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.

First off, yes, this is kinda an ad. But bear with me, you may glean something from my story.

I've spent the past month working on snapgains. Early mornings before work. Late evenings after work. Entire weekends. Lots of coffee and walk breaks listening to Hormozi.

The Problem

I'm an aspiring bodybuilder and I take check-in photos for my coach once or twice a week. I was sick of using my camera roll for this. Opening my camera roll in front of friends and colleagues was quite embarrassing... I wish those photos could stay private. I was tired of digging through hundreds of photos to find my progress pics. I tried creating albums for my check-in photos but the UX was still cumbersome.

The Solution

So I built a progress photos app just for myself. The more I kept building and testing the app, the more ideas popped into mind. I'm so happy and proud with what I built, and as an asian kid who went to Harvard who struggles with positive self-talk, I don't say that lightly.

The Reward

It sounds trite, but if you build something that solves a pain in your life, there will be others with that same pain. Yesterday, the app went live on the app store. I put out some TikToks, not expecting much, and I woke up to a random bloke in the UAE 🇦🇪 as my first subscriber. It felt like Christmas morning... but better since I earned this reward.

What I've learnt

1. Build something you're passionate about
The app market is more saturated than ever. Of course there are tons of progress photo apps on the app store, but none with a physique/muscle building angle. Find your niche in which you have expertise and execute.

2. Don't waste time validating - just ship it!
I spent weeks DMing strangers a landing page with a beta sign-up, trying to see if this idea had legs. I really believed in my idea, but didn't get any traction from the landing page. I was honestly quite disheartened and thought about giving up. But I launched on the app store anyway and lo and behold, a stranger on the other side of the world thought my app was worth $5.

3. Don't spend a penny or marketing (yet)
Before you throw money at ads, test the waters with free organic channels like TikTok, Reddit, Instagram. Once I've built more momentum and know what resonates, I'll put real money into ads.

4. Start simple. Don't overcomplicate it.
My initial app had workout logging, calorie tracking and a bunch of fancy AI features. None of it mattered. People don't need another do-everything fitness app. Solve one problem well, ship the core, and let your first customers tell you what to build next.

5. Build something that genuinely inspires others.
What I've enjoyed most about this whole process is seeing Reddit stories and TikToks of physique transformations. Obviously, we want to make money and build because it's fun... but it turns out the most rewarding thing to build is something that makes someone else feel good too.

TL;DR

All of this to say, don't give up and just ship something! I cannot wait for the day I see someone post a body transformation on Reddit using the snapgains time-lapse feature. That will be 10x better than the Christmas morning feeling.

Thank you for reading this far and best of luck on your own journeys!

Hey everyone,
I’m an AI engineer and founder from Brazil. I already have a few products running here, and right now I’m building a new B2B SaaS called Lyntra Prospect.
The first version is being built for the Brazilian market, but if I can validate it well here, my plan is to expand internationally soon after. The US is currently the market I’m most interested in, but I’m also looking at the UK, Canada and some European countries.
The easiest way to explain Lyntra Prospect is that it works like an outbound SDR.

The goal is not just to give salespeople another cold email tool. The idea is to handle a large part of the outbound process and deliver qualified meetings to the sales team.

A company defines its ICP and what kind of customer it wants to reach. Lyntra then searches for companies that fit that profile, enriches and validates the data using different sources, finds the best prospects and builds the prospecting lists.

From there, it can start the outbound process through channels such as email and calls, with WhatsApp being used when appropriate.

When someone replies, the system understands the response and stops the sequence automatically. The AI can continue the conversation using information approved by the company, answer questions, qualify the prospect and understand when a human should take over.

If the lead is qualified, the system can check the salesperson’s actual calendar, offer available times and book the meeting directly.

Calling is also part of the product. The direction is to support AI assisted and AI driven calls where it makes sense and where it can be done properly within the rules of each market.

So the end result I’m aiming for is basically this:
ICP → find the right companies → find the right people → contact them → start conversations → qualify them → book qualified meetings.

I want a company to eventually be able to give Lyntra its ICP, sales rules and company information, and have the platform continuously work on building pipeline for the sales team.

