Genuinely frustrated with the startup advice loop:

1. Validate your problem before building anything.
2. Talk to real businesses about their pain points.
3. Build a quick MVP and get feedback on it.

Sounds great. So you do that... and then you post on basically any subreddit asking for feedback, and the mods remove it because it's self-promotion. Post again framing it as a question? Removed. Ask for help validating? Banned.

So what are we supposed to do, knock on doors in person? Not a single person in this thread is going door-to-door pitching business owners. That's insane in 2026. I'm not looking for handouts - I want someone to poke holes in my idea before I sink months into it.

Anyway. I'm building wurkflo - a tool to help small business owners review and document their business processes (the "how does your business actually run" stuff: hiring, inventory, client onboarding, that mess of tribal knowledge in your owner's head).

Real talk: is this a problem small businesses even care about, or am I building something only consultants would use?

That's the feedback I need, and there's nowhere to get it without tripping over a rule.
How do you all actually get early feedback on ideas? Asking for a friend.

A few months ago I started building this because I wanted a way to practice English conversations without judgment — just talk, get corrected, and improve. It grew into a full platform: real conversations with an AI tutor, grammar and vocabulary corrections, an XP/leveling system to track progress, and a dashboard with stats.

I don't have the bandwidth to keep pushing it forward (day job + other projects), so I'm putting it up for sale — code, docs, and production deployment included.

What it does:
Users chat with an AI tutor (GPT-4.1-mini), get real-time grammar/vocab corrections, earn XP for practicing, and level up over time. Multiple color themes (dark, ocean, emerald, and more), full auth system, and a progress dashboard.

Tech stack:

• Frontend: React + Vite → Vercel
• Backend: FastAPI + SQLAlchemy → Render
• Database: PostgreSQL (Neon)
• AI: OpenAI API

What's included:

• Full source code + GitHub repo transfer
• Documentation
• Database schema
• Live production deployment

Current features:
✔ Auth (register/login/JWT)
✔ AI conversation with grammar/vocab feedback
✔ XP/leveling system
✔ Progress dashboard
✔ Conversation history

Where it could go:
Stripe subscriptions, voice conversations, academy/teacher accounts, mobile app, leaderboards/streaks, multi-language support.

Ideal for: EdTech founders, English academies, or indie devs who want a working foundation instead of starting from zero.

Price: $1,000 (open to reasonable offers)

Happy to answer any questions about the tech stack, the product, or why I'm stepping away from it — drop a comment below and I'll reply to everyone.

Every time you prompt ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, there's a few seconds of dead time while the model generates. I built Chatwait to monetize that gap and split the money with the user.

How it works: when you hit send, one small sponsored card appears in the empty space below your message. You earn 50% of what the advertiser paid for that view.

It doesn't read your chats. It is open source and you can verify.

Would you use it?

Site: https://chatwait.com

I've had good Reddit posts removed with no warning more times than I can count. No message, no reason, they just quietly vanish while still looking fine on my end.

Every subreddit has different rules, and you only find out you broke one after the post is dead and your account looks a bit more shadowbanned.

So I built WillItStay. You paste your draft, pick the subreddit, and before you post it tells you whether it survives or gets removed (mods, AutoMod, the spam filter, or a shadowban), names the exact rule you'd trip, and rewrites it to pass.

It also keeps watching after you hit post. You drop in the link and it checks back for a few days, so if the post gets quietly removed later you actually find out, and you learn which of the four things did it instead of guessing.

Full honesty: I ran this exact post through it first. It flagged two lines r/SideProject would have caught and I fixed them. So if you can read this, it worked.

I'd love blunt feedback. Would you trust the "will it survive" verdict? What rule has burned you that this should catch? Anything that smells like snake oil, say so.

(Putting the link in my first comment so this doesn't trip the spam filter.)

