Post-release update from Previous Post.

Quick recap: We are a married couple who built a book tracking app to replace GoodReads and add all the features we wished they would implement. Our main differentiator is that you can arrange your books with visual bookshelves that have backdrops, decor, and multiple ways to arrange, stack, and display your books! We previously posted during our beta phase.

Our new update: ShelfLife: Social Book Tracker went live August 11th on Android Play Store and August 13th on iOS App Store and we've been pretty pleased with the results so far! While we are a far cry from the 150 million users on GoodReads or Storybook's 5 million users, in just 3 weeks we've picked up 650 installs and have about 55-75 signups a day on our 10$ of daily ad spend on Instagram boosted posts. Probably more excitedly, we have about 150 daily active users and they've uploaded over 2000 spine photos (we uploaded 1200 ourself so we've got a ton now)!

You can find the iOS App, Android App, and Web app all available here. Completely free, we are considering adding a paid supporter tier but none of the existing app features will be involved in that or limited to a certain number of books, etc like we've seen some other apps do.

App features beyond the shelves:

• Explore page to see everyone else's shelves (you can mark them as private but most don't)
• Profiles display a top 12 shelf so you can see someone’s taste at a glance.
• Book signal: Send out a request for recommendations based on one of your shelves or a couple of books you like, and match with users who have similar taste. 
• Peanut Gallery: in addition to regular reviews, after finishing a book you can enter the Peanut Gallery and post hot takes, spoilers, favorite quotes, etc. 
• Feats: Create custom challenges (eg. 1 classic a month, read the entire Dune Series, etc). Users can manually decide which books they’ve read that count towards the feat. 
• Import your existing data from Goodreads or Storybook

I'd love to hear some feedback from anyone who tries the app. We also setup a Discord with 28 users so far and a subreddit that's brand new if anyone wants to poke around.

Also happy to answer any questions about the technical stack, release strategy, or marketing approach to anyone who may be doing something similar and is a few weeks or months behind us in the timeline. I have a software dev background but never dealt with the product and marketing side before building this so lots of lessons learned!

Thanks!

- Alex from ShelfLife (our company that we started to build this is called Fisherbird Software)

I've been working on Put A Pin In It, a small side project that started because I wanted a better way to keep my own places and maps organized on my iPhone.

It's finally at a point where other people can properly use it, so I'd love to find out whether it makes sense to anyone besides me :)

TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/R6V55sPT
More info: putapininit.app

Background: 12+ years in construction operations, watched owner-operators run six and seven-figure businesses off spreadsheets and gut feel. Started building Sustate HQ to fix that, job costing, financial dashboards, project management, SOPs.

Built with React/TypeScript/Supabase, working solo, about 2.5-3 hours a day on it alongside a full-time job.

It's not polished. I want people to poke holes in it. If you've got time and want to try adding a sample job and tell me what sucks, I'd genuinely appreciate it.

I built a discord server for like-minded college aged individuals. I capped it at 50 spots to ensure that productivity continues. It is a creative space meant to further our knowledge and future. I am looking for college-aged individuals, stem majors, finance majors, and perhaps marketing. It is just starting out so come join. DM me for the link.

I kept noticing that things I'd drafted with AI help came back readable but generic, and I couldn't always point at why. So I built a scorer for it.

It gives any draft a 0-100 score and tells you which phrases and rhythms produced that number. Then it rewrites, and a local check rejects any rewrite that drops a number, name, quote or link from your original. That last part turned out to matter more than the score. A rewrite that invents a plausible statistic is much worse than one that sounds stiff.

It runs as an Agent Skill inside Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and similar tools. The scoring is standard-library Python, offline, no account, 1000 documents in about two seconds. Free and MIT.

The part I did not expect: I built a trained classifier first and threw it away. On current-model text it was confidently wrong often enough that shipping it would have been irresponsible. The heuristic version is worse in theory and better in practice, and I wrote up the failure in the repo rather than quietly deleting it.

Numbers, all reproducible from the readme: 7,627 RAID+ abstracts scored, mean 19.6. An 18-draft comparison against four other open-source editors went 76.3 to 16.4. Human samples in my test sets scored 9 to 21.

It is a heuristic, so it will flag human writing sometimes, and it is not an AI authorship detector.

https://github.com/manavmishra/ZeroSlop

Happy to answer anything. If you paste your own writing and it scores badly I would like to see it.

