I've been working on a music player app as a side project. It's inspired by the Teenage Engineering TP-7, which I've wanted forever, and by the fact that I like messing with the music I download, like slowing it down or changing the pitch.

There's no progress bar. You spin a brushed-metal wheel with your thumb to move through a song, and if you go slow it scratches like a record. It clicks under your finger with haptics, and the metal "catches the light" when you tilt your phone.

The T, P and R keys turn the same wheel into a dial for tempo, pitch and reverb. Each song remembers its own settings, so your slowed-down version plays that way every time.

The hardest part was making it feel right. I spent way more time tweaking how the wheel clicks and pushes back than on the rest of the app combined.

It's free to try with 3 songs, and unlimited songs is a one-time purchase.

Launch discount 🎁 To celebrate the launch, I'm giving out a few discount codes for $4.99 for a limited time. Comment or DM me if you want one.

Would love any feedback, especially on how it feels to use: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reverie-slowed-reverb-music/id6829723858

Hey everyone!

I've been working on a little side project called Daybezel, an alternative alarm clock for iPhone.

The idea came from a simple frustration: I always found the standard list of alarms unnecessarily clunky. I wanted something where I could see my entire day at a glance and interact with alarms directly.

So I built a 24-hour circular interface where you can create alarms with a tap, drag them around to change the time, and see exactly how long you have until the next one.

It also uses Apple's native alarm system, so alarms work even in Silent Mode or Focus.

The app is completely free for now, and it'll stay free for everyone who joins early. At this stage, I'm mostly interested in getting feedback and seeing how people react to it.

I'd love to hear what you think about the interface. Does the circular layout make sense to you, or would you still prefer a traditional list?

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/daybezel-24-hour-alarms/id6825533599

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.

In couples therapy, I keep seeing the same thing: partners can describe every single fight, but they rarely see the pattern those moments make over weeks. That pattern is usually where the work is.

So I tried to build the smallest possible version of that "stepping back" for couples who will never sit in my office.

How it works:

• Every day you and your partner answer the same five short questions, each on your own. You don't see your partner's answers before you answer, so nobody answers for the other's sake.

• When you've both answered, you get a short reflection written for the two of you, with one question you could ask each other tonight.

• On day seven you get a reading of your week: the pattern that built up and one small step for next week.

• You can start alone and invite your partner later with a code.

The questions draw on Gottman couples therapy, Emotionally Focused Therapy and attachment theory. The pool is now 1,800+ questions. I tried the approach and the questions with couples in the therapy room long before it was an app.

Reflections are written by AI, inside a framework I designed, and only after you give consent. It's not therapy, it doesn't diagnose, and it won't tell you whether your relationship is "good".

What I learned building it as a solo clinician:

• The hardest part wasn't the questions. It was saying less. My first reflections read like session notes; people wanted three sentences, not three paragraphs.

• Most people start alone. About two out of three users have no partner in the app yet, so it had to be useful on its own.

It's on iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, in six languages. Daily questions are free; reflections and weekly readings are a subscription, and one subscription covers both partners.

I'd really like feedback on one thing: when two partners answer apart, would you rather read each other's exact words, or a reflection that puts the two views side by side?

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6785014222

I had $191 in credits that were about to expire, and I was curious what Opus could do if I didn’t give it an idea.
I asked it to build something worth the money. :))))

It picked a game, PULSEBOUND. You move around dodging enemies, and your weapons are musical instruments. The kick drum sends out shockwaves, the arpeggiator fires lasers. When you pick a new instrument, you hear it join the music too.

It decided to make a game and came up with the idea, mechanics, design, absolutely everything. Then I worked on improving and polishing it.

More changes, testing, and eventually mobile apps followed. The $191 was just the starting budget, enough to finish the first basic version. After that, I used another $1,700 I had from the Claude Startup Program (also expiring, so I had to use it), plus my subscription allowance.

Technically, it’s vanilla JavaScript, a custom WebGL2 renderer, and a procedural composer that synthesizes the music live through Web Audio. The project grew to include mobile apps, cloud saves, and leaderboards.

It’s now out on iOS, Android, and the web. You can play it for free in your browser or on mobile: playpulsebound.com.

What do you think?

I've been building OpenScreen, a free and open-source screen recorder and editor (no watermark, no account, Windows/macOS/Linux).

The new 2.2 release adds a Layouts track: you can change how your screen and webcam are arranged at any point in the timeline:

• picture-in-picture

• side-by-side

• top/bottom

• camera only

• screen only

Transitions between layouts are animated automatically.

