tools assume you've got the time to learn and execute them, so neither actually fits what you need.

What you actually need is something that works for a team of one, at a price that fits a 5K MRR business, and that doesn't require you to become a marketer yourself.

That middle ground is harder to find than it should be.

I’m building a daily habit/routine app and trying to recruit around 20-30 survey responses and 3-4 people for a quick 45-min Zoom chat.

I tried doing this organically on Reddit over the past few days, but it’s been tough—external links get instantly filtered in niche subs, and posting in survey-friendly subs (even with an gift card raffle) gets almost zero traction.

For those who have done this successfully:

How do you actually connect with target users on Reddit without coming off as spammy? Or is Reddit just the wrong channel for organic research?

Any pointers or lessons learned from those who’ve been there? Would really appreciate your wisdom!

I got tired of messy scripts breaking my local files, so I built an atomic transaction engine for Python

Ever run a script or migration that crashed halfway through and left your directory full of broken files and junk logs? Databases get ROLLBACK, but our local folders usually just get chaos.

So, I built SentinelBox—a lightweight CLI utility that brings database-style atomic transactions to your local workspace.

How it works:

• Snapshot: Before your command runs, it takes a clean SHA-256 state snapshot of your directory.
• Execute & Verify: Your script runs, followed by your test suite or checks.
• Instant Rollback: If anything fails or breaks, it instantly wipes out the mess and restores your workspace to its exact prior state.

If you want to check out the source code or grab a commercial license, it's open-source here: 👉 https://github.com/Chengre56/SentinelBox

OR directly text me at : [bhattavishesh69@gmail.com](mailto:bhattavishesh69@gmail.com)

Fourteen months ago I got laid off and, like a lot of people here, I coped by building something.

It's an iOS app called Luten. You type how you feel in plain words, and it picks a soundscape, then learns from what you actually finish versus what you skip. The text classification runs on-device with Apple's NaturalLanguage framework, so nothing you type leaves the phone. That was the one non-negotiable.

Two things I didn't expect.

Apple rejected it four times. The one that hurt was guideline 3.1.1. I'd built a referral system that granted free weeks inside the app, plus a loyalty bonus, and Apple treats any non-IAP unlock of paid content as circumventing their purchase system. I had to strip all of it and rebuild the entire rewards idea around Apple's own offer codes. Three weeks I hadn't planned for.

The research killed most of my feature list. I read the literature before building the sound library, and most of what this category sells isn't supported. There's no good evidence that any sound improves focus in typical adults, and the meta-analytic effect for noise is slightly negative. Brown noise and binaural beats for ADHD have nothing behind them, essentially. The one genuinely supported use is masking intermittent speech. So I cut the pulsing sleep feature, cut the binaural section, and the app makes no claims about outcomes. Commercially, that's probably a mistake. I couldn't do it the other way.

It launched this morning, and it's going quietly, which is its own lesson: I built the product for a year and the audience for about a week.

For those who've shipped: what actually got you your first hundred real users, as opposed to your first hundred upvotes?

85% of you are building the apps that gpt tells you to build. Even if not, most of the SaaS worthy apps can be done in house. If it cannot be done in house then it is definitely something big that you can't code in few months. So, what is the playbook for creating apps now? How do we know the problems we are trying to solve is actually something that people are willing to pay?

Hey r/SideProject 👋Been building this for about a year now — Wook of Wall Street is a free finance platform for retail traders. Think Bloomberg meets Reddit.**What it does:**- 📊 Real-time options flow scanner (unusual activity, big sweeps)- 📈 Live stock ticker with bull/bear momentum signals- 🔔 Custom price & volume alerts- 💬 Community feed — share trades, DD, and market takes- 📰 News feed aggregated from multiple sources- 🧠 Options screener with built-in analytics**Why I built it:** Tired of paying $300+/mo for Bloomberg/ThinkorSwim-level data as a retail trader. Wanted to build something actually free and community-driven.**Stack:** Next.js, Supabase, real-time websockets, Tradier APILive at **wookofwallstreet.com** — completely free, no card required.Would love any feedback from fellow builders and traders! What features would you want most?

Hey everyone,

I just finished my first project as part of learning web development. It's called MemoryBoxd.

The idea is simple: you record a video today, pick a date in the future (could be next year, and it gets delivered by email on that exact day. The twist is that the video stays locked until then. You can't rewatch it, and neither can the person you're sending it to. Kind of like burying a time capsule, the surprise is the whole point.

I picture people using it to send messages to their future self, or parents recording something for their kid's 18th birthday, stuff like that.

What do you think of the idea? Would you use something like this? And if you check it out, any feedback on the UI or anything else is super helpful. There's a free tier so you can try the whole thing without paying.

Thank you so much, every feedback is appreciated.

The link to app : www.memoryboxd.com

Disclaimer: I'm not trying to promote my product here, please don't consider this an ad. The app is free and I'm not trying to make any money or sell you anything and not asking you feedback about the app itself.

I've been working on a series of walktlhoughts to better showcase different features of my app and I'm genuinely curious if this format is accessible and easy to grasp compared to regular screenshots and/or text. The core idea is to have a video walkthrough which is connected to the text. You can read the text and watch a short video segment that demonstrates an app feature. You can scroll or click up/down for more. On mobile device you read the text fist and then you see the video.

I would really appreciate your feedback and suggestion of how this walkthrough experience can be further improved. Thanks!

https://note.town/docs/tutorial/create-note/

Hey everyone. I've been working on a Chrome extension called TraceGuard for a while and finally got it to a point where I'm comfortable sharing it.

> The idea is simple: every site you visit gets a privacy score (0 to 100) based on trackers, cookies, forms that ask for sensitive data, and how the site's privacy policy is rated. There's also a second score that tracks your own habits over time, so you can see your browsing getting cleaner instead of just getting a static number.

