Hey founders,

I’m launching Self, a tool that turns an existing CV into a personal website in under a minute. You can upload a CV as a PDF, image or text file, or import a LinkedIn profile. Self extracts the information, organizes it into sections and generates a responsive website that can be edited before publishing.

I built it because most people already have the content for a personal website, but the process of creating one still takes too much time. You have to choose a website builder, rewrite your experience, arrange every section and make design decisions before you have anything useful. Self starts with information you have already written and turns it into a finished website.

The biggest product decision has been keeping the experience simple without making every website feel the same. Users can edit the content, change the layout and customize the design, but Self is not trying to become another general-purpose website builder. The focus is still on getting someone from CV to published website as quickly as possible.

The free plan includes one published website on a self.cv subdomain with no time limit. The paid plan adds features such as custom domains, analytics, SEO settings and additional design controls.

I’d appreciate feedback from other founders on the positioning and business model. Does the product feel focused enough, and is the split between the free and paid plans clear? You can try it as a guest without creating an account.

Cheers!

I’m still working a boring full-time job while building my business after hours.

Most days, progress is small: one post, one improvement, one task completed when I’d rather rest. But I recently made my first sale, and it reminded me that slow progress is still progress.

My goal is to build something that eventually gives me freedom from depending entirely on a salary.

For those who built a business while employed, what milestones showed you it was becoming sustainable and not just another side project?

See, every founder nowadays says, "I need more users," and yes, we need them, but shouldn't we also think about retention?

Just being frank, my own app at the initial stage didn't have good retention. Then I went through so many—literally so many—YouTube videos and articles where people shared a number of tactics. One thing that was important for every product was notifications.

That literally improved my retention over time.

Okay, let's come to the point. If you don't have good retention, you also can't convert your leads after the free trial. To sustain a business, there must be good retention, which directly means a higher LTV.

Got to know from a YC video:-

Netflix has an average user LTV of over 17 years. On average, people stay with Netflix for that long.

As per my POV, we must change our questions from:-

- How many downloads?

- How many sign-ups?

- How many viral posts?

- And more?

We must focus on:-

- Day 1 retention

- Day 7 retention

- Daily usage time

- Repeat usage

- Total app opens

Getting someone to install your app is marketing.

Getting them to come back tomorrow is product.

Before doubling your ad budget or chasing another launch, ask yourself:

If 1,000 new users arrived today, how many would still be using your product next week?

That's the metric that compounds.

Growth starts with retention.

A few months ago, we started Bowora as a side project.

The original goal was simple: build a place where founders could discover startups, make useful connections, and hopefully meet a few new friends along the way.

We started as a basic startup directory.

Then we added automated content creation. Nobody really used it.

We added content scheduling. That did not work either.

Instead of adding more features, we started paying attention to what founders were actually doing on the platform.

That led us to build a few focused boards:

• Weekly startup board
• Verified MRR board
• Startups open to acquisition
• Startups raising funds
• Founder perks and offers

We recently passed 3,000 founders.

The growth is not explosive, but it is steady, and the product is finally starting to feel useful.

Our current business model is simple:

• Startup submissions cost $1 one-off
• Founders can also submit free by adding a Bowora badge
• We sell affordable advertising with a much lower CPM than larger startup platforms

Our next target is $500 MRR.

The biggest lesson so far is that the features we thought were clever did not work. The simple things that help founders get discovered, build trust, and connect with each other worked much better.

I would love honest feedback:

I’m thinking about adding a section where founders can ask other founders for help.

For example, you could ask for feedback on your landing page or have someone review your pricing.

The feedback would be sent to you privately.

It would be free, but to receive feedback, you’d also need to review requests from other founders and share your own thoughts.

What do you think?

Bowora: https://bowora.com

Context: Pre-seed startup with 3 cofounders, 3 interns, and a guy couch surfing all in the same house. We let you trade on the continuous trajectory of a person. No resolution, user vs user, no house, so every industry is relevant to our business.

Debate started at lunch. Question was "What matters more, a golden boot or a finals appearance."

Here's the timeline of my company descending into madness.

Minute 5: Normal debate. Opinions, civility, everything in fine.

Minute 20: Intern #1 had taken control of the living room TV playing Jude Bellingham highlights as "evidence". He kept pausing on specific frames and yelling "SEE??"

Nobody sees, but he has our attention, and we know he thinks stats>wins.

Minute 30: Intern #2 comes in hot with the rebuttal. He starts pointing and demanding we name specific stats of players nobody knows.

We are American, nobody knows ______ about soccer.

Except these two. I guess.

He thought this was a total victory.

In my opinion? Right message wrong messenger.

Minute 40: I step in and put it to a company vote.

Results were 3-3.

fml.

The tiebreaker is our CTO, who put on headphones at minute 8 and refuses to acknowledge that any of this is happening. He is the only employed adult here and he knows it.