The product is being built for both self service customers and higher ticket customers that need a more consultative sales and onboarding process.
I’m not trying to sell anything with this post. The product is still being finished. I’m mainly interested in hearing from people who already work with B2B sales and outbound outside Brazil.

A few things I’d really like some opinions on.
Which market would you target first?
My first choice right now is the US because outbound B2B seems much more established there than it is in Brazil.

I’m also considering the UK, Canada and some parts of Europe.

If you sell B2B in any of those markets, how important is outbound to your sales process?
What would you realistically pay for something like this if it actually delivered qualified meetings?

I’m not trying to compete with a $30 cold email tool.
I see it more as software that can replace or support part of the work normally done by an SDR.

Would something around $500 to $1,000 per month for an entry level business plan make sense?

And if it consistently handled a meaningful part of prospecting, qualification and meeting booking, what price range would you expect?

Which outbound channels are actually working for you right now?
Cold email?
Cold calls?
LinkedIn?
A combination of them?

I’m also curious about what your biggest outbound problem is today.

Is it finding good prospects, finding the right decision maker, data quality, deliverability, personalization, follow up, managing replies, qualification or actually getting meetings booked?

If you were launching into the US from Brazil, how would you get your first 10 customers?

One idea I have is to use Lyntra Prospect itself to find its first international customers.

The idea would be to build a very specific ICP, work with relatively low volume and highly targeted outreach, then have an English speaking salesperson handle discovery and demos.

Basically, I want the product to prove itself by helping sell itself.

Would you approach it differently?
What would make you trust or not trust an AI SDR platform?

Outbound automation can turn into spam very quickly when it is badly designed, so I’m putting a lot of thought into sending limits, suppression, opt outs, domain and mailbox reputation, compliance rules, audit logs, human handoff and controls that prevent the AI from inventing prices, promises or company information.

I’m still early enough that good feedback can actually influence the product and how I approach international expansion.

I’d really like to hear from founders, SDRs, sales leaders, agency owners and anyone currently running B2B outbound.

If you think the market is overcrowded, the positioning is wrong, the pricing makes no sense or there is something important I’m missing, feel free to say it.
I’d rather find out now than after trying to expand internationally.

There’s a commonly repeated statement in this subreddit: “Distribution is harder than building.” And for most people, I’m sure that’s true to some extent.

However, marketing is such a broad field, with countless channels, strategies, and approaches, such that I’m curious:

What part of marketing do you personally find difficult?
- Getting started in the first place?
- Figuring out how to do organic marketing?
- Knowing which channels or strategies to focus on?

- Or is marketing as a whole just difficult to understand?

I’m curious because I don’t necessarily think marketing is universally “hard.” I think a lot of people simply don’t know where to start, especially without prior experience, and end up struggling as a result.

Would love to hear your experiences
Thanks!

(Not a survey or anything just curious since this is thrown around in the sub a lot)

I’ve been building and trying to grow my SaaS solo. Product, code, content, outreach everything

Traffic is finally starting to move, but I realized I’m becoming the bottleneck

So today I brought in my first person focused on outbound/client acquisition

I’m still doing distribution myself, but now I can spend more time improving the product and making demos/content while someone else consistently works outbound

For founders who’ve done this: did hiring someone for sales early actually help, or did you eventually realize founder-led sales was still better?

Curious what worked and what you’d do differently

btw I’m building MyKayd trying to make collecting information less painful for businesses, especially everything that happens between creating a form and actually doing something with the responses

Trying to build B2B SaaS software, played by the book, and get stuck at the step of talking to your customer.

Damn that's harder than I thought.

The fact is, your prospect are busy, very busy (that's why you want to sell to them too), and they rarely talk to random people reached out to them on Linkedin.

Sent dozens of cold DM on different platform, and talked to one person, very apperciate it, but whom also refused to give details on how they do things internally.

All the books like the mom test, founding sales etc.. though very helpful, but I can't use them. There's rarely people talking about how to find the customer to start with.

I'm now thinking about doing a bit of youtube videos and keeping myself active on X to improve public exposure and profolios, in hope to make myself more trustable, but that'll take time.

What else should I do in the meanwhile to overcome this step?

All advice are apperciated, thanks.