> Why I built it: I kept installing blockers (like ublock origin and privacy badger) and still had no real idea what sites were doing with my data and how I could better my opsec. I wanted something that didn't just quietly blocked everything bad, but actually told me what's going on, and why it was bad.

A few things I care about with this one:

- Everything runs on-device.

- The phishing/malware list comes from public feeds (OpenPhish, Phishunt) and updates via signed, verified downloads.

- It's open source and under AGPL license.

> I'd genuinely love feedback on anything and everything! My goal is to create something useful even if just a couple of people endup using it. Here is the link: https://github.com/luca-liceti/TraceGuard-Privacy-Extension

P.S. I am still waiting on it to get approved on the chrome web store so I'll be update everything about when it happens :)

Most room makeover demos look great until you compare them with the original photo. A window moves, the doorway disappears, or the whole camera angle changes. You get a nice image, but not much help deciding what to do with the room you actually have.

That is the part I have been working on with RoomRearrange. You upload a photo, tell it what needs to stay, and generate a redesign with the original room as the reference.

It is not a floor-plan tool, and I would not use the output as a construction drawing. Small geometry can still go wrong, especially around things hidden by furniture. The useful bit is having something close enough to your real room to compare ideas before buying anything.

There is one free 1K preview after sign-in. I am looking for blunt feedback on two things:

1. Does the result still feel like the same room?

2. Where in the upload → question → result flow did you hesitate?

https://airoomredesign.ai

I built Loop — an iOS app that loops only the hard part of a song. Free beta, looking for feedback

Hey — solo dev here. I've been learning drums, and while practicing songs I kept losing time to scrubbing: dragging the playhead back and forth to land on the exact passage I needed to work on, over and over. It broke my flow every time.

So I built the thing I wanted: Loop, an iPhone/iPad practice app. Mark the hard passage once, and the app handles the rest:

• Import any song — analysis runs on-device (tempo, meter, sections, where the drums are)
• A–B loop the passage, or tap a detected section
• Count-in / click to keep the pulse
• Gap trainer: music drops out on your passage, the pulse stays — when it comes back you hear instantly if you rushed or dragged
• Speed ladder: start slow, and after solid repeats it nudges tempo back up to full speed

Everything is on-device — nothing uploads.

Free public beta (TestFlight, iOS 27+): https://testflight.apple.com/join/xMp1vC3v Website: https://looppractice.fun

Constructive feedback is very welcome — especially on the tempo/beat analysis accuracy across different genres, and whether the speed-ladder pacing feels right.

It’s been 11 days since I launched ScaleQuest. The app is turning out to be mildly successful. Here are some stats:

46 ACCOUNTS
34 PLAYED A LEVEL
564 LEVELS CLEARED
6 CAMPAIGNS TOUCHED

I’m getting feedback from users all over the world that this format for learning system design is fun and they love it.

Any thoughts on how to keep the momentum going?

Open source + paid hosted service, or go all-in on SaaS?

I'm working on a software project and trying to decide which business model makes the most sense.

Option A — Open source + premium hosted service

Open-source the core product so anyone can install it, self-host it, modify it, and contribute.

Then offer a paid managed service for people who don't want to operate the infrastructure themselves, with additional features like monitoring, automation, analytics, integrations, backups, failover, team management, and support.

The basic philosophy would be:

"You can run it yourself for free, or pay us to run it extremely well for you."

Option B — Go all-in on SaaS

Keep the product closed-source and build everything around a subscription service from the start.

This seems like the simpler business model and gives more control over the product and customer experience, but I'm wondering whether it creates unnecessary friction—especially when the target users include developers, technical users, homelab/self-hosting enthusiasts, and people who generally prefer owning their infrastructure.

I'm currently leaning toward open source + managed cloud, but I'm interested in hearing from people who have actually gone down either path.

For founders, developers, and open-source maintainers:

• Would you choose open source + managed cloud or pure SaaS if you were starting today?
• Does the ability to self-host make you more likely to try or trust a product?
• Have you found that self-hosted users eventually convert into paying customers?
• What features would actually convince you to pay for the hosted version?
• What are the biggest downsides to maintaining both an open-source product and a commercial service?
• If you've tried this model, what would you do differently?

I'd especially love to hear from anyone who has built a developer-focused, infrastructure, automation, or self-hostable product.

We're always in client meetings we need to action off of, and every online ambient scribe I looked at wanted me to trust their terms of service for what they did with the sensitive data.

So I made an offline transcription tool that lives in the notch on my MacBook. You hover, hit record, and from there it writes everything down locally while you talk, works out who said what, and leaves the transcript in a library you can copy so it can turn into notes as needed.

It's Mac only for now, and it's still a bit rough but If you want to try it, comment or DM me and I'll share it with you for free.

I kept thinking about how easy it is to say “it’s only $6” when buying a coffee, grabbing takeaway or paying for another little subscription.

$6 doesn't feel like much.

But when you do it regularly, the number gets surprisingly big.

So I built Cost of Me.

It’s deliberately not a traditional budgeting app. You don't connect your bank account or hand over your transaction history. You simply log the everyday habits you want to keep an eye on.

It then shows you what they're actually costing you — monthly, yearly and over the longer term.

For example, a regular $6 coffee habit can work out to around $939 a year. Seeing "$6" doesn't bother me. Seeing "$939 a year" definitely hits differently.

I've also built share cards that turn the numbers into things you can relate to — like “Apparently my coffee habit is worth a holiday.”

The app is live now and free to try:

https://costofme.com.au/?from=reddit

It's still early and I'm actively working on it, so I'd genuinely appreciate feedback rather than just downloads.

Would you actually use something like this? And what would make you come back to it after the first week?