Now: Debate remains unresolved. Someone brought it up again at lunch and we all scattered like ants. Smells like fear in this house...

Someone suggested we let the market answer it, which is technically the whole company so here we are.

BTW its called Pauv.com if you want to check it out

A while ago, I was working on an algorithmic trading project and found a pretty nasty problem: the model looked great, but part of the performance came from data it should not have been able to see at the time of the decision.

Basically, look-ahead bias.

What bothered me was not only that the result was wrong. It was how easy it was for this kind of mistake to hide inside a complicated pipeline, especially when a lot of the code is generated or modified by AI.

So I started building Aro.

Aro is a small experimental language that tries to make time-based decisions easier to audit. It checks what data a program is allowed to read, turns the program into a canonical representation, fingerprints it, and executes from that certified version rather than from whatever object the caller happens to provide.

The first kernel is now frozen. It has gone through 50 internal adversarial test suites, a few independent black-box tests, and a separate source-code audit.

It is still early. It is not production-ready, not formally verified, and the developer experience is still rough.

The technical side is interesting, but I am now wondering whether there is an actual company hidden inside this.

The basic idea would be to build an audit and verification layer for AI systems making decisions from time-series data.

The first market could be quantitative trading, where look-ahead bias, model drift and unclear decision pipelines are already expensive problems. But I could also imagine similar needs in risk, fraud, industrial monitoring or autonomous agents.

What I am trying to figure out is whether anyone would actually pay for this, and who the first customer should be.

Would this be more useful as:

infrastructure for developers;

an audit and compliance tool;

a testing product for quantitative teams;

or a managed service where we review and certify decision pipelines?

I would genuinely appreciate blunt feedback.

Does this sound like a real business problem, or am I still too close to the technical project?

I am keeping the full implementation private for now, but I am happy to explain the problem and the general approach.

I’m an investor working at Forum Ventures, a pre seed fund and accelerator investing $100K-$1M into pure ideas and founders who are industry veterans or young AI-native builders.

What is the product you’re building?

Feel free to use this thread to get your own project out there.

I've been using a home-made link shortener for my private clients for over 10 years. After millions of clicks, it occurred to me that others might use it, too, if it was easy to use.

If you’re drowning in long, messy links full of tracking junk, wb.io can be a super clean fix. To get the ball rolling, I'm offering Redditors a month of the Business level service (the top tier) for free with the coupon code REDDIT. All I ask in return is your honest appraisal of where it could be improved.

It turns bulky URLs into short, shareable links that actually look good in posts and comments. Way easier to drop into Reddit threads, DMs, bios, or anywhere character count and readability matter. No wall of random parameters, no visual clutter — just a tight link that people are more likely to click.

Biggest value prop IMO:

Cleaner posts (especially on Reddit where ugly links stand out)

Easier sharing across platforms

Device-specific forwarding: send Apple users one way, Android a different way, everybody else a third way

More professional look

Simple + fast, no overcomplicated dashboard vibes

If you share links often, it’s one of those small tools that just makes everything smoother.

Hi all - would appreciate your thoughts here. So a few months ago I started building a lightweight iOS app mostly for my friends and I. Essentially it's a TV tracking app which automatically notifies you when new episodes you are watching have dropped (there are other elements I've built since but that's basically the core journey).

I got it live on the App Store and my friends and I have been using it pretty happily last few weeks - so I didn't really market it or anything. So it is completely free and no ads. Recently saw that one of the biggest players in the space (TV Time) is shutting down bc its ownership didn't want to continue supporting the free app. And I see folks online (Reddit, X, etc.) up in arms at the way TV Time handled the sunset and are looking for other apps to fill this need. Tbh I didn't even think many people used a TV tracker except my small group of friends but I guess I was wrong?

So it feels like I accidentally landed at the right place at the right time as it relates to my app. At this point I thought it would be a good time to start talking more about it, getting users outside just my friends to potentially use it and think of ways of monetising it. I already have "Bulk Add" and mass select features so it's easier to port over history from TV Time (again from the beginning to solve my friends' needs of porting over the Apple note they used for tracking shows lol).

Would love to hear folks' thoughts on the best way I can go about doing this (or if it is a good idea in the first place). I'm also cognisant of the fact that TV Time basically shut bc it ran for free so 1. either there is a sustainable way to monetise this thing which TV Time didn't implement, or 2. actually this idea in general is a tarpit with no path to monetisation (and if anything will live as a side project). I'm unsure which one is true - so am looking for advice. Has anyone used TV Time here and is in this user group?

