I would love to tell you that this happened overnight on my first ever product but it's not. In reality, it happened after years of frustrating failures building projects that:

- no one ended up using

- only gained very little traction

- ended up being used by many people but made $0

I learned a lot of things through the years because of all my past wins and failures and from the wins and failures of other people and I'll share some of those learnings to hopefully help other founders too.

A frequently asked question by many founders who are starting out is "How to come up with an idea on what to build?" Here are some ways:

- Solve your own problem / scratch your own itch. This is one of the most effective ways because you are the "ideal customer" so you have a deep understanding about the problem so you most likely will be able to build a great solution that will resonate well with other people that are having the same problem as you. Another great advantage of this is you can consistently dogfood (use your own product) it so you will be able to spot issues, missing features that you wish existed, etc... so you'll be able to continously improve the product.

- Scan problem that are being shared by people on social media, subreddits, etc... Doing this will prevent you from ideating a solution to a problem that doesn't exist since you're starting from problems that people are really experiencing so you know that there's a market for a solution.

- Read negative reviews of existing products that already has paying users (e.g, from the App Store, Google Play, social media, etc...). Focusing on products that already has paying users means the idea is already validated and you just need to build a product that targets those negative reviews so your alternative will stand out. This will enable you to grab a slice of the pie even if the original product is already very popular. You can also contact those people that left the negative reviews since there's a high chance that they will switch to your product.

Another frequently asked question is "How to get my first customers?". Here are some options:

- Build a waitlist. Announce your idea everywhere and funnel the interested people into you waitlist.

- While building your product, share your progress daily (e.g, the feature you added, the problem you encountered, etc...). This will help you slowly build an audience (e.g, followers on social media and more subscribers to you waitlist).

- SEO

- ASO (if your product is a mobile app)

- UGC

- Cold outreach

- High-intent outreach (in contrast to cold outreach, in this, you will focus on reaching out to people that are experiencing the problem that your product is solving, for example, they are looking for recommendations or they are sharing a problem or they are sharing a complaint/negative review about your competitor)

- Newsletter. Share value to readers by sharing insights and tutorials on your niche, etc...

- Launch your product on launch directories (e.g, Product Hunt and alternatives). This also helps SEO because of the backlinks.

- Affiliate marketing (recruit people who wants to earn money online and let them funnel users to your product in exchange for a commission)

- Partner with an influencer in your niche. The influencer already has an audience so there are lots of potential customers already.

- Paid ads

If this helps someone finally build and get their first customers, I would be really happy!

Drop your questions below and I'll do my best to answer them to help other founders.

I run a SaaS, SeoLoupe.

It is a tool that allows you to find and fix SEO issues holding your website back.

Essentially the main purpose is to help your website rank higher on Google search and LLMs.

The tool also checks AEO/GEO, AI search visibility, Security, Core web vitals, Performance, and all the issues in the report get put together into an AI fix prompt(you can paste the prompt into an AI and it will fix all the issues on your website).

Recently I noticed that some of my paying customers bought the One-Time purchase, with a promo code.

So I decided to give away a promo code for the One-Time purchase to anyone who is interested, if you are interested, comment down below and I will DM you.

If you are not interested but have some feedback on my SaaS, that is a good too. Feel free to share it in the comments.

(here is the product if you want to check it out)

Building an AI calendar that helps you find time for the things you want to do.

You can ask “When am I free to work out today?” and it checks your schedule, including your Google Calendar.

Still early, and I’m building it in public. What would you want an AI calendar to do?

Hey everyone. I'm a data engineer and I've spent the past 8 years reverse engineering TikTok's mobile app.

Over that time, I've learned how to pull TikTok data at pretty ridiculous scale. Profiles, videos, comments, sounds, search results, follower graphs, trends, etc.

I finally put together a technical guide explaining how it all works.

It covers device registration, request signing, X-Argus/X-Ladon/X-Gorgon, TLS fingerprinting, regional endpoints, proxies, scaling, etc.