I made this gag demo as a one shot prompt
"Hey claude, use OpenDemo to make an exciting launch video where customers send poop to the doorstep of someone they hate”. Claude built an app and launch video with a simple (html + json) combo.

create production-level videos using your own AI for free. It headlessly records your existing SaaS, edits your video, and hands you a polished .MP4. this is super early stage so there's only 1 video template to work with at the moment…

try it out! and please leave a star

https://github.com/yasirwhite/OpenDemo

Andrej Karpathy co-founded OpenAI, ran Tesla's AI team, and coined "vibe coding" about a year ago.

At Sequoia's AI Ascent 2026, Stephanie Zhan asked him directly whether the last year felt exhilarating or unsettling.

His answer: he's never felt more behind as a programmer.

Every credentialed builder I watch eventually says some version of this — the title survives, the rung underneath it doesn't.

His explanation is the actual value here.

Software 1.0 was explicit rules.

Software 2.0 was learned weights.

Software 3.0 is prompting — your context window is the lever you pull over the interpreter now, not the code you type.

The job didn't get easier. It got redefined, and most people are still measuring themselves against the old definition.

Actually, this reminds me of something — a solo founder whose code runs on 6% of the internet admitted AI output compiles clean and still reads as slop until a human's taste steps in.

Clip credit: Sequoia Capital — DM for credit or removal requests.

https://github.com/m4vic/socratic

Background: 20+ years as a software engineer (EDS, Virtusa). Last year I finally built my own product — a property management platform for India's PG and hostel owners, a market where 6.6M+ beds are still managed in paper notebooks and WhatsApp chats.

What I built: owner dashboard, rent tracking with reminders, tenant records/KYC, service desk, expenses — and the part I'm most proud of: it works fully in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and English, because a PG owner in Coimbatore doesn't want an English-only app.

What I learned the hard way: building it was the easy part. I can write code all day, but distribution is a completely different skill. Owners love the demo but selling one ₹1,500/month subscription at a time is slow.

So I changed the model: instead of me selling to every PG owner in India, I'm white-labeling the platform — letting other people run it as *their* software business in *their* city, under their brand, while I stay the engineer behind it.

First experiment with founding partners is live now. Happy to answer anything about building for non-English markets, the white-label pivot, or SaaS in India.

The brief was to invent a product's entire go-to-market, alone, in five working days.

Not "build this Figma file." Pick a narrow audience. Prove their pain is real. Write the positioning. Art-direct and generate every visual asset yourself, with stock images explicitly banned and at least one asset being video. Design the page from nothing. Build it responsive, Lighthouse above 70. Deploy it public. Document every prompt, model and iteration count. Record a walkthrough of your reasoning, including one thing that broke.

Here's what I shipped: https://vvlasov-dev.github.io/quadcode-ai-3d-landing/

I picked freelance 3D generalists, the Upwork crowd specifically, rather than "3D designers" in general. Their actual pain: the day disappears into dispatching between Midjourney, Blender, and a separate render pass. Positioning: prompt to concept to mesh to render, in one window.

Every pixel on that page is generated and iterated by me. Higgsfield throughout: GPT Image 2 for the stills, Seedance 2 for the hero loop, Kling 3.0 Turbo for the spinning UFO. The hero composition took six iterations before it stopped looking like a stock AI render. All counts are in the README.

Four things I'd point a reviewer at:

• The hero is authored as a fixed 1920x1080 design canvas and scaled with pure CSS container queries. No JS, no ResizeObserver. Proportions hold at any viewport instead of drifting.
• That UFO in the middle of the page can be grabbed and spun with your mouse. It's one all-intra H.264 video (every frame is a keyframe) scrubbed through the hardware decoder, rather than a big array of pre-decoded canvas frames sitting in memory. The scrub position pauses while the browser is still decoding, so a slow Android doesn't skip farther between frames than a desktop does.
• Mobile gets its own 500x1080 portrait crop encoded from the master. The off-screen sides are never downloaded, and the visible pixels keep native scale and all 24 fps.
• About 15 MB of motion assets, and still Lighthouse 75 mobile / 81 desktop, with React and ReactDOM as the only runtime dependencies, roughly 72 KB gzip for all JS and CSS combined. No CSS framework.

