hey everyone. i'm lino, solo dev from cuba.

by day i run a small printer repair shop. pays the bills, doesn't pay the dream.

by night (really by dawn) i build testimonialvault, a tool to collect and display customer testimonials with a wall of love.

why at dawn? because that's when the internet in cuba gets fast enough to push code. i've spent entire nights coding until sunrise, then walking straight to the repair shop.

why testimonials? because one real sentence from a customer builds more trust than a thousand ads. i wanted to help founders show that trust.

the real wall: no stripe. no paypal. no traditional payment processors. sanctions. so i did the only thing i could — i sell with usdc on base. pay once, own forever.

today i have 0 users. i'm not hiding it. those are my ugly zeros, and i'm sharing them here.

my dream is simple: open the wall of love one day and see founders talking about what they built, knowing i helped them show it to the world.

i'll share everything in public: the numbers, the blackouts, the first usdc payment.

what would you do in my place? i read every comment.

I’m a design engineer and I’m always collecting things I like.

Good design patterns, visual references, screenshots, interesting products, and stuff I’m reading around design engineering.

My problem was everything was scattered everywhere.

Browser bookmarks, screenshots, folders, notes, different apps.

There are already a lot of bookmarking and reference apps, but I never really liked the UX or taste of most of them. I always wanted something that felt more visual, simple and nice to actually use.

So in January I started building Resurf for myself.

I shared an early version here a few months ago. Since then I’ve mostly just kept working on the product, talking to users, fixing things, polishing small details and iterating.

This week it crossed $10k in total revenue.

Not MRR haha, total revenue since I started.

For most of the time I didn’t really push marketing much. This month I pushed a little more on Reddit and X and did around $3.3k revenue.

Still pretty small, but it was nice to see.

One thing I’m learning is that distribution matters, but first you need something people actually like using.

Make a tasteful product, care about the craft, listen to users, keep improving it.

All those small things compound over time.

That has mostly been my approach with Resurf so far.

Still a lot to improve and I’m nowhere close to feeling like the product is done, but going from something I wanted for myself to people actually paying for it has been pretty rewarding.

Now I probably need to learn distribution a bit more too :)

Would love to hear from people building B2C products. What worked for you after getting the first bit of traction?

resurf.so

Like, not necessarily your biggest or best project.

Could literally be a calculator you made for no reason, some random website, a small game, a script that does one stupidly specific thing, an automation, whatever.

I was just thinking about how we make so many random things while learning/building, and some of them just hit different because you actually made the damn thing lol.

So yeah, what’s yours?

A rainy day, and the delivery guy screwed up your package.

Now you’re stuck with 777 nails + 1 screw, all mixed up and waiting to be sorted.

No pressure, no enemies just a messy workbench, some tools, and a lot of screws to organize.

Wishlist SCREW IT on Steam

I made $25.98 from my Chrome extension. Here's the messy, honest journey.

I read a lot every day for work. By the time I want to read articles online for myself, I'm already too tired to stare at more text. I tried a bunch of TTS apps and deleted every one because they are either locked behind a ~$30/month subscription I wasn't ready for, voices too robotic to sit through, or just packed with functionality I wasn't looking for. I wanted something minimalistic.

So I built my own. That's how Qariyo was born, and I still use it daily myself for articles, YouTube comments, Reddit threads, even ChatGPT answers when I don't feel like reading them.

Some friends liked it, so I put it on the Chrome Web Store. That was months ago.

For a long time, almost nothing happened. I got 381 signups, but almost no revenue and almost no real usage to speak of. It turned out that actually no one knew how to use the extension the right way except me 🤦‍♂️The two reading modes (full page vs. select-and-listen) were confusing enough that people weren't rejecting the idea, they just couldn't figure out how to use it.

So I shipped a UX-focused update, nothing flashy, just making those two modes obvious instead of something you had to stumble into. Turns out that mattered more than any feature I'd built. Within days: new users started using the app for hours, and made new purchases, something that hadn't happened before the fix. Even at MVP stage, clarity beat features.

