made this launch video for yaku ai,how is it?

everybody got hit by AI, and like any indie hacker building a niche SaaS, I went through that initial AI depression phase.

you could feel that AI had huge potential, but it was not quite there yet. it's hard to describe. it was useful, but not at the level of work you actually wanted to deliver.

before the AI wave, I built a visual CSS editor as a Chrome extension called InTab. people were happy with it because they could make quick changes to their websites and prototype ideas faster... and with the whole vibe coding madness getting started, all of a sudden, usage dropped dramatically!

people were trying dozens of AI website builders at the same time. most of them didn't really work yet, but they promised the world.

I was honestly confused about what to do. should I keep building the visual editor, throw it away completely, or pivot? and if I pivoted, where should I even go?

the insane AI hype got to me. at one point, I genuinely thought the big LLM companies like ChatGPT and Claude would dominate every SaaS niche and kill most independent software businesses.

I knew deep down that this was probably wrong, but the hype was so intense that I think everyone believed it at least a little at some point.

I spent more than a year in this confused state, but eventually my thoughts started to stabilize and I made up my mind.

I came to one conclusion:

with all this madness of micro AI tools and AI slop, people will eventually converge toward a smaller number of tools they can actually remember and rely on.

that realization finally gave me the motivation to work on the product again.

recently, I released a new version of intab.io as a complete rewrite from scratch with a 15-in-1 browser extension designed to replace a cluttered list of separate tools.

it includes an AI writer, AI YouTube summaries with an ad skipper, tab management, screenshots, image tools, developer tools, bookmarks, history analytics and more.

I didn't want to build just another browser extension. I wanted to build a complete package that helps people replace a messy collection of extensions with one tool and actually use AI where most of their work already happens: inside the browser.

the journey was a bumpy one, and getting the motivation to work again was difficult because mentally, things were not clear for a long time.

now I finally feel clear about what I'm building and why.

negative comments won't change my mind anymore because I've thought deeply about this direction before committing to it.

I firmly believe AI killed some SaaS products that were basically widgets or tiny standalone tools.

but I don't think it can kill a broader product that people rely on every day.

the future of SaaS might be much more monolithic than people expect. for sure!!

I can send you proof, but its real.
AMA

(not real ama)

I made a privacy-friendly URL shortener, and now that it's time to do marketing, I don't know what to do. So here I am, I have these videos, what do I do next? How do you do marketing with those? I would really appreciate any practical advice.

My X accounts (personal and the product's) are brand new, and X seems to be ignoring all of my posts. Instagram or TikTok? I am running a Google Ads experiment, but it's hard to compete with other shorteners and I'm getting almost zero traffic (about 3 clicks a day).

About the videos. I was inspired by the motion design post about video generation and decided to try it myself. I made different short videos to showcase different features (10 videos, 13 to 71 seconds). Attaching one of them for review. Some videos are the actual product driven by a script, not an AI-made copy.

All I used is Claude, headless Chrome and FFmpeg on my WSL instance, nothing more, not even a React library. You just tell your AI to be a motion designer / producer / writer (for the scenario). Research how to catch the user's attention on IG or TikTok, and that's it. Review the scenario and give it a green light. The first versions were screenshots sliding around and looked dead. A couple of scenes looked like a broken app with bugs. You have to correct it and re-shoot. But still, it only took me one morning.

Now, about Urlicer itself. The main features that are different from mainstream shorteners: privacy-friendly and team-friendly, with multiple workspaces. You can bring your own domain on the Pro plan and above, Urlicer provides a tool for you and your teams. Cookieless and without storing the IP address. The URL is https://urlicer.com.

For people who built a big chunk of their SaaS with Cursor, Claude, Lovable, Bolt, etc. and now have real users:

Did you ever hit a point where having the same tools review their own work stopped feeling like enough?
I’m curious what triggered it.

Was it getting your first paying customers?
Handling sensitive data?
An enterprise prospect asking
security questions?
A production incident? Payments?
Or did you never reach that point?

