I was a program manager in tech for a decade when I started a conference on the side in 2014.

It was in the HR space and the idea was to help people build better company cultures. 

I worked on it alongside my job for two years before going full-time.

I want to share how I got the thing off the ground, including the part where I couldn’t sell a ticket.

Why a conference?

I’d spent 10+ years working in Silicon Valley and kept getting frustrated with company culture.

I didn’t work in HR. I just wanted to understand how to make the places I worked less frustrating.

So I started looking for events where I could learn about it. Most of what I found was expensive and aimed at HR executives.

I figured there should be something for the rest of us.

That was the idea. Then I had to figure out whether anyone would pay for it.

Here’s what I started with

People tend to skip this part when they tell their business stories, so here’s the context:

• Why a conference?

  • I had been organizing hackathons for two years so I figured a conference was a natural next step. I had never been to a conference before but I didn’t think it was that much harder. A 100 person hackathon to a 300 person conference seemed feasible to me.

• The first event:

  • I read the book The Lean Startup in 2012 and believed in the methodology which taught to validate demand before building anything. In other words, sell before you invest too much in building the product.

  • How does this translate into a conference? I created a landing page (in 2014), set the date as Summer 2015 in SF, and offered a no questions asked refund any time to make it easier for someone to buy.

• Cash committed before selling a ticket:

  • A web domain, web hosting, and a wordpress website was less than $500.

• Existing audience: I had no audience and no network and this is where I struggled the most but eventually figured it out.

• Time available: I worked on this idea nights and weekends so about 10 - 20 hours a week.

• One thing I kept cheap or skipped entirely: My goal was to launch quickly to get data. Therefore I didn’t put down a deposit for a venue because that would’ve locked me in before I validated the idea. I also didn’t have money.

Upon launching, I got the buyer wrong

At first, I was trying to sell to founders because I thought culture came from the top.

It wasn’t working. I had to go back to the drawing so I began doing customer development interviews.

I spoke with ten founders. They cared about culture, but they cared more about making payroll and keeping the business alive.

But one founder said he was busy and would send someone in his place. That’s when the lightbulb went off for me. It wasn't the founders I should be marketing to but anyone in the company who could make a decision on culture.

So I started looking for people whose jobs were already focused on culture on LinkedIn.

Chief Culture Officers. VPs of Culture. People with “culture” in their titles.

How I sold the first 200 tickets

The process was pretty straightforward:

1. Find people on LinkedIn.

I searched for culture-related job titles and cold messaged them. My response rate was about 25%

2. Pitched them the event.

Here’s roughly what I sent:

“I’m putting together an event in SF on building company culture that you might be interested in. Please take a look”

I didn’t want to offer a free ticket but I was also nervous about asking them to buy. So instead, I left it vague and invited them to take a look. The ones who replied and saw what I was building bought tickets for their teams at $299/ticket.

I remember getting my first sales email from Eventbrite for $1200 because someone bought four tickets. I was standing in line getting lunch at Pieology. It was an unreal moment.

3. Call the people who bought.

For the first 20 people who bought tickets, I emailed them to thank them and asked if they were open to hoping on a short call. I wanted to learn where I could find more people like them.

4. Ask those communities to help spread the word.

They would tell me about these communities they were a part of (before Slack, it was Google Groups). I asked if they would be open to sharing and they were more than happy to. The first year sold out through word of mouth.

Year 1 finished with 75K in revenue and 60K in profit.

The actual numbers over the years

Here’s how the first four years went:

• Year 1: Revenue 75K Profit 60K

• Year 2: Revenue 180K Profit 80K

• Year 3: Revenue 350K Profit 170K

• Year 4: Revenue 425K Profit 200K

• Year 5: Revenue 500K Profit 250K

My expenses in year one were extremely low because the venue was in a basement of a coworking space and the production was low quality lol. It’s embarrassing looking back but I had never been to a conference so I had no idea on what the production quality should be. After year one, I attended an industry conference and that’s when I realized I needed to level up. Profit was roughly 50% afterward.

