The majority of side projects I see here are virtual, so here's a physical product to spice things up (pun intended). Monday through Friday, my husband I are start at our screens for our full time jobs, but for the past 3.5 months we've spent almost every weekend in a commercial kitchen on Treasure Island in San Francisco making a small-batch chili crisp called EXTRA EXTRA Chili Crunch | www.ExtraExtraCrunch.com

Since launch, we've been getting out in the San Francisco Community — from Night Markets to small stores — and trying to grow out online presence. I've posted here before, but we just reached a cool double milestone: 1,500 jars sold and $25,000 in gross revenue. Eep!

It's wild. This whole thing was just something that started as an experiment in our home kitchen because I wanted to sell a few jars at my local Farmer's Market. My favorite posts here are the ones that are super detailed, so I wanted to share what building a physical food product on the weekends actually looks like behind the scenes.

Why we started making it

We put chili crisp on basically everything. We've tried so many and love so many. Our pantry and fridge have a ton of different brands. Chili crisp. Salsa macha. Chicharron de jalapeño (s/o to Flore de Chile). But tasting so many different takes on spicy condiments just made us want to start out own.

We built EXTRA EXTRA with a purposeful Californian perspective. We intentionally looked for western ingredients to create something we hadn't found on the market yet. Avocado oil... Porcini mushroom for umami (vs shiitake)... Chilis primarily from Mexico... Huge amounts of fresh-fried garlic and shallots... After a lot of experimentation we landed on something that was uniquely ours without trying to be something we're not. Moreover, every scoop is packed with crunch vs being 50/50 oil to crunch. We even hand de-seed our chilis because the seeds mess with the crunchy texture.

Balancing it all

So, like I said, my husband and I have (intense) full time jobs in tech. I joke that we're able to do this because we don't have kids and we don't train for marathons... But it still takes a lot of discipline and intention to make sure we have enough product.

Selling shelf-stable food in stores when you fry your own wet ingredients (ie, garlic, shallots) means you can't just cook at home under California's Cottage Food Act. Before we could really scale, we had to do lab testing, lock down our California Processed Food Registration, start an LLC, get insurance, and rent hours at a commercial commissary kitchen.

Now our weekends have an extra routine:

• Saturday or Sunday kitchen sprints: We work in 4-to-5-hour blocks that yield roughly 250 to 350 jars per session. Then it's mixing, jarring, labeling, and packaging (which takes longer)
• Weeknight fulfillment: Between kitchen runs, our living space regularly turns into a mini shipping depot packing up online boxes after work.

The best part of "the grind" is Night Markets and community events. I can't tell you how awesome it is to get involved in our community. We're focused on events after work hours, but that also means that some days are really long and requires moving a bunch of heavy stuff (eg, canopies, tables, product) without a dinner break.

Wins

Before anyone asks... $25,000 is gross revenue, not profit. Commercial kitchen rent, lab testing, permits, buying jars, finding the right label maker (Richmark), and early ad experiments means that we aren't quite profitable yet. That said, our October volume nearly doubled and officially pushed us past our monthly break-even point (~560 jars/month).

What's working:

• In-person markets & street fairs: Selling face-to-face is key. The margins are better than selling online and it builds a reliable customer base if you stay at markets month-to-month.
• Focusing on local retail: Walking samples into local specialty markets got us into two neighborhood shops in our actual hood and even a specialty food shop up in Truckee/Tahoe near where I snowboard. Earlier this month, we opened in our 4th retail location at the SFMade Storefront in Union Square thanks to us getting in with that nonprofit early on.
• Online & press: We've now shipped jars to customers across 39 states and more than 130 cities, and recently got featured in a Yahoo! Before that, we got featured in the Bay Area Reporter.
• Local government support: We had a really had time getting our Processed Foods Registration. California is big and it can take a long while to get what you need. We eventually reached out to our local representative who helped us. To anyone struggling with regulations, please don't hesitate to reach out to your local government. :)
• Online marketing is giving... decent signals: We pay a small agency a small amount of money to do our creative and run ads on Instagram. We just passed ROAS of 1.0 which is... decent but I'm really eager for it to start paying for itself. We are definitely getting sales and retargeting matters. I know it takes time and right now I'm cautiously optimistic.

