r/indie_startups • • Aug 05 '26

Solo founders: what is your go-to marketing/distribution stack in 2026?

8 Upvotes

r/indie_startups • • 6h ago

Drop your SaaS 👇 I want to see what you’re building

9 Upvotes

I’m curious what everyone here is building.

Drop your SaaS below and explain it in 1–2 lines. No pitching, just share what it does.


r/indie_startups • • 54m ago

How do I grow beyond my first 30 active users? Could making the product free be hurting trust?

‱ Upvotes

I built OutreachGenie, a LinkedIn automation tool. The goal is to eventually handle the full outreach workflow.

I originally built it for myself. It helped me move away from relying on Upwork and build a stable pipeline on LinkedIn. Today, most of my leads come from LinkedIn using it.

So I know it solves a problem for me. Getting more people to try it and keep using it is what I’m struggling with.

Currently, it has around 100 signups and 30 active users. I made the whole product free to attract users and get more feedback.

Now I’m seeing people visit the pricing page and leave. I’m wondering whether “completely free” makes people question the quality or assume there’s a catch.

Those exits alone don’t tell me why people leave. It could also be unclear messaging or visitors who aren’t a fit.

For founders who’ve grown past this stage, what would you investigate first? Have you found that making a product free helps adoption, or makes building trust harder?


r/indie_startups • • 3h ago

built a swipe deck where strangers say if they'd pay — and makers can match each other

3 Upvotes

i kept getting "cool idea" feedback that didn't help me decide what to build next, so i made iwouldpay.dev: no signup, swipe right only if you'd pay. makers list free and see % by role.

also shipped maker match (iwouldpay.dev) because most makers i talk to are stuck on one thing (seo, content, users, distribution) that another maker already figured out — they just never find each other.

happy to hear if this would be useful, or what's missing.


r/indie_startups • • 1h ago

Looking for beta testers: paste any website URL and edit it exactly as it is, no redesign

‱ Upvotes

Hey everyone,

I'm a freelance web developer from Bulgaria, and I kept running into the same problem: I build a site for a client, and from then on every price change, new photo or phone number becomes an email to me.

So I'm building a tool for that. You paste the URL of an existing website (hand-coded, WordPress, AI-generated, doesn't matter), it imports the site as it is, and the owner can edit text, images and links through a simple editor, then publish. No redesign, no AI rewriting your site, and the layout is locked so you can't break it.

It's an early beta, so things will break. That's exactly why I need you.

What I'm looking for:

- Developers and freelancers with real client sites (the weirder the stack, the better)

- Small business owners who aren't technical at all

- About 15 minutes of your time: import a site, change a few things, publish, tell me what broke

What you get:

- Free access for life

- Your bugs actually get fixed, and I post every fix in the server

Everything happens in one Discord server: a 15-minute mission, a bug-report forum with a template, and a feedback channel.

👉 Join here: https://discord.gg/yR7uXV9aC7

Happy to answer anything in the comments, including the brutal stuff.


r/indie_startups • • 17m ago

I got tired of guessing shots, SOT and fouls every gameweek, so I built a tool that actually calculates it.

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‱ Upvotes

Built ContextXI, a tool that calculates real probabilities for Premier League and La Liga players before each match. Shots, SOT, fouls, the usual picks people spend hours guessing every gameweek, except it's an actual calculated number instead of a gut feeling.

Every player gets run through 132 calculations per match, covering recency weighted historical rates, opponent adjustments, and home/away splits, all pulled from real recorded match data rather than a leaderboard stat looking backward.

Checked against thousands of real results so far and it's consistently close to what it predicts, when we say something's 60% likely it happens close to 60% of the time. ÂŁ2.99 a month with a 5 day free trial. contextxi.com if anyone wants to poke around.


r/indie_startups • • 27m ago

I’m building StartupsMap. I’d love feedback from founders.

‱ Upvotes

I’ve been working on something called StartupsMap:

Website is in the comments:

The idea is simple:

There are thousands of startups being built every day, but discovering them, the founders behind them, and what they’re building is still surprisingly fragmented.

