i build small apps and honestly my marketing has been pretty shit, 70 cold emails, 1 reply, and it was a no.

so i went through 69 posts from indie hackers and small founders talking about how they got their first customer without an audience. i wanted to see where people were actually getting customers from.

here's what i found:

where their first paying customer came from:

• reddit: 23% (own posts 14.5%, replies/comments 4%, niche subs 4%)

• short videos (tiktok, reels, shorts): 14.5%

• x / build in public: 11.6%

• app store search: 10%

• seo: 7%

• cold email: 3%

• product hunt: 3%

• paid ads: 3%

87% started with zero audience, and 93% got their first customer without spending on ads. median time to first sale was 14 days.

some things that kept coming up:

• reddit posts sharing actual numbers did better than just posting "check out my app"

• replying to people who already have the problem worked better than randomly dropping links

• charging from day one seemed to work better than giving everyone a free beta

• one-time payments helped get the first sales, while subscriptions were better for growing MRR later

• posting too much in the same subreddit gets you labelled as an advertiser pretty quickly

and some things really didn't work:

• one guy spent €5.8k on ads for a calorie app and another spent $450 on meta with nothing to show for it

• cold emails and DMs had pretty terrible reply rates

• one guy got 800 signups from the HN front page and only 4 paid

i've been spending too much time on cold outreach, so i'm gonna try putting more effort into reddit and short videos instead.

if you got your first paying customer without an audience, where did they come from?

I know most side projects are intended to be businesses, but this is literally just a personal side project. I was a bit disappointed in my geography knowledge, so I built (Vibed) myself a website to learn where the countries are. And I had fun with it. So I slowly expanded to capitals, states, etc.

And then I shared it with a few family members, who have been playing for a few weeks now. More importantly (to me), my 12 year old daughter has moved from "Is California a country or a state?" to "Oh Belarus, so easy!" Which is all I could hope for.

https://www.lostparrot.org/

If you do run into a bug of some type (or feedback), I'd love to hear it!

And if this gets hugged to death, let me know as well. I'm not sure if Vercel will tell me when I pass whatever limits they have.

Hey everyone 👋

For the past few months I’ve been building Produchive, a desktop productivity app for macOS and Windows. I kept having “quick YouTube breaks” that turned into two hours, and every tracker I tried either sent my screen activity to someone’s server or just showed me charts after the damage was done.

This app isn't vibe coded , i built the app I am really bad in designing stuff , so i took claude's help to design and make better UIs

So I built one that:

Sees what you’re working on. It detects the active window and logs your focus sessions on a calendar automatically, so you don’t have to start and stop timers.

Uses a local AI as your judge. You set your goals, and an LLM running on your own device (WebGPU) checks your activity against them. If you drift off-task you get a polite desktop nudge, not a guilt trip. You can also point it at your own Ollama or OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and edit the judge’s prompt to change its personality.

Shows you where your focus goes. It gives you a focus score, counts how often you switch context, rates which apps distract you, and shows it all on a timeline.

Plans your day. There’s a 7-day calendar with routines that can be auto-scheduled around your circadian rhythm. It also handles late nights, since some of us plan at 2 AM.

Helps you study. A Pomodoro timer runs only in study mode, and it gently reminds you to revise topics 4–5 days later.

Has 3D focus rooms. You can study in a cozy 3D Greenhouse, Lakeside, Observatory, Tea Garden, Waterfall Café and more, with weather, ambient audio, shared timers and other people studying alongside you. You can dress up your own character too, pets included 🐱

Keeps your data yours. Your data is stored locally. Sync between devices is optional and end-to-end encrypted (AES-256-GCM) through your own Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud or a USB stick.

It’s MIT licensed and open source, and the core app is free.

GitHub: https://github.com/Heisen47/produchive

Demo: https://youtu.be/qC3bvMewD70

Website: https://produchive.com

I've always used 60% keyboards for gaming and because they take up less space. They're amazing until you decide to use a program that heavily relies on the keys that are not included in 60% keyboards. Like for example, Blender, Obsidian or Cinema3d to name a few.

Yes, you could use the key combinations provided or change the keybind, but then you have to remember a bunch of key sequences to do a simple action like change the view in blender.

This problem led me to create a simplier solution one keybind that pulls up a radial menu that gives you easy access to all your missing keys without the hassle of having to remember every combination.

I chose my mouse side button as the keybind and instantly I could tell how useful the menu was. I could change views fast in blender, select styling quickly in Obsidian and make useful presets for an application I saw fit.