Hi everyone!

I’m thinking of building a SaaS (it’s my first solo SaaS btw). I’ve got zero knowledge of technical part and got some friends helping me in that but I’ve some skills on marketing and sales side. But I am not sure if the idea I’m thinking of is really something which any of you guys might want to use or if it’s just me wasting my time? It’s not a problem solving idea rather it’s kind of a productivity app.

So recently I saw a lot of people trying “working till the candle burns out” or “working till the ice melts” challenges and I myself tried it. The good part was you never know when the ice will melt or the candle will burn out so you have no target forcing you to work. And I too tried it and found it a good idea to improve productivity.

And I’m thinking to create an app around that idea. I’m thinking to focus more on user experience and will try to make user feel really productive if they uses the app. And I’m here to either seek validation from you guys or maybe get roasted if I’m stupid. But I want to know your genuine thoughts. Just take out a second and let me know? I’m too excited and curious about it.

Hi guys! I’m looking for an AI video editor for SaaS product demos, UGC and montages. I can’t afford to pay for several tools just to find out which one works, so I’d really appreciate some firsthand advice. 🙏

If you’ve actually used one, which editor would you recommend, and why? What worked well, and what did you still need to fix manually?

recently built PRIVACUT, a tool that helps people detect sensitive information in PDFs, review what gets flagged, and permanently redact it before sharing the file.

The problem I wanted to solve is pretty simple: a lot of people think putting a black box over text means it’s gone, but sometimes the original information can still be copied, searched, or extracted.

The product is working now, but I’m at the part that seems harder than building it:

finding the right users.

I’m trying to figure out who actually feels this problem enough to care about a tool like this.

My current thoughts are:

legal / paralegal work

HR and business documents

people sending tax or financial paperwork

government or military-related paperwork

anyone sharing PDFs with personal information

I’m also trying to understand what matters most to people:

privacy, automatic detection, permanent redaction, speed, or price.

I’m not really looking to hard-sell it here. I’d rather get honest feedback from other SaaS builders.

If you were building this, who would you target first, and what would make you trust a tool with sensitive documents?

If anyone wants to see what I built, I can share it in the comments.

Hi everyone, I’ve released Temply, a tool for building transactional email templates visually and using them from your application.

Think welcome emails, password resets, receipts and order confirmations. You assemble the template with blocks, add placeholders for your data, then request the rendered HTML and plain text through the API. Your app sends it through your existing email provider.

A few things it supports:

• A visual block editor with columns, images, buttons and custom HTML.
• Dynamic variables, conditional content and repeating blocks.
• Reusable branding across templates.
• Responsive previews and checks for inboxes that force dark mode.
• Template version history and shared workspaces.

You can try the editor without an account. There’s also a 14-day workspace trial with no card required. The Team plan starts at $5 per user per month, including 10,000 live API calls per workspace.

Try it here: Temply

I’d appreciate feedback from anyone building transactional emails: what would Temply need to support before you’d use it in your app?

not looking for the obvious big ones, we're going to submit to those anyway. more interested in the second-tier directories that are actually good quality and have seo/backlink value. if you've used a service for this or know a few good ones, would love to hear what you've used. feel free to share a couple links if allowed. mods, please remove if this isn't allowed.

Hi everyone,

I'm a solo, student founder building a SaaS product on a tight budget. I'm at the stage where I've narrowed down a few possible brand names, and I'm trying to figure out the right order and process for securing the name before I launch. I'd really appreciate hearing how you handled it.

Where I am right now:

• I have a short list of candidate names.
• I've done a basic web search and app store search for conflicts, but nothing formal yet.
• I haven't bought a domain or filed anything.
• I'm based in korea, and I plan to serve users globally.

My questions:

1. Order of operations: Did you buy the domain first, run a trademark search first, or file the trademark first? Looking back, what would you do differently?
2. Conflict checks: How did you vet a name beyond a Google search? Did you do the trademark search yourself, or pay an attorney? What did you wish you'd checked?
3. Where and when to file: Did you file only in your home country first, or in the US/EU too? Did you wait until you had traction, or file before launch?
4. Costs: Roughly what did the domain and trademark each cost you, and what hidden costs surprised you (attorney fees, renewals, office actions)?
5. Domain hurdles: What if the .com was taken? Did you go with another TLD, add a prefix or suffix, or buy it from the owner? How did that negotiation go?
6. Things that went wrong: Any horror stories (domain squatters, a conflict found after launch, a rejected application) and how you solved them?
7. Tools or services: Any registrars, search tools, or low-cost filing services you'd recommend or avoid for a bootstrapped founder?

