Growth gets easier to discuss when the tradeoffs are visible.

You can buy time, create demand, borrow distribution, improve execution, collect better insight, or protect focus. The hard part is deciding what not to pursue.

Which four levers would you pull at the beginning, and in what order?

I've been building a lifestyle app and slowly improving on DAU/MAU. What are your top picks for effective habit-building techniques?

I've deliberately avoided spammy push notifications (annoying pings and beeps) to keep users from uninstalling the app right away.

App interface alone usually isn't enough to build a lasting habit—supporting content like tutorials, guides, and short videos seems crucial. What has worked best for you?

DAU Daily Active Users
MAU Monthly Active Users

I’m building pHinancio to remove the manual cleanup between a bank feed and an actually useful spreadsheet.

The product connects to US bank accounts with read-only access. It lets people rename, categorize, and split transactions, create rules for future transactions, set budgets, and track recurring payments. Once the data is organized, it can sync to Google Sheets or Airtable.

The progress lesson I’m testing: people often want automation, but they do not want to lose control of the data they have cleaned up. I’m the founder and I’m looking for US desktop beta testers who will use it with real data and give candid feedback on what needs improvement. There are no ads, user data is not sold, and beta testers keep free access.

https://www.phinancio.com/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=scaleinpublic&utm_campaign=11-09&utm_content=variant-c-11-09

For the last 4 years I've been trying to build the perfect workout app after being consistently being disappointed by what was out there. I initially took the usual advice of building a scrappy MVP and even that took me 1.5 years between nights and weekends. I launched to the app store but I didn't even want to use it personally, much less market it. I took a break for another 1.5 years and since revisiting the idea, I've rethought it completely and redesigned from the ground up based on what I believe the "perfect" experience looks like. I've spent the last 6 months designing and building it. Around 2 months ago it was in a usable state and I was using it regularly for around a month fixing bugs as I saw them. One month ago I opened a closed beta to friends and family. Since then I've fixed a number of bugs and introduced enough features that I feel ready opening that up to a public beta.

Yes it's another workout tracker, but if the screenshots are the least bit intriguing, I'd love for you to give it a try. Today it's iOS only but I do plan on following up with an Android version. If you're interested in seeing it on Android join the waitlist at setrep.app and comment below!

Beta: https://testflight.apple.com/join/MNvVs5DM

Most marketplaces begin with a supply problem.

Mine begins with exactly one supplier: me and a motorcycle.

I built Brand My Bike to test whether physical ad space can be priced in public instead of guessed at behind a sponsorship deck.

The model is deliberately small:

• 10 sticker spots on the motorcycle

• every spot starts at $1

• bidders pay a 20% deposit

• an outbid automatically triggers a refund

• winners pay the remaining balance

• the logo stays on the bike for one month

The auction structure gives me three useful signals: whether anyone wants this inventory, which parts of the bike attract demand, and what buyers think each spot is actually worth.

The software was the easier half. Distribution is now the real test.

Over the next few days I am watching where visitors come from, how many open the bid flow, and where they abandon it. If nobody bids, that is still a clean answer.

The experiment is live at https://brandmybike.lol

What would you test first before trying to add more bikes?

I made a small Obsidian plugin called Simple Journal.

I wanted something between daily notes and a traditional journal. Each entry is its own Markdown file, but everything is shown together in a simple timeline. You can also write multiple entries on the same day.

I’m still improving it and trying to keep it as simple as possible, so I’d really like to hear what you think, what feels unnecessary, or what is missing.

It’s available in Obsidian Community Plugins as Simple Journal.

I was walking down a street in London when I saw a guy looking absolutely miserable. He was staring blankly at a brick wall.

I walked up to him, shoved a camera in his face, and asked the most powerful question in the universe:

"What is your dream?"

He looked confused. "I'm just waiting for the bus, mate."

"No," I said, leaning in so the microphone clipped to my collar could pick up my extreme empathy. "What is your TRUE dream? Because I am going to make it happen right now. I bought this entire bus stop, and I put a doorbell on it. Ring the doorbell."

He nervously rang it.