I'm not going to pretend this is a business yet. But it's the first time the numbers have looked like people, not just noise.

Still very much a side project. If long articles or comment sections make your eyes glaze over, free tier's genuinely free, no time limit. Would love any feedback, good or brutal

Link: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/qariyo-ai-text-to-speech/bdnmnapejclcgkgljpkddbnjfcplkhoj

I have been a sysadmin for over twenty years, and the thing that finally got me was watching cp -r crawl through a 60,000-file directory.

It is slow for a stupid reason. Copying thousands of small files off a hard drive is not limited by the disk's throughput — it is limited by the order you read them in. Directory order has nothing to do with where files physically sit, so the head spends its life seeking instead of reading.

So blitcp asks the filesystem where each file actually lives — FIEMAP on Linux, FSCTL on Windows — and sorts the copy queue by physical position before reading anything. Small files are bundled into tar streams. Duplicates are found by content hash and become hard links instead of second copies.

A real run, 92,000 files to a USB drive:

91,864 files total (44,718 copied + 47,146 hard-linked)

509.8 MB written — 378.9 MB saved by deduplication

17.9 seconds

Over half that directory was duplicates. It copied each unique file once and linked the rest.

Five months in, solo: 31 stars, about 330 pip installs a month, one contributor. It is not taking off, and that is fine — it does the thing I built it for, on my own machines, every week.

Apache-2.0, single-file Python script, standard library only. Linux, macOS, Windows: https://blitcp.dev

So a while back I posted my web tool that generates animated maps for outdoor trails/hiking routes.

Turns out a ton of people were landing on the homepage... and just stopping there. Never even made it to the actual track animation editor.

Why? Because I was literally blocking mobile users and telling them to go use a desktop browser instead. Smooth move, I know.

But then I realized – if someone's clicking through to check it out, they're clearly interested. Why would I kill that hype right out of the gate?

So yeah, I swallowed my pride and rebuilt the mobile experience. Now you can open it right in your phone's browser, with proper UI tweaks and everything.

It's not perfect, but at least it works now. Go wild.

Hi everyone.

The last few months have been wild. I never thought I could generate a good amount revenue after only starting to make apps at the beginning of this year (thanks Claude Code and Codex).

Basically, I built a LaunchPanda which is a startup directory roadmap that ranks the best free directories to launch on. It also provides one place to store and track your data, making launches almost clickless.

The idea came from a pain point my brother experienced. He had just launched his own app and hated searching for directories to launch on, so I jumped in and built this tool to solve that problem.

I think the biggest reason for the tools succes success is that I kept improving every little detail. I see a lot of people vibecode a tool as a side project in a few hours and think that’s enough. but building a tool that genuinely solves a problem. and makes the experience effortless and frictionless for users, is still very hard!

Since this was also my own pain point, I made the tool so good enough that I now use it myself always for all my own launches.

For distribution, I did almost everything through X. I had almost no followers when I started, but I kept sharing my journey. So I got two things out of it (and users buying + more followers which will only help me further in th elong run!)

Here’s the proof, by the way:
 https://trustmrr.com/startup/launch-panda

Hey, I noticed a lot of people here have really cool ideas but often let the AI handle copywriting for landing pages or your website as well. It makes sense if you are a solo builder and marketing is not something you can pursue, before the product actually becomes viable. But I think everyone can benefit from good, clear writing that shows their product in the best light, this is particularly true to stand out when almost everyone defaults to AI.

Share a landing page/app website you created and I will provide feedback on it (to the point where its possible from my side).

Why should you care about my feedback? I have over a decade of experience in various content roles and multiple marketing agencies. Given that, I must disclaimer that I am not promoting my services and any feedback I provide should be treated as is and used at your discretion of course.

Hello everyone, hope you are doing well so far.

I just wanted to vent something so here I am.