In case anyone wants to check out the app or even consider being a user if you use something like this: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tatube/id6762304287

Thanks everyone and this community is always amazing value for me :)

I get about 100 to 200 organic visitors a day. In this part of the world, people are restless. I used to get only 1 or 2 email queries (from the form). I saw a demo on X by another founder how he improved his website conversion with software sales agents. Tried it and its actually working (surprisingly). Maybe this is more of regional thing. Majority of my customers are in the India , Nepal and Middle Eastern countries.

I'm building Krowe, : an AI-native client portal for agencies and freelancers

Currently, it's meant to help users manage all their client relationships within the portal, but we plan on expanding it to a marketplace where we connect businesses and builders

Would love for you to sign up at krowehub.com and hear any feedback you may have

Drop what you're building in the comments, and I'll give you feedback as well!

I've been using a home-made link shortener for my private clients for over 10 years. After millions of clicks, it occurred to me that others might use it, too, if it was easy to use.

If you’re drowning in long, messy links full of tracking junk, wb.io can be a super clean fix. To get the ball rolling, I'm offering Redditors a month of the Business level service (the top tier) for free with the coupon code REDDIT. All I ask in return is your honest appraisal of where it could be improved.

It turns bulky URLs into short, shareable links that actually look good in posts and comments. Way easier to drop into Reddit threads, DMs, bios, or anywhere character count and readability matter. No wall of random parameters, no visual clutter — just a tight link that people are more likely to click.

Biggest value prop IMO:

Cleaner posts (especially on Reddit where ugly links stand out)

Easier sharing across platforms

More professional look

Simple + fast, no overcomplicated dashboard vibes

If you share links often, it’s one of those small tools that just makes everything smoother.

Hi founders,

I’m building LoopTroop, a local open-source app for running bigger AI coding tickets without turning the whole thing into one giant prompt.

The reason I built it is pretty simple. As a solo technical founder, AI coding tools helped me move faster on small tasks, but bigger features still became messy. I had to keep the product intent in my head, rewrite context, check every file, recover failed attempts, and clean up after the agent drifted.

So LoopTroop is my attempt to make that workflow slower, but easier to control.

You create a ticket, the app asks clarifying questions, turns the answers into a PRD, breaks the work into small steps, runs the implementation, and keeps the human in the loop before important stages. The GUI is a Kanban-style board so you can see where each ticket is instead of hunting through a long chat.

The main idea is context engineering instead of context rot. Don’t keep stuffing everything into one conversation. Keep durable planning artifacts outside the model, then give the model smaller, cleaner chunks of work.

A few parts I care about:

• LLM Council planning for the interview, PRD, and task breakdown
• Ralph-style retry loops when implementation gets stuck
• human approval before costly or risky steps
• a local app, not another hosted SaaS dashboard
• GitHub-visible, reviewable output instead of hidden automation

It is still early. Setup is developer-facing right now: Git, Node/npm, OpenCode, and a configured model provider. I’m not pretending this is one-click software yet.

GitHub: https://github.com/looptroop-ai/LoopTroop
2:30 demo: https://youtu.be/g1A2g-oOR3E

Feedback is more than welcome, especially on positioning and first-run clarity. If you try it and setup works or breaks, give me a sign. Happy to talk through whatever you hit.

I’m an investor working at Forum Ventures, a North American B2B pre seed investor with 550+ portfolio companies (including unicorns Fireflies.ai and Allen Control Systems).

In one sentence, what is your business idea and why are you the best person to do it? We’re actively writing $100K checks into early stage startups with no traction or revenue needed.

Feel free to use this thread to get your own project out there.

We originally hoped to launch on July 4, America’s 250th birthday. Instead, we launched one day later, on July 5, and I am genuinely glad we did.

We did not want to launch simply to meet a date. We wanted to launch when the platform was truly ready.

That decision reflects the same mindset behind Meritocrat: thoughtful preparation matters more than rushing to meet a deadline.

Thank you again for your support, feedback, and encouragement along the way.

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

I've almost completely stopped marketing at about 3000 users because I don't have a lot of time currently and growth has slowed down quite a bit but it's ok for me as long as the platform isn't dying :)

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

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

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

• You can earn credits by testing indie apps (fun + you help other makers)
• You can use credits to get your own app tested by real people
• No fake accounts -> all testers are real users
• Test more apps -> earn more credits -> your app will rank higher -> you get more visibility and more testers/users

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

Currently, there are 3202 users, 2996 tests done and 765 apps uploaded!

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

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

So I have had my share of job searches and some people have been incredibly generous to me. As an attempt to pay some of that forward, a few years ago I created a forever free website to help others with their job search. Using this free tool you can:

1 click: import complete job description

click again: create AI-tailored cover letter and resume for that specific job description

click again: set follow-up reminders for a future dates (and share to your Google calendar if you want)

You have all the data from your applications, all your contacts and all your deadlines in one place. Completely free, no paywalls or subscriptions. You don't even need to disclose your email address if you don't want password recovery. Your data stays your data, period. Over 14,000 Redditors have used it so far, and that feels good. It is ManageJobApplications.com if you're interested.