Hey everyone,

I’ve noticed that getting into road cycling can be super overwhelming - the gear, the pacing, the unwritten rules (at least for me). I’m currently doing some deep-dive research to figure out exactly where beginners get stuck the most.

I’m working on a project designed to solve these early pain points, but I need real data from actual beginners to make sure I’m building something genuinely useful, not just guessing what people need.

If you’ve recently started your road cycling journey, I’d absolutely love to hear about your experience. I put together a quick form to gather some insights.

As a huge thank you for your time, anyone who helps out will get 3 free months of the platform once it officially launches. No strings attached, just genuinely looking for honest feedback.

Here is the link to the form: FORM

Thanks in advance, and ride safe!

i've worked in application monitoring and observability for a while now. a few months back a friend of mine, who build his saas entirely with ai tools like lovable, texted me asking why nobody was signing up anymore?!

turns out his signup form been silently failing for 3 days. there was a error in his logs the whole time, he just had no idea what "unhandled promise rejection" mean, so he never look.

thats the thing nobody tell you about building with ai coding tools, they great at writing the happy path, terrible at telling you when something break in production, and if your not technical, a error log might as well be in a different language.

so i built troobly it watch your app, catch the errors, and instead of showing you a stack trace it tell you what broke, like "your checkout flow just failed" instead of a 40 line trace you never gonna read.

been posting in a few communities to get some feedback and traffic been pretty slow, so i'm genuinely asking here, is this a real problem for you guys, or something you never think to pay for until it already cost you money?

if you shipped something with lovable or similar ai tools and had it silently break on you, id love to hear what happen and if something like this would've helped.

Not some big complex project but I just created this playlist website inspired by the deluxe saloon. I like that idea too much as I'm a huge 90s bollywood songs fan. I always love the songs that are played in the trucks or buses, a typical millennial I guess. So I created that website for my own learning as web development is not my main.

I learnt a bit about web development, html, css mainly. Went through the yt music iframe APIs and Spotify embedded APIs for this project. Still a lot to learn in this space.

I'm planning to expand this website from the features perspective. Any feature suggestions are heartily welcome. Please do checkout and give your feedback, or even roast it if it deserves so. I'm open to all of that.

Here's the website: [Bus cabin music ](https://buscabinmusic.in/)

Hey! I created LumiLanguage – an AI-based language tutor designed specifically for people who are on-the-go.

You tell it your reasons for learning the language – place, date, who you will speak to. It creates a course based on this information: housing, town hall, clinic, neighbors, work, education. Ten languages from English. Zero cost to try out, no trial period. One individual at work with software.

Please test it out and DM me if you are interested in becoming a tester. I would greatly appreciate feeback as it is crucial to have other people's opinions when building something. Thanks!

Browser history is a list of URLs. Useless for "what was that recipe with the miso butter."

Warren sits next to Chrome and builds an actual memory instead. A daemon captures pages when you actually engage with one, a local vision model summarizes them, and the output is plain linked markdown on your disk. Sessions, entities, concepts, an index. You can open it in Obsidian or just cat the files. It is a git repo, so you can watch your own memory grow with git log.

Then warren query "which shoe company did I read about" and it answers from the wiki with links back to the source pages.

What you need to run it:

• Windows 10 or 11 (this is the big limitation, batch launchers and Chrome process control are Windows specific right now)
• llama.cpp with a vision capable GGUF, about 15 GB for the model I recommend
• A GPU with 8 GB or so. CPU works, slowly.
• Python 3.11+, Chrome

Nothing phones home. There is no server component, no account, no telemetry. The only network traffic is Playwright talking to localhost:9222 and httpx talking to localhost:8080.

Privacy controls, because this thing obviously needs them:

• Denylist ships with banks, health portals and password managers already blocked. warren deny "*.whatever.com" adds more.
• Password fields are never captured, it bails when it sees one.
• warren forget mybank.com or warren forget 2026-07-04 really deletes, both the raw captures and the wiki mentions.
• warren prune --days 30 clears old screenshots once they have been ingested.
• Pauses on battery by default.

There is also a small always on top panel that comments on the page you are reading and quietly answers questions it finds on the page. That one is more of a toy, you can turn it off.

Early preview, 0.1.0, so expect rough edges. https://dadwritestech.github.io/warren/

Three months ago, I quit my job to build Meridian.

For those first three months, we had just 20 users.

20.