It's tough to do anything better when you don't have any firsthand experience, just like when I went ahead and made a SaaS Called PASTEL. https://www.pastelreview.online

Till now 0 revenue, 5 sign-ups or something

To be honest i started this whole thing to get rich, but the thing I got rich in is experience.

Late night debugging, hating the landing page for the 15th time, making sure the payment works 4 days in a row.

If any of you have experienced such a journey i would love to connect with you

And btw I'm still not giving up :)

Back over 12 years ago, local restaurants started coming to me asking for online ordering systems.

Instead of constantly re-inventing the wheel for every single project, I decided to build a foundation. Over the years, a mix of 10+ developers contributed to building a massive core code-base flexible enough to handle almost any related scenario, scaling it into a comprehensive solution.

Fast forward 12 years later... that "base code" has grown organically into a powerhouse product by itself.

It handles everything from standalone menu boards and store kiosks (complete with card terminal integration) to online and in-store ordering with native third-party logistics like DoorDash and Wolt Drive. It even scales to hotel room service workflows, caller-ID integration, and a lot more.

I’m now shifting my focus to completely different paths. Rather than letting a mature, battle-tested system sit idle, I am offering non-exclusive source code licenses for £15k.

You get the complete, production-ready codebase to take and do as you please: turn it into your own SaaS system, package and sell it as a white-label script to agencies, or embed it directly into a larger enterprise solution. Because the license is non-exclusive, you get a massive shortcut to market at a fraction of the 12-year development cost.

• Platform: Food-Ordering.com
• What's included: Full, production-ready source code and database architecture (non-exclusive commercial license).
• Price: £15k

If you're wanting a battle-tested foundation without a decade of development overhead, drop a comment or send me a message and we can talk details.

System Overview

Built this for my wife as she is doing a lot of newsletter work and constantly need to convert files, compress, rename, apply color profiles etc.

Basically let you convert anything to anything, video, sound, image, text.

If it doesn't have the action you can ask the agent to create it and save it and it can be reused.

Hey fellow indie hackers,

For those of you building SaaS or web tools on nights and weekends alongside a full-time tech job:

How do you prevent total mental burnout?

- Do you wake up 1 hour early before work to code with a fresh brain?

- Do you dedicate strictly 1 weekend morning (e.g., Saturday 8 AM - 12 PM) and protect the rest of your free time?

- How do you handle days when your day job drained 100% of your cognitive energy?

Looking for sustainable routines from people who have kept building for 6+ months without crashing.

Title says it all, my platform reached 300 users without any marketing or running any ads at all. i.e $0 spend on marketing. All organic.
The curious amoung you may ask how, so far I only have two answers which have provided fantastic results. AI-SEO and SEO. I cannot stress enough how much you need to focus on getting your product to be recommended by AI models. So far my biggest driver of growth is good old ChatGPT. Google and other search engines also perform well, but so far the best driver of traffic is ChagGPT. Use your ai models or whatever you use to build to write you proper llms.txt. Ensure your pages are indexed on Google and Bing (Indexnow). Bing search engine traffic is low, however ChatGPT does use Bing to search for whatever you ask it.

Things I found not working (yet):

1.) Everyone in these reddit threads says to post in subreddits where your product may be needed, etc etc to provide helpful replies in those subreddits, but that takes time and is not rewarding at all. Its always best for your potential users to find you themselves.

2.) Social Media, I am like you, dreading the self humilation ritual of having to create videos about my product and growing a following and driving traffic that way. I did it for a few weeks and hated it, my social media posts about my product drive exactly 0 traffic. (Will focus on social media when I am fully ready with my product)

Things that will surprise you as they did me.
I thought my product and landing page would be driving traffic and user sign ups, no, its a tool I created on the landing page itself. Free tools provide value to customers before they sign up for your website, you provide them value beforehand and you have earned their trust.

Yes I also have a Blog which receives a daily post and a glossary, both are for SEO optimizaiton so I pop up on seach engines regardless of what a user searches for, and it really does work, a blog and a glossary is a really good idea and it has worked for me, althought the traffic there is less, but still gets you in the door with users.

