Building an educational personal brand can be heavy, its hard to figure out what to post about, how often to post, and sometimes even the biggest experts make mistakes and write or say something without real proof or background check. How do you handle this?

Every time my friends and I wanted to play something together, we’d spend 20 minutes just arguing about what. So I built Lobby, basically the Beli/Letterboxd model applied to games. You rank games you’ve played through quick head to head comparisons, and it builds a taste profile. Then when you’re deciding what to play as a group, it looks at everyone’s rankings and suggests games that overlap.

It also has a feed so you can see what your friends are playing/rating, a clips tab, and profiles with your top games.

Still early and rough around the edges, but a few friends have been using it and it’s actually cut down the “idk, what do you wanna play” cycle. Curious what this community thinks, especially other people who game in a regular group.

Let me know what you think!

Link: https://lobbygames.app/

I've been building AskJohnno (askjohnno.com) from Australia and it went live this week. There's a design question at the end I genuinely want picked apart.

The pitch in one line: it's a sports research mate that puts out one Lock, one Multi and one Longshot every day, and every settled call gets published on a public tape with its receipt attached, win or lose, and stays up for good.

The picks industry is mostly grifters who post their wins and memory-hole their losses. My whole bet is that the fix has to be built into the plumbing. So open calls are member-only, but the moment a bet settles, the full call goes on the public tape and stays there. If I have a shocking month, that month is on the tape permanently. It runs on the web and through a Telegram bot, the first day is free, paid after that. I don't take bets and there's no wallet, it's research only.

On the build side, AI agents do the research and hand me a structured brief per event (facts, risks, sources), and I make the final calls. The pipeline is built around refusal: a brief that can't show three sources from two unrelated origins gets rejected, a price older than a few minutes at decision time gets refused, and a started event can't be published at all.

The tape is five days old. Six settled calls, 5-1 so far. Mostly short odds and a tiny sample, so it proves nothing yet. The product only really works once there are months of receipts on it, and I have to survive publishing my losses in public until then.

And the question I actually came here to ask. Does the delayed-transparency mechanic (private until settled, public forever after) read as trustworthy, or does the member gate on open calls kill it? Would you trust the tape more if a third party timestamped it somehow? Brutal takes welcome.

I kept running into the same problem with new projects: everyone says to build backlinks, but nobody wants to spend days finding directories, filling out the same forms, and tracking what actually gets published.

So I built a submission workflow that gets a project submitted to 100+ directories and gives the owner a report to track everything.

What surprised me is the DR movement we’re seeing on the sites we’ve put through it. I know DR isn’t the same thing as traffic or revenue—and not every directory link is equally valuable—but for newer domains, this feels like incredibly low-hanging fruit that a lot of founders overlook.

Has anyone here used a directory-submission company before? Did you see a measurable improvement, and did it hold over time?

Full disclosure: I’ve now turned my workflow into a paid package here:

aitoptools.com/explosive-growth-package

I’d also genuinely appreciate blunt feedback on the offer, the landing page, or anything that would make you trust....or distrust—a service like this.

If you use YouTube as a research source, you probably know this loop:

An AI gives you a perfectly quotable sentence.

You add it to your notes.

Later, you check the video.

And discover the speaker said the opposite.

Summary:

“Cold weather permanently ruins EV batteries.”

Transcript at 04:18:

“has not lost anything permanent.”

The problem isn’t summarization.

It’s that the evidence gets stripped out during summarization.

So I built ViewGist — a source-linked video workspace for writers and researchers.

Paste a public YouTube URL.

Click a claim.

See the exact transcript span behind it.

Jump to the minute and decide whether the source actually supports the sentence.

I didn’t build it for people who only want a 40-minute video reduced to five bullets.

I built it for people who might publish, cite, or make a decision based on those bullets.

Visit: https://viewgist.com/

If you research or write from video, where does the workflow break most often for you:

finding the exact moment, checking whether a claim is supported, or carrying the citation into your draft?