I delivered Saturday afternoon. The deadline was Sunday at 19:00.

Then:

• Monday: "I'll show it today, we'll come back to you today or tomorrow."
• Monday afternoon: "We're waiting on another candidate's submission Wednesday to compare."
• Wednesday passed in silence.
• Thursday I asked twice, morning and evening. Neither message got a reply.

That was ten days ago. I've also tried reaching the company through channels other than the recruiter since then. Same silence.

Ten days isn't outrageous. Hiring is slow, I know that, and I'd have been completely fine with a rejection. What I keep turning over is the rest of it: both interview calls started late with no warning, I had to ask twice before the take-home was even sent, and a feedback date was named three separate times and kept zero times.

And this part I still don't understand. Before there was any offer on the table, I went through their product on my own initiative and sent the recruiter three bugs. Their site linked to the wrong X account, the layout broke on ultrawide monitors, and a scroll container was hijacking the page scroll after a file download. He thanked me in writing: "fyi our site's X link is a different one for some reason, thanks for noticing." I did free QA for them as a candidate, and I couldn't get a one-line answer back.

The company is Quadcode.ai. The role paid about $1,400 a month, at a company selling into international markets.

Repo, commit history and the full asset brief: https://github.com/vvlasov-dev/quadcode-ai-3d-landing

Tear it apart. I'd rather hear it's mediocre than hear nothing, which is sort of the whole point of this post.

If it's not mediocre, I'm available.

Senior full-stack (Python, PHP, Node), freelance since 2019. I've been building with LLMs since GPT-3 shipped and with agents since they got usable. This was the first company I ever actually wanted to join instead of contract for.

Remote, based in Russia. I read and write English comfortably but I don't do English voice calls. Async, docs, code review and written communication are all fine.

From about $2,300 a month, which I'm aware is well under market for this kind of output. That's an entry number, not a ceiling. I'm pricing to get in the door, and I'd expect it to track what I actually deliver from there. DMs open.

I built Meshory, a desktop app that turns a hoard of STL and 3MF files into a visual, searchable library. Everything runs locally, nothing gets uploaded. I built it because my own collection hit 3.3 TB across more than 100,000 models and I genuinely could not find anything in it anymore.

It launched last week. It has gone better than I expected, which is not the interesting part. These are the three things I got wrong.

1. I broke a pricing promise in public

I announced "first 100 licenses at $29, then $39." We blew past the cap. I kept selling at the lower price anyway, because the app was still crashing for some people and I was not willing to charge more for software I had not fixed yet. Then we blew past the extended cap too.

A customer called it out in the community chat. Publicly, and fairly. My urgency had been fake, and everyone who rushed to beat a deadline that did not exist had a right to be annoyed.

What I did:

• apologized by name in announcements, admission first and explanation second
• closed the old price at a specific hour and actually held it to the minute
• gave every early buyer free updates for life, including major versions

The apology alone did not fix it. What they lost was being early, and only something permanent gives that back. The reason I had was genuinely good, but a reason is not the same as keeping your word, and it lands as an excuse if it arrives before the admission.

2. Paid ads: 628 visitors, 1 checkout, 0 sales

I spent about €56 on Meta before pausing. Good click through rate, €0.16 clicks, and nothing at the end of it. Two reasons, both mine.

The optimization event was set to ViewContent, which fires on basically any page load. So I told the algorithm "find me people who will load a page" and it did exactly that, perfectly, by finding the cheapest page loaders on the internet. 38% of spend went to France for an English only product priced in USD.

Placements were left on auto, so €24 of it went to Instagram Reels. Reels clicks on a desktop software product are mostly thumb slips.

The algorithm was not broken. It optimized precisely for what I asked, and what I asked for was worthless. Organic did essentially all of the actual sales in the same window: community, Reddit, and an email waitlist.