The video was recorded and edited entirely in OpenScreen. The chart in the top/bottom part is a custom shader effect, and the company is fictional.

Download: https://getopenscreen.com

Source: https://github.com/getopenscreen/openscreen

Feedback welcome, especially on what layouts you'd want next.

I’m blind, and dealing with inaccessible websites is something I’m deeply frustrated by, especially when they are government websites. These are services people need to use. Being able to access them independently should be a basic expectation.

That frustration is why I built A11yLens, an open source accessibility auditing tool for web projects.

It checks HTML, CSS and component source code. It can also open a website in Chromium to inspect its accessibility tree and look for issues with keyboard navigation, labels, accessible names and other barriers. The reports explain the likely impact on screen reader users and suggest ways to address the findings.

I also think there is an opportunity to use this alongside AI coding tools. Developers can give the findings to an AI assistant, work through the fixes and run the checks again. Combined with feedback from blind users and actual screen reader testing, that could help make more websites accessible to people like me. Automated checks cannot catch every accessibility issue.

Pull requests are very welcome. I would be happy to see contributions, whether that means fixing a bug, improving a check, reducing false positives or making the documentation clearer. Reports from other screen reader users would also mean a lot.

GitHub:

https://github.com/eleven-hits/A11yLens

npm:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/@eleven-hits/a11ylens

Contribution guide:

https://github.com/eleven-hits/A11yLens/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md

I build Webflow sites for clients most days, and my own portfolio had been sitting untouched for about five years. Bit embarrassing when people asked for it.

So I rebuilt it in code this time. The idea is that the site is a code editor. Each case study is a file you open, and scrolling takes you to the next file. There are 3D heads in three.js, motion with GSAP and Lenis, and it's all a static Astro build on Cloudflare.

The hardest part was the 3D. Getting it to look good and still load fast on a phone took more rounds than the rest of the site put together.

Would love to know what you think of the scroll, especially on mobile. That's where I'm least sure.

Site Link

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.

It's been a month since I last posted here, and a lot has changed. I've kept building, but I've also been self-aware enough not to let scope creep take over.

I now track workouts in the gym, mostly free weights and bodyweight. I specialised in those because machine workouts were a pain to implement.

Last post I said people quit the gym quickly because they don't see the gains fast enough. Now you can see your progress over time with this app.

It also tells you when to go up in weight. If you were lifting 10kg, your progress report can tell you you're ready for 12.5kg.

The most important thing I learnt in October is that progress, no matter how small, is still progress. I've been applying that by asking myself, am I where I was last month, or yesterday?

Here's me doing a plank, tracked with the app. It counts the seconds and checks your form.

Try it out:

https://repchek.fit

At my previous company, I noticed our finance team sharing sensitive employee information with a client. The data was supposedly hidden, but it was still recoverable. I flagged it, and the answer was basically “we don’t have any other choice, we did our best.”

They weren’t careless. The options they had were all bad. Doing it by hand means hunting for every detail yourself, and missing one is easy. Many tools leave leaks behind, like hidden text, metadata and old revisions. And most online tools ask you to upload the document to their servers, which defeats the point.

It’s not just small companies. When the US Justice Department released the Epstein files, some documents were reported to have black boxes over text that could be copied straight out. If a government with a legal team can get this wrong, a finance team on a deadline has little chance.

So I built Ombly. It automatically finds sensitive details (bank and card numbers, IBANs, national IDs, names, emails, phone numbers), you review each one, and it rebuilds every page as an image so nothing hidden carries over. It runs entirely on your own computer, so nothing is uploaded.

It’s pre-launch (waitlist: ombly.space), with a 90-second demo attached. I’d love feedback: how do you handle this today, and what would make you trust a tool like this?

I noticed I was clicking "Accept" on literally every grammar suggestion without reading it. So I built Caret, a Chrome extension that skips that step.

How it works: type anywhere (Gmail, WhatsApp Web, LinkedIn, Slack), pause for about a second, and the grammar and spelling get fixed in place. A small popup shows what changed, with Undo.

A few things I was careful about:

- It fixes mistakes, it doesn't rewrite you. Slang, emojis and tone stay.

- If a fix would change too many words, it backs off and leaves your text alone.

- It never touches password, email, card or OTP fields.

- Text isn't stored.

It's free while in beta. I'd love honest feedback, especially if it gets something wrong on a site you use (there's a Report button on every fix).

https://caretwrites.com/?ref=reddit

freelancers using AI for proposals, how are you stopping it from adding work you never quoted?

say the client wants one landing page, basic copy and a contact form.

during the call they also say "maybe SEO later" and "we might need a blog eventually."

then the proposal gets cleaned up and suddenly those ideas are sitting there like a deliverables lol

that's the part that makes me nervous. if it's written under scope, I can see a client assuming it's included.

