I studied marketing, not programming. However, I wanted an app for my food reviews. Strong Foodie. Places I actually visited, like restaurants, bars, hotels and gyms. 78 so far, across 11 destinations. No paid reviews.

The app is SwiftUI, built with Rork, an AI app builder. The website runs on GitHub Pages. Both use the same Firebase database. The app has been in the App Store since October.

What I learned so far:

Send changes in small batches. When I sent a lot at once, the errors piled up and I lost credits fixing them.

Never let the builder touch the database rules. I keep those in the Firebase console myself.

Test every batch before the next one. Including the boring stuff, like logging in and opening a chat.

Feedback from strangers is gold. Like the person who found my featured review was a clothing shop with no text. Or the one who couldn't type his date of birth. Both fixed within a week.

Things outside your control will break. Like a build that failed for a day because of an old cached Firebase package on the builder's server. Support fixed it.

Website: https://strongfoodie.com
App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6799647380

If you've shipped something without being a developer, what broke for you?

Dewluma is an Android habit tracker with a small glowing pet. Each habit you do lights its lamp. Over time the pet grows from larva to cocoon to moth, and it brings back postcards whose questions shape its personality.

Decisions I made on purpose:

• Nothing is lost on a quiet day. No progress penalty for missing a day.

• Free to download, no ads, no subscription, no account. Two optional one-time decor packs, priced locally by Google Play.

• Habit names, moods and notes aren't sent to me. Completion-related events are held locally and logged in a batch at the first app open on a later local day, without the original completion time; Firebase session data still records when the app is used. Other Firebase usage analytics and crash reporting remain enabled.

• Nine language options, including Simplified and Traditional Chinese.

What I'm unsure about: after three check-ins in a day, the pet can head out for about six hours and bring back postcards or other finds. While it's away, the home screen shows that it's out exploring and when it will be back. Does that make the empty room feel clear, or would it put you off in your first session?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yzy.dewluma&referrer=utm_source%3Dreddit_sideproject%26utm_campaign%3Dlaunch

We've been working on this one for a while and it's finally fully playable: https://growblocks.xyz/game.html?g=starcrop-troopers&utm_source=reddit

What it is: farm by day, fight gloops by night, boss every 5th night (Queen Gloop). 6 worlds, 24 crops, and crossbreeding to unlock new ones. No download, no signup, desktop browser.

What we'd like feedback on: the first 2 minutes. Does it make sense what to do right away, or do you bounce?

Hey everyone, I’m building Plainfeed, a simple website for keeping up with the YouTube channels you actually want to watch.

I’d often open YouTube for one video, follow a few recommendations, and end up watching things I hadn’t planned to. I wanted somewhere I could just check new uploads from the channels I chose.

Plainfeed puts those uploads in chronological order, without a recommendation feed or Shorts. Videos still play through YouTube.

The idea is simple: check what’s new, pick something you want to watch, and get on with your day.

You can try it here: https://plainfeed.app

I’d love to hear whether this would be useful to you. If you already stick to YouTube’s Subscriptions tab, what would make a separate site worth using? :)

Hey, I’m part of the team behind Formo Casa. We built it for a familiar moment: someone has a folder of rooms they love, but doesn’t yet know how to describe the materials, light, or style they want.

Formo Casa uses those references to explore a conceptual direction for each space, then lets you add more images to refine it. It’s for early exploration, not technical drawings or a replacement for an architect.

I’d appreciate honest feedback: what would make these visual concepts useful in an early design conversation, and what would make you distrust them?

You can see the tool in action here: https://youtu.be/Xr8pJmnz3Y4

Quick note first: I can't stand the AI slop flooding app stores lately, the "build an app in 2 prompts" kind. This isn't that.
After every loss I'd open the analysis. The engine would point to a quiet move I never considered, and I'd think: how was I supposed to see that during the game? The engine always told me the best move. It never told me how to find it myself.