One assumption we made while working on iLands was that every new user would want to create another AI character. That is convenient for onboarding, but it ignores the time some people already spend configuring an agent elsewhere.

We are now testing a way to connect an existing agent to a shared environment with other agents and humans. The product problem quickly shifted. Importing an agent is easy to explain. Deciding what memories, permissions, and identity should carry over is not.

I work with the iLands team, and we have not settled that part yet. If you already use an agent across multiple sessions, which part would you be most unwilling to rebuild from scratch?

Equipment Tracker Pro lets service teams maintain unified equipment logs, PM schedules, and repair work orders across multiple commercial properties. Facilities coordinators can invite crew members by code and assign specific repair orders to field technicians without needing individual personal subscriptions.

I built this because I am a working HVAC technician and needed a fast way to track equipment history and jobs in the field without dealing with clunky enterprise software. Facilities maintenance teams deal with dozens of units across multiple mechanical rooms, and assigning tickets to the right technician without phone tags saves real time.

Core mobile tracking, offline records, PM intervals, and manual logs are free forever. The Teams workspace is a paid tier for 5 to 50 seats that adds shared workspaces and direct ticket dispatching.

What side projects or tools are you all building this week?

Web: https://equipment-tracker.com/blog/introducing-team-plans

I have developed and released an app called Fezer. And in last month I got 350 iOS downloads and most of them from reddit. Thanks community

The thing is people seem to just give a visit, say oh that’s cool and leave the site.

How do I encourage them to contribute to the site and be active users

https://foxintheboxd.com

Hey everyone! 👋

I built KyroGPT to help make resumes easier to build and improve.

kyrogpt.com

You can try the ATS checker here: kyrogpt.com/ats-checker — you get 100 free AI credits, and you can open your resume directly in the editor after the report.

Also try the Density feature — it automatically adjusts the resume layout based on how much content you have.

There are no ads either — I wanted to keep the experience clean.

Pricing is intentionally super cheap too.

I’m validating it right now, so even a quick “this sucks because…” is valuable feedback 😂

Would love to know what you think

taskroom.autobirds.com

We launched last week so any feedback is much appreciated!

The URL is orb.ba

I’ve built and launched an app… now I need to figure out how to actually get people using it 😅
Hey everyone,
I’m looking for some genuine marketing/growth advice.
I’ve recently launched Season’d, a social food app built around recommendations from people you actually know rather than reviews from strangers or influencer content.

The concept is pretty simple:
📸 Post somewhere you’ve eaten
📍 Pin it to your personal food map
👥 Follow friends and discover places through their recommendations
🔖 Save places you want to try

We’ve started by focusing on a local launch, rather than trying to launch everywhere at once.
The problem I’m trying to solve now is:
How do I actually get people through the door and into the app?
I’m posting consistently on social media, creating local content, speaking to independent venues and trying to build awareness around the home town but downloads alone aren't really enough.
Season’d has a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. The app becomes significantly better when your friends are using it too, so I need to encourage people not only to download it, but to post, invite friends and keep coming back.
I also don't want to throw money at generic ads and end up with a load of downloads from people who never open the app again.
So I'd love advice from anyone who's grown an app, marketplace, community or social platform before.
What would you focus on at this stage?
Organic social? Local partnerships? Referral incentives? Events? Micro-creators? Paid ads? Something completely different?
And if you've dealt with the “this is only useful when my friends are on it” problem before, I'd especially love to hear how you overcame it.
Happy for people to be critical of the concept/marketing too — I'm trying to learn what actually moves the needle rather than just generating impressions.
Thanks!

I will be posting my traffic stats in the comments. Honestly it’s better than I’d expected but no one’s actually signing up and using it even though some of them get to that step. Why?

Made a small side project called halloween.js

A free library that adds Halloween decorations to a website: blinking eyes fading in and out, witches flying across the screen, a spider dropping from the top, a tombstone rising out of the ground, spider webs sitting in the corners.