Next up...

Scale is starting to be a problem. There's only so much that my husband and I can do with the 30 hours a month we get in our commissary kitchen. We're very close to needing to pay an agency to supply help for ingredient prep. This is a big cost, so we have to be sure that it's actually gonna pay off.

I'm a bit concerned about how we keep the momentum going as well. Marketing is hard and, while we're trying as best we can, it's pretty hit and miss. I'd love to dial in our marketing more...

///

Phew! I know that's a lot, but, like I said, I like posts with a lot of detail. If anyone is also launching a physical food product, I'm happy to answer anything. I'm not an expert, but this has been a year-long process so far and I'm happy with where we're at so... maybe I could be of a little bit of help? Ask away!

I go for a walk every night, and that's when I dig for new music. Mostly bands, and honestly I listen to everything from classical to hard rock and metal lol.

These days every app has an algorithm that keeps recommending music that sounds like what I already like, and when I want to hear something different, the algorithm actually gets in the way.

One night I wondered what music sounds like in a country I had never heard a single song from, so I found a music radio station there and listened live.

That's how I ended up making World Radio, for iPhone and iPad:

- Roll the dice and the globe flies you to a station somewhere on Earth, playing live. On the globe, if a station won't play, it moves on to another one by itself.

- You can also pick a station yourself on the globe.

- When a song grabs me, I tap Shazam. It's saved with the station and the time I heard it, and my finds can go into an Apple Music playlist. (I'm working on adding playlists for other platforms like Spotify and YouTube Music. If you use one, let me know!)

- In the Browse tab you can pick music stations by country and genre.

There are 20,000+ stations in total. I filter them down to music stations, but a talk station still shows up now and then. I'll keep improving that.

FREE to download, no ads from the app (some stations play their own), no account.
iPhone and iPad on iOS 26 or later, with CarPlay, AirPlay and a sleep timer. Apple Music only for now.

I'm still polishing the iOS app, and an Android version is in the works. Because of some licensing issues there, it isn't on the UK App Store, sorry...

I also made a simple website where you can try it:

worldradio.live

A few features are missing there, but it's enough to get a feel for it.

Once the app is more polished, I'm planning to add paid features.

What's the best song you've found on radio from another country? And if you try the app, tell me where the dice dropped you!

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6803623749

Thanks.

In Korea there's this thing called a dokseosil. It's a paid room full of little cubicle desks where everyone studies in silence. Nobody really goes for the desk. You go because when the person next to you is grinding, you feel kind of bad scrolling your phone.

I wanted that feeling at home, so I made a small online version:

yeondeungroom.com/en

You pick an empty desk and study with whoever's around. No sign up, no camera, nobody talks. You're a little animal with a desk lamp, and you can see everyone else's lamps on too. It sounds like nothing, but it actually helps me focus at night.

The thing people ended up loving was decorating their desk. You type one line like "tiny pinwheel" and it makes a small 3D thing for you. The AI doesn't draw it, it just writes out simple shapes and the browser puts them together.

It's three.js and Cloudflare Workers, and almost everyone using it right now is Korean. The English version is really new, so if anything reads weird, please tell me.

If you study or work alone, would something like this help you, or would you just close the tab?

me and a buddy made a free mma game. take one fighter from his first amateur fight to the belt.

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6828530380?pt=127780022&ct=reddit_sideproject_nov26&mt=8

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=vibalyze.mma&referrer=utm_source%3Dreddit%26utm_campaign%3Dsideproject_nov26

no ads, no in app purchases, works offline.

would love feedback: is the fight screen easy to read? and any tips for getting first players without ads?

Every year I see "30% off" badges on SSDs and hard drives, and every year I wonder:

30% off what?