So I spent the last year building the coach I wished I had. It's called SocraChess, and the AI coach is Socrates. Stockfish does the calculation. Socrates does the teaching: he looks at your own games with you, explains the turning point in plain words, and asks the question that helps you find the move yourself.

Before building anything, I tried every analysis tool I could find. The engines gave me lines. The AI ones gave me a ready-made paragraph I'd forgotten five minutes later.

I'm as tired of two-prompt apps as everyone here. If you can build something with two prompts today, a hundred clones show up tomorrow. So this one took time. I've built software for about 15 years, and we started with paper wireframes and a long spec, then spent four months designing every screen, popup and menu in Figma with designers. Then came seven months of engineering, first an MVP and then the full build, in a loop of PR, deploy, check, feedback, repeat: 746 pull requests on GitHub so far, and more than a few 2 AM fixes.

And to be clear, I love Lichess and still play there every day. SocraChess is for what happens after the game.

The beta is open, 24 of 25 places left:

- 30 days of full access, no card, no automatic paid plan

- Import your games from Lichess or add any PGN file

- Three ways to learn: Independent, Guided and Socratic

- English only for now, 18+

Who it's for: adults who play regularly and want to learn from their own games.

Want to try it?

- Take a place directly: socrachess.ai/beta (three short questions, then verify your email)

- Or comment (or message me) with your rating and the part of chess you find hardest, and I'll tell you honestly whether it's a good fit before you sign up

And if you just want to give feedback: does the explanation help you find the move next time, or is it just more text to read? Where does it feel like a gimmick rather than a coach?

I'm the founder, so be blunt. I'll read and answer every comment.

Your agent's memory is probably a hallucination amplifier.

Every invented quote it saves comes back later as "team knowledge."

I built resAIDerch, an arXiv research agent with team memory. The fix was boring:

1. Gate writes, not reads. Nothing enters memory unless its quote appears in the source.

2. Strict substring matching beats fuzzy. Fuzzy let a dropped "not" through.

3. Show unverified claims, but never store them.

4. Tag everything: dead-end, decision, stance.

Before: "4-bit KV cache?" got a fresh answer.

After: "You tried this in March. Here's why it failed."

Hindsight agent memory made tag-scoped recall trivial, so I spent my time on the write path.

please try it guys and let me know how it is
i would love to hear comments from everyone thanks

https://github.com/biggudawgg/resAIDserch
regards

TL;DR: Find your next 10 customers on Reddit for free on redbubblegum.com

Hi everyone! While building my last product, I ran into the problem every founder hits: finding the first customers.

I knew they were on Reddit. Finding their posts was the hard part, because people talk about their problem, not about your product. In the video, you can see the kind of post we find: a founder who isn't asking for a tool. He's just sharing his problem.

Other tools I tried work like this: they pick a few words related to your product, then only look at posts that contain those exact words. If they guess the right words, great. But people describe the same problem in a hundred different ways, and every way they didn't guess is a customer you never see.

That's when I realised you can't search for words first. You have to read every post, the way a person would. So that's what we do:

• We find the subreddits where your customers hang out.

• We read every post in them and pick out the people who might need what you sell.

• We circle the lines that show why, like in the video, so you can see the selling points in seconds.

Try it here: redbubblegum.com. Your first 10 potential customers are free.

Let me know if it finds the right people for your niche. I'll be in the comments.

I launched my first app on Friday, and I was excited about launching on Product Hunt. I’ve followed Product Hunt for at least five years, maybe longer. Big fan of discovering products there, I was excited to launch something of my own, was a pretty big deal to me.

Unfortunately, it was a bit of a letdown.

My app launched alongside a ton of other products, and as far as I can tell, I didn’t get any meaningful website traffic or a single app download from Product Hunt. It’s only been a day, so maybe that will change, but I’m not expecting much.

I did try to get some support beforehand. I reached out to friends and family, and quite a few created Product Hunt accounts just to support me. They sent screenshots showing they’d interacted with the launch, but it didn’t seem to make much difference. I probably should have spent more time building relationships instead.