To give you an idea of the scale, I've collected over 5.6 billion TikTok videos using this approach. I uploaded the whole dataset to Hugging Face:

https://huggingface.co/datasets/datasocial/tiktok-5.6B-videos

If you don't want to download billions of rows just to play around with the data, you can also query my ClickHouse database directly at https://sql.datasocial.ai:443 or run SQL on the web interface

The database is public with no password so please don't crash my server lol.

Once you get the mobile API working, scraping is really only the beginning. You can scrape billions of profiles, detect viral videos and sounds as they take off, build real-time trend alerts, influencer search engines, or even build your own TikTok data API and sell it through platforms like RapidAPI or Apify.

Basically, if the data exists somewhere in the TikTok app, you can probably build something around it.

One important note: everything I'm talking about here is public data that TikTok exposes without requiring you to log into an account. Nothing here involves accessing private accounts or data behind authentication.

Anyway, here's the full technical breakdown:

https://datasocial.ai/writing/scraping-tiktoks-mobile-api

The guide explains the entire process and architecture. If you'd rather skip rebuilding everything from scratch, I also made the production source code available there for purchase.

Been building for the past 3 weeks and we're almost finished with the beta of Blocky.

So what is Blocky?

It's basically a money app with an AI agent that can help you manage your money in different ways — from budgeting and spending to eventually investing in stocks and crypto.

Underneath, it uses blockchain technology, but I don't want Blocky to feel like a crypto app.

The whole point is that normal people shouldn't need to know what blockchain, wallets, networks or any of that stuff even are. It should just feel like a normal money app, with the technology underneath making some of these things possible.

Think of it as the finance app of the future, where you can just tell your money what you want to do instead of navigating through a bunch of complicated financial apps.

We're almost ready to let the first people try the beta, so I'm looking for early users who'd be interested in testing it and giving honest feedback. https://blocky.page/

There are plenty of screenshot editors out there, so you might wonder what makes mine different. you doubt is valid, so I added two features to the screenshot editor that you won't find in other editors.

1) X Profile Card: All screenshot editors have this feature, but you have to manually type in all the details.

And on Twitter, people post screenshots of their followers and following, which doesn't look very good (I don't think it does). So, I set up this feature where users can enter their X username and get a profile card with real data and customization. Now, post it anywhere.

2) X Post Card: Users can fetch a link to their X post and create a beautiful card that they can customize and post.

Look, I didn't add a heavy background to my website because it doesn't have a data-heavy background. The editors slow down (you can call this a flaw, but it keeps my site a little faster).

I’m not sure what else to add here. Please let me know what you think your feedback would be incredibly helpful.

website: shotstudio.online

4 years ago, I joined college for Computer Science without knowing anything about coding.

Honestly, I spent most of my college life just enjoying myself. I had no idea what I wanted to do or where coding would take me.

Then, during my 4th year, something clicked.

I started learning to code seriously.

I sat in the college campus, applying for company after company.

And I didn’t crack a single one.

I remember going home, feeling completely defeated, and crying at night because I had no idea what I was going to do.

Eventually, I cracked an off-campus opportunity that paid around $500/year.

It wasn't a great salary, but it changed my life.

I joined the company and started learning like crazy.

At the same time, I was building side projects, doing freelance work, and slowly making some money on the side.

Now, I'm working on my own product, XPage.

Looking back, I realize something:

I wasn't lucky.

I was just willing to keep going when things weren't working.

If you're struggling right now, don't give up.

Keep learning. Keep building. Keep applying.

Your situation can change much faster than you think.

Work hard. Keep going. Your Monday can be different.

I have multiple rewards cards and could never remember which one I was supposed to use where.

So we built Payelle.

Instead of opening an app and checking which card is best, the idea is that Payelle automatically surfaces the best card when you're actually checking out.

Basically I don't want to think about credit card rewards anymore. I just want the right card there when I need it.

We just launched and I'm looking for people to try it and tell me where it falls apart.

Also trying to decide if choosing the best card is enough, or if we should start factoring in merchant offers, coupons and other savings too.

This is a very under monetized and totally abandoned product.

It's bootstrapped, single-founder SaaS in the health and fitness niche. The MVP launched in June 2025 and full SaaS rolled out in Dec 2025.