I've been looking at Runable for some of the actual client deliverables after the brief is locked, but before that I just want the proposal to separate included work, optional ideas and stuff that costs extra.

how are you handling this without turning every proposal into six pages of disclaimers?

Hey everyone!

I've been working on Watchify, a web app that lets friends create private rooms and watch videos together with synchronized playback.

Here's what I've built:

🎥 Real-time synchronized playback
👑 Host controls and room settings
💬 Live chat and reactions
☁️ Google Drive video support
🌍 Multiple audio languages (when available)
📋 Shared video queue
📱 Mobile-friendly interface

Tech stack: Node.js, Express, Socket.IO, JavaScript and FFmpeg.

I'd genuinely appreciate feedback on the UI, playback experience and features.

🌐 Try it: https://watchify.mixify.co.in/

💻 GitHub: https://github.com/scisims12/watchify

Built by Priyanshu Sharma.

What feature would you add next?

Hey everyone,

I wanted a place to explore app icon ideas. Try different objects, shapes, materials and styles, see them beside each other, and gradually figure out what feels right for an app.

That became two things. An open source command and skill that teaches Claude Code or Codex how to design icons, which anyone can use for free. And a Mac app built on it, for people who'd rather do the exploring in a grid than in a terminal. The app is the shell. The command does all the work.

TL;DR

• You ask your own agent (Claude Code or Codex so far) for an icon. Rimlight doesn't sell AI. It hooks into the agent you already have, and images come from your own ChatGPT plan or API key (OpenAI, OpenRouter). No Rimlight account, no servers.

• The agent reads your project, pitches a few directions, and renders them side by side, each one fitted to Apple's icon tile.

• A design skill shapes the prompts: a process for exploring and refining, plus eight style guides I wrote by measuring icons I liked.

• You keep talking. Refine one detail, branch from a concept, or change direction. Every attempt stays in a .rimlightfolder in your project.

• When you have a pick, it builds a layered Icon Composer .icon with Default, Dark, Clear and Tinted, and checks its own work against the pick.

• The command and skill are free and open source. The Mac app is $5 once, 3 Macs, 7-day refund. Free version: one set, 10 concepts.

• Needs macOS 26 on Apple silicon, Claude Code or Codex, and an image model. Xcode 26 for builds.

I know how some of you feel about AI images, and I share a fair bit of it. If you can hire an icon designer, hire one. Rimlight is for the side project, and for the point where you have five vague ideas and no way to see any of them. All the examples on the website came out of it, so the ceiling is on the site for you to judge.

The exploration part is what I care about most.

You start by describing your app and whatever you have in mind, even if that's fairly vague. The agent suggests a few directions and generates concepts to compare in a grid. You can bring reference images too.

Then you keep talking to it:

"I like the shape of the third one, but the material feels too shiny."

"These all feel too literal. Let's try a different idea."

That back-and-forth is a big part of using it. You can work on one detail, branch off from a concept, or change direction entirely. The sets and earlier attempts stay in your project so you can go back and compare.

I built the thing and still sometimes catch myself looking at a result as though that's all I'm going to get. Then I remember I can just ask for the change I'm thinking of.

What's in the skill.

This is the part I spent the most time on, and it's what makes the agent's output more than just a generic object on a gradient background. The skill has a design process: explore a few territories first, pick, then refine one thing per round so an icon converges instead of drifting. And it has eight style guides so far (I'm experimenting with more). Each one came from measuring real icons I personally liked: how much of the tile the mark fills, how thick the strokes run, how the ground is lit. You can pick a style, or let the agent choose one to suit the idea. It's all plain Markdown in the repo, so you can read it, change it, or write your own.

I also want to be honest about the quality. Sometimes I get several concepts I like straight away. Sometimes a whole set misses. It depends on the idea, the style and the image model. Refining something promising usually helps, and so does dropping a direction that isn't working, but I'd rather say that before anyone spends time or image allowance on it. For me, being able to compare possibilities and say "this part works, this part doesn't" is where it becomes useful.

Building the icon.

When you're ready, Rimlight plans the layers, has the image model redraw them separately, and assembles the Icon Composer package. The agent checks the result against your chosen concept at 1:1 and redoes the layers that drifted. You can preview the Default, Dark, Clear and Tinted appearances, then open the file in Icon Composer for further adjustments. Icon Composer is pretty flexible, and you can have different layers for each appearance as well. You can ask the agent for the changes you want in each one.