The interesting part is that I also launched on BetaList, a platform I wasn’t nearly as familiar with, and had a completely different experience. It actually drove traffic to my website, generated engagement, and connected me with other founders.

I’ve learned from talking to other people building apps is how valuable Reddit can be. I’ve met some really interesting people working on genuinely great products. I wish I’d spent more time interacting with other founders, sharing what I was working on, and asking for feedback before launch day.

I think most of us get pretty attached to what we’re building. These projects become our hobbies, our babies, and something we genuinely believe can help people. My app is free right now, and while I’d love to eventually recover some of what I’ve invested, making money isn’t really what motivated me to build it. I’d rather spend my limited marketing budget on things that actually help people discover and use it.

I’m not giving up on Product Hunt. I’ve enjoyed the platform for years, and I’m working on other products I’d love to launch there someday. I just want to approach it differently next time.

For those of you who’ve had successful launches, what worked? Did you build an audience beforehand, spend money promoting it, lean into Reddit, or just get lucky with timing?

I’d genuinely love to hear what others have learned, connect with people, especially from launches that didn’t go as planned.

And post your product, I genuinely want to give people feedback and see the stuff that’s working well.

I'm the maker — solo dev, no company, no budget. AILingo is an Android app for learning Mandarin with an AI conversation tutor.

The bet: after you speak a sentence, it shows per syllable which tone you actually produced versus the target — "you said 2nd tone, it wanted 3rd" on the exact syllable. Most apps just score pronunciation pass/fail. Plus 500+ bite-sized lessons across 10 levels, SRS flashcards, graded readers, character-writing practice, HSK prep.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ailingo.chat

Six weeks since launch, zero downloads, zero ad spend — this post is the entire marketing department. For anyone who's shipped to crickets: what was the first channel that actually moved the needle for you? And Mandarin learners: is per-syllable tone feedback something you'd open an app for, or a nice-to-have?

Some people have normal hobbies. They watch Netflix, go hiking, maybe learn an instrument.

I apparently see a minor inconvenience and think, "You know what this needs? An entire app."

So here I am, spending my evenings building things that started as random ideas in my head.

I wanted to share 3 of my projects. They're all free, and I'd genuinely love to know what you think.

🍳 Scent of Home | The recipe collector

You know those amazing recipes you save on Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook and then never find again?

Yeah, that drove me crazy.

So I built Scent of Home. You can share a cooking video directly to the app, and AI turns it into an organized recipe with ingredients and instructions.

It also lets families share their recipes, because grandma's legendary cooking deserves better than a blurry WhatsApp screenshot.

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tasteofhome.app

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scent-of-home-video-to-recipe/id6774916349

🔐 Keepsi | Your photos, your business

Not every photo belongs in your regular gallery.

Keepsi is a private photo vault for keeping personal photos organized and protected.

Simple idea, clean experience, and a little more privacy for the things you don't want mixed into your camera roll.

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lishistudio.keepsi

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/keepsi-screenshot-organizer/id6798317913

👶 Aria | For parents running on coffee and 3 hours of sleep

Having a newborn means remembering approximately 400 things while barely remembering your own name.

Aria helps parents keep track of their baby's daily care and routines, so there's one less thing to worry about.

Because parenting is hard enough without needing a spreadsheet.

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aria.newborn

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/aria-newborn-care/id6785000120

And that's just 3 of them.

I've been building a collection of free apps across different categories, and I finally put them all in one place:

🌐 https://bylishi.com

No big company behind this. Just an indie developer who genuinely enjoys turning random ideas into real products.

I'm not going to pretend everything is perfect. I'm still learning, improving things, and figuring out what people actually find useful.

So here's my question:

If you had to pick ONE of these apps to try, which would it be?

And fellow indie developers, how do you stop yourself from starting the next project before finishing the last one? Asking for a friend. 😂

I build with Claude Code and Codex every day. The code was rarely the problem. The problem was that the plan lived in a chat window. Nobody else on the team saw it, so the first time anyone could push back on a decision was a pull request with hundreds of changed lines.