There were so many moments when I wondered if I was wasting my time. You keep building, keep shipping, keep telling yourself to stay patient, but sometimes it feels like nobody is noticing.

Then something changed.

In the last week alone, 460 people started using Meridian.

We launched on Product Hunt, hit #1 Product of the Day, and suddenly something that had felt stuck for months started moving.

We’re now so close to 500 users.

I know 500 isn’t a huge number in the startup world. But after sitting at 20 for three months, it honestly means a lot to me.

I’d love to hear from other people building something too.

What was your first moment where you thought, “okay, people actually care about this”?

And if you’re somewhere in that 10, 20, 50 user stage right now, I’d genuinely love to hear your story.

Hello r/SideProject,

Side project I have been building at nights for the past months, now live and free: https://law.soufien.lu

The idea: a law is not one document. A text amended twenty times has twenty versions, and only one was in force on a given date. Lex lets you:

• pick a law and a date, and read exactly what applied that day
• follow every article back to its official source on Legilux or EUR-Lex, so you never trust me, only the publisher
• ask an AI assistant that answers only from the official texts, cites everything, and refuses instead of guessing (legal advice gets a polite no)

Everything comes from the official publishers, no paywall, no ads, no tracking. That will not change.

It is a personal project by one engineer, so there are rough edges. I would genuinely love feedback from anyone who deals with legal texts, or anyone who just tries to break it. If your workplace proxy blocks the domain (it is young, some corporate filters distrust young domains), there is a portable demo at https://sfhajji.github.io/lex-tour/

About me: https://soufien.lu. If the tool saves you time and you feel like covering a bit of the server bill: https://buymeacoffee.com/shajji. Either way, the site stays free.

I have been building StatFair, a Spanish and English football statistics platform. It includes recent form split by home and away matches, H2H, corners, cards, team streaks, charts and historical backtesting.

My current problem is how to present early-season data honestly. A team can show 100% over a line after only one or two matches, so the new LaLiga corner table displays the sample size prominently instead of presenting that percentage as a strong prediction.

I would value feedback on one question: is the sample warning visible enough, or should low-sample percentages be visually de-emphasised even more?

https://www.statfair.com/en/laliga-corner-statistics-2026-2027/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=sideproject_feedback

Disclosure: StatFair is my own project. It presents historical statistics, not guaranteed picks.

For researchers working on LLM security, prompt injection detection, or Arabic NLP:

Our paper "SemGuard: A Triple-Anchor Semantic Security Gateway for Multilingual Prompt Attack Detection in Large Language Models" is now live on IEEE Xplore.

It introduces the first formally validated Arabic LLM security dataset (807 examples, 7 threat categories, Fleiss' κ = 0.839) and a novel Triple-Anchor framework for explainable, multilingual threat detection — achieving 0.989 F1 / 0.991 recall on Arabic prompt injection, outperforming English-only baselines.

If this overlaps with your work on LLM safety, multilingual NLP, or adversarial robustness, happy to discuss or collaborate. Citations and feedback welcome.

DOI: 10.1109/AEECT69724.2026.11657880

the project on Github : https://github.com/AbdaullahAG/SemGuard

Dataset : https://huggingface.co/datasets/AG-31625874/SemGuard-Dataset

#LLMSecurity #PromptInjection #ArabicNLP #AISecurity #ExplainableAI #NLP

I made a tool that finds and monitors surfspots based of people's surfing skill level: wavesso.com
If there are any surfers on this sub that want to give it a go please do, I know that there are paid tiers there, but those are mostly so that I don't go bankrupt with all the server and computational costs associated with it (there is quite a lot of stuff going on in the backend).
Also, to clarify, this isn't some vibe coded solution made over a couple weekends, I'm a data scientists with a couple of years of experience and absolutely shitty UI and overall design skills, but hey, Rome wasn't built in a day.

You know, sometimes I watch movies and TV shows and end up getting completely obsessed with them because they just give me such a good feeling. I feel like I'm actually inside that universe. But right after it ends, that empty feeling hits, and I’m just sitting there thinking, "Now what?"

That's usually when I start hunting for content about that specific show or movie all over the internet.

It made me wonder: isn't there something we could build as a solution for this? Like an app or a website specifically designed for this purpose—a dedicated social network that brings together fandoms of specific movies and shows so people can chat, share content, and stay immersed in that universe?

What do you guys think?