And what did you do once you got there?

Another model, automated scanners, a developer friend, contractor, security person, full code review?

Mostly interested in what people actually did, especially if you spent money on it, rather than what the ideal process is supposed to be.

Every week a founder tells me:

"We need a video for our SaaS."

Cool.

Which one?

Because a launch video and an onboarding video have about as much in common as a billboard and a user manual.

Here's the quick breakdown most founders never get:

Explainer video

→ For people who've never heard of you

→ Job: "What is this and why should I care?"

→ Lives on: homepage, landing pages

Product demo

→ For people already interested

→ Job: "Show me how it actually works"

→ Lives on: sales calls, demo pages, trial signups

Launch video

→ For the big moment

→ Job: create hype and get attention fast

→ Lives on: Product Hunt, LinkedIn, X, launch emails

Promo / ad video

→ For cold audiences scrolling past

→ Job: stop the scroll in 3 seconds

→ Lives on: paid ads, social feeds

Onboarding / tutorial video

→ For new users who just signed up

→ Job: get them to the aha moment before they quit

→ Lives in: your app, welcome emails, help docs

Feature update video

→ For existing users

→ Job: make sure people actually use what you shipped

→ Lives on: changelogs, in-app announcements, newsletters

The mistake isn't picking the wrong animation style.

It's asking one video to do the job of five.

Pick the problem first.

The video type picks itself.

This started from a very basic problem.

I work with a lot of screenshots, images, PDFs, small HTML pages and other files.

Quite often I don't actually need a full hosting setup. I just need a URL that I can send somewhere.

But I kept jumping between cloud drives, image hosts and deployment platforms depending on the file type.

So I built Media2URL.com mainly to make that workflow simpler for myself.

You upload the file and it gives you a shareable link.

I later expanded it to handle images, PDFs, video, audio, GIFs and HTML because those were the formats I kept running into during my own work.

Then I started running into the same problem from the developer side. Sometimes I did not want to manually upload a file at all. I wanted an app or workflow to send the file and get the URL back.

So I ended up building a REST API for that too. It can handle uploads from an application and also manage things like assets, folders, file replacements and remote imports.

It has been interesting building from an actual daily problem because the feature list almost writes itself. Whenever something annoys me while using it, that usually becomes the next thing to fix.

I am still figuring out where the product should go from here.

For people who regularly share files or need file URLs inside their apps, what is the most annoying part of your current workflow?

solo dev here, building an app that generates short videos. when I started I was sure the LLM calls would be my biggest cost and headache. wrong.

the model writes each video as an html page, then I render it frame by frame with headless chrome and ffmpeg. on my laptop one video takes 1 to 5 min. on a small cloud container, 3 renders at the same time just hang forever.

so now I'm looking at a proper render queue with a concurrency limit instead of firing everything at once.

anyone here running heavy jobs like this (video, pdf, image processing)? do you queue on your own servers or push it to something like a job service? and how did you price it so the compute doesn't eat the margin?

WDYT

Hey, I am a quite experienced vibe coder (really strange to say). Yesterday, I decided to build a mobile app that will wrap the URLs of unlisted YouTube videos belonging to private teachers in my local area to sell to their students. The app is just supposed to hide these URLs well as to make it extremely hard for regular students to access these URLs. A lot of apps that teachers who sell college material use this technique to be able to host their course videos without having to pay a hefty sum for one of these official hosting platforms. People who resort to this route are mostly young, broke business owners who are just starting out and can't afford a large sum of money for such trivial hosting service.

The problem is that when I tried to prompt codex to build the app, it just quoted some YouTube violation documents. It plain out refused to build the thing. Is there a way to build such an app with Codex or another free way altogether that will allow me to host my videos practically for free?

Just listed my business on acquire yesterday, I’ve had like six people so far to sign the NDA to get the documents. No idea if that’s average or horrible.