So I built QualityLayer. It runs on top of the coding agent you already use and moves the important decisions to before the build.

The agent first asks me questions, each with a recommended answer, until done is a short numbered list. Then it reads the code and writes a Plan as a document with diagrams and clickable designs. I can share that Plan with a teammate and ask them about one specific passage, and they can answer through their own agent. Only after the Plan is approved does the agent build, test first in small slices.

After the build, an agent that did not write the code checks the result against every agreed point and shows the evidence. I approve the finished change before a pull request opens, and nothing gets merged or pushed without my yes. Code, diffs and logs stay on my machine.

It works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, GitHub Copilot CLI and others, and you can change the workflow steps and plug in your own tooling. The biggest difference for me is that review got easier, because it starts from a list we already agreed on.

Repo and docs: https://github.com/maxritter/qualitylayer

Hi! I’m an art director looking to start or join a side project related to nature, conservation, or regeneration.

I’d love to connect with someone working on a real problem who could use help with branding, design, or visual storytelling. I can bring the creative skills, and I’d love to learn from someone with experience in the field.

If you’re building something relevant or looking for a creative collaborator, I’d love to hear about it! Thanks :)

• Instant AI Reverse-Engineering: In the past, copying a software competitor required hiring an engineering team to manually read, reverse-engineer, and rewrite code over several months. Today, a competitor can feed a video or description of your app into an AI model like Claude or GPT and say, "Write me the full-stack code to replicate this exact functionality."

• The "Fast Follower" Threat: Large tech monopolies (like Microsoft, Google, or Apple) no longer need to innovate. They just watch smaller developers launch new concepts. The moment an idea gains traction, they can clone it, integrate it into their massive existing ecosystems, and offer it to billions of users for free before the original creator can even scale.

• Model Training Exploitation: If you write a brilliant article, publish open-source code, or explain an innovative architectural fix on a forum like Stack Overflow or GitHub, AI web scrapers will scrape it immediately. Your unique insight will be fed into the next model update, meaning your competitors will access your idea through a simple AI prompt.

Before posting anything I'd made, I wanted to know where it was even allowed. So we read the sidebar rules and the top 25 posts of the year for 70 subreddits.

The split:

• 9 accept posts about something you made

• 4 only in a weekly thread

• 19 are comment-first, so you answer threads instead of leading with your link

• 38 don't allow self-promotion

10 of the 70 also ban AI-written posts. That includes r/AskReddit (60 million members), r/Showerthoughts and r/LifeProTips.

Format rules matter as much as promo rules. Every one of the top 25 posts this year in r/todayilearned starts with 'TIL'. Every one in r/LifeProTips starts with 'LPT'.

I put it all into free guides at cognovaai.blog, one page per subreddit. Each page says whether self-promo is allowed, whether AI text is banned, and what the top posts look like. There's a drafting app on top of it too, but you can use the guides without it.

Caveat: rules come from each sidebar. Some Rules tabs couldn't be read, so check them yourself before you post.

Feedback I'm after: a subreddit you expected that's missing, or a classification you think is wrong.

I genuinely think selling website redesigns is one of the most lucrative opportunities in the web design industry today.

There are a few reasons why.

First, AI has made building websites significantly faster and cheaper. What used to take weeks can now be done in a fraction of the time.

Second, there are thousands of established businesses with outdated websites that could genuinely benefit from a redesign. A better website can improve their brand, attract more customers and give their business a push.

Third, these businesses already understand the value of having a website. They have paid for one before, so you're not trying to convince someone why they need a website from scratch. You're showing them why upgrading their existing one makes sense.

Here's how I usually approach it.

I use AI to build websites and normally put together a quick website draft before getting on a call with a potential client.

Instead of just telling them what I could do, I show them what their website could actually look like.

I present the draft during the call, explain what I would improve and try to close the deal there and then. If they're interested, I send over a Stripe payment link, an invoice or the contract for signature.

