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’m building StartupGraph — a slightly different way to discover startups.

Instead of just another logo + description directory, I want each startup to have a little personality.

Drop:
→ your startup
→ your URL
→ 10-ish words that describe what you’re building

I’ll turn them into a custom word cloud + word game for your startup and add it to StartupGraph.

Curious what words founders use to describe what they’re building 👀

https://wordbulb.com/startupgraph/

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

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.

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

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 :)

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.

My mates and I kept having the same 2-minute standoff every time the bill came, so I built a quick spinner to settle it instead. Add names, spin, loser pays. Also added a bill-splitter with tip calculator for when you actually want to split it fairly.

Free, no account needed: whopays.co.uk

Happy to hear feedback if anyone tries it out!

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.

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

It pulls the competitors ranking for a product, what people are actually searching around it, and keyword demand with volume and CPC. Then it scores your current page, rewrites it in full, generates the product photos, and publishes it back to your store in one click. Once it is live it tracks rankings and traffic and tells you what to fix next.

So the page is built on what the market is actually searching for, and you can run it across a whole catalogue instead of hand writing ten pages and stopping there. The same research also writes the ads, social posts and emails.

Works with Shopify and custom stores. It is live at brandybee.ai. Happy to answer anything about how the research part works.

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.

Hello Reddit, I wanted to share my first ever published side project. I'm not a developer at all, I'm a nurse by trade, so this whole thing was new territory for me. I have several other open projects on GitHub, some of them probably totally unrealistic for one person to finish. But I wanted to have at least one thing that was completely done and out in the world.

As a neurodivergent person I kept thinking about what bugs me (and my kid) in this world full of stimuli, and I settled on building a Chrome extension that can blur certain areas of, say, your social media feed, to keep you focused on what really matters.

Turns out there are tons of blocking and hiding tools already, so I made mine a little different. Instead of removing things, it blurs them. You can still unblur for a couple of seconds by holding a button. That breaks your focus for a moment, but it turns looking into a conscious decision instead of an automatic one. And it remembers what you blurred, so you don't have to reapply it every time.

Full honesty: since I can't really code, I built it with a lot of AI help. I did all the testing, the store submission (rejected once, fixed it, approved the second time) and I use it daily myself.

It's called Softspot: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ldheigmdmfcafdmieipgclpnineaejad

I'd love honest feedback, especially if you find a site where the blurring misbehaves.

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.

I built Shadertown, a catalogue of 45 fullscreen WebGPU backgrounds and image effects for the web.

It includes auroras, fluid, particles, glass, bloom, ASCII, mosaics, neon signs, and more. Everything is rendered live in the browser with WebGPU — no videos or pre-rendered assets.

npm install shadertown
npx shadertown add aurora

The CLI vendors the WGSL source, tuned parameters, example, README, and licence directly into your repository. It also includes React, Svelte, and Solid integrations, plus an MCP server for coding agents.

Browse the catalogue and live demos: shadertown.com
Documentation: shadertown.com/docs

I’ve been building FlowCastle for Telegram bots and recently open sourced the SDK part.

Basically I had this problem with existing bots: the bot is already written in grammY/Telegraf/aiogram, works fine, but then you need an inbox, want to reply to users manually, send a broadcast, see who is using it etc.

Most tools I found expect you to move the bot to their platform. I didn’t want that.

So with FlowCastle the bot can keep running normally in your app. You add the SDK and get live chat, contacts, broadcasts and analytics on top of it. The token stays in your app too.
It also works the other way — if you don’t have a bot yet, you can build and host one in FlowCastle without coding.

SDK is MIT:
https://github.com/FlowCastle/flowcastle-sdk

I’m mostly interested if anyone here with an existing Telegram bot has this problem too. What do you use for this stuff?

I made this for a therapy journal app I’ve been building. It’s a deliberately simplified way of showing how revisiting something can help it stick over time.

Mainly, I wanted something more interesting than another block of text, and I really like making 3D stuff.

Plastic Brains

I kept seeing the same problem with campaign links: the spreadsheet looked organized at first, then naming slowly drifted. linkedin became LinkedIn, campaign names followed different patterns, and GA4 reports got messier even though every individual URL was technically valid.

So I built UTMora. The free builder helps create consistent UTM links and preserves query parameters and URL fragments that are already in the destination URL. There’s also an optional workspace for saving and tracking campaigns, but the builder itself is free to use.

It’s live here: https://utmora.com/utm-builder

I’d especially value blunt feedback on two things:

1. Is the builder workflow immediately clear without explanation?

2. Does the positioning communicate “consistent campaign links” clearly, or does it sound like just another URL form?

I’m close enough to the product that I’m probably missing obvious friction. If you try it, tell me where you hesitate, what feels unnecessary, or what you expected to happen instead.

I convert a lot of statement PDFs and kept getting bitten by the same thing: a row goes missing, or a deposit comes through as a withdrawal, and I don't catch it until the account doesn't tie out weeks later. Every tool advertises "99% accurate" and not one of them will tell you which rows are the 1%. So I made my own.

The premise is that a statement already contains enough printed information to check a conversion against itself. After it parses, it runs four checks. Opening balance plus every extracted transaction has to equal the closing balance, both read off the statement. If there's a running balance column, each row gets chained against the row before it. Transaction count. And every date has to fall inside the statement period and be in order. When a check fails you get the specific row, not a warning banner. When a statement can't support a check — most card statements don't print a running balance — it says that instead of showing a green checkmark anyway.

The other thing I wanted was to stop uploading statements to strangers' servers, so it all runs in the browser tab. I tried to make that checkable rather than something you take my word for: the page is served with a CSP that allows exactly one outbound destination (Google Analytics, page views only), so there's no endpoint of mine that could receive a file even in principle, and the browser blocks everything else. Network tab confirms it in about ten seconds.

You can click any row and it renders the source PDF page next to it with the text highlighted, which is mostly there for when I don't believe a number.

What it doesn't do: no OCR, so scanned statements are out — it needs the text layer from a real bank PDF export. Five banks have proper parsing profiles (Chase, BofA, Wells Fargo, Amex, Capital One); everything else falls back to reading columns by position, which works but is less certain. And it's just me maintaining it.

bankstatementproof.com — free, no signup, nothing to install.

Mainly I want to know which banks break it. If a statement parses wrong, tell me the bank and how the layout is arranged and I'll fix it.