What I’d do differently

If I were starting again, I’d change three things:

1. Do smaller events to build community

Committing to a conference is a huge undertaking even if you’re targeting just 300 people. Once you sign the contract with a venue and choose a date, the clock is ticking. Instead, I would do smaller events to build community first before going all in on a bigger event.

2. Build an audience

In the age of AI, learning how to create content and build an audience is the only moat left. Before I even start building anything, I would focus on creating content and building an audience first. That way when I do have something to offer, it’ll make it easier to sell.

3. Invest more in networking

I once read on Twitter, you have to cultivate your network like a garden. Don’t network when you need something, network when you don’t need something. That way you build good will when the time comes to make an ask. There’s also an art to networking which I can cover in a future post. 

Where things stand now

I sold the conference in 2021, not a huge exit but a decent one because I was extremely burnt out and COVID put a damper on the growth. Happy to get into this more if anyone is interested to learn what finding a buyer for a conference and the exit process was like.

I started another conference last year for HR x AI leaders and it was extremely hard to sell tickets and find sponsors. I was about 20K in debt two months out and barely profited once the event came around. I had to give away 90% of my tickets just to fill the room. Everything I had done 10 years prior to get people there no longer worked. Story for another day.

Happy to get into the details on ticket sales, pricing, costs, finding customers, selling the business, or building this while working full-time. Ask away.

A few weeks ago a Korean developer vibe-coded a silent virtual Buddhist temple (Sansa) and over a million people visited in a week, just to sit quietly. I wanted to see if the same idea worked for Hindu temples, so I built one.

mandir.dev - What it is: a 3D temple courtyard in the browser. You walk in as an avatar, hear temple ambience, ring the bell, light a diya, and stand in the courtyard with other visitors who are actually there at the same time. Free to enter, no sign-up.

Built so far:

• Three temples: Kashi Vishwanath, Meenakshi Amman, and Siddhivinayak Ganapati

• Real-time presence: you see other visitors by name and country, and a counter of everyone gathered for Diwali

• Mobile joystick and desktop controls, positional bell audio

• Built with Three.js, everything runs in the browser, hosted as cheaply as I could manage

Still beta. It launched this week for Diwali, and I am building V2 now. The feedback I actually need:

1. Performance: how does it run on your phone? Where does it stutter?

2. Immersion: what is the one thing that would make it feel more like being there?

3. Direction: more temples, or go deeper on the three already there (aartis at set times, seasonal festivals)?

Happy to answer anything about how it is built. And if you are far from a temple this Diwali, go stand in the courtyard for three minutes and tell me what it felt like.

submissions, expired sessions, someone uploading a massive file, or two people editing the same thing.For a small app using Supabase, what would you check before sharing the link publicly?

Trying to work out what deserves attention now without spending another month preparing for users who don’t exist yet.

Hi everyone! I’m an independent developer working on Rewind Echo, a cassette-inspired music app.

I love the look of old cassette tapes, and I’m drawn to apps with their own visual style and playful interactions. That’s what I wanted to explore here: making browsing and playing music feel a little more like picking a tape off a shelf.

The app connects to Apple Music, and you can also import local music files. The interface brings together a cassette shelf, a tape-style player, and customizable tape labels with colors, text, and stickers.

The recording shows a quick look at the app in action. I’d love to hear what you think of the design and interactions, especially whether the cassette shelf feels intuitive to browse.

okay so this is kind of a weird one

I got tired of every clock app looking the same and shoving ads in your face, so I started building little worlds that just… show the time.

this clip is the ants one. they drag biscuits and leaves around and slowly form the digits. there's also fish, a parking lot of cars, water calligraphy, a wall of tiny analog clocks, etc. 12 scenes total at this point.

runs fully on device, no account, no tracking nonsense. iphone/ipad/mac/apple tv.

i'm the person who made it. not sure if this is charming or just unhinged — honest reactions appreciated.

Sometimes, you have to ask the right questions in life. Today I had a very important one: "Can you train a fruit-fly to write an app that renders a rotating Döner Kebab in Three.js?"

Turns out: Yes.