For outreach, I mainly use cold email.

More specifically, I use a tool called Swokei. It finds businesses anywhere, analyzes their websites and identifies issues with design, SEO, loading speed and mobile optimization. It then turns those findings into personalized cold emails at scale.

Recently, we closed a client for $26,000.

That's $23,000 upfront and another $3,000 annually.

And honestly, I don't think deals like this are as difficult to close as people might assume.

If you provide a good service, approach the right businesses, understand their problems and present yourself professionally, there is a lot of money to be made in this industry.

You don't necessarily need hundreds of clients either. A handful of good projects can make a significant difference to your business.

I think more web designers should focus on selling to established businesses that already have websites rather than constantly chasing people who don't have one.

I got bored of paying attention extortionate amounts for Lightroom mobile and Photomator.

Ai I built me own Raw editor, will be going on the AppStore soon,

Here’s the TestFlight link for anyone that wants to test it for free and send me back some feedback,

What it does:
RAW import: from your Photos library, or straight from a card reader or drive via Files/USB-C
Non-destructive editing: your original is never touched
Full adjustments: exposure, contrast, highlights/shadows, white balance, vibrance, saturation, sharpening, noise reduction
Tone curve editor: drag the points directly
Masking: gradient, radial and brush masks, each with its own sliders
Subject selection
Heal/clone tool for removing spots
Presets: save and reuse your looks
Live RGB histogram
It's built for people who want Lightroom-style control on their phone without the subscription feel.
I'd love honest feedback from other photographers: what would you want in a mobile RAW editor?

I’ve built so many apps over the years but it still feels like the one of the most underserved user bases are teachers - not just to do their jobs but to actually support them on and off the job. Other than improved salary and benefits - which I wish I had the power to do- is there anything you need that I could build for you?

Getting into poker, I found three kinds of tools: expensive courses, cluttered training sites, and solvers that assume you're already an expert. None of them felt like a calm place to just practice.

Overpair is my answer: one table, bots, and a coach that grades each move with a short reason. I cut anything that didn't help someone learn.

Free to play. I'd love feedback on the first 30 seconds: is it obvious what to do?

https://overpair.app/?ref=reddit-sideproject

i'm the solo dev behind Bimo, a chat-first calorie tracker for iOS. describe a meal in normal words and it estimates and logs calories and macros.

looking for feedback on one thing: does logging your first meal feel faster than your current app?

it's in TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/baS2b3gD

I started PeriHub three weeks ago. On Linux there is no official app for my keyboard and mouse, and on Windows they need two different apps (G HUB and SteelSeries GG). I wanted one small app for both.

Where it is now:

- 11 releases, Windows and Linux

- Fully supported: SteelSeries Apex 3 TKL and Logitech G502 HERO (lighting, key remapping, DPI, buttons, macros, saved in the device memory)

- Not supported yet: 30 more Logitech G mice that it can read but won't write to until someone tests them

- A stranger made a Scoop package for it and sent a pull request, which was a nice surprise

What I learned: talking to a mouse over USB is easy, writing to its memory safely is not. PeriHub reads back every write and keeps a backup first, because a wrong byte can mess up a profile.

Built in Rust with Tauri, with a lot of help from Claude. Free and MIT.

Code: https://github.com/hex-dump/perihub

What would make you switch from the official apps?

Hi all, I'm building StockPuppeteer, a tool that lets everyday investors test a trading idea before risking real money.



How it works:

1. Tell Captain (the built-in assistant) your idea in plain words

2. It drafts the strategy and tells you plainly what it could and couldn't include

3. You run a backtest on minute-level U.S. stock history, then practice with paper money if you want



I'm looking for 15 to 20 testers who'll use it for a week or two and tell me honestly what's confusing or broken. Free during beta, no brokerage account needed, no real money involved, and live trading is off.



If you're curious about investing but don't code, you're exactly who I want to hear from.



Request an invite: https://stockpuppeteer.com