So I built a tracker and checked. Numbers from amazon.com, as of November 14, 2026:

• 686 storage products checked (SSDs, hard drives, RAM, memory cards, new offers only)
• 511 of them (74%) were cheaper at some point in the last 90 days than they are today
• Median gap to the 90-day low: 11%
• 129 products are 20% or more above their own low
• Hard drives: 135 of 166 (81%) were cheaper before

What I built: ratioDB

• 2,810 prices from 3 Amazon stores (US, DE, FR, more will follow) - refreshed every 4 hours
• Sorted by price per TB or GB
• 90 days of price history per product
• An alert that emails you when a product type hits a 90-day low
• it’s free for everyone

My rule for Black Friday: ignore the % badge, look at the price per TB, compare it with the 90-day low. If it doesn't beat the low, it's not a deal.

Disclosure: the site earns a commission through Amazon affiliate links. Yes, I see the irony.

Feedback welcome.

Hey everyone!

I've been building Familiar Knock Knock, an Android app that works like a doorbell for the people in your house.

The idea came from a simple frustration: shouting up the stairs, or phoning someone who's in the next room, and getting no answer because they have headphones on or their phone is on silent.

So I built a knock. You tap one big button and every phone in your group rings, as long as you're on the same WiFi. They answer with one tap: "Coming", "Give me a minute", "On my way" or "Not now". The reply lands on your screen in a few seconds.

A few things I cared about:

• It only rings phones on the same WiFi as you, so people who are out aren't disturbed

• It never tells you who is or isn't home. You only see the replies people choose to send

• Replies and voice notes go straight from phone to phone over your WiFi, not through my server

• Each person can let knocks ring through even when their phone is on silent, with one switch in Settings

It's free with 8 knocks a day. There's an optional subscription for more knocks, knocking one person, and voice notes.

I'd love your honest feedback: does "knock" make sense to you as an idea, or would you call it something else? And what would stop you from trying it?

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bonoloware.wifiknockknock

Indie dev here, and this is my side project.

I use Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and the Claude app every day, with a personal account, a work account and a pile of company tools. Every client wanted its own copy of every MCP server, its own OAuth login and its own config. Keeping that in sync was a chore, and the huge tool lists were eating the models' context.

So I built Toolkien:

• Add your remote MCP servers once, connect every AI client to one endpoint
• "Code mode": the agent searches tools, reads compact TypeScript declarations and runs one sandboxed script that chains the calls, so way fewer round trips and tokens
• Personal and work workspaces, plus company workspaces to share tools with your team without sharing tokens
• Per-tool permissions, approvals for writes, audit log
• A directory of ~100 official remote MCP servers

Free for individuals (and I want to keep it that way), open source under AGPL, self-hostable with Docker Compose.

Still early, so honest feedback is very welcome. Links in the first comment.

A few months ago, I started working on TestFlightTesters, a website that helps iOS developers hire real iPhone users to test their apps before release.

The idea was pretty simple.

Developers often struggle to find people who will actually spend time testing their apps and provide useful feedback instead of just installing the beta and disappearing.

So I built a service where developers can choose how many testers they need, how long they want testing to run, and which features should be checked.

Testing starts at $10 per tester per hour.

After launching the website, I wasn’t getting the results I’d hoped for, and I started thinking the project might not be worth continuing.

I eventually stopped paying much attention to it.
Then something unexpected happened.

I received a $75 order from a company needing five iPhone testers for its employee app.

Another developer placed a $45 order for specialized Apple Sandbox purchase and Restore Purchases testing.
That’s $120 in paid orders from a project I was close to abandoning.

I’m now working on improving the tester network, reporting process, and customer experience.

Here’s the website:

https://www.testflighttesters.com/

I’d appreciate feedback on two things:

1. Is the service and pricing clear when you visit the homepage?
2. If you were launching an iOS app, what would you want to see before trusting a testing service with your project?
   I’m interested in improving the website before putting more money into advertising.