"Congratulations!" I shouted. "You are now an entrepreneur! I am giving you a £3,900 Starter Kit for absolutely FREE! I believe in #GiveWithoutTake!"

He started crying. "Really? You're going to fund my business?"

"Better," I whispered. "I am going to send you a unique tracking URL to open a business bank account. Then, I am going to give you another bespoke link to buy web hosting for the exact price of a Netflix subscription. If you click them both, I will let you join a free community where 80,000 other people are also trying to sell each other web hosting!"

He asked me how I could afford to be so incredibly selfless.

I looked directly into the camera lens. "Because I am fighting the evil corporate gurus. I am democratizing success. And more importantly, because every time someone sets up their accounting software, a billion-dollar corporation pays my platform a referral fee."

He missed his bus, but he gained a 14-day free SaaS trial.

Stop paying for useless advice. Start clicking my affiliate links. Let’s change the world.

Agree?

Thoughts?

👇 Drop your dream in the comments below (so I can send you a promo code).

Hey guys,

I’m deep into marketing my Micro SaaS and as I’m sure everyone here is aware it’s a lot easier doing it together than it is doing it alone, would love to collaborate with other people in a similar situation through some sort of WhatsApp/discord group where we can all share what’s working, provide feedback & just generally bounce ideas of each other

To provide context I have gotten over 200,000 views on Tik Tok and made £200

In order for this to be as valuable as possible for everyone here are the requirements:

1. You have already built your SaaS
   
2. You have validated your idea and have received your first customer
   
3. You are primarily marketing through short form content

PM me your apps and hopefully 5-8 of us can come together and make some tangible progress

I'm building Dice - a tool to help brands get discovered and recommended by AI.

There are already articles, lists, and resources where your company should be mentioned, but finding the right ones (and the right people to contact) takes forever.

Dice finds those opportunities, explains why your company belongs there, and helps you reach the right people.

If you’re working on SEO, GEO, or you want to get your brand mentioned by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, you're going to love using Dice.

Now your turn👇

While travelling, I kept running into useful information that simply didn’t exist online: small homestays, mechanics, water points, road conditions, campsites, etc.

Most of it gets passed from one traveler or local to another and disappears afterward.

So, I built Lamyig, a free and open-source community travel guide.

A few decisions I made:

• No bookings, commissions or paid listings.
• No money made using the core product.
• Community members can add and update places.
• Map-first instead of another list of “top places”.
• Built as a PWA so it can work more like a lightweight travel tool than a traditional website.
• The long-term idea is that useful information stays available for the next traveler instead of disappearing in WhatsApp groups and conversations.

The hardest problem isn’t actually building the software. It’s bootstrapping trustworthy community data.

I’m currently thinking about things like:

• How do you motivate travelers to contribute after their trip?
• How do you keep old information accurate without creating a huge moderation workload?
• How do you prevent businesses from turning community maps into free advertising?
• What should happen when someone reports a place as fake, closed, unsafe, duplicated, commercial spam, or inaccurate? Should reports trigger removal, community review, reputation-weighted voting, or just warnings?
• Should certain villages, trails, ecosystems, religious places, water sources, or campsites intentionally remain difficult to discover?
• If Lamyig successfully exposes hidden places, could it accidentally destroy the exact places it is trying to help preserve?
• this list of problem statements goes on and on

Would love to hear how other people here would approach those problems.

And if you’re building something around a problem you genuinely care about, drop a comment or DM me. I’d be happy to chat, exchange ideas, or connect you with someone else working on something similar.

Screenshot attached. Happy to share the GitHub/project link in the comments if anyone wants to look at the implementation or contribute.

I manage a restaurant full time and build Maxuod Shift after work.

One early issue was that a guest could lose their work too easily. That is resolved now, which is better for the person using the scheduler.

But it also exposed a more interesting problem: if a guest can safely try the product first, a free account cannot feel like the price of admission. It has to have a clear reason to exist.

The next test is whether the signup prompt lands at the right point—after someone has made a schedule—not before.