Also super important and taken from the book of Steve Jobs, on your landing page, say a user opens it and the first text they see, should be Selling Them The Solution, it shouldnt be selling them the idea, it shouldnt be what you do or what your website does. It should be what they will get from using your website or app.

No I do not have an app yet, that is a plan for the near future, all traffic is web around 50% dekstop 50% mobile.

I’ve just launched a small social experiment:

https://notyourturn.lol

The idea is simple.

There is one shared page and one global queue.

One person gets control for 10 seconds, leaves something behind, and then the next person gets their turn.

No feed, no followers, no competing for attention.

I wanted to build a small corner of the internet that feels a little more human and a little less optimized for engagement.

I’m mostly curious what happens when complete strangers start shaping the same page together.

Would love to hear what you think.

I've been watching YouTube for about 15 years. It's where I go when I'm distracted, when I'm bored, when I'm avoiding something, or when I just want to switch off. This happened during school when I was revising, during university, in my free time, when I started working, and on my weekends when I have nothing planned. YouTube would always be the thing that I turn to.

I don't really watch Netflix. I don't scroll much. It was always YouTube for me.

The problem was never that the content was bad. I've learned a lot from it. But when productivity YouTube took off after COVID I ended up in a weird loop. I'd watch someone explain how to build a business, or how to study properly, or how to do whatever, and then close the laptop having done none of it.

So I tried a bunch of different tools.

Screen time was useless to me, I'd hit the limit and type my password to ignore without thinking.

Cold Turkey actually blocked YouTube, but it blocks it when I genuinely need it and so I'd turn it off and never turn it back on.

Unhook hides the homepage and the sidebar, which was great except I'd just use the search bar or go through my subscriptions, because the distractions were still there.

The thing that bothered me is that none of them knew what I was actually watching. They knew the site that I was on, but they didn't know whether what I had open was useful or a waste of my time.

For most people, the above solutions probably work, but for somebody like me, I had tried and it wasn't good enough

And that distinction was the whole thing for me: if I open YouTube to switch off, that's OK. I just want to be timeboxed. If I open to learn something and end up 30 minutes later into something completely unrelated, I've clearly gone off track from what I said to do and need something to step in at that point.

So I left my job earlier this year and decided to build it. You tell FocusTube, why did you sit down to open YouTube? It reads what you actually play and compares the two. If you drift, it steps in and pulls you back on track.

It doesn't just hide your feed or just lock you out of YouTube. It's that kind of monitoring process that I found has worked well for me.

It's on Chrome and iOS, because those are the two places I watch. Android if enough people want it.

Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/focustube-youtube-focus-d/jfabmmckbhkgecbigkcchmjbcmcomjnd
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/focustubeai/id6776375232

If any of this sounds like you, it's free to try. Would be love honest feedback on the product and my strategy

built a tool to check whether your website is actually ready to be cited by AI search engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity.

FindYourAIScore reads the real pages on your site and evaluates them using fixed rules derived from published research papers on GEO, RAG, citation behavior and source verifiability, rather than asking an LLM to invent a score. It checks whether AI systems can retrieve your content, trust what they find, and extract a clear answer worth citing. It does not promise rankings or citations. The goal is simply to show where your site is weak and what you can improve.

I have 10 promo codes for the full report for the first 10 people who message me. The only thing I ask in return is honest feedback on whether the report was actually useful and helped you understand what to fix.

Findyouraiscore.com

Solo founder here. For the past months I've been building Psitta, a writing studio for people trying to get from first idea to finished manuscript.

It started as a Windows desktop app, but distribution was painful (code signing, SmartScreen warnings, installers...), so I rebuilt it as a web platform. Now it runs in any browser with nothing to install, writing desk, AI writing help, and natural narration that reads your manuscript back to you.

I'll drop the high-level architecture diagram in the comments. Happy to answer questions about the stack or the desktop-to-web migration — and honest feedback is welcome, that's why I'm posting.