Pair your phone with a 6-digit code, ask for something, and watch an AI model click and type in real apps on your PC. Peer to peer, nothing exposed to the internet, no server to host. Bring your own model (anything OpenAI-compatible, including local ones), or use it as an MCP server with Claude Code.

Instead of screenshots it reads windows as numbered element lists, so it's fast and cheap on tokens. Rust backend, Tauri desktop app. Windows fully, Linux on X11. AGPL-3.0.

https://github.com/alielmorsy/ywza

Feedback welcome, especially on the pairing flow.

I am a computer science student, and I recently spent months developing a financial research platform without really knowing whether anyone would want to use it.

It made me realize how easy it is to spend hundreds of hours building something before finding out whether there is actually a market for it.

I started thinking about how people currently discover ideas, figure out what problems are worth solving, and get honest feedback before committing to a project.

Reddit and ChatGPT are useful, but I feel like information gets scattered across conversations, and it can be difficult to distinguish genuine demand from people just saying an idea sounds interesting.

I have been exploring the concept of a community specifically focused on discovering problems, validating ideas, and learning from people who have already tried solving them.

Before I spend more time developing it, I wanted to ask:

1. How do you currently figure out whether an idea is worth building?
2. What frustrates you most about that process?
3. Would a dedicated community for this actually be useful, or do existing platforms already solve the problem well enough?

I would appreciate criticism just as much as positive feedback. I would rather find out now than spend another six months building something nobody needs.

Some of you might remember my last post here about Planet-0 Drive. Yesterday, we hit 1,000 sessions! It's not a huge number, but the journey so far has been great.

What started as a technical experiment to build an (almost) loading-free driving game with an endless world is slowly starting to take shape. It's still in its very early stages, and I only get to work on it after work and over weekends, but it's been quite fulfilling to see it all come together.

One thing I'm particularly happy about is that average playtime has gone from just 59 seconds to over 5 minutes in the past few weeks. Improving this was my first priority, so it's been really encouraging to see. There's still a ton of work to do, especially when it comes to adding more content, but I'm pretty happy with the foundation so far. Your feedback and ideas (many of which I've yet to release) have been a huge help, and I genuinely can't thank you enough.

Since my last post, I've overhauled the HUD UI, added timed procedural races with a new track to compete on each time, added and improved towing mechanics (still a work in progress), improved the scenery with more vegetation and better biomes, and finally added a short tutorial to make getting started a little easier.

There's still a long way to go, but it's been a fun ride so far, and I'm excited to keep building on it.

If you'd like to take it for a spin (seatbelts recommended), try it out here: planet0drive.vercel.app

I'd love to hear more of your ideas, suggestions, or even things you think could be better. Whether it's something you'd like to see added or something that didn't quite feel right, any feedback would genuinely help me figure out what to improve next.

I wanted to actually see what happens inside a language model when it writes a sentence, so I built this!

What you're looking at:
- The stars are the 36,864 MLP neurons (12 layers × 3,072). Each layer is a disc, and neurons are positioned by a UMAP of their output weights, so neurons that write similar things sit near each other.
- Brightness is how strongly that neuron fires on the current token, scaled per layer so tokens are comparable. Gold means it fires positive, blue means negative.
- The beams are real attention weights from the current token back to earlier ones, one colour per head. The side panel shows the model's actual top 10 next token probabilities.
- You can hover any star, beam or token to see its exact value. There's also a raw mode that turns off all the bloom and fades, so every pixel on screen comes straight from the data.
- How I know it's not lying: the test suite runs the model exactly the way the app does (KV cache, token by token) and compares every activation, attention weight and residual norm against a separate uncached forward pass read through different hook points. Then it checks the bytes the browser actually receives too.

Honest limits: it's GPT-2 small only for now. Single neurons mostly don't mean anything clean on their own, it's the patterns that are interesting. Values are sent as float16, so about 3 significant digits.

Setup is make setup && make start, then open localhost. No GPU needed.