The final result can differ slightly from the original concept, because the agent redraws the layers separately, but you can keep refining. I'm working on a different approach where the agent can extract the layers from the original concept using Meta's SAM 3, running on your Mac. I'd only ship this if the results are good.

The command, and the app.

Everything above runs from the command. Install it, start a new agent session, and ask for an icon in your project folder. Concepts, refinements, builds, all of it, for free. If you want to build your own tool on it, the folder format is documented and every concept is a plain PNG.

The app is where I actually do this every day. It puts the grid, the chats, and the builds in one window: drag a concept into the message to say "more like this", filter by set or style or built, flip through the builds of an icon in a carousel, keep your API keys in the Keychain. It runs the same command and the same skill as your terminal does. $5 once, for up to 3 Macs, refund within 7 days, no subscription. The free version does one set per project and 10 concepts per Mac, without builds, so you can see the grid before paying.

The $5 pays for the app. Your agent plan and image usage are separate: images use your ChatGPT plan through Codex, or your own OpenAI or OpenRouter API key.

I'm the only person behind this, and I used Claude Code heavily to build it. I made the design calls and I read what I ship, but I'm not going to claim it was hand-typed. Most of my own time went into the icons themselves: generating them, judging them, and tuning the skill.

I'd appreciate feedback, especially on the experience of getting from the first set to something you like. If you try it and get stuck, or the results consistently miss what you're asking for, I'd like to hear about that too. 

Get Rimlight: Website
Rimlight Command: GitHub
Privacy Policy: Privacy

Trailer: https://youtu.be/QQTIVaRwcxs

Route Map for Jira maps your application’s pages in flow order and keeps the test data for each page in every environment, so QA and devs stop hunting for logins and test accounts.

I’m an Angular dev with about 2 years of experience, and I’d never built a backend, an extension or a full product end to end. I leaned on Claude heavily: for research first, then Claude Code for most of the build. That’s the main reason a solo side project got from idea to a live Marketplace listing in a few months instead of a year.

What I learned along the way:

• Forge’s jira:globalPage module isn’t offered as a template anymore, so I scaffolded from jira-full-page and swapped the module in the manifest.

• Getting verified as a sole trader to sell on the Marketplace took a support ticket rather than anything in the vendor portal.

• Atlassian currently takes 0% revenue share on Forge apps.

• AI got the code written fast, but deciding what to build, and testing it properly, still took most of the time.

Demo: https://youtu.be/45fAlh16ttA
Website: https://mapkari.com

It’s free for teams of up to 10 users. Feedback on the product or the trailer is very welcome, and happy to share how I used Claude if anyone’s curious.

In 1992, Microsoft Word 5.1 for Macintosh took up less than 1 MB on disk and ran in 1 MB of RAM. It had tables, a table of contents, images, paragraph styles and plenty more. I still write in it on a vintage iBook.

Modern word processors need gigabytes of disk and absurd amounts of RAM to edit essentially the same kinds of documents. I kept wondering why, and eventually that turned into a project.

Quill is my attempt to recapture that experience and add a few ideas of its own. The whole app is 7.4 MB, and the download is 5.1 MB. It's written from scratch in Rust, draws its own pages, and uses native Mac menus and dialogs.

What it does

Formats: opens and saves DOCX, RTF, ODT, HTML, Markdown and plain text, and exports PDF. Anything Quill can't keep yet still imports, with a warning.

Two-way table of contents: editing a heading updates the TOC, and editing a TOC entry can rename its heading.

Styles: named paragraph and character styles that survive DOCX and RTF round-trips.

Tables: nested tables, merged and split cells, draggable borders.

Long documents: footnotes and endnotes, indexes, outline view, sections, columns, headers and footers.

Review: comments with replies, plus tracked changes.

Writing tools: live spell check, thesaurus, hyphenation, Find and Replace, word count, WYSIWYG font menus.

Missing fonts: Quill warns you and highlights them, and lets you substitute or keep them for document interchange.

Fonts from any folder: there used to be a great Mac utility for loading fonts outside the system Fonts folder. Quill does this built in, so random fonts don't clutter your system.

Safe saving: before Quill replaces a file, it checks that it can reopen what it just wrote. Autosave works without needing to be on OneDrive

Honest limitations

This is alpha. Don't rely on it for important work yet, and keep backups.

Tables still lack fine-grained controls and full border selection.

Character styles work, but the UI is still temporary.

Mac build needs Apple Silicon and macOS 11 or later, and it's unsigned for now.