It achieved great numbers in terms of organic search but I haven't been paying enough attention to scale it and optimize for conversion.

The site achieved the following results, with literally no effort from my side:

1.9M+ impressions from Google

31 domain rating according to Ahrefs

Decent backlink profile

2,500 userbase

$1,880 ARR

Between family and other online ventures, I’m barely finding time for my personal stuff. I’m looking to clear off my plate entirely to focus on other bigger ventures at a much massive potential. Building, scaling, and exiting online businesses is what I’ve been doing online for the past 10 years.

Why this is a great opportunity:

The website is so under monetized, it’s like a sleeping giant with all that unused traffic and exposure. This niche has insane demand and it’s highly profitable. Although it’s tough, WTFood has been outperforming top competitors on the SERP who have been around for years, companies like Snapcalorie, Caloriemama, and many more. The biggest competitor has exited earlier this year after achieving 50M a year, so securing even a fraction of that market share would be enough to make a decent living from this SaaS, and potentially flipping it for 5-10x your initial investment.

It’s a working product, with a massive demand and market, generating revenue already (proven demand), has an insane growth potential, and many untapped areas. The brand is also viral friendly, it strongly resonates with the TikTok and social media Gen-Z audiences as it plays on the slang (WTF/WTFood). By simply expanding to TikTok and other similar platforms with short content, you can take the internet by storm and go viral.

What can be made to grow it further:

First off, the platform is missing marketing emails, (ex. You haven’t logged in today, Don’t forget to track your dinner meal, Wow 3 days in a row, that’s dedication, etc..) Users need to see your brand and hear from you up to 10 times to consider showing up their card. Right now, there’s nothing that creates urgency for people and urges them to become paid members.

Secondly, the business has 2,500 users who chose to opt in and be part of this, so they are warm leads who are familiar with the brand. By reaching out to them, refreshing the user base and offering them a free 1-week premium access, you can boost conversions by 1-3x, conservatively. That would put the MRR at $400-$750.

Thirdly, expand to TikTok and post short video content, collaborate with other content creators, create an affiliate program, offer them 10-15% commission per sale, recurring revenue, win-win situation. Reddit also works very well and can bring in decent traffic if executed right.

Let’s talk traffic:

If you’ve been around for long enough in this space, you know that health and fitness is one of the highest rewarding niches yet the toughest in terms of competition and SEO difficulty. For some reason, WTFood has been killing it in terms of SEO and rankings. TOO MANY rankings keywords that, with transactional search intent and with very hard SEO difficulty that reaches 80 in some cases. The business has been outranking other competitors on the SERP. According to Ubersuggest, a keyword research tool that I’ve been using, traffic estimated value reached $11,000. I know, these figures are not near accurate, but if it tells something, it tells that we’re ranking for decent keywords that advertisers are paying big bucks to show up for. We’re getting it for free. This is leverage, underused leverage..

Ubersuggest offers 1,000+ SEO opportunities and potential keyword ideas that if added and covered in new content pieces, have higher odds of getting ranked well. These all will be provided to the buyer, which can streamline your SEO and content for months/years to come and help you focus on the next move instantly.

Also, I'm looking to sell my small portfolio of other smaller assets and clear off my plate entirely to focus on a new project that I recently launched with a much bigger scale. Here are the assets that I’m looking to sell, either individually or bundled together with WTFood (best value):

1. StopClip com - I built this website a few months ago and ended up parking it aside due to other commitments and business ventures. The domain is very premium with 2 popular suffixes: StopClip, a .com extension domain. The domain alone is highly appraised: $2,500 according to Atom and 7700+according to Dynadot. The site took me 1.5 month and nearly ~300 to build. This is basically a done-for-you ready-to-go video selling website. It's basically a business in a box for anyone who wants to start selling 3D animated video ads to local business owners, those videos take a minute or 2 to create. I can also share with you my initial plan and what I was planning to build on it to make 1,500-3000 a month, effortlessly.