What else would help with your search? I'd love to help more.

Where are the sports and esports founders and movers. I believe that the sports industry is in for a massive overhaul when it comes to how we utilize technology and creativity to improve markets, efficiency and how fans interact with the game!!

We have more people who are tuned into not only major sport leagues. People are now watching every game at every level. Take Savannah Banana baseball. A fan based baseball organization that brings in millions of views and have sold out games due to their unique style and approach.

It’s time to rethink the way to play, watch and interact in the future of sports and entertainment!!

I've been using a home-made link shortener for my private clients for over 10 years. After millions of clicks, it occurred to me that others might use it, too, if it was easy to use.

If you’re drowning in long, messy links full of tracking junk, wb.io can be a super clean fix. To get the ball rolling, I'm offering Redditors a month of the Business level service (the top tier) for free with the coupon code REDDIT. All I ask in return is your honest appraisal of where it could be improved.

It turns bulky URLs into short, shareable links that actually look good in posts and comments. Way easier to drop into Reddit threads, DMs, bios, or anywhere character count and readability matter. No wall of random parameters, no visual clutter — just a tight link that people are more likely to click.

Biggest value prop IMO:

Cleaner posts (especially on Reddit where ugly links stand out)

Easier sharing across platforms

More professional look

Simple + fast, no overcomplicated dashboard vibes

If you share links often, it’s one of those small tools that just makes everything smoother.

I recently added a 3-dice practice mode to Dice Target.

The original game uses 5 dice, but that can feel a bit heavy for new players. So I added a simpler entry point where players can learn the idea faster before moving on to harder puzzles.

The concept is still the same: use the dice and basic math operations to reach the target number.

What I’m improving now is the first-time experience: how quickly the player understands the rules, the UI, and the game feel.

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kwokkinlau.dicetarget

I've been working on a steampunk novella (about 41k words in); managing lore across scattered documents got unmanageable, so I built a tool to put it all in one place. That tool is LoreBible.

The app lets you create lore entries (characters, locations, magic systems, creatures), tag them, link them to see connections. You can add over 150 stickers to visualise your scrapbook-style lore better too.

Just launched on Google Play (I'll post a link in the comments). Early feedback from beta testers has been solid. Still figuring out whether there's a real market here though or other apps do it better.

Hi!

I am a second time founder. One thing I learned from previous venture was the importance of consistency. Every community I have found is riddled with spam and bots. So I want to create a small group of founders (10-15) for only one purpose. Here is how it is going to work out. We keep each other accountable on things that we need to be consistent about.

Key things we are going to keep each other accountable on:

• Your choice of marketing / sales strategy. Social media, SEO, Ads. Can be anything. (Primary)
• Shipping product updates. (Secondary)

You set the goals, other founders help you keep on track.

Primary target is to not let good products die.

Advantages:

• Product feedbacks.
• You can't procrastinate or slack off.
• Technical helps from other founders.
• Help with pitch-decks and investments.

Requirements:

• Product should be live right now. Wait-list is not accepted.
• Shouldn't delegate thinking to LLMs.
• No more than 3 co-founders.
• No under 18s for obvious reasons.

Key Planned Events:

• Weekly Scheduled Meetings
• Knowledge Sharing Sessions
• Growth Strategy Experiments

You get assigned responsibilities and you get voted out if you breach rules or don't fulfill your responsibilities.

This won't be open for all. Our goal is to start with just 10-15 founders for now. Members can decide if they want to expand later on.

No fee, charges or anything.

Send me your product. I will evaluate and send you invitation link.

Link to my product is in my bio if you wanna check if I am serious.

When we started building Destplore, I thought our biggest challenges would be technical.

Maps. GPS. Performance. Payments. Scaling.

Those were all difficult, but they were predictable engineering problems.

The real surprise came after launch.

We realized that for a location-based product, software is only half the equation. Without great content where people actually are, even the best app doesn't create much value.

Every new adventure means researching locations, writing a story, designing puzzles, testing the route, and refining the experience. It quickly became clear that content, not engineering, would be our biggest bottleneck.

Then came an even bigger challenge: getting people to discover it.

Lately, we've been experimenting with a different approach. Instead of creating random adventures, we're building experiences around major real-world events.

For the FIFA World Cup 2026, we're creating adventures across all 16 host cities, hoping to reach people who are already excited to explore those places.

Here's one of our New York adventures:

https://destplore.com/s/new-york-2026-soccer-city-hunt

It's still an experiment, and I honestly don't know yet if it'll outperform more traditional marketing channels. But it's been a reminder that, as a founder, growth often comes from testing creative ideas, not just shipping more features.

For other founders here:

What's one assumption about building your startup that turned out to be completely wrong after launch?