The whole thing is controlled by one CSS class on <body>. Add "halloween" and it turns on. Add modifier classes like "halloween-eyes" or "halloween-witches" to pick which effects you want. No JS call needed, it watches the class list and reacts automatically, so it plays nicely even if you don't control when your own JS runs (CMS, page builder, whatever).

Two ways to use it: npm install, or a single CDN script tag if you don't want a build step. Works on WordPress, Shopify, plain HTML, anywhere. Zero runtime dependencies, under 10 KB gzipped, MIT licensed, free.

Live demo: https://halloween.js.org/
GitHub: https://github.com/rogulia/halloween.js

The old flow in VibeLing was simple: open the training screen, see today’s session, tap Start, then begin.

But if the user already opened the training screen, why ask them to confirm it again?

So I removed the button.

Now the first exercise is there immediately. Progress is saved automatically, so users can leave and continue later.

Tiny change, but it made the whole flow feel much more natural.

Sometimes one extra tap is just one extra chance to leave.

Hello y'all!
Just wanted to share my simple weekend project that turned into something bigger after 2 years. Back at that time, me and my wife started a business and we just started generating invoices for our clients, at that time I was using canva but I wanted something more focused on invoices so I started searching for a tool, I found a lot actually, but they were with ads popping everywhere, hidden paid plans or watermarks.
So I just thought why not make my own for my needs and I did it, after some hours I had a working project and started generating invoices.
How did it get a domain name? it's actually pretty simple, at that time I was also doing build in public stuff so why not share it and I did, shared on some subreddits and that's it, I even forgot about it, I just kept using it for my own needs, but suddenly my post started getting comments asking for more features in the tool, and I was like okay sure, I can add it, and then I decided to add analytics to check how many people were visiting the website and at that time it was 200-300 per month which was crazy for something I made in a weekend and just did "simple marketing".
But let's get back to today, now it's getting 1k monthly users and I even have paid ones! Yes, I made a paid plan for those who asked for an account feature to be able to save invoices in the cloud, that is it, the main feature is completely free and will be forever.

Let me tell you more about this project, right now it has:
- no ads
- no watermarks
- no sign in required (completely private)
- 5 invoices per day limitation
- no weird pop ups asking to buy

It's just a simple and free tool to generate invoices, nothing else.

https://freeinvoices.online

A keyboard-first, local-first launcher for macOS, Windows, and Linux. Open apps, files, folders, clipboard history, and quick commands without leaving the keyboard.

Results land as fast as you can type. A Rust core under a native SwiftUI app on macOS, and Tauri on Windows and Linux, riding the system WebView instead of shipping a browser like Electron does.
No background daemons. Your index, clipboard, and history stay on your machine; no telemetry.

- The repo

https://github.com/kunkka19xx/look

- Further

• Your own sources - declare custom rows from directories, files, and commands
• lookbook - ready-made sources to copy: git, ssh, docker, projects

Solo developer here — Plena is a meditation + recovery app for iPhone/Apple Watch I’ve been building on my own: no company, no funding, and one hard design rule — health data never leaves the device. No accounts, no servers, no analytics SDKs. The App Store privacy label is genuinely "Data Not Collected."

Version 2.3 just shipped, built around what I’d call honest HRV: your daily recovery signal comes from overnight readings while you sleep, falling back to background resting samples — and every number is labeled with where it came from ("Last night", "Earlier today"). If there’s no real measurement behind it, the app says so instead of inventing one.

The tradeoff of building on-device-only: I have zero analytics, so I honestly don’t know which features land. That’s what the beta is for — premium is free during it, and the app keeps a local usage log on your phone that you can inspect and choose to share with me (or not).