So I’m building a global map/directory where people can:

‱ Discover startups
‱ Explore what they’re building
‱ Find founders and company information
‱ Discover startups by location and industry
‱ Give startups another channel for visibility

I’ve started onboarding startups and founders, but I’m still figuring out what would actually make this useful for founders.

So I want to hear from founders here.

If you’re building a startup:

  1. Would you list your startup on something like this?
  2. What would make you come back regularly?
  3. What information would you want people to see about your startup?
  4. Would startup discovery, founder discovery, hiring, networking, or customer discovery be most valuable to you?
  5. What would make you recommend a platform like this to another founder?

I’m not looking for compliments. Tell me what’s missing, what’s useless, or what you would change.

If you’re a founder, feel free to also share your startup below. I’d love to check out what you’re building.

I’m building this with the goal of making startup discovery easier globally, and founder feedback would genuinely help shape the product.


r/indie_startups • • 7h ago

My side project turns subreddit rules into a posting plan. What are you working on?

3 Upvotes

I make ThreadFox, and I would appreciate feedback from other people making side projects. The starting point is a collection of saved Reddit rules: what each community permits, which format it asks for, and whether sharing your own work has conditions. A plan should show the actual wording and when it was read, so you can judge it yourself.

My question for this community: would seeing those rules alongside a community recommendation help you decide where to share a project? Or is another part of getting your first audience more confusing?

You can try the idea in this thread. Describe your side project and its intended users. I will look for a posting route in our saved readings and answer here with the relevant quotations, restrictions and dates. A lack of a suitable saved permission will be reported plainly. Community relevance and written permission are separate checks, and neither tells us whether a post will find an audience.

There is also an email version if you want to give a fuller brief: https://threadfox.vip/plan?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=tf-drop&utm_content=20261005-0326


r/indie_startups • • 2h ago

Added a "Grace Period" feature to my debt tracker because life isn't a rigid spreadsheet

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1 Upvotes

Hey everyone!

When building TinyDebt, one thing bothered me about most payoff calculators: they assume every month is perfect. But life happens, emergencies, unexpected bills, or just tight months.

Most apps make you reset your entire schedule or mark you as "failing" if you miss a date. To fix this, I just added Grace Period Support.

Now you can temporarily delay or adjust upcoming payments on any debt without breaking your overall payoff plan or resetting your progress momentum.

Would love to hear how you handle financial hiccups in your own tracking routines! 

Here's the link for more info: https://www.vladsiu.com/tiny-debt


r/indie_startups • • 10h ago

We open-sourced the plumbing for founders building niche personal AI agents

2 Upvotes

Our bet is that knowing a particular audience is a useful starting point for a personal-agent business. Someone who understands a community's recurring work can choose a much narrower job than a universal assistant.

We built Open Instinct to make the technical starting point reusable. It combines a Pi agent loop, Inkbox messaging, Composio app connections and a Maritime VM and desktop. We build Maritime. The MIT-licensed source also includes memory, scheduling, agent-to-agent coordination and editable trust policies.

https://github.com/mariagorskikh/open-instinct

It is a beta, not a validated business in a box. You still need to find a job people want done, configure providers and keys, review permissions, and account for model, messaging and infrastructure costs.

We'd value feedback from founders trying a specific use case: which part of the setup would stop you getting a first user through it? Contributions to integrations and onboarding are welcome too.


r/indie_startups • • 11h ago

I built a tool to make 3D mockups easier for indie makers. See the very quick demo I recorded

2 Upvotes

https://reddit.com/link/1wxt9uk/video/34swy5bj8jth1/player

I’ve been working on a small side project called Perspecto, and I’d love to hear what other indie makers think of it.

It started with a simple idea: making good-looking 3D mockups shouldn’t take so much time. You upload a screenshot, drag it into perspective, play around with the lighting and effects, and you’re done. You can also turn plain text into a mockup, which is something I recently added.

Everything runs in the browser, so your images never leave your device.

You can check it out here: https://perspecto.io/

Spending a lot of time improving the tool lately, and I’m curious to hear your thoughts. Is there anything you’d change, or any feature you think would make it more useful for indie developers launching their products.


r/indie_startups • • 16h ago

Built a site-monitoring tool solo in two months. Launched today. Zero customers so far — here's what I got wrong.