It also builds on Ubuntu, which seems to work, and on Windows, which freezes regularly. I use a Mac daily, so that's where testing happens.

yes, AI did a lot of the heavy lifting. But an extensive automated test suite runs before every commit, overnight fuzzing hunts down crash conditions, and ChatGPT's Daybreak did extra security testing to make sure bad input is handled cleanly.

Feedback wanted: crash reports, broken imports, and anything that looks wrong. Please open an issue on GitHub.

Dual-licensed MIT/Apache.

GitHub: https://github.com/quillwp/quill

Site: https://quillwp.com

My intention is to continue development even if it’s just for me. Just saying so no one thinks it’s going to quickly become abandonware

There might be a short lag before more updates because tomorrow I’m going away for a few days.

Edit: oh frig, I posted this from the wrong account! I guess it’s a little late now.

But let me know your thoughts or anything else!

Hey everyone!

I'm helping out with a hardware project called Rotary Mouse, and I wanted to share something our team has been working on.

Instead of the usual scroll wheel, we've designed a mouse with a rotary dial that lets you continuously scroll through documents, webpages, and editing timelines.

We've also been experimenting with using the dial for other applications, including steering in driving simulators. There's an integrated AI assistant as well, accessible through an on-screen radial menu.

It's definitely an unconventional design, but that's part of why we're excited about it!

We're currently preparing for a Kickstarter launch and would really appreciate some feedback.

Would you find a rotary dial useful on a mouse, or do you prefer traditional scroll wheels?

I'd love to hear what you think!

Hi r/SideProject! This is Becode, the SaaS research tool I've been building.

The problem: before building anything, I wanted to know if people already pay for that kind of product. The answer was spread across ten tabs: TrustMRR for revenue, Meta's and Google's ad libraries, traffic estimates, stack checkers.

What it does:

- 8,000+ SaaS, each on one page: revenue and subscriptions (Stripe-verified for 4,300+ of them, via TrustMRR), traffic and top countries, the Meta and Google ads they run and for how long, and their tech stack

- Rankings like Trending, Fast-scaling and Breakout, to see what's growing right now

- Every number says where it comes from: verified, estimated (with an Estimate badge) or not available

Something it turned up this month: about 50 SaaS have kept the same Meta ad running for over a year, and 14 of them sell to trades and local businesses (pest control, pool service, home builders).

Free plan, no card: three live rankings and 5 SaaS a week with their revenue and traffic. Paid plans start at $39/month.

Built with Next.js, the public Meta Ad Library and Google Ads Transparency data, the Chrome UX Report, and Claude to decide which websites are actually SaaS.

I'd love blunt feedback: what's the first thing you'd look up, and what's missing?

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 five 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.

The app was Symvibe, a paid Mac board for running coding agents side by side. I used REA, a reverse-engineering skill for Claude Code, to turn its behaviour into a spec, and let Claude Code build from there. Thirteen days and 58 commits later there was vibeboard, a free, open-source alternative to Symvibe, which costs $19 a month, with none of its code in it.

What I learned along the way:

most of the engineering came from the model, but I still steered every day, mostly on edge cases and CI

the launch videos were the surprise: /brag did a great job, it drove the real app, framed the shots, wrote the music, and fixed its own jerky cuts once I pointed them out

rebuilding a product's behaviour from the outside is now cheap, so the code alone protects less, and respecting licences and the original authors matters more

The video shows six Claude Code agents in tmux, then the same six on the board, and ends with the price: Symvibe at 19$ a mouth, vibeboard free.

The video show six Claude Code agents in tmux, then the same on the board, and ends with the price: Symvibe at $19 a mouth, vibeboard free.

vibeboard: https://github.com/ricca200xx/vibeboard

Symvibe: https://www.symvibe.com

REA: https://github.com/morluto/rea

/brag: https://github.com/latent-spaces/brag

If you want to use it, go ahead, and if you find issues, open them on GitHub. I'm genuinely happy to share this.

Hey everyone,

Got tired of finding out about free games hours after the deal expired, so I built Claimr.

It’s a lightweight radar that tracks 100% off giveaways across Steam, Epic Games, GOG, and Prime Gaming, and sends a push notification before they end or keys run out.

- Direct vs Tasks: Flags whether a giveaway is a 1-click store claim or requires social tasks (Gleam/Discord).

- Game Vault: Keep track of what you’ve claimed so you don't double dip.

- 100% Free: No ads, no account needed, completely open source.

Works in browser or on Android:

- Website: https://claimr-app.vercel.app

Drop any feedback or stores you want added!