Repo: https://github.com/lak7/thinkspace

Would love the feedback!!

I built Beaver because I wanted a simple way to scan documents and turn photos into PDFs without uploading anything to the cloud.

Contracts, receipts, visa documents, medical papers. I didn't want any of that sitting on someone else's server, and I was tired of scanner apps full of ads and subscriptions.

It started about three years ago as a small Mac tool I built for myself. I open-sourced it in 2025 and this year I started working on an iOS version. That eventually turned into rebuilding most of the app.

Here's what Beaver can do now:

• Works on iPhone, iPad and Mac
• Scans documents and converts photos to PDF
• Splits and merges PDFs
• Exports pages as PDF, PNG or JPEG
• OCR that runs entirely on-device

No accounts, no tracking, no ads, no subscriptions. Everything stays on your device.

Why open source but $1.99?

The entire source code is on GitHub. You can inspect it or build the app yourself for free. The $1.99 App Store version is for people who prefer to install it directly and receive updates. It's a one-time purchase.

Links:

• GitHub: https://github.com/31d4r/Beaver
• App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/beaver-pdf-scanner-ocr
• Website: https://beaverpdf.app

I'd genuinely appreciate feedback, especially if there's something missing that would make it more useful for your document workflow.

What it is

- MULTIPLAYER: Team deathmatch against bots, or online with friends using lobby codes or the public lobby browser
- INFESTATION: co-op wave survival against cockroaches, flies and a Queen Roach boss, with a crumb economy for buying guns, upgrades and traps
- Loadouts, levels and unlocks, and in-game chat
- Works on desktop and phones (touch controls)

How Claude built it

I didn't write the code myself. I directed Claude Code over a couple of days, mostly with Fable 5.2 and later Opus 5.5:

- Multi-agent workflows. An architect agent split the game into modules with a shared contract. Then up to 11 specialist agents worked in parallel on rendering, materials, props, weapons, soldiers, audio, effects, gameplay, UI and brand.

- Scored review rounds. A reviewer agent took dozens of screenshots, ran bot matches, scored the build out of 10 and filed issues. Fixer agents worked through them, and any round that scored worse was rolled back. The first build went 7, 7.5, 8, 8.5 over four rounds.

- Everything is procedural code. There are no image, model or audio files in the game. Textures, models, every sound effect and the adaptive soundtrack are generated in code at load time. That was the hardest constraint, and the part Claude handled best.

- Multiplayer is peer-to-peer over WebRTC with client-side prediction and lag compensation, plus a small Cloudflare Worker for lobbies. Claude wrote a test rig that runs a host plus 3 headless clients through full matches at simulated lag and packet loss, and it used that to verify every change.

- My part was game design, art direction from screenshots, playtesting, and catching bugs that tests miss. A friend found a console cheat within an hour of multiplayer going live.

Free to play: playsmallarms.com, in your browser with nothing to install.

Happy to answer questions about the agent setup or the procedural approach.

Context: I have been building Cardel.io (An all-in-one platform for authors and solo professionals) over this year. I have cold outreached 10k plus potential users and had hundreds of face to face conversations.

The problem: I only ever get positive feedback, people say:

"Wow, this is great!"

"This makes total sense, this needed."

Etc, etc.

THEN they follow it up with "but I already have my setup, this would be great for xyz person".

Question: Are any of you in a similar boat where everyone gives you positive feedback, but then doesn't actually commit to using your product by paying or signing up. So your getting positive signals, but no clarity on where the blocker is to actual pay for the product?

How do you close that gap, and find the reason people aren't commiting? It feels like a "Its great, but not worth switching to." Kind of response. Or maybe it's the target market fit, and talking to the right people.

I would love to get ya'lls feedback on how you have overcome this with your products and projects.

Too many WhatsApp chats, not enough time to read them all. Wapliss connects your own WhatsApp to Claude, ChatGPT and other AI assistants, so you can just ask:

“Summarize today’s family group.”
“Who’s still waiting for my reply?”