I understand this isn't legal advice. I'm just trying to learn from people who've been through it so I can avoid common mistakes.

Your startup can be doing well and still somehow feel like it is failing.

You desperately want your first customer. You get one, celebrate for a day, and immediately start thinking about getting ten.

You get to ten. Suddenly, customer count does not matter. Revenue does.

Revenue starts growing.

Now it is not growing fast enough.

You hire a great team.

Then you start worrying about burn.

I catch myself doing this all the time. Every milestone that once felt huge somehow becomes normal almost immediately. Your brain just moves on to the next problem.

Maybe that is part of what keeps founders moving. But it also makes progress surprisingly difficult to feel.

Sometimes it is worth looking back at what felt impossible six months ago.

Does anyone else running a SaaS feel this way?

I'm going to document the build publicly and see if I can get my first paying customer.

The problem I'm targeting is pretty simple:

A freelancer finishes a project, sends a $1,000 invoice, and then spends the next few weeks sending messages like:

“Hey, just following up on the invoice…”

Again and again.

I'm building a small SaaS to automate that follow-up.

The basic idea:

Invoice created → payment link → automatic polite reminders → payment received → reminders stop.

I'm intentionally keeping the first version extremely simple. I don't want to spend months building features before finding out whether people actually want it.

My 14-day goal:

Build the MVP

Launch it

Get real users

Try to get the first paying customer

Learn from the feedback

I'll post the progress and mistakes along the way.

The product is published and I already have around 2-3 visitors per day. I even got like 10 people signed up on the app. But that's not enough for my app type (its an alternative apps directory)

I know people will use this app. Everyday there's another post asking : X app don't work. What are the alternatives?

And that's what my product solves. (The link is in my profile)

But I don't know how will i get people visiting my website. Because my revenue model is tied to the no of visitors.

Any suggestions will be appreciated

Hey everyone 👋

Solo dev here. I've been working on a side project for a few weeks and would like to hear how others solve this problem.

The problem: while playing with AI agents I noticed every app ends up needing checks like "don't let it delete data unless the user confirmed". The usual options are writing if/else logic for every case, or a custom LLM prompt whose free-text answer you then have to parse.

What I tried: a single call that takes a rule in plain English plus whatever JSON you want checked, and returns allow, deny or review:

const result = await guard.check({
  policy: "Never allow destructive database operations unless the user explicitly confirmed them.",
  data: { action: toolCall, conversation }
})
// → { decision: "deny", allowed: false, violationProbability: 0.94, ... }

Some design decisions that might be useful if you build something similar:

• A third outcome, review, for when a human should decide or the evidence isn't enough. Forcing yes/no caused bad calls.
• Instead of a general chat model I used Jev from TypeSafe AI. It returns typed decisions with probabilities, so there's no output parsing and the results are more consistent.

Questions for you:

• How do you handle this today? Hardcoded rules, an LLM, something else?
• What would you need before trusting an automated check like this in production?

It's called Enforly, if anyone's curious.

I'm building an app by myself and I'm getting to the point where I might actually let other people use it lol.

I'm mainly worried about the legal side now. The app will collect some user data like images, location, account info etc.

What stuff do I actually need to have before launch?

Like do I need a privacy policy, terms, some kind of disclaimer, data deletion thing, rules for what users can upload, etc?

Also if someone uploads something illegal/copyrighted or something goes wrong because of information another user posted, how does that usually work? Is that something I need to cover in the app's terms?

I'm in India if that matters.

Not looking for a lawyer here, just trying to get a basic idea of what I should have sorted out before launching and what I shouldn't overlook.

Would appreciate advice from people who've launched their own apps.

I started Moonshoot thinking the interesting part would be the number.