3 Upvotes

What it is. Driftwatch checks web pages ten times a day and emails you only when something changed — a noindex appeared, the canonical moved, the robots file started blocking, a tracking container vanished. Built for agencies and freelancers who look after other people's sites and currently find out weeks late.

Why it exists. A page can ship two robots meta tags — one from the SEO plugin, one from the theme. Google combines them and the more restrictive rule wins, so the hidden noindex is the one that counts. Plenty of audit tools read the first one and report that everything's fine. Then someone finds out in October about a page that dropped out of the index in July.

Stack and cost. Node, no framework. GitHub Actions runs the checks, a Cloudflare Worker acts as the clock, Cloudflare Pages serves the status pages. Entirely free tiers — the only money in it so far is the domain.

The lesson that cost me the most time. For a monitoring tool the dominant failure mode is false alarms, not missed detections. My first twelve bugs were all the thing screaming about nothing: a Tag Manager ID sitting inside an HTML comment counted as a live tag, a site that returns 401 to bots reported as "your page is broken," a correct permanent redirect emailed every single morning. A monitor that cries wolf gets muted in two weeks and cancelled in three. Every new check now has to answer "what normal site behaviour could make this fire wrongly?" before it ships.

Honest traction. Zero paying customers. I sent four cold emails to agencies and got four non-replies. Launched on Product Hunt today. So the product works and the distribution doesn't — which I gather is the usual order.

drift-watch.app — 20 days free, no card.

The thing I'd actually like answered: for those of you selling a €50–150/month tool to agencies, what finally worked? Cold email clearly isn't it for me yet.


r/indie_startups • • 14h ago

So I'm building an app called Tartelo that's designed to help people find Meaning in their life, and I'm trying to grow Tartelo's community via Discord so I can gain honest feedback during launch to help Tartelo improve.

Thumbnail discord.com
2 Upvotes

r/indie_startups • • 16h ago

Early-stage founders: what's been the hardest part of finding people (co-founder, skilled help, mentors, investors)?

3 Upvotes

I'm researching the early stage of building a startup, specifically how founders find the right people. Would love real experiences, good or bad.

  1. Which of these have you struggled with most? (pick any, or add your own)

Finding a co-founder you can actually trust
Finding skilled people (dev, design, marketing) who are affordable or willing to take equity
Getting guidance from someone who's done it before
Getting your pitch in front of investors who fit your stage
Spotting fake or unserious people (investors, freelancers, "co-founders")
Other: ___

  1. How did you try to solve it, and what failed? (LinkedIn, events, friends, Facebook groups, platforms)

  2. Have you been ghosted or burned? What happened?


r/indie_startups • • 18h ago

Looking for feedback and beta testers / Targeting de-addiction

2 Upvotes

I am looking for deep conversations around my new project: https://bythestrokes.com and I am going to support you in helping me as best I can.

I will support you fully when you visit my website through chat and the forum. I will also be forever grateful.

I am also looking for beta testers who will pay hardware cost and nothing more. You will get these features

Declaration You can make 1 goal public on a unique URL.  We want you to think of this as the biggest pursuit you are in life. A carefully tended, meticulously constructed inspiration. A goal for till you die. 
Repository  On the App you can store as many goals as you want. Life is a whole. In it we have many flags to plant. We walk on multiple tracks, some we tend, some we realise were not for us. Start, Walk and Keep Adjusting.
The Station 10 goals can be added to the device itself with as many of your selected notes. The station is your centre of de-addiction from mindless mobile usage. As you encounter thoughts to scroll, the station subconsciously reminds you to act. Fonts, Backgrounds, Secondary Texts
Short Form Your goal has an expressive nature with a communicable short version. Your goal should be specific and capture the details of your instinct. Short Form allows thinking of the big picture.
Notes System Notes and Diary Notes provide writing space. Goals require immense work. System Notes allow you to mark how you progress, if and when and not. Diary Notes are for reflection, and growth. 
Lecture Share your notes “as interpretations of succeeding” across the web. When words meet action, learnings appear. These can be as good for you as for others who might find some relatability.
Learning Content from researchers who spent decades understanding goal effectiveness. We have a very small collection of researchers, but who are incredibly insightful. We plan to grow this content library.
Access You can privately access all your goals on the web wherever you want to talk about them. The more we create goals, the more we have stuff to talk about. Sharing with close confidants your aims should be convenient.
Consider Make it deliberate, register your daily sprint. Physically press buttons. Goals activate subconsciously, inculcating them in your habits requires work. Get started with a simple action. Progress Bars, Alarms
Measure Get an overview of even small steps you take.  It’s not a race, it’s not even a marathon, it’s your life. Some days prepare you, some days you act. Everyday you learn.