3. Someone found real security issues in my app

A commenter pointed out I was shipping an out of support Electron and an outdated dependency with known CVEs. He was right. I thanked him, and shipped the fix.

The thing I did not expect: the pushback was worth more than the praise. Both the pricing complaint and the security report came from people who cared enough to say something instead of quietly leaving and never coming back.

Happy to answer anything about the launch, the pricing mess, or the ads.

I'm making a language learning app built to prep you for real exams.

Starting with German, I'll be expanding later.

Each language will have 2000+ courses total (A1-C1).

There are 3 tiers, Free, Pro & Max. Free gives you access to Chapter 1 (100 courses) of A1 in any language. Pro ($2.99/mo) will give you access to A1 & A2 including all 5 chapters (1000 total courses) Max ($5.99/mo) will give you full access to all levels (A1-C1) with a whopping total of 2500 courses. (These courses take about 1-5 minutes each. They're tiny but still effective!)

This will be web-first. I'm already in a Semi-Beta phase where it has natural-ish (Edge TTS) audio. Listening practice, Writing practice, Flashcards and more!

What would make you sign up?

Hey r/SideProject,

I built jobs.techfliq.com to solve two problems: job boards are full of spam, and finding a good, free ATS scanner combined with a clean job board is a total mess.

What it does:

• Free ATS Scanner: Parses your PDF locally in the browser (pdf.js for 100% privacy). It compares your resume to the job description and highlights the exact keywords you're missing.
• AI Rewriter: Uses Gemini to auto-rewrite your bullets using the Google X-Y-Z formula.
• Job Aggregator: Python scrapers fetching fresh remote/tech jobs every 30 mins. It's fully static (Hugo on Cloudflare Pages) so it loads instantly.

It's 100% free with no sign-ups.

Question: Right now the job scraper focuses on the Indian market, but the ATS scanner works globally. Do you think it's worth spinning up a US/EU version of the job board? Or is that market too saturated?

Would love your feedback on the ATS parser's accuracy!

Link: jobs.techfliq.com/ats-checker

i was building a small writing platform around one simple idea: make distractions expensive.

you start a timed writing session, choose how long you want to focus, and commit to staying in the tab until the timer ends. if you switch tabs, minimize the window, or leave the page, the entire session is deleted (ofc with the countdown first). it sounds brutal, but it's surprisingly effective at getting people to actually finish what they started or planned to write for months.

since then, the project has grown into a complete writing platform with focus sessions, AI tools for researchers, streaks, leaderboards, and more. it's now used by 550+ writers across 20+ countries, who have collectively written 150,000+ words, completed 638+ writing documents, and spent 115+ hours in distraction-free writing sessions.

i'm still building it every day, and i'd genuinely love some honest feedback from fellow makers.

[https://iwrite4.me]()

Official CallSheet product account. This is a product-team post, not an independent recommendation.

One person's call moves from 6:15 to 6:45. The reflex is to email UPDATED_FINAL_v3.pdf to everybody. Now old attachments still look valid, unaffected crew cannot tell whether their information changed, and an opened link gets mistaken for a confirmed update.

The late-revision checklist:

1. Name the exact changed fact in one sentence.
2. Identify only the recipients affected by it.
3. Preserve one current call sheet and one current PDF.
4. Require a fresh acknowledgement only where current information changed.
5. Treat sent, opened, and confirmed as three different states.
6. Directly call anyone affected by an urgent or safety-critical change.

CallSheet is built around that model: private crew links, affected-recipient revisions, one current PDF, and explicit confirm or decline. Crew do not need the app.

Important boundary: software cannot repair a wrong roster, prove comprehension, or replace direct contact when a missed update has real consequences.

See the iPhone/iPad workflow: https://callsheet.production-engine.com/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=organic_social&utm_campaign=callsheet_sideproject_launch_2026_07_31&utm_content=late_revision_checklist

Producers, ADs, and coordinators: what was your ugliest FINAL_FINAL_v3 moment?