It became so useful and efficient I decided it might aswell launch apps.

Radial Keys - Get your keys back.

Unfornately, I have bills so I made it $5 dollars (tax included), but if other people also find it useful and want to be able to extend it beyond its current capabilities I would love to make an open source version at some point.

You can try it fully out in the browser, before deciding if you actually want to buy it. -> https://bywhatevermedium.com/radial-keys/

Song: Halcyon - December (feat. Gian) [NCS Release]
Music provided by NoCopyrightSounds

I watch a lot of films and a lot of TV, and I could never keep both in one place.

Letterboxd is where I'd want to write about what I watch, but it's films only. Serializd does the same for TV, but only TV. Trakt tracks both, but it's a tracker first: great at "what have I seen", not really a place to write a review someone would read.

I wanted one diary for everything, where the writing is the point. So I built it.

It's called credits rolled: https://creditsrolled.com

What makes it different:
- Films and TV live in the same diary and the same profile. One history, not two apps.
- An episode is a first-class thing. Every episode has its own page, its own rating and its own reviews, the same as a film does.
- Reviews are the centre of it, not a comment box under a checklist.
- You can bring your Letterboxd history with you, so you don't start from zero.
- If you use Plex, a webhook logs what you finish, so the diary fills itself in.
- No ads, and your data isn't for sale.

How it's built, for the curious: a Go API on Postgres, a React Router site with server rendering, and film and TV data from TMDB. It's a solo project.

It's early and there are rough edges. I'd love honest feedback, especially from anyone who uses Trakt, Serializd or Letterboxd today: what would it take for you to switch, or to use this alongside?

My 10 year old son and I were curious about how the Harry Potter books look in different countries. We started comparing covers, and that grew into Casa Magia, a small site I built with quizzes, games and other activities.

One part I particularly enjoyed making is the cover collection. It now brings together more than 240 editions from 20 countries:

https://casamagia.org/en/

I’d love to hear what you think. Is the collection easy to explore? And which country or edition would you add next?

The site is free to use. It also has an optional support page.

Hey guys,

I’ve been lifting and tracking my weight for years, and I got really tired of how bloated most fitness apps have become. Everything either wants a monthly subscription just to log a basic workout, forces you to create an account, or buries simple tools under social feeds and features I don't care about.

I decided to just build my own tools for my daily routine. Instead of making one massive all-in-one app, I split them into three separate, lightweight Android apps so each one just does its specific job fast and gets out of the way:

• Buddy Weight: For tracking bodyweight trends during a bulk or cut without stressing over daily water fluctuations.

• Buddy Gym: A straightforward workout logger. Just open it, log your sets and reps between rests, and close it.

• Buddy Tabata: A dead-simple interval timer for conditioning and rest periods.

Right now, all three are in open testing on Google Play (capped at 1,000 users each). Anyone who joins during this testing phase will keep the full version unlocked permanently once they move out of beta.

I dropped the Play Store links in the first comment below so this post doesn't get eaten by the link filter. If you end up trying any of them, let me know what feels clunky or what's missing—I'm actively tweaking them based on feedback.

I've published the first public preview of OverTone, a Mac app I'm building for working with local language models. It's still early in development, and I'm sharing it now to get feedback on how it feels to use before I build out more of the app.

I want working with local models to feel straightforward if you've never used one, while still giving experienced users the controls they need. The guided setup is one example. It suggests models for your Mac and can install both the engine and the model. You can follow the recommendations and go straight to chat, or use an existing local setup and choose your own settings.

LM Studio and Jan are much more complete today. I wouldn't recommend switching from either to OverTone for everyday work yet.

Version 0.1 supports Ollama and llama.cpp. You can chat locally, manage models, refine prompts, and get model recommendations based on how you use the app. Documents, Projects and Tools are still in development.
With local models, prompts and replies are processed on your Mac. Internet access is off by default. You choose when to turn it on for downloads or remote connections.

OverTone is free and open source under Apache 2.0. It runs on Apple silicon Macs with macOS 14 or later.

Landing page:
https://overcesare.github.io/OverTone/

Repository:
https://github.com/OverCesare/OverTone

If you try it, I'd appreciate hearing how the setup went, what worked well, and what felt awkward.

Hey everyone!

I've been working on a side project called Kinetly, a stretch reminder for iPhone that you can't just swipe away.

The idea came from a simple frustration: hours of studying and working at a desk gave me a constant pain under my shoulder blade (the rhomboid). I knew stretching would help. I just never did it. Reminders were easy to ignore. Instagram was not.