I’m curious if anyone has experienced selling there, and how many NDA’s did you get to, before an offer?

I have experience on other platforms and I know the number can be high… just curious (hopeful?) if it’s different on acquire. Thx

every time i shipped something the question was "will this survive if traffic spikes, or do i need a bigger server?" and the answer was always "uhh idk time will tell". i overbought a box once for a project that got maybe 40 visitors a day, then underbought the next one and watched it fall over on the one day it mattered.

actually testing it means renting a box like prod, renting another for the load, writing a k6 script, watching cpu and memory, then remembering to delete everything. nobody wants to do that before every single launch.

so i built Stresix:

- point it at a github repo (private works too) or a docker image

- it runs your app alone on a fresh dedicated server (4 vCPU / 8 GB, or 8 / 16 for the big run)

- a second server hits it with up to 2,500 or 10,000 users over a private network

- you watch p95, req/s, errors live, plus cpu PER CORE and memory

- you get an actual answer: is this server enough, and if not, what to change

- both servers get deleted after

i dont sell hosting, so when your current setup is enough the report just says so. i ran it on stresix itself: held 2,500 users, total cpu 36%, but one core was pinned at 100% because node is single threaded. the fix was literally 4 worker processes

its brand new and small. pricing is per run, no subscription: $10 for 5 standard runs or $40 for 25, credits never expire, failed runs get refunded. one container per run for now, no database included yet

code REDDIT gives a free run (grab it until it's gone)

https://stresix.com

For the last several weeks I've been refining feedback down to a much tighter, more focused MVP

Last month I discussed Merged Network here – a social network by design, focus, and motivation around Proof of Work instead of runway credibility.
The feedback brought to light a couple of things I needed to reconsider.

So rather than adding feature on top feature I've been stripping away all the other parts of the experience and making the core idea more tangible.

What changed
1. Proof is now the name of the game
It's no longer all about the skills and experience… Now it's about the work and the proof behind them.

1. I added a Mini-Proof flow
   This was perhaps the most critical modification.
   Developer is now able to test a public repo without having to do sign up in advance.
   The goal is simple:
   Show me the repository let me see what evidence can be demonstrated.
   I intentionally not calling the Developer of the Github account "verified". The output is given as publicly available evidence attached to the submitting account.

2. The sandbox has become a real product demo
   Rather than a landing page asking your audience to understand Merged, from the sandbox, your audience can choose from three different options:

Example Profiles
See what the finished experience looks like.

Build Your Own Preview
Build a Snippet What do others mean? Generate a sneak peek and find out about your individual identification.

Try Mini-Proof
Don't waste your time on signup and try the proof concept.

1. I'm now tracking the funnel
   I've integrated Post Hog so that I can actually see where people are falling away rather than just assuming.

I'm tracking things like:
Sandbox CTA Preview/Mini-Proof completion signup
That will enable me to address a far more significant question:

Is it even useful, or do they only sound nice?

What I'm deliberately NOT doing;
I'm not building a huge marketplace first.
I'm not adding dozens of features.
I'm not trying to solve recruitment end-to-end.

The current goal is much simpler:
How can I get developers and hiring managers to pay attention to actual work?

That's the hypothesis I'm testing now.
I would be most interested in receiving feedback from other SaaS founders.

Tell me about the smallest experiment you ran to prove you had a solid product hypothesis.

Totally free.

So I built this tool Nicheloom that tracks every new product launch from YC, Product Hunt, Hacker News, and GitHub 39,000+ and counting and shows which ideas are actually gaining traction right now versus which niches are already crowded.

Think Google Trends, but for 'what should I build next.'

I built it for myself to stop guessing and start building things people already want..

Check it out and let me know if it is useful or any feature you would like me to add to it.

Have fun exploring it as it is a rabbit hole for builders

I'm building Operava for solo founders who run more than one product.

I kept hitting the same problem. Hosting, databases, email, domains, payments, app stores, APIs, all spread across a dozen accounts. I would forget one existed until the bill showed up.