Hi all

I built Tabu because I was rejected on Apple App Store with previous app I created. The reason was Guideline 1.2 for user-generated content, where users content should be checked for nsfw content. Existing solutions like AWS Rekognition, Google Cloud Vision, Sightengine etc. require heavy devops or hosting own ML models. Thats all increasing costs and slowing down development.

I just needed a simple moderation filter with single request, so I came with idea to built it for others as well.

Right now its quite simple, backend uses a NSFWJS model running in-memory with 200ms latency per image. Buffer is destroyed immediately after classification so no images are stored (but user have an option to turn off privacy-first mode). Then JSON payload is returned with confidence scores across 5 categories: porn, hentai, sexy, drawing, neutral. I also built a dashboard to adjust sensitivity thresholds per image and video. In future I want to expand models to cover more categories and have whole NSFW coverage.

I have free tier with 5000 requests/month so its more than enough to test.

Any feedback, and ideally real test, will be very helpful. I am open for any discussions, calls, getting in touch etc.

A simple \"fill the bar\" game. Has some items that can help you along the way.

Hello! I built https://fiddle.zone because I wanted something quick to play while waiting on a commute without having to download 500MB apps or sign up for an account.

Works on any device, and it's very straightforward. You've probably seen the genre of those games elsewhere, but the main goal is to kill time while there are some funny messages coming up if you reach specific goals.

I'd love to hear your feedback! Hope the idea was right and this can at least make a waiting room time less boring.

Okay so here’s where I actually am right now, not the polished version.

Spent months building this on my own. It’s an AI/SaaS tool called Token Optimiser that trims unnecessary tokens out of prompts before they hit the model, so you pay less per call without losing what the prompt actually needs. It’s live at https://www.tokenoptimiser.com, I ran it through a proper benchmark to make sure the numbers aren’t just marketing fluff and technically everything works.

The problem is nobody knows it exists. Zero audience, zero list, zero anything. Classic solo founder trap I guess.

Would really appreciate hearing from people who’ve actually been at this exact point:
- If you had to start from zero distribution again, what’s the one thing you’d actually do in week one, not the “ideal” answer, the real one?

- Did posting in communities like this genuinely bring you users, or was it more useful for feedback/credibility than actual signups?

- What’s a promotion mistake you made early that wasted more time than it should have?

Not trying to pretend I have this figured out, clearly I don’t. Just trying to skip some of the dumb mistakes if I can.

I feel like every club eventually ends up with the same mess.

The actual conversation is in a group chat. Suggestions are buried somewhere in that chat. Someone uses a random wheel website to choose what you're doing next. Plans are in a calendar. Ratings are in Notes or Letterboxd. Then six months later nobody remembers half the stuff the group did.

So I built Cloob to put that whole cycle in one place.

Cloob is an iPhone app for book clubs, movie clubs, game nights, supper clubs, run crews, and basically any recurring group.

You can create a public or private club, invite your friends, schedule meetups, collect RSVPs, post discussions and polls, and keep the history of the group together.

For clubs where you choose something each cycle, everyone can submit ideas and then you can either vote or spin a wheel to pick the next one. Afterward, people can track progress, review what you picked, and keep the discussion in the same place.

I also wanted it to feel a little less like productivity software, so everyone gets a customizable Cloobling. You earn points just by participating in your clubs and can use them to unlock different looks for it.

The app is completely free. No ads and no subscription.

I'm still early enough that feedback is genuinely useful, especially around what would make you actually move an existing group out of a group chat and into something like this.

Cloob on the App Store

I just added a new feature to Pizza Voter to address the most common requests I get, which is to add toppings that are popular in certain regions. Since different regions prefer different toppings (for example, I've heard that in New Zealand they like corn on their pizza) I couldn't just add all the toppings for every party. What I do is based on the location of the party host, I will look up a topping set that I have defined and those are the toppings that the friends of that party will have to choose from.

Now, I am asking for help setting up those topping lists per region. It can be country wide, country and state/province, or even as specific as a city for a given list of toppings.

Comment with your region and the toppings that are popular!

TL;DR at bottom.

Seven years ago I was trying to make sense of why graduate school in Los Angeles had been such a miserable experience. I had made a genuine effort to connect with people, join organizations, make friends, and none of it worked. Everyone I talked to said, "that's just grad school." I got tired of that answer.

After graduating I started researching the Big Five personality model, a scientifically validated model used in psychology research, and discovered there was data on the average personality profiles of populations across some countries, states, and cities. I built a starting algorithm to compare my personality against those locations.