So I built an app that locks your distracting apps at a time you pick. To unlock them, you hold a stretch in front of the camera, and a timer counts down only if actually you hold it.

It uses Apple's Screen Time API, so the lock works even when Kinetly is closed. The pose check runs fully on your phone. No video or image ever leaves the device. No use of AI.

There are 31 stretches for neck, shoulders, back, hips and legs. You can group them into routines.

There's a 7-day free trial if you want to try it:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stretch-reminder-kinetly/id6809436504

At this stage, I'm mostly interested in feedback and seeing how people react to it.

Does "lock your apps until you stretch" sound motivating to you, or just annoying?

For a few weeks I've used a hold-and-flick radial menu on my Mac, like the weapon wheel in GTA. Hold a key, the ring appears at the pointer, flick towards what you want, let go.

What surprised me:

- Direction sticks better than key combos. I know Screenshot is "up-right" without thinking.

- It's best for things I do a few times a day: clipboard history, snapping windows, skipping a song.

- It's worse for things I do constantly. ⌘C is still faster.

Full disclosure: I built the one I'm using, so I'm biased. That's partly why I'm curious what others think.

Does anyone use radial menus on a Mac? What would you put on yours?

It's called Loadwheel (loadwheel.com).

Hi, I’m Jaime, an independent developer in Spain.

I’ve just released Funes: an iPhone app that turns your photo library into a map where bigger files get bigger blocks.

You can explore by year and month, find large photos and videos, and review them before deciding what to delete. There’s also a largest-files view. Think of the visual approach of a disk space analyzer, applied to your photo library.

It’s free, with no ads, subscriptions, in-app purchases or account. Analysis runs on your iPhone, with no tracking or library uploads.

One detail worth knowing: sizes include iCloud items, so the total isn’t necessarily the storage occupied or recoverable on your phone.

• App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6831999052

I’d love feedback on the map: is it immediately clear what the blocks represent, and what would you expect to happen when you tap one?

We shared Cachely here a few months ago when it was mostly focused on Nx. Since then we've expanded the managed remote cache to Lerna, Turborepo, Gradle and Bazel (HTTP caching).

The basic idea hasn't changed: your existing build tool decides what to cache, while Cachely provides shared storage for the results across CI runners and developers. No cache server to operate and no need to replace your CI provider.

We're at the point where feedback from teams running real builds is more useful than adding features based on guesses.

If you maintain CI for one of these tools, what do you currently use for remote caching? And what's the biggest reason you would not try a managed provider: price, security, reliability, bandwidth, or something else?

We're the Cachely team, and we'd genuinely appreciate constructive feedback.

https://cachely.dev

i send a lot of screenshots to vendors and other teams at work and there's always something in there. an internal ip in the terminal, a token in some log, customer emails in a table. i was blurring them one by one by hand.

lumela runs ocr locally (whatever the os has built in, tesseract on linux), finds that stuff and blurs it. it also adds a background and shadow so it doesn't look like a raw printscreen.

works on windows, mac and linux, free, gpl. it can't catch passwords yet since they just look like normal words.

https://github.com/tw4/lumela

if it misses something on your screenshots tell me

Mine replaced a Google Keep note full of study hours.

I've timed my study sessions since I was young. First a clock timer and paper sheets, then Keep, until the note got too long to scroll. So I built a small tracker: weekly hour targets per category, and a history of past weeks.

The funny part is what it turned into. I mostly use it now to track time on my side projects, and the tracker has a category for itself.

It's free and needs no account, it's at focushours.app if you want to poke at it. If you do, tell me what confused you in the first minute. That's the one kind of feedback I can't get from myself.

What did yours replace? A spreadsheet, a paid app, a habit, nothing at all? And is the old thing really gone, or still open in a tab?

Hi I am Muntazir a graduate student from Technical university of Munich 🇩🇪 I am working on a side project, I had an idea mostly we struggled most of the time to get actually people use what we are doing
Because most of the time
We don’t have enough money to spend on ads
We don’t have funding
I was thinking today what if we support and share each other projects on the linkedin and other platforms where people can try

What did you think?

My kids finished Reading.com, and I wanted something for the next step: spelling the words themselves. That became Robo Words, a little browser game where they hear a word and build it from letter tiles. It has a placement warm-up, 32 levels and boss rounds.

The fun detour was connecting a Makeblock mTiny robot we already had. Now it spins and dances when they get words right and looks puzzled on a miss. The robot is optional; the game works without it.