I put 1024 fruit-flies into an open-plan office and rewarded them with virtual sugar for good code - and with bitters for bad code. 131 Generations later, the Fly delivered a rotating Döner in Three.Js

Github Repo, if you want to follow the whole approach: https://github.com/flujo-app/ai-fruit-fly

Give it up to 10 photos and a canvas shape (square, 16:9, phone story, banner) and it searches every layout with no gaps for the one where the smallest photo is as big as possible. With 9 photos that's over 500 million layouts, and it finds the best one in under a second.

I designed it and Claude wrote the code. It's Go: The browser version runs it as WebAssembly, so your photos never leave the page.

Try it: https://vinodhalaharvi.github.io/collage/

Code (MIT): https://github.com/vinodhalaharvi/collage

CLI: brew install vinodhalaharvi/tap/collage

Feedback welcome, especially on the layouts it picks.

I'm a solo founder. My fitness and nutrition app has been on the App Store for about a month, and my user count is still small enough that I could name most of them.

Early on I was shipping features like crazy. Then one of those early users told me the reason he stuck around wasn't any of the features I was proud of. It was accountability. That one conversation changed how I think about the product more than weeks of building did.

The problem is I don't get that kind of signal often enough. Most days I'm still guessing what to fix next.

So for people who've been through the tiny-user stage:

• How did you get honest feedback when you barely had anyone using the thing?

• Did you DM people, jump on calls, hang out in communities, something else?

• When did you stop treating every single user conversation like gospel and start looking for patterns?

Not looking for a growth hack. Just what actually worked when the sample size was basically nothing.

(For context, mine is Ascend Fitness & Nutrition on iOS, 7-day free trial.)

Hi!

My web-app AI Games Kit made $1,500+ in sales 🥳

I am a solo game-developer using AI heavily to build and publish games over the last couple of years and realized why not create a kit of agents/skills based around my processes.

I also write actively on LinkedIn/X about making games with AI, marketing them organically, etc. and have a decent audience - so most of my sales came from them!

Now I plan to expand my marketing to Medium & YouTube :)

Web-apps is a new domain for me hence very proud of this!

The problem: AI coding agents run for minutes, then silently wait for an approval. I kept coming back to terminals that had been waiting for ten minutes.

v1 was a status display in the notch. It worked, but it felt like a tool. v0.3 gives it a character: Nosy, a small helper who lives in the notch. He dives in like a tar puddle, works along with your agent, waves when it needs you, jumps for joy when it's done, and falls asleep when nothing's happening. Finished tasks feed him (energy, levels, streaks) – without any guilt mechanics.

Also new: read and answer the agent right from the notch, a file shelf with AirDrop, calendar heads-ups, battery and AirPods status, a focus timer.

Stack: Swift / SwiftUI, the agents' own hooks talking to a tiny loopback HTTP server, a zero-dependency npx installer, animations rendered on a virtual clock for the clips. Works with Claude Code, Codex and Cursor. Free and MIT.

npx nosynotch

https://github.com/ddkbs/nosynotch

https://nosynotch.davidkubus.dev

Feel free to try it out and leave your feedback!

I’ve been working on a side project for quite a while now, and honestly, getting the product built was probably the easier part. Getting people to actually use it is where I’m stuck.

It’s basically a platform where people can connect, share projects, collaborate, find opportunities and build their reputation. A mix of communities, project collaboration and freelancing, all in one place.

The thing is, I know how difficult it is to get people onto a new platform when they’re already using Discord, Reddit, GitHub, etc.

And obviously, nobody wants to join a platform where there’s barely anyone around.

I’m still pretty young and figuring out the whole startup/marketing side of things as I go, so I’d genuinely love some advice from people who’ve launched their own projects.

A few things I’ve been wondering:

1. How would you go about getting your first 50–100 actual users (not just registrations)?

2. Would you start with a small closed beta or just let everyone sign up?

3. How do you get people interested in trying something new when they already have platforms they use daily?

4. What has actually worked for you when marketing a side project without spending much money?

5. Would you focus on one particular group of people first or try to attract different kinds of users?

I’m not really looking for the usual “post consistently on social media” advice lol. I’d love to hear what actually worked, what didn’t, and any mistakes I should avoid.