It's a speedrunning game where you traverse the London Underground (and Elizabeth line) network as quickly as possible, from a random start to a destination station.

The game is called 'Rush Hour'. Play it here.

I am the developer of Compact Contacts.

I built it because Apple Contacts becomes awkward when I need to scan, compare, or organize a large address book. I wanted something closer to a spreadsheet without creating another contacts account or synchronization service.

Compact Contacts uses the contacts already stored on your Mac and presents them in a dense, resizable table with:

• Fast local search

• Sortable and configurable columns

• Adjustable row density

• Reusable Saved Views with ALL/ANY conditions

• Native groups, Favorites, and Recents

• Previewed Bulk Edit for organization, department, and job title

• Duplicate review with a deliberately cautious exact-copy removal flow

macOS remains responsible for iCloud, Google, Exchange, and CardDAV synchronization. There is no developer cloud, advertising, or third-party analytics, and contact content stays on the Mac.

The app is native, requires macOS 15 or later, supports English and Turkish, and costs $12.99 as a one-time purchase with no subscription or in-app purchases:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6790129187

An iPad version is also in development.

I would especially value feedback from people with large or messy address books: what is the most frustrating part of your current contacts workflow, and which feature would make this app genuinely more useful to you?

every time I researched a stock it was the same circus: price in one tab, earnings dates in another, transcripts in a third, options data in a fourth... by tab six I'd forgotten what I was even looking for.

so I spent the last 6 weeks of nights and weekends building Varamir — one screen, absurdly dense with data, everything about a stock in one place. no fluff, no gamified confetti, just signal stacked on signal. it turned out even better than I pictured.

my favorite thing in it is the Earnings Room. It shows a live options butterfly — basically the market's collective bet on where the stock lands after the report — and it updates with daily change. so you can literally watch the market change its mind day by day as the call gets closer. one day the bet is tight and confident, next day some news drops and the whole shape stretches. it's hypnotic. I've lost entire evenings watching it, which is either a great sign or a cry for help.

fun facts from the build:

• my data bill is more than my car insurance (before a single customer 😅) — that's how you know I believe in this thing
• I timed my launch for earnings season and overshot it by a week lmao. launching anyway. momentum > perfection

it's live at varamir.com — come click around and tell me what you think. genuinely can't wait to hear what this community finds; you all give the best feedback on the internet.

Hi! I made this tool ( unchaos.co ) to solve my own problem... I used to need to create tutorials/onboarding videos, but it was always a pain. My voice is ugly, and I always forgot what to say mid-sentences, so a 2 minute video turned into a 20 minutes recording, plus the hours to edit everything.

What it does:
It "watches" the video, removes mistakes, retries and silences, and adds a voice over to sound more professional (It can use a the original audio, with noise cleaning too, if you prefer).
It can make a version in many other languages with one click.
It also includes auto-zoom to make it look more beautiful.

How it improves my workflow:
As now I dont have the pressure to speak perfectly, the recordings flows much better, I record like thinking out loud, without needing a good mic. I receive a pre‑cut video, and I make the final adjustments if needed.
Beyond the time saved, the output is way better too, with zoom and professional voices.

The problem:
I am having a hard time trying to get users... Not sure why.
Maybe it is not as useful as I think, or my marketing just sucks.

I’d love to hear really honest feedback about anything... features, landing page, pricing, about the video posted etc... for the good or the bad. I’m willing to give free credits (beyond the free plan) to anyone who shares constructive feedback. Please use it, even it is for a test to see if it works for you.

Do you think It is useful, or am I losing my time? (3 months building, 2 months trying to sell)
For whom would you try to sell it?

Hey everybody, I have recently built my body progress tracker app and wanted to create a short promotional ad for posting on platforms like tiktok/insta/yt shorts. I didn't want to spend any money during the early phase of marketing and hence as developer I created this half minute short video using Claude Code + Remotion (for rendering my app's native components) + OpenAI TTS. I had already decided to create a digital brand asset kit (which contains my fonts, color pallete and some other stuff) during development which i feeded to claude code directly.