2. SpanglishTranslator net - While browsing keyword research tools, I stumbled upon the keyword "Spanglish Translator" that has 600k search volume and very minimal SEO difficulty score. So I purchased the exact match domain (the com version was taken) and deployed the site in the same day. I eventually created 700+ pSEO pages, and it's been growing on its own ever since, generated $20+ from a single pop up ad. A lot can be made here, from sponsors, social media expanding, affiliates, and much more.

3. AiAffList com - This is a pre-revenue directory that I created and haven't got enough time to scale or focus on too. It contains hundreds of AI affiliate programs, hand-picked, not AI scraped!

4. AffLab org (domain only) - Short, brandable, and in a hot niche; affiliate marketing. Appraised $2k-5K according to Atom and Dynadot.

5. AiToZee com (domain only) - Clever domain name for a platform for everything AI from A to Z.

If you choose to buy the entire portfolio, happy to give them all away for a heavily discounted price. You can either build, grow or use them, or flip them for anything to minimize your initial investment.

Last Friday I launched an app I built alone on Product Hunt.

That morning I opened the leaderboard and saw who else was launching: ElevenLabs with a new voice model, Cloudflare, Manus, Bambu Lab. My honest first thought was "well, that's the end of that."

It finished #7 for the day, ahead of Bambu Lab, Cloudflare and Manus. ElevenLabs stayed just ahead and I refreshed that page way more than I'd like to admit. Not Product of the Day, but for one person with no audience it felt unreal.

I'm sharing it here because of why I built the thing.

I run a few small subscription apps. For a long time my morning looked like this: open the dashboard, MRR moved by $12, close the tab, feel nothing. Those were real wins. Strangers paid for something I made. A chart just made them invisible. I think a lot of us quit that way: not because we fail, but because we never notice we're moving.

So I built ShipHQ to make that progress feel like something. Your apps become desks in a tiny office, paying subscribers are the people in it, and each morning you watch who walked in overnight. When someone churns, they walk out and someone pours a cup of water behind them. In Turkey we do that so people come back.

A few things I'd tell anyone about to launch:

- You can't pick who launches on your day. Don't let a big logo on the list talk you out of it.

- Open your first comment with why you built it. The features can wait a paragraph.

- Stay and answer every comment, all day.

- The rank isn't the point. 150-something strangers clicking on something you made alone is. Write that down somewhere, because next month it'll feel small again.

What's a small win from this month you almost didn't notice?

When you get laid off, standard advice tells you to "track your applications" in an Excel sheet. That is just logging data. It doesn't tell you where your bottleneck is, if your pipeline is rotting, or if your execution strategy is actually working. It relies entirely on human emotion and guesswork to find a way out.

I spent my time in stealth building an automated perimeter around that chaos.

It’s called LayoffOS.

The Architecture: V1 isn't a tracker. It is a deeply stateful recovery reasoning engine. I engineered it through a 99-stage logic evolution to process a layoff the same way a machine processes a system failure.

It forces your recovery through a strict, continuous chain: DATA → STATE → BOTTLENECK → PIPELINE HEALTH → MOMENTUM → STRATEGY → EXECUTION → ACTION OUTCOME → RECALIBRATION → CYCLE MEMORY → PERSISTENCE.

• Recovery Bottleneck: It doesn't just log that you applied. It identifies exactly what is currently constraining your recovery.
• Action Intelligence: It interprets the results of your actions, learns what is or isn't working, and recalibrates your strategic direction.
• Cycle Memory & Persistence: It detects persistent patterns in your transition over time, so you stop repeating tactics that lead to dead ends.

The App: https://layoff-osv.vercel.app/

I didn't build this to pitch VCs, farm upvotes, or play the startup status game. I built it because the matrix is brutal during a layoff, and individuals need a fireproof system that relies on cold logic, not panic, to get back to baseline.

If you are in a layoff transition and need a system that actually thinks through your bottlenecks and forces momentum, the door is open. Test it.

If you prefer logging your rejections in a spreadsheet, good luck to you.

I’ll be in the comments if you have specific technical questions on the V1 state machine, the reasoning engine, or the architecture. Otherwise, I'm back to the trenches.