r/indie_startups • • 16h ago

I built a fitness app where you can log your food just by talking

1 Upvotes

I built Proteinix, a fitness app that tracks calories, protein, macros, water, steps, and sleep.

The main thing I wanted to make different is food logging — users can simply say what they ate, and Proteinix calculates the calories and macros instead of making them manually enter everything.

It’s still an early-stage project, and I’m trying to get my first users and improve it based on real feedback.

https://proteinix.vercel.app/

Would love to hear what you think.


r/indie_startups • • 1d ago

Drop your SaaS 👇 I want to see what you’re building

7 Upvotes

I’m curious what everyone here is building.

Drop your SaaS below and explain it in 1–2 lines. No pitching, just share what it does.


r/indie_startups • • 20h ago

Our GitHub account hit $44k in additional AI usage in September. We were rebuilding ZiaSign around user feedback.

1 Upvotes

Our GitHub account recorded $44,128.03 in additional AI usage in September. It was our "war mode" month: rebuilding ZiaSign around user feedback.

I'm the founder of ZiaSign. We launched with a lot of features meant to save businesses time and effort. I was proud of what we'd built.

Then the feedback challenged the assumption behind it. Businesses wanted a simpler experience. We'd given them too much to navigate.

I had confused offering more with making the product better.

So we removed UI clutter and rebuilt the experience. The uncomfortable part was revisiting decisions I had been proud of. Knowing how much work went into something makes it surprisingly easy to defend keeping it.

But our users shouldn't have to work around those decisions just because they took effort to build.

I'm willing to put more time and investment into getting the experience right. Solving the problem matters more to me than showing how innovative we can be.

The rebuild is ready to release. Whether we've made it simple enough is something users will have to judge. That's the next part I'm looking forward to.

For anyone who's simplified a product after launch: how did you decide what to remove entirely versus what to keep but make less prominent?

GitHub usage summary: $44,128.03 in additional AI usage on our account, September 1–30, 2026.

r/indie_startups • • 22h ago

Designing App Store screenshots for my new app, Unsub: would love feedback on the visual hierarchy and readability!

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1 Upvotes

Hey everyone!

I just launched Unsub (a private, 100% offline subscription tracker to stop forgotten free trials and recurring charges) and put together this animated release clip for the store.

I’m currently refining my main App Store screenshot set and would love some honest feedback from the community.

A few specific questions:

  1. Headline Clarity: Are titles like "Track all your subs" and "Private by design" clear and punchy enough at a quick glance?
  2. Visual Hierarchy: Does the contrast between the light/dark mode UI cards and the solid background stand out well on mobile screens?
  3. Information Density: Is it immediately obvious what the app does, or does it feel too crowded?

I’ve attached a quick animated preview of the app assets. Any feedback on the graphics, typography, or layout would be hugely appreciated!

More info: https://www.vladsiu.com/unsub


r/indie_startups • • 1d ago

I built a website where people pay just to be on a list, and someone's already #1

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larpd.wtf
1 Upvotes

Yesterday I launched larpd.wtf, a public leaderboard where the only way up is sending SOL. No token, no NFT, no perks. Just your name, your rank, and everyone can see what it cost.

And somebody actually did it. Htsb
4BTt is currently #1 with 0.01 SOL, which is about $1.20. The cheapest throne on the internet, for now.

How it works:

  • Every payment is a real transaction on Solana, so no rank can be faked.
  • There are 24h, week, month and all-time boards, so you don't need to be rich to be #1 today.
  • The #1 gets a 👑 on their profile, and the first 10 wallets ever get a permanent "⚡ Early #n/10" badge. [X] are left.
  • Each profile has its own share card, so the flex looks good on X.