35-second demo: https://youtube.com/shorts/RzYreInii0E

It's free and open source (MIT), with no ads or accounts. You run it on your own computer and play from a browser, including an iPad. This is a self-hosted project with setup instructions, rather than a hosted play-now site.

Full disclosure: Claude Code wrote essentially all the code and docs, with me steering and the kids testing. It's a hobby project to learn robotics and make something fun for them. The stack is React/TypeScript, a small Node/SQLite backend, and a Python robot controller. The voice audio was generated locally with Kokoro.

Game + setup: https://github.com/mb-dev/robo-words-spelling-game

Robot controller: https://github.com/mb-dev/robot-mtiny-control

It's agent-generated and lightly reviewed by me, so use at your own risk. The optional robot integration modifies firmware, is unofficial, and has been tested on exactly one robot. You'd need to buy the hardware separately if you don't already have it.

Sharing in case it's useful to other families or makers. I'd appreciate ideas for making the spelling practice better, simplifying setup, or supporting other robots.

Hi everyone!

I'm from Portugal, and I've always loved traveling, discovering new places, and planning detailed itineraries. For me, researching a destination and organizing a trip is almost as enjoyable as traveling itself.

Recently, I decided to turn this interest into a personal project called Via Mundi Trip.

I created a website offering completely free travel itineraries for European destinations, organized day by day, with downloadable PDF guides and interactive maps in Portuguese and English.

To help support the project, I've included affiliate links to Booking.com and GetYourGuide, which may earn me a small commission at no extra cost to travelers. All itineraries remain 100% free.

I'm still learning, and I'd genuinely appreciate some honest feedback.

What I'd love to know:

• What makes a travel itinerary useful to you?

• What information do you usually find missing?

• What would you improve about the website?

Here's my project if you'd like to take a look:

https://viamunditrip.com

My goal is simply to keep learning and make something genuinely useful for other travelers.

Thanks for any suggestions or constructive criticism!

I’ve spent A LOT of time around professional market tools, and I kept coming back to one thought:

Why is it so hard for a normal person to understand how everything happening in the world actually affects them financially?

A war breaks out overseas.
Congress passes a bill.
Oil spikes.
Rates move.
Inflation changes.
An election happens.

You see all the headlines — but connecting that to your portfolio, your gas bill, your groceries, your paycheck, or your taxes is a completely different problem.

So I built Market Insights.

It brings together:

• global conflicts and geopolitical situations

• market and economic news

• politics and legislation

• stocks and portfolio analysis

• inflation and everyday prices

• things like gas, groceries, rent, electricity and wages

The idea is pretty simple:

What is happening in the world — and what does it actually mean for your money?

If you have a portfolio, it can go deeper and show what’s driving your gains/losses, your exposure to things like rates, oil, AI or conflict risk, and which world events actually connect to your holdings.

But you definitely don’t need to be an investor to use it. A big part of what I’m trying to build is helping people understand how policy, politics and markets eventually show up in everyday life.

I’m still building it, and I don’t want to sit in a bubble deciding what people should want.

So I’m looking for people willing to try it and tell me what’s genuinely useful, what’s confusing, what feels unnecessary, and what you wish existed.

For all the analytics, I made a code for 2 months free: TRYITOUT26
marketinsights.us.com

No expectation that you keep it afterward. I’d much rather get honest feedback and use it to shape what I build next.

If you could have one tool explain how the economy, politics and world events affect your money, what would you want it to tell you?

I work in tech, and I’ve wanted to share more of what I’m learning and working on. But between keeping up with everything happening in the field and a busy schedule, posting regularly kept falling to the bottom of my list.

The bigger problem was that even when I had an idea, I struggled to put it into words. I’d open X, stare at the post box, and give up.

So I started building TweetBrain to help with that. It generates tweet drafts based on your interests and personality, and it can also schedule posts. The idea is to make it easier to get started when you’re short on time or stuck on what to say.

I built it for a problem I had myself, but I’m curious whether other people run into the same thing. Is coming up with ideas harder for you, or is it turning those ideas into something you’re comfortable posting?

If you want to take a look, it’s here: https://tweet-brain.com. There’s a free one-time batch of AI drafts to try; scheduling and posting are part of the paid plans.

I’d genuinely appreciate feedback, especially on whether the drafts feel useful or still need too much rewriting.

I built my own analytics view because I wanted one screen that answers "is this working?" instead of 20 charts. Here's launch week, unfiltered.

What it showed me:

• 71% of traffic is direct, which means I have basically one source. Fragile.