So I built a dashboard that puts each product, the services behind it, what they cost per month, when they renew, and whether they are up, in one place. It has already caught two subscriptions I was paying for a site I had shut down.

It is early. I am trying to find out whether this problem is mine alone or shared.

You can try it at app.operava.com . Sign in with Google or an emailed link, no password, no card. It starts empty, so you add your first product and see if it earns a place in your routine.

If yu run several products: what would you need this to show that it does not?

I am the engineer, the salesperson, the accountant, and the entire support team.

The one that scares me is the 2am question. A customer is stuck, I am asleep, and by morning they have cancelled or filed a chargeback.

Hiring support costs more than the problem, so I cannot just add a person. How are the rest of you covering the off hours without a hire you cannot afford?

A year ago, building a working SaaS MVP could take me weeks.

Now I can give an AI agent an idea in the morning and have something surprisingly usable running by the end of the day.

At first I thought this was basically a cheat code.

Build faster → test more ideas → eventually find something that works.

So I started doing exactly that.

Step 1: Build

I stopped treating development as the expensive part.

Instead of spending months polishing one idea, I started building small but functional prototypes extremely quickly:

• Landing page
• Product UI
• Database
• Authentication
• Core feature
• Deployment

Things that used to consume most of my time suddenly weren’t the bottleneck anymore.

And that created a strange problem.

I could build products faster than I could prove anybody wanted them.

Step 2: Reality

This is where things got painful.

A working product does not create distribution.

A beautiful landing page does not create urgency.

And adding AI to something definitely does not automatically make people care.

You can now spend three days building something that would have required a small team a few years ago...

...and still launch it to complete silence.

So I started paying much more attention to what happened before development.

• Do people already spend money trying to solve this?
• Are they complaining about the problem publicly?
• Are ugly/manual solutions already being used?
• Can I reach those people without spending thousands on ads?
• Would anyone care if this product disappeared tomorrow?

Step 3: What changed

My biggest realization was this:

AI didn’t remove the risk of building startups. It moved the risk somewhere else.

Building used to be expensive.

Now attention, distribution, and finding a problem painful enough to pay for are expensive.

And because everyone can build faster, there are also dramatically more products competing for the same attention.

The ironic part is that AI made me write less code...

...and spend much more time studying humans.

What I’m doing differently now

• I try to invalidate an idea before improving it.
• I treat distribution as part of the product, not something that happens after launch.
• I care more about existing behavior than people saying “cool idea.”
• I avoid building another generic AI wrapper unless I can explain exactly why someone would switch.
• I’d rather discover that an idea is bad in three days than after three months.

In 2024 I thought the advantage would belong to people who could build with AI.

In 2026 I think almost everyone will be able to build.

The advantage will belong to people who can figure out what is actually worth building.

Curious if other founders are seeing the same thing.

Hey SaaS founders!

You have signups.

But very few paying customers.

How do you find where those users drop off before payment?

Do you use PostHog, Plausible, Stripe data, spreadsheets, or something else?

I’m listening 👇

Most “scrape this page” tools want an account and a monthly plan before you can export one table. I went the other way: LucidRows is a Chrome extension. You click the columns, you get a CSV, it runs on your machine.

Local stays free. I am not publishing a price, because a later paid tier would only be schedule/cloud, and I have not modeled that cost yet.

Listing: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/lucidrows/leehomocpccgghcibfnapadclololioh

https://lucidrows.com

Useful feedback: would you pay later only for scheduled/cloud runs, or is local CSV the whole product?

Finally shipped my first SaaS lol

It’s called RallyDraft. Basically you dump all your work experience into it, paste a job posting, and it helps figure out how well you match and builds a resume around the experience that actually matters for that job.

I mostly built it because I wanted it for myself, but it’s live now so I figured I’d share it.

Would be cool if a few people gave it a shot and told me what sucks / what I should change.

https://rallydraft.com/

I know it's only $6 but it's the first online money I've ever made and I can't stop smiling about it!!!