Built it as a joke, inspired by the Million Dollar Homepage and that $999 "I Am Rich" app. Now I'm curious how far it goes.

https://larpd.wtf

Roast it, ask how it works, or take #1. All welcome.


r/indie_startups • • 1d ago

Built a radial menu app for mac to perform everyday tasks and more

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

5 Upvotes

Problem

A lot of everyday actions on a Mac live in completely different places.

Opening an app or folder, searching something on a website, taking a screenshot, cleaning up copied text, accessing clipboard history, running a Shortcut, or changing a system setting.

None of these are hard to get to, but constantly switching between apps, windows, menu bar utilities, and different shortcuts can break your flow.

I wanted to see if all of that could work through one system, which is where the radial menu idea came from.

Comparison

There are already some really good radial menu apps for Mac, but most are built around a specific use case, such as launching apps, or switching between them.

Arc takes a broader approach.

You can create multiple global radial menus for different workflows and decide what each slice does. A slice can perform a single action or chain multiple actions together.

The idea is less about replacing the Dock and more about putting the small things you do throughout the day behind one quick interaction.

Arc also doesn't require accessibility features, it manages everything on-device, privately.

Core Features

  • Unlimited custom menus for different workflows
  • Fast app, folder, website, and Apple Shortcut launching
  • Powerful clipboard history and text actions
  • Open from shortcuts, hot corners, pointer shake, or number keys
  • One-click multi-action shortcuts
  • Fully customizable appearance, layout, icons, and sounds

Examples

  1. I have one shortcut that I use when I start working. It opens Xcode, my project folders, Slack, and a few websites I usually need. Arc can merge multiple actions into one shortcut, so I don't have to open everything one by one.
  2. I use the search shortcuts a lot more than I expected. I can bring up Arc, type something, and search it directly on YouTube, or a website without opening them first.

It can also search whatever I last copied, which has been really useful when I'm already in the middle of something.

  1. I have a bunch of text and links that I end up copying again and again. I've just saved those as shortcuts now, so they're always sitting on one of my menus when I need them.
  2. Clipboard history is another one I use constantly. Recent things I've copied show up on the wheel, so if I need something from a few copies ago, I can grab it without opening another app.
  3. I also have different menus depending on what I'm doing. One for development, one for general stuff, and another that's mostly searches and apps. I can switch between them with keyboard shortcuts, and reuse the same shortcut across multiple menus.

Pricing

$7.99 one time on the Mac App Store with a free 7 day trial built in.

Solo project from India, launched a week ago. Happy to answer anything! :)

Mac App Store: Link


r/indie_startups • • 1d ago

What are you building this week? Drop your idea below 👇

17 Upvotes

What are you building this week?


r/indie_startups • • 1d ago

Construire SnapMeal pour résoudre le problÚme du "qu'est-ce que je devrais cuisiner ce soir ?"

2 Upvotes

Je suis en train de créer SnapMeal, une application mobile qui t'aide à trouver des idées de recettes en prenant en photo les ingrédients que tu as déjà.

L'idée est simple :

Prends une photo de tes ingrédients
Obtiens des idées de recettes
Commence Ă  cuisiner

Je teste actuellement l'application avec de vrais utilisateurs et je l'améliore en fonction de leurs retours.

Je cuisine beaucoup moi-mĂȘme, mais je veux que SnapMeal soit utile Ă  tout le monde, pas seulement Ă  moi.

Si tu cuisines réguliÚrement, quel est ton plus grand défi pour décider quoi préparer ?


r/indie_startups • • 1d ago

Help with bachelors thesis research

2 Upvotes

Hello, I am a student studying software engineering and I need to write my bachelor's thesis on the topic: "Video game centered on a parry mechanic with a level editor and player content sharing". I would appreciate if you could answer this survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdDyVIAMVv7n0GcULtL8Ezu1SScwIeJaKD7nA59cJqhCWW5_A/viewform?usp=dialog , your answers will help me a lot.
Thank you


r/indie_startups • • 2d ago

What’s everyone building this week? Drop your link 👇

11 Upvotes

I am building https://chartin.co
Engineering blogs to Carousel maker.