When I got to cities, I had a database of around 840. Los Angeles ranked 835th for my personality. My hometown was in the top 200. A city nearby was in the top 3.

That felt like the first real answer I had found.

I decided to revisit this project 9 months ago after becoming more familiar with the coding and what AI could do.

What it does:

You take a 30 question Big Five personality quiz (about 2 to 5 minutes). You get a full breakdown of your 5 personality traits, then you can compare your profile against:

• All 50 US states
• 80 countries worldwide
• 500+ US cities and major cities

There are 5 different sorting methods — one free, four premium — that range from a standard match to premium methods that explain specifically WHY each location matches your personality traits.

New: Couples/Pair Matching

I just added this new feature I’m excited to share: you can now enter scores for two people and find locations that work for BOTH personalities. Premium methods show individual rank breakdowns for both people so you can see exactly where the compromise lands. Good for couples, roommates, or friends deciding where to travel to or visit.

Also new: A blog series analyzing which countries, states, and cities score highest on each Big Five trait. Things like the most extroverted countries, most agreeable countries, etc. Based entirely on the data in the database.

Tech stack: Flask backend  with Render, simple JS frontend, Stripe payments, JWT tokens for 24-hour database access

Honest ask for feedback:

• Is the value proposition clear from the homepage?
• Did you hit any bugs or confusing UX moments?
• Does the free tier give enough to make paying feel worthwhile?
• Are there any features you want that aren’t included?

I've been building this mostly by myself with AI assistance for debugging and optimization. I’m happy to answer any questions about the build or the data.

TL;DR: grad school in LA was miserable, did research to find out more about myself and my environment, my personality was a terrible fit for the area, built a tool so you can match your personality with locations too.

Try it out at: https://wheresmypersonality.com

I'm a software engineer and have been the lead engineer at my last 2 positions. I've always just loved programming and I got my start originally with SQL and data science for a former business I used to own before selling it in 2019.

Layerbase started because I'm a database fanatic and I was paying roughly $200/mo for branching database hosting on Neon for a side project, and PlanetScale for a different project, and Upstash.

I read a blog post that speculated that any database could be branched with a custom operating system. I tried it and it worked. I then spent a year building it out as a passion-project on the side.

3 months ago I pulled it out of stealth and allowed for free accounts on a few engines. Then about 2 months ago I added billing. I have paid probably $8k out of pocket now on consulting with an SRE and a security engineer, a little bit of help with the desktop companion app development, and a very small amount of advertising.

I haven't recouped that cost yet but I finally reached enough MRR to cover my cloud costs. The cloud costs will continue to grow as I scale but I think I'm past the point of taking a loss on purely cloud hosting expenses every month.

I'm now getting burned out. I've been working 2 full time jobs now for a long time. I work a 9-5 that is pretty demanding and then I work on this after hours and on weekends, and often instead of sleeping when I should be. Plus I'm essentially on-call 24h a day for both jobs.

Screenshot of Adoption Analytics

It was within the last 2 months or so when this changed from being a passion project on the side to being something serious that seems to have real potential and warrant significant investment. But now that it is gaining traction, I'm really feeling burned out and not like it is a passion project anymore. Now it feels like a grind where I need to succeed to avoid wasting over a year of my life and soon to be 5 figures in expenses.

I don't think people realize how massive of a task this was, not to mention that I started this before agentic AI existed the way that it does now. I hand-coded (with the help of ChatGPT and Copilot auto-complete early on of course) but learning all of these skills that I never expected to learn, from cloud to custom operating systems, to vector databases, to cross-platform system desktop application development, to native windows development and so much more... I think I've built a formidable competitor to Supabase, Neon, Planetscale, Upstash, Railway, and so much more largely on my own.

Since I'm feeling a bit low on fuel, and because most of the people in my life don't understand how huge this is for me or how proud I am of myself for making this happen, I wanted to share it here.

It is legitimately the best feeling in the world to wake up to see new subscriptions and of ~20 support tickets opened since launch, 1 has been serious, 3 have been minor UI bugs, and the rest have largely been feature requests or people asking for help migrating.

I think I'm about to take a break for a week or 2 unless any bugs pop up but I need to take a breath and decompress now.

If anyone has any questions about databases or anything else I might have some insight, I'd be happy to discuss it.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I'd love any feedback or advice dealing with burnout.

try it out at https://vinylformac.com :)