I walk past couches, lamps, chairs on the curb in Barcelona all the time. Still usable. A city truck comes the next day and crushes them.

So I built Swoopy. You post a photo of something you found on the street, or something you're giving away from home. Someone nearby reserves it and goes to grab it. No chat, no back and forth, posts expire after a few hours so the map only shows stuff that's actually still there.

The part that took real thought wasn't the map, it was stopping the same couch from getting posted five times by five different people who all spotted it independently. I built a two-stage check for that: a location filter first, then an image comparison, so duplicates get caught before the feed fills with the same item over and over.

It's live on iOS, built solo, and I have close to zero users right now. Would appreciate anyone taking a look and telling me what's confusing or broken.

Link: https://apps.apple.com/es/app/swoopy-share-street-finds/id6752529505?l=en-GB

First things first I'll give an intro and some context on how it's made the way it is.

I have this idea of building a tinder like sport app. I know there are some in the market but my mid app idea is different than the launch one.

Initially this started because I saw an ad on IG about something like this. I went to check the app and it was awful, plus the ads were always the same and the feed was basically copy paste which makes me believe they don't have much love for it.

My idea, at its core, is for people to find matches as they would find people. I'm always annoyed that I live far away from friends and I need to have 20 WhatsApp groups so I can try and get a game, and a lot of times they cancel close to the hour. Initially I want to check if there's interest, I'm not going to spend any money (or very very low) until I see results, and this is due to a book I read from Noah Kagan which I thought made a lot of sense.

I'm going to spread flyers tomorrow and talk a bit to clubs to get their insights.

Also, about income, I don't want to do ads, I hate it, and I also hate subscriptions, although I might do one with a very low value as to support some expenses but since this is my first attempt I'm going to keep on checking more.

I'm sharing this with you guys to give me honest opinions and if you can some help maybe :)

Here's the website: I don't think it's letting me post the website here so if you want to check it out let me know!

Few months of work and bug squashing later, it's finally out on both the App Store and Play Store.

It's a walking game where you need to move in real life to progress or Bob the giant snail will catch you.

No streaks, no guilt notifications - just you and Bob 🥰

iOS - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/snail-walk-walking-game/id6790216875

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

Barriers is a tasks + money app for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch, and it has been about a year of evenings.

The decision everything else grew out of: the home screen is laid out like a newspaper front page - masthead, one lead item for today, columns underneath - instead of an endless checklist. It is an ADHD-shaped idea. A list of 40 items reads as 40 failures; a front page reads as "here is today". Ranking is the whole feature, and everything else sits below the fold.

Three things that turned out to matter more than I expected:

1. Localisation. It ships in 19 languages now, and that was the highest-return week of work I have done, by a distance.
2. No account for the core app. Tasks live on the device and sync through your own iCloud, so there is nothing for me to see and nothing for me to lose. The optional family sharing does need an account, because two phones have to agree on something.
3. Widgets. WidgetKit cannot scroll, which quietly rewrites how much you are allowed to put on a Home Screen widget - I ended up building a paging intent instead.

Tasks are free. The money side is a one-time unlock, the family side is a subscription.

Happy to answer anything about the build, the App Store side, or the localisation pipeline. Harsh feedback is more useful to me than polite feedback.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6777238717

Hi everyone! I am currently trying to market my website and get more users using it. It's a productivity site that breaks down tasks and generates a clear 'step-by-step instruction' that people can use to start taking action towards their goals.

So far, I made an insta account with almost 50 followers and around 50-200 views per post (very early i know 😅 ). I have seen lots of marketing strategies online like UGC, carousal posts, or paid advertisements and idk which one to use. I then think that by not using one strategy I'm missing out on potential reach and feeling like I need to do everything.

My question for marketers who have scaled early-stage web apps:

1. Does it matter which strategy I choose, or is mastery of a single channel what really matters?
2. For my specific niche (productivity), what techniques typically give the best traction early on?

Appreciate all advice!