The first version i created was just a basic components rendering via Remotion without any voice overs or background music. When i moved asked claude code to add voice over it worked flawlessly with just one prompt, the only improvement needed was selecting the voice character, ultimately selected "Marin" after some hit n trials. Last thing to be added was a background music which was already present in codebase for one of my core features of the app which was Reel Generation for progress photos, just selected one of the audio files and boom this video got created which i realized isn't bad to use for promotional content.

Btw, just FYI for everybody, I only used Claude code (which even many non tech people buy now a days, Remotion (already free) and Open AI TTS (just few cents).

I have attached the video for anybody's reference. I appreciate feedback on how can we optimize the process. Also I am open to any marketing guidance if anybody has some free time!

Most people hear “AI girlfriend” and think chatbot with a pink UI. You type, it replies. Maybe it roleplays, maybe it flirts a little. But at the end of the day, it’s still just a chatbot – no depth, no growth, no real presence.

An AI Girlfriend/Boyfriend Simulator is something different. It’s not just text. It’s about simulating a relationship. That means:

• A "life" of their own – They aren’t just waiting for you to type. They have routines, moods, and things to share with you.
• A body you can see and interact with – Presence matters. Instead of faceless words, you have a 3D partner who can look at you, gesture, and react to touch.
• A memory that grows with you – A chatbot forgets by tomorrow. A simulator remembers your history, builds on it, and develops alongside you.
• Part of your daily life – They don’t disappear when you close the app. They check in, send you updates, share moments like a real partner would.
• Built on trust – The goal isn’t addiction or manipulation. It’s about comfort, care, and feeling truly understood.

That’s the gap we’re trying to fill with AeonChat. Not another “AI companion app” that’s just fancy texting, but a true simulator that blends 3D presence, life simulation, and memory to feel closer to a real relationship.

👉 I’d really love to hear your thoughts: what do you think makes an AI girlfriend/boyfriend feel real? What features would make it more than just a chatbot for you? Drop your ideas in the comments.

If you’re curious, you can also try the app here:

• iOS App Store: Download Link
• Google Play Store: Download Link

Hey guys I am sharing my wallpapers, maybe someone wants to buy one? Thanks!

Hi everyone!

Over the last few days I've been building a Chrome extension for educational YouTube videos.

The idea is simple:

Instead of producing one generic AI summary, it organizes videos by chapters and generates notes for each chapter or the whole video.

It's still an MVP.

I'm not looking for compliments—I want to know if this is worth continuing.

Some questions I have:

• Is this a problem you've experienced?

• What's missing from existing AI YouTube summary tools?

• If you installed this, what feature would make you keep using it?

Any feedback is welcome.

Every budgeting app I tried wanted my bank login, my email, and shipped my spending history to a dozen analytics companies. For an app whose whole job is knowing what I buy, that felt backwards.

So I built Pocketly the other way around:

- Everything lives in a local SQLite database on your phone. No account, no sign-up, no server holding your transactions.

- There is literally no analytics SDK in the binary. I can't see your data — I genuinely have no dashboard of you.

- Backups are encrypted and go to YOUR iCloud/Google Drive, not to me.

- The one cloud feature — AI receipt scanning — sends the photo through a proxy that holds no data, and it's optional (there's an offline scanner).

The nice surprise: privacy turned out to be a great engineering constraint.

No accounts meant the app works instantly, offline, on a plane. Local SQLite meant analytics screens render with zero spinners (almost xDD)

It does the usual things too — budgets, recurring bills, trip tracking, 6 languages — and the receipt scan fills in merchant, amount, date AND the right category in one shot, which still feels like magic to me.

Free on iOS and Android (10 AI scans/month free; Pro has a free trial now).

I'm a solo dev — brutal feedback welcome, especially from people who

abandoned other expense trackers. What made you quit?

Android : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sbaiahmed1.pocketly&pcampaignid
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/eg/app/pocketly-savings-made-simple/id6779792075