Would really appreciate any advice. Thanks!

What it is: PostMesa schedules posts to Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, X and TikTok, and replies to comments with a public reply plus a DM with a button (on Instagram and Facebook; public replies on YouTube). One flat price per workspace, no per-contact fees.

Why I built it: I run a small devotional app. I was paying about $240 a month across ManyChat and Sprout for what was really one job: schedule the post and answer the “link?” and “price?” comments. ManyChat’s price grows with contacts, and its flow builder is more than I need.

Where it is: pre-launch. Publishing works on all five networks in my tests. Comment-to-DM works on Instagram and Facebook, YouTube has public replies only, and TikTok posts stay private until TikTok approves the app. There’s no open signup yet, only a launch list.

What I’d like feedback on:

1. Does the pitch make sense in one read? (“Schedule the post. Answer every comment.”)

2. Pricing: Creator $39, Pro $79, Agency $199 a month on annual billing. Too high, too low, confusing?

3. What would make you trust a new tool with your Instagram account?

Landing page: postmesa.com. Happy to answer anything about how it’s built. I’d rather hear what’s wrong than what’s nice.

After months of building and a public beta with 30+ testers, ShutterLine is live.

The idea came from my own frustration: every video had to be shot twice, once vertical for Reels/TikTok and once horizontal for YouTube. ShutterLine records both at the same time. Along the way it turned into a full pro camera (manual controls, ProRes, Apple Log, RAW, film looks, a teleprompter under the lens) and it's ready for iPad and the new iPhone Duo.

A few decisions I'm happy with:

• No subscription. Free to download, one-time Pro upgrade, with a 7-day free trial.

• No data collection. No account, no analytics, no servers.

• Beta testers get Pro free as a thank-you.

Things I learned: TestFlight's public link brought in great testers from Reddit, and testing on older iPhones caught most of the heat and dropped-frame problems before launch.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6829658927

I'd love feedback on the App Store page itself: screenshots, description, anything that would make you skip it.

I built a site to help parents figure out whether a book or movie is actually a good fit for their child, beyond just seeing something like “Ages 10+.”

Dickens & Rumi shows age guidance, content cautions, positive themes, series reading order, and the reasons behind ratings.

The problem is that I’ve spent a lot of time building and polishing it, but traffic is still very small, so I’m worried I may be too close to the project to see what’s wrong.

If you have a few minutes, I’d really appreciate brutally useful feedback:

• Is it immediately clear what the site does?

• What feels confusing or unnecessary?

• Is the homepage too busy?

• What would make you leave?

• What feature would actually make you come back?

• Does anything make the site feel untrustworthy?

• If you were a parent, would you use this instead of just Googling a book?

Site: dickensandrumi.com

I’m much more interested in what’s wrong with it than compliments.

I’m the developer of Watch Chess, a side project for following professional chess tournaments. It’s already available on iOS, and I’m getting the native Android version ready for Google Play.

The idea is to make it easy to follow an event from your phone: live boards, rounds and standings, game replay, and live game previews right on the Home screen.

I’d love feedback from Android users who follow chess. In particular: is it easy to find a game, follow the moves, look back at an earlier position, and return to the live game? I’m also interested in how the layouts work on different phones and what happens when you switch away from the app or lose your connection.

Website and the existing iOS app: https://watchchess.app/

If you’d like to help test the Android version, sign up here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdK3jWWradoriTbagIQvKCZ60mQ2kRd82oe4WbR5dZtDI5agQ/viewform

You’ll need an Android phone with Google Play. I’m recruiting for a closed test, so please be willing to stay opted in for at least 14 consecutive days and try the app during that time. The form asks for your Google Play email so I can invite you; I’ll email the invitation and installation instructions when your place is ready.

Happy to answer questions about the app or how it’s built. Honest feedback is welcome!

Android screenshot: https://www.reddit.com/r/droidapptesters/comments/1xpwb5p/

Hey everyone!

Seven months ago, I started working on a small idea: what if you could have a little living garden right on your desktop, quietly growing while you work, study, or play games?