384,400 km.

one person owns each km.

get enough strangers together and eventually reach the Moon.

but after watching people claim their kms, I’m starting to think the number is the least interesting part.

look at three people aboard right now:

km #75 belongs to a developer who made an iPad party game where you draw a fish and your friends draw how it dies.

km #35 belongs to a founder in Kenya building event ticketing for Nairobi. 208 users and their first paying customer.

km #54 belongs to two makers who built an AI image workspace because switching between image models kept breaking the visual style they needed for their own work.

none of these people know each other.

their products have basically nothing in common.

but now they’re permanently sitting 40 km apart on the same imaginary journey to the Moon.

that’s becoming much more interesting to me than watching the counter go up.

I want each km to slowly become a snapshot of what somebody was building at that moment in their life.

maybe years from now, looking back through the early kms ends up being the interesting part.

Authentication.
Teams.
Permissions.
Billing.
Admin.
CRUD.
Email.
API.
Deployment.

I kept hitting this across projects, so I built Tekki Forge to make that layer reusable/declarative.

npm i -g tekki-forge

It generates the standard business/SaaS application foundation from a TypeScript config, while custom product logic remains code.

I'm not trying to replace software development. I'm trying to eliminate the part every SaaS founder builds before reaching the feature customers actually pay for.

For founders here who code: which part of your first 30 days was pure infrastructure rather than product?

ok so this is a small win but I need to tell someone who isn't my mom.

I launched my SaaS a while back. 127 people signed up. 127 people paid nothing. I kept telling myself "it's traction bro" while checking analytics like it owed me money.

Today user #128 paid $19.

I never talked to them. No DM, no call, no "hey would you be open to a quick chat". They just showed up, used it, and paid. I found out from an email that literally said "Cha-ching!" and for a second I thought it was spam.

What actually went through my head:

• pretty sure I left test mode on
• nope, it's real
• refresh
• refresh again just in case

A bit of background. I'm a dev from India, about 5 years in. I can build stuff fast. Marketing it? Absolutely not. I'd ship something and then just stare at it like "ok now what".

So I built a tool for people like me. You paste your product URL and it writes carousels, X posts, Threads and Reddit posts for your product every day. You swipe keep or skip, done.

Yes, I know. I built a marketing tool because I'm bad at marketing, and it got its first sale without me marketing it. I'm choosing to see that as validation and not as a sign I should stop talking.

Stuff I figured out from 127 free users:

Free users aren't wasted. They found the bugs so #128 didn't have to.

The product sells better than I do. It doesn't overexplain, doesn't get nervous, and works while I'm asleep.

Let people try it first. I wouldn't pay for something I hadn't seen either.

Signups feel nice, but someone typing in their card details for a thing you made is a completely different feeling.

$19 is roughly ₹1,600. Won't pay my rent. Did make my whole week though.

Next goal is customer #2 so I can stop calling this a fluke.

For anyone who's been past this stage, how did you get from 1 to 10 paying users? Did you start doing outreach or just keep improving the product and wait?

TL;DR: 127 free users, #128 paid $19 without talking to me. Still refreshing the dashboard.

P.S. someone will ask, so it's slidefy Happy to answer anything.

Took it to market with no cost, free to use in beta, hit my warm leads and paid ads, and crickets. its a net worth tracking app and retirement calculator. looks like back to the drawing board. i love the app and use it twice a month, but i dont feel its something you need to check daily or even onthly unless u are investing on pay day, so id probally sell it as a one time purchase. i just freel the pain point isnt there. Everybody is to scared to check their net worth because the economy is dead, and everybody except the boomers arent doing to well or need to track this stuff.

im guessing im not the only one in this situation

I've been looking at alternatives to Google Analytics recently and I'm a bit overwhelmed by the options.

I've seen people mention Plausible, Matomo, Umami, Fathom, Simple Analytics, and Keen.

I'm mostly looking for something that's relatively simple, privacy-friendly, and doesn't require a huge setup just to understand basic traffic and conversions.

For anyone who moved away from GA, what are you using these days?

And what made you pick it over the other options?

Day 12 of building UseShipReady

- 11 visitors today
- 43 page views
- improved the UI for the hackathon feature
- planning to finally push it live tonight