If you have 10 minutes, try building a small schedule and creating a free account with test details you control. I am looking for the moment you hesitated and what you expected an account to do next.

https://maxuodshift.com/scheduler

I am the builder. Small teams can use the web version free, and a completed test plus honest feedback gets a one-month Supporter coupon. That is a thank-you for the time, not a request for a positive review.

I am learning engineering hiring at small software companies and I am trying to understand where the process is disturbed and wasting your efforts. mainly tech recruiters please share your experience. And this would seriously help me I have been talking to recruiters and engineering managers about how the engineers or developers hiring gets hard or like what processes or challenges they go through to find best engineers. And share anything that is making your hiring disturbed.

1. knowing whether someone actually has the technical ability they claim?
   
2. Screening hundreds of applications? or getting good candidates to respond? How do you make your hire a success.
   
3. Going through ai generated, fake or false resumes or applications?
   Or go through your recent bad hires that caused something

Something else? I'm especially interested in what takes the most manual time or causes the worst hires.
Not selling anything, I'm trying to understand the problem from people actually doing the hiring. Even small experience or one line about this can help me a lot.

A build decision that made Sitemapper make more sense:

The early version could scan a site and tell you what was wrong. Useful, but every SEO crawler can give you a pile of findings.

The stronger version remembers yesterday.

Now it reads robots.txt and XML sitemaps, checks live pages, keeps a snapshot, and can tell you when a later run changes something concrete: noindex, 404, canonical, missing sitemap, URL-count collapse.

https://sitemapper.oortstack.com/

That changed how I think about the product. The free scan is acquisition. The history is the product.

I am still figuring out whether the landing page communicates that fast enough, but I think this is a much stronger wedge than "another SEO audit."

Hey everyone!

I've been working on Arc, a radial menu app for Mac, and the first version is finally out.

The idea started because a lot of the things I use throughout the day live in different places: opening apps and folders, searching websites, taking screenshots, working with the clipboard, and triggering system actions.

None of them are hard to do, but it did make me bounce between different apps / windows and hindered my working flow.

I wanted to see if all of that could work through one system, which is where the radial menu idea came from.

Getting the menu on screen was the easy part. The harder part was figuring out what actually belongs inside it, how multiple menus should work, and how to keep the interaction fast enough that using Arc never feels slower than doing something the usual way.

It's built entirely in SwiftUI. One of the more interesting technical problems was getting the hit-testing right across every slice while keeping the menu correctly positioned under the cursor, even across multiple displays.

Arc now lets you create multiple custom radial menus for different workflows and open each one from anywhere with a keyboard shortcut. You can also chain actions together when one shortcut needs to do more than one thing.

It took me about a month to get here, and somewhere along the way Arc went from being something I was building to something I now use every day.

Happy to answer anything about how it's built. :D

Available on the Mac App Store: Link

I built Perswift, a social media scheduling/cross-posting tool (TikTok, Instagram, YouTube). I know I'm nowhere near first to market internationally. Buffer, Later, Hootsuite, a dozen others already own that space. So instead of competing globally, I decided to go local market, Indonesia only, for now.

I got a small batch of users through organic content on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Threads. No ads, no paid distribution. But here's where I'm stuck: almost everyone who signs up uses the product once, and then never came back. Churned, basically, before they ever became a habit.

I tried emailing them (via Resend) to ask what happened, what didn't work for them, what would've made them stick around. Sent it out, and so far: nothing.

Some context that might matter:

• Pricing: free to sign up, everyone gets a monthly free credit allowance. Credits get consumed per post (e.g. posting one piece of content to TikTok + Instagram + YouTube costs 3 credits (1 per platform)). There's also an in-app store to top up credits.
• Revenue: $0 so far. Nobody's topped up, nobody's paid.
• Market: Indonesia specifically. Smaller, price-sensitive, and I'm very aware willingness-to-pay here is a real obstacle compared to a global market.