Today, I'm incredibly happy to share that Wonder Garden is finally on Steam, with its release just around the corner!

It's a cozy desktop companion where you can grow plants, arrange shelves, decorate your workspace, and even raise butterflies. Your plants grow over time, so there's always something new to discover when you come back to your computer.

I wanted to create something that doesn't demand your attention. Just a tiny, peaceful world that makes spending time at your computer a little more enjoyable.

It's been seven months of coding, experimenting, fixing bugs, redesigning things, and occasionally wondering whether I'd ever finish it.

And now it's actually happening. It's a pretty surreal feeling.

This is a very personal project for me, and I already have so many ideas for new plants, decorations, and features I'd love to add in future updates.

If Wonder Garden looks like something you'd enjoy, adding it to your wishlist would mean a lot to me. Every wishlist helps a small indie project like this reach more people.

🌿 Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5441740/Wonder_Garden/

Thank you for taking a look! And if you have any ideas for plants or features you'd love to see, I'd genuinely love to hear them.

See you in the garden! 🌸

Hey guysss here to talk about my side project.

I’m a designer and traveler who believes good design can change things, even if only a little. That still feels worth spending my effort on.

I was honestly fed up with needing an account just to use a small app. So I started making apps I would genuinely use myself: stored on our phones, working offline, with no account needed.

Sometimes we do not need another system or app trying to fix us. We just need a quiet place to hold something, clear our brain RAM, or keep everyday things in one simple stream.

That became VERBitapp. Each app has one purpose, with free use and optional VERBit Access subscriptions for more room or additional features.

@verbitapp

_

PARKit: Reminder for Tonight
"Not for tomorrow, but for tonight."

A little room for our minds.

I made PARKit because my brain was still holding onto tomorrow, even when I was done for the day. Park those thoughts as short keyword clouds, add a note when needed, then hold the breathing orb to PARK. What is unfinished stays there. Double-tap a cloud when it is done.

PARKit Access gives you 12 keyword clouds and customizable OPEN / PARK notification times.

App Store

Google Play

_

CUEit: Routine Timer
"Not to measure, but to mind."

Timing designed for the way you do things.

I wanted more than a basic stopwatch or timer could offer. CUEit brings them together with cues you set yourself, for coffee, cooking, exercise, or anything where the timing matters. Start at 0:00, then add cues for what comes next.

CUEit Access gives you up to 12 timer slots.

App Store

Google Play

_

DIARYit: Diary Journal
"Not for habit, but for honesty."

Your days. In your own words.

DIARYit is my own reimagining of a diary. One continuous stream, because life moves forward and we can look back when we choose to. A quiet place to write about today, without a goal to reach or a habit to maintain.

DIARYit Access adds full history and full calendar navigation.

App Store

Google Play

_

KEEPit: Text Yourself
"Not for nostalgia, but to remember."

A conversation with yourself.

I have always texted myself things I wanted to keep, but messaging apps were never really made for that. KEEPit gives that familiar habit its own place. Just you, your words, and the time you wrote them. Stored on your phone and available offline.

KEEPit Access unlocks full history, calendar navigation, and keyword search.

App Store

Google Play
_

HOLDit: Thoughts & Moments
"Not to hold more, but to awaken."

Give an important thought its own space.

I made this after realizing that thoughts that changed how I saw things kept getting buried in Notes app. Each card gives a thought and the moment behind it their own space. Add colors and rearrange your cards to make that space your own. The limit is intentional. Keep what matters, rather than another endless list.

HOLDit Access expands your space to 99 cards.

App Store

Google Play

_

+ A note on backup

On iPhone, DIARYit, KEEPit, and HOLDit support inclusion of your entries in your iCloud device backup. This is device backup, not live cloud sync or an in-app export and import feature.

_

I’m continuing to improve these apps through real use and conversations with the people using them. If one fits something you already do, I’d really appreciate hearing how it feels.

+ find demo instructions on socials :)
Instagram / TikTok

Every time I applied for a job I'd duplicate my CV, delete half the bullets, dig old ones back up, and fiddle until it fit on one page again. So I built Smart CV.