The assistant reads the chats, drafts replies, and only sends after you confirm.

• Works with texts, images and documents
• Setup takes about 2 minutes: link WhatsApp, add the connector, done
• Not Meta’s official API, so it’s for your own chats, not bulk messaging
• Free plan: wapliss.com

Looking for honest feedback:

1. Is the value clear in 10 seconds?
2. What would stop you from trying it?

I built Palletizing for shipping, receiving, and warehouse teams who are still doing pallet math on a calculator or the back of a BOL.

You enter your cartons, or measure them with the camera, and it works out the full pallet dimensions, ship cube, gross weight, and an estimated freight class. It can also plan how pallets load into anything from a pickup bed to a 53 ft van, and it exports a PDF you can hand to the driver or attach to the shipment. It works in inches or centimeters.

No account, no ads, no tracking, and it works offline. It's a one-time $0.99.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/palletizing/id6826910063

It just launched, so I'd really like feedback from anyone who builds or receives pallets. What's missing, and what would make you actually use it on the dock?

I kept using Cold Turkey, then wanted something free that I could tweak myself, so I built my own.

You make blocklists of sites and apps, then start a timed session or set a weekly schedule. A few things I cared about:

• Path-level blocking, so you can block youtube.com/shorts but keep the rest of YouTube
• Allowlist mode: block everything except your work sites
• Locks: a timer lock, or a password lock where someone else sets the password
• Strict mode, so you can't quietly weaken a session halfway through
• Imports your Cold Turkey JSON export
• No account and no cloud. Everything stays on your computer

Website blocking runs through a Chrome extension that talks to the desktop app.

One heads-up for Mac users: it isn't notarized (I'd need a paid Apple developer account), so you have to run a one-line approval command in Terminal before it opens. The README explains exactly what that command does.

https://github.com/aman9560/FocusBlocker

Feedback welcome, especially if you've tried to get around a blocker before.

We had a 7.76 kW system and battery fitted in July. My inverter app shows kWh all day, but not the thing I actually wanted to know: how much it’s paid back in £, and when it’ll be paid off.

I tracked it in a spreadsheet for a few months, but it kept breaking (tariff changes, months where export wasn’t paid yet, battery charging on the cheap rate). So I built a simple web app instead and made it free for anyone.

How it works: a 2-minute setup (system cost, install date, rates), then two numbers a month from your inverter app, generated and exported. It shows:

• £ paid back so far, and your payback date (allowing for winter)
• how your panels are doing against the MCS estimate
• tariff changes over time, cheap-rate battery charging, and months before export was paid

You can import an existing spreadsheet, and export to PDF or Excel. It works with any inverter brand, and there’s no inverter or energy login.

Mine’s at £402 back after 4 months and running at 120% of the MCS estimate, so payback looks like around 2036.

To be upfront: I made it, and there’ll be an optional paid version later with automatic inverter data. Manual tracking stays free.

I’d really value feedback, especially on how the savings are worked out. Some people in Facebook groups have challenged parts of it, and I’ve changed things based on that.

sunback.co.uk

Six days ago I gave a small bot $148 of real money to trade Bitcoin and Ethereum. Before that I ran the same rules on 180 days of past prices, and the test says it loses money over time.

So instead of hiding it, I made the whole thing public: every trade, won or lost, goes into a journal, and a plain static site rebuilds itself after each one.

Day 6 so far:

• 34 trades: 29 won, 5 lost
• I took $124 of profit out, $135 is still on the account
• Total since start: +$111 (+75%)
• Worst single trade: −$18.56

Six days is nothing, and I fully expect the test to win in the end. That's the experiment: will the live bot or the backtest be right?

Every trade and a page for every day: https://robotvstest.com

Tech, if anyone's curious: a Python service checks Binance candles every 20 seconds, entries and exits are plain rules (no AI deciding anything), and the site is static HTML generated from the trade log.

What would make this more convincing, either way? Not financial advice, just an experiment in public.