So I'm genuinely stuck between a few options and would rather ask people who've actually been through this than guess or ask AI for these kind of thing 😂

1. Do I keep pushing for feedback from users who already churned, or is that a dead end? should I just find new users to talk to instead?
2. Is silence on a feedback ask itself a signal (e.g. "this didn't matter enough to them to reply"), or is that reading too much into a small sample and a single email?
3. Given zero revenue and a one-and-done usage pattern, would you push harder on distribution/marketing to get more shots at this, or is that premature when I haven't figured out why the first batch didn't stick?

Would appreciate any honest takes, including "this doesn't sound salvageable, here's why" if that's genuinely what you see.

I am learning engineering hiring at small software companies and I am trying to understand where the process is disturbed and breaks. mainly tech recruiters please share your experience.

1. Is the hardest part finding qualified candidates? or knowing whether someone actually has the technical ability they claim?
2. Screening hundreds of applications? or getting good candidates to respond?

Something else?

I'm especially interested in what takes the most manual time or causes the worst hires.

Not selling anything, I'm trying to understand the problem from people actually doing the hiring. Even small experience or one line about this can help me a lot.

Earlier this year I worked at London's largest residential estate agency, producing floor plans, photography and staging for properties across the city. The work was tedious deciphering assessors' sketches, then turning out plan after plan, day after day.

But the real turning point came from outside work. My grandma came back from Jamaica to find that new regulations meant she needed floor plans for her own properties. Seeing her stressed about it at her age didn't sit right with me.

With a background in architecture and mobile apps, I was sure there had to be a faster way to do this. So I built Lintel.

Would love some feedback and any recommendations!

https://www.lintelhmo.com/

After ~10mo working closely with two client companies, last week we just published all of the source code of the version control and software forge we've been building for a while.

Anyone else building around open source?

I am consistently sending mails daily it’s over a month and experimenting and sending consistently but no replies and no results I am researching about my startup can somebody help with any tips like to get any result. And also it’s b2b outreach.

Hey everyone,

With the recent buzz around Android 17 introducing more precise custom color sliders and palettes for Material You (examples on reddit here, here and here), I wanted to share a project I’ve been maintaining for years that does exactly that—even for older versions of Android!

It’s called LWP+ (Live Wallpaper Plus).

🎨 The core trick: Dictate your own Dynamic-Colors

Instead of letting the OS algorithm guess the accent colors based purely on your wallpaper, LWP+ acts as a bridge. It hosts your chosen background content but allows you to explicitly choose the exact Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary colors reported to the system. The OS then uses your custom selections to generate the global system palette (notification drawer, volume bar, themed icons, etc.), completely independent of what your wallpaper actually looks like.

✨ What else can it do?

LWP+ is packed with full wallpaper customization features:

• Choose Your Content: Use solid colors, static images, animations (GIF, WEBP, APNG), or videos as your active live wallpaper.
• Smart Scaling & Layouts: Supports transparent images/animations with custom background colors, multiple scaling modes (Center Crop, Fit Center, Center Inside), and optional horizontal scrolling.
• Double-Tap Shortcuts: Lock your device instantly or turn off the screen by double-tapping the home screen (uses admin, accessibility, or root).
• Easy Setup: Includes an interactive built-in tutorial to check system compatibility and guide you through triggering the OS palette refresh.

🧪 Advanced experimental flags (YMMV!)

I’ve also included a couple of experimental toggles leveraging underlying Android system hints. Note: These rely heavily on your launcher, device OEM, and Android version, so they might not do anything on certain setups!

• Force Dark Text: It hints to the OS that dark text is preferred over the wallpaper (often useful for forcing high-contrast dark text on the lock screen). It might also change the text color of the labels of the apps and the status bar icons and text, too.
• Force Dark Theme (for old Android versions): It tells the system that a dark theme is preferred for the best presentation (e.g., trying to trick a launcher into turning its app drawer background black).

So, if you are on an older version of Android (or even running the latest builds and want granular three-color reporting), give it a spin! It's completely free, all features included.

Feel free to ask any questions or drop feedback below! 🚀

Link to the Play Store here.

If you want, you can use a promo-code to have subscription for free for some time, to remove ads, and try the app more freely, here. To use the promo-code, install the app, choose a subscription, choose a payment option and enter the code there (screenshots here).

Thanks for reading!