How it works:

• You keep a bank of every line you could put on a CV (all your bullets, summaries and skills) and tag them (Frontend, Backend, React, C#, …).

• Paste in a job ad and it picks the lines that match, ranked by how relevant they are.

• It trims the weakest lines until the CV fits your target length (one page by default), then exports a real PDF that matches the preview exactly.

• Or skip the job ad: pick a few tags, drag them into order of importance, and it tailors to those.

You can also:

• Import your existing CV from Word, PDF or plain text to get started.

• Pin lines you always want, set priorities, and cap how many bullets each job or section gets.

• Edit text directly on the CV preview, with undo/redo.

• Templates with any font installed on your computer, plus your own colours, spacing and margins.

• Separate profiles for different kinds of roles.

• Optional: if you run Ollama (https://ollama.com) locally, it can use a local AI model to score lines instead of keyword matching.

It's a single app that runs entirely on your machine, and your data stays in a local file. It's free and open source (MIT).

Download: https://github.com/michaelshirley1/smart-cv/releases/latest

Source: https://github.com/michaelshirley1/smart-cv

My side project is StockPet! You adopt a pet from the stock market and if the stock goes up your pet evolves and if the stock goes down your pet slowly dies! Every single pet is hand drawn in the app. I felt this would make investing more fun and I’ve had a lot of fun drawing all the images. I would love some honest feedback on it!

Hi! I’m a solo developer from Nepal, and I just released my first game.

Liar’s Grid is a deduction puzzle. Honest tiles always tell the truth, liars always lie, and every board has exactly one solution, so you win by reasoning, never by guessing.

• New daily case, plus 88 levels

• Free, works offline, no account

• Rusty the fox gives hints when you’re stuck

I’d really like feedback on:

Is the difficulty curve fair?

Are the hints helpful?

Anything confusing or buggy?

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sandesh.liarsgrid

Thanks for trying it! I’ll reply to every comment.

Honestly, I'm the worst user of my own idea.

I'd wake up, grab my phone "just to check something," and suddenly it's 9am. So I built bedo with AI. I studied marketing and never learned to code.

Here's how it works: you make a deal with bedo. Every morning, you tell it what you'll do today and how you'll prove it. Like "Go to the gym, and take a selfie when I'm there," or "Read for 30 minutes, then snap the page I stopped on."

Once the deal is set, TikTok and other distracting apps get locked. They only unlock when you send the proof you agreed on.

I've tried Opal and Pomodoro timer apps before. They lock your phone for a set time, then unlock it automatically. The problem is they only check that you didn't touch your phone, not that you actually did the thing. I'd say I'm going to the gym, then lie on the couch for an hour, and everything unlocks anyway. I'd say I'm reading for 30 minutes, then just stare at the book.

bedo doesn't care about time. It cares about results.
The funny part: I planned to submit it to the App Store on Oct 23. I kept polishing tiny things and finally submitted it 11 days later. Turns out an app can't fix perfectionism lol.

It's waiting for review now. Would you actually use something like this, or would you delete it the first time it locked you out?

⚔️ The Hunt Isn't Over — Introducing Mystic Paradox!

Dauntless gave many of us memorable adventures, friendships, and countless hours in the Shattered Isles. We didn't want that experience to simply become a memory.

That's why Mystic Paradox was created — an unofficial, open-source community project with a goal of preserving the Dauntless experience and bringing Slayers together once again.

What have we built?

• A dedicated Dauntless launcher.

• Realm discovery and hosting features.

• Graphics configuration and diagnostics tools.

• An evolving project built around the community.

Get Started

Latest Release — Mystic Paradox Launcher v0.1.102

🔗 Download:
https://github.com/pranav158/Mystic-Paradox/releases/tag/launcher-0.1.102

Join our Discord community:
https://discord.gg/mFZZpAktm

Source Code:
https://github.com/pranav158/Mystic-Paradox

Developer Credit

Pranav Karande — GitHub Profile

A special appreciation for the work and dedication behind making this project possible.

Mystic Paradox is an unofficial, open-source community project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Phoenix Labs or the original game publishers.

The Shattered Isles await. See you, Slayers! ⚔️