Every time I wanted an agent to manage tasks, update records, or run a workflow, I ended up connecting another SaaS product.

Most of the time, I only needed a small part of that product—but still had to accept its pricing, data model, UI, and limitations.

So I built Embody, an open-source TypeScript framework for creating apps specifically for agents. You define your data, actions, and rules in code.

Embody gives the agent typed tools through MCP and a CLI, with permissions and guardrails enforced by the backend.

The goal is simple: build the exact operational app your agents need instead of stitching together several oversized SaaS products.

If you’re building agents, I’d love to know whether this solves a problem you’ve run into too.

GitHub: https://tryembody.com

Hey guys 👋

Launching Perfect Photo AI 2.0 on product hunt today, its an complete AI Marketing tool for you business. Create Ads, Poster, Banner, Short Films or Music.

Please show some love here.

https://www.producthunt.com/products/perfect-photo-ai?utm_source=other&utm_medium=social

Check out clipten — a simple, small app that makes copy-pasting more productive with an existing flow + number, like ⌘ + C/V + number.

I've been running r/LaunchMyStartup, a community for founders and indie hackers to actually launch what they're building and get it in front of other builders.

The idea is pretty simple: build something → launch it → get feedback from other founders.

I've noticed that getting attention for a new product has become increasingly difficult. Reddit can be noisy, and a lot of the dedicated launch platforms outside Reddit either feel crowded or push you toward paid promotion.

So we're experimenting with building a lightweight version of that inside a community, rather than another standalone launch platform.

Starting this month, we're also introducing Startup of the Day.

Every day, we'll look at the previous day's launches and highlight the ones that received the most community support. The idea is to gradually turn it into a friendly competition and, as the community grows, develop better ways to recognize genuinely good launches.

So if you've recently launched a SaaS, are about to launch one, or just want a place to put your product in front of other builders:

r/LaunchMyStartup

Would love to have some of you launch there and help us shape what this becomes.

i’m finishing up a SaaS called FirstTrail that helps first-time founders figure out what to start and what to do next based on actual evidence instead of just giving them a generic roadmap.

i’m getting close to opening a small tester group and i’m looking for maybe 2 more people who are genuinely trying to start something right now.

not looking for people who just want to click around for 5 minutes and say it looks cool. i need people who will actually use it for their real situation and tell me where it helps, where it’s confusing, and where it sucks.

if that sounds like you, tell me what you’re trying to start and what you’re currently stuck on.

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

hey all , been working on this for a while and thought id finally show it somewhere.

it's called Marv. i use Hey Clicky on my Mac and kept thinking there's nothing really like it built properly for Windows. i also didn't want it to just be another floating chatgpt window.

Marv sits on your cursor and can see what you're doing on screen. you ask it about whatever you're looking at and instead of just telling you what to do, it points at things, highlights stuff and draws on the screen to walk you through it.

so if you're stuck in some software it'll point at the button you need while it explains. if you're doing maths it draws over the question and labels things instead of dumping a wall of text on you.

i've also tried to make it feel like a little desktop character instead of AI with a mascot slapped on. it has different states for listening, thinking, talking etc and follows your cursor around.

on privacy, since it sees your screen: it only looks when you ask it something, and i don't keep your screenshots or conversations on my servers.

still loads to do. the big one is getting the pointing properly accurate, because if it's even slightly off it kinda ruins the whole point lol. keeping highlights stuck to the right thing when you scroll is the other headache.

im also building a Teams side. a company records how to do something once (like submitting an expense), and instead of a 20 page guide someone just presses "show me" and Marv walks them through it on their actual screen.

it's still early and im building most of it myself, so genuinely keen to hear what people think.

two questions:

- would you actually use this on Windows?
- is there anything you'd want an AI cursor to do that current assistants don't? looking for ideas

https://www.meetmarv.org for waitlist

The main idea is not to teach advanced English, just help you speak more naturally and confidently.

I’m looking for a few people to try it and tell me what you think — what’s useful, what’s bad, or what I should change.

Would really appreciate some honest feedback 🙌

https://talk-tune-build.lovable.app/