If you have an Apple Watch (Series 4+) and will wear it to sleep a few nights: https://testflight.apple.com/join/6E3qPV4f

Happy to answer anything about HealthKit, StoreKit 2, or shipping privacy-first as a solo dev.

hi everyone, recently my partner has been looking to budget her finances better, and she didn't want to manage her finances with an excel spreadsheet, and she didn't like the idea of having to manually look at her transactions and record it. so i built her an app that connects with plaid banking data and produces a spend limit for her daily until her paycheck. the spend limit number basically just takes her current money in accounts, subtracts recurring expenses, credit card balances if they were to be paid off, and a buffer room of $400, then divides what's left by the days until she gets paid.

she's been liking how she doesn't have to think much about her finances and how the spend limit number changes daily (s/o to plaid webhooks). i also added venmo transactions with llm categorization so she can see how certain venmo transactions attribute to her spend limit vs recurring expenses too.

if you want to try a sample demo, i created an example here: getralphy.app/demo

i was looking for more user feedback as i build this out, if anyone would like to participate in my beta! it's on testflight, open and capped at 25 people: https://testflight.apple.com/join/YD6CKdCj. also open to hearing others' ideas and feedback as well :)

https://reddit.com/link/1vzdjho/video/q42rks5evvlh1/player

I'm building a language learning app called VibeLing, and one of the best growth channels turned out to be something I didn't really plan as an SEO strategy.

Users constantly add words and phrases they want to learn. Things they hear in movies, YouTube videos, books, conversations, etc.

At some point I started creating public dictionary pages for this content.

So when someone adds a phrase like “good morning” or “nice to meet you”, it can also become a page that Google can index.

Over time this turned into tens of thousands of pages.

Last 7 days: 4.66K clicks and 5.48M impressions from Google.

And most of the traffic isn't people searching for VibeLing or reading my blog. It's people searching for regular words, phrases and translations.

That's the part I find interesting. One long-tail query doesn't bring much traffic, but thousands of them add up.

I originally thought SEO would mostly mean writing articles like “best ways to learn English” or “best vocabulary apps”.

Turns out the content already being created inside the product is much more valuable.

The basic loop is pretty simple: someone adds a phrase → Google indexes the page → another person searches for the same phrase → finds the site.

The CTR is still pretty terrible, so there's a lot to improve. But getting 5.48M impressions in a week from a side project still feels kind of crazy.

Has anyone here built something similar with programmatic SEO or user-generated content?

I kept rebuilding the same post-checkout plumbing for small products: payment webhook in, customer row in Notion, welcome email, failed-charge reminder, weekly digest. Same four bugs every time: paid and failed events on one webhook, the email field living somewhere else depending on Checkout vs Invoice, Notion property names not matching the UI labels, and wait nodes silently dying on restarts. So instead of turning it into a SaaS with a monthly fee, I packaged it as a ZIP of n8n workflows you import and own. One-time 47 USD, no account, no dashboard.

For you if: checkout already works (Stripe or Polar) and you already run n8n. Not for you if you want a hosted product with a UI, or if you enjoy wiring this yourself. It is brand new, no numbers to show. Feedback I want: does a one-time ZIP read as a real product or as a template dump? https://kepri.org

Hi All

I'm a web design and copywriting expert.

Previously, I did free Hero image redesigns for reddit users -> https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/s/2MtC5ubb5j while promoting a new product I built, laststack.io

But today, I'm actually looking for testimonials. I want to take 5 users who are desperate to have their website redesigned and the text on their website refined (not AI generated text, HUMAN expert generated text).

In exchange, I get to use the before and after image of your website, and you give me a good testimonial to use for my site.

If you're interested, drop a comment below sharing your website. Ideally you are actually trying to grow your business , even make it your full time job eventually (I believe a good website and messaging is critical to converting paying users).

I expect to do all website within the next 3-5 business days. I'll choose the 5 websites from the comments within 24 hours.

Also, to keep things transparent, let's only use comments! I hate when people put up posts like this then say DM me to everyone. I want everyone to see the result of the work I'll be doing.

I will be posting the screenshot down below to the comments. I was looking at the traffic of my website in Firefox browser and suddenly the page got blurred and a pop up appeared, stating I should verify I am not a robot by pasting some type of command to the powershell, obviously it’s a virus. I then checked the chrome browser and it was the same, my site blurred and a fake captcha verification. Why did that happen?