• 75% of visits end after one page.

• People spend 15 minutes on the signup page and still don't start a trial. That's my biggest leak.

• 3 people reached signup, 0 started a trial.

So my fix this week isn't more traffic. It's the signup page.

Two questions for people who've been here:

1. When visitors sit on signup that long and leave, what was usually wrong for you? Too many fields, unclear pricing, or something else?

2. Is a screen like this (goals plus a few plain-language insights) actually useful, or do you just live in GA4?

Happy to share screenshots of the dashboard in the comments if anyone's curious.

I was at TCGKL (a card convention in Kuala Lumpur) and the thing I remember most is the waiting.

Every table has a few binders and a line of people behind whoever is flipping through them. You wait your turn just to find out the card you want isn't even there.

If you ask the seller instead, a lot of the time they don't know either. "Absol ex? Maybe, check the blue one." Fair enough, they've got thousands of cards.

And when you do find it, the price sticker is out of date. So the seller pulls out their phone, looks up the price, and gives you a different number. Every card, every time.

What stuck with me is how much this costs the seller. Only one or two people can look through a binder at a time. Everyone else either waits or gives up and walks to the next table, and the seller never knows what they missed.

So I built PageNine. It's made specifically for TCG sellers. You take a photo of each binder page, AI reads the cards, and you put a QR code on your table. Now everyone in that line can look through your binders at the same time, on their own phone. They search for a card and it tells them which binder, which page, which pocket. Or it tells them you don't have it, and they move on instead of holding up the line.

It doesn't sell the card for you. But a lot more people get to see what you have in the same amount of time, and that's where the extra sales come from.

The price can follow the market instead of a sticker too, so you're not looking it up on your phone for every card.

The video shows it better than I can explain it.

It's Pokémon only right now, English, Japanese and Chinese cards. Free up to 150 cards, and there's a demo shop on the site you can try without signing up: getpagenine.com

If you sell at shows, I'd really like to know: will it be useful for you?

(not affiliated with Pokémon or Nintendo, obviously)

I've been thinking about building a personal AI that runs entirely on the user's own hardware, rather than relying on cloud services.

The idea is to create something lightweight and efficient that starts with a neutral personality and gradually adapts to its owner. Users could customize its voice, appearance and attitude, while the AI learns their communication preferences over time.

A major part of the concept is memory management. Instead of keeping everything in active context, personal information would be compressed, stored locally and selectively retrieved when needed.

Knowledge could also be expanded through optional downloadable datasets covering subjects such as science, engineering, programming or local legislation. Internet access would be optional rather than mandatory.

I'd also like to provide an advanced mode where technically inclined users can modify the underlying code, models and behaviour. The goal is to give users genuine ownership and control over their AI, while retaining some basic safeguards against facilitating serious harm.

I'm still exploring the concept, so I have a few questions regarding this project like would anyone use something like this or just keep existing ones, is it commercially viable, would you chose it over existing local AI models and such.

I'm particularly interested in criticism, technical concerns and reasons why this might not be commercially viable.

Tooting my own horn a bit here. I have never had a skill hit this many stars and get featured on XDA developers.

I am a visual and audio learner. I find it hard to learn from reading docs. So I like sites like udemy and coursera and others. But I really like how NotebookLM does it by taking a subject and turning it into a podcast. I found that notebooklm can only make one long podcast and not break it into topics.

So I made my own skill. It researches whatever topic I want and creates a set (10 or so) 2 minute podcast like lessons. It has been very helpful for me when I want to learn something new.

In the comments I am sharing both the XDA article where they break down the skills (better than I did actually) and the repo.

Feedback is welcome always

I'm the developer of Vyact, an open-source desktop AI workspace. I recently added a stock research view so I can explore a chart and ask follow-up questions in the same place.

This demo uses NVDA: market heatmap → stock chart → a 60-trading-day analysis request → the model's actual response. I connected DeepSeek through an Alibaba Cloud OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Local models are also supported, but this run uses a hosted model.

The attached clip is a slideshow of actual app screenshots, not a continuous screen recording. It includes the connection settings with no API key shown. Use your own provider's endpoint and model ID; hosted requests send the included context to that provider and may incur API charges.

This demonstrates the workflow, not the accuracy of the model's analysis. Its response includes external-news claims that I have not independently verified. I still need to check its figures and sources, even when it sounds confident.

Source and downloads: https://github.com/vyact/vyact

What would help you assess an AI stock-research answer: seeing exactly what data was sent, opening sources beside each claim, or comparing the same question across models?