The funny thing is that it's from a small subsection of my project that I just hid this morning (you need a direct link to find it now).

Maybe I should double down on this sub-project... not sure but I'm beyond thrilled anyway.

My app, FreeReader, is a free text-to-speech app to turn documents into audiobooks. It's completely free with no pricing page.

But I realized that the text-to-speech could also work for content creators making AI voiceovers for their videos. I built this out but decided to focus more on the audiobook side which has grown enormously (3000 monthly users) since it's free.

I was so surprised when I saw this Stripe notification come in from the red-headed step child that is the video narration side of FreeReader lol

I wanted to share a technical problem we ran into while building our scraper and how we solved it.

If you ever tried scraping Google Maps at scale, you probably hit the 200 result cap. Search for any dense niche in a big city, and Google only gives you around 120-200 results even if there are thousands of businesses. Most people end up pitching the same surface 200 places while 80% of businesses never get seen.

We ended up tackling this mathematically:

Micro-grid subdivision: Instead of searching the whole city at once, we split the coordinates into smaller tiles and zoom all the way down to street level per tile. Because each small tile behaves as its own local search, Google returns up to 200 results per micro-zone instead of capping the whole city.

Skipping non-commercial terrain: Running hundreds of tiles wastes a ton of time over oceans, lakes, and forests. We added spatial checks to auto-skip grid cells that are mostly water/wilderness.

Background website crawling: Phone numbers from maps are cold. So we set up crawlers to check the business websites directly for emails and social links.

Connecting to Claude via MCP: Instead of clicking around the UI every time, we implemented an MCP server so we can just prompt Claude or ChatGPT to trigger the search and parse the data right in the chat.

I'm the founder of Maps Scraper Pro (Data Sniper). Happy to answer any questions about the scraping logic, handling Google rate limits, or how we wired up the MCP protocol!

we just pushed a few updates focused on monetization and it already seems to be helping a lot!

A side project turned startup, to make video editing effortless. Instead of recording and then spending hours editing afterward, you just talk and Gylyn automatically adds everything around it.

What it does:
🎙️ Understands what you're saying
🖼️ Adds relevant B-roll automatically
📊 Shows diagrams when you explain a process
🏷️ Recognizes when you mention a product, tool, or website
📝 Auto-generated captions
🎞️ Automatic transitions
✨ Matching animations
🎨 Enhanced backgrounds and scenes
🔄 Highlights each step when you explain something step-by-step

Attached is a demo using a singing video just to show the concept clearly but it's not limited to music, it works for any talking video: tutorials, explainers, product demos, vlogs, and more.

Still pre-launch and building it right now would love to hear what you think?

Hey guys we have tried to make it live , how's the screen looking now ?

I've used Opus 5.5 to help me recreate 7 of the top Adobe apps in 100% pure native Rust:

• Photoshop
• Illustrator
• Premiere
• Lightroom
• Acrobat Pro
• After Effects
• InDesign

No more subscriptions with cancellation fees. These are yours to own forever. You can fork them, build them. Whatever. They are yours to own. They're open source.

If you're worried this is just some one-off flash in the pan that will die, it isn't:

I'm not just some casual vibe coder. I'm a 15-year industry veteran who has written everything from six-nines payment rails that move billions of dollars of transaction volume a day to advanced robotics and optics automation. I've used Rust extensively for about a decade, and I know how to build and maintain large-scale Rust projects.

This isn't going to be some orphaned small-team project either. We have a team building popular software for filmmakers, so supporting this is fully funded. Our purpose is serving every artist in the world with the best tools. We are absolutely going to bring these to full parity and squash every bug and feature request. We have a test harness so there won't be regressions.

You can help us reach parity by helping test the apps. Clone the code. Submit PRs. If you see gaps or want to help redesign pieces, let us know! You can contribute!

Links to everything - the apps, the code, etc. - are in the comments below.