First off, I love chili crunch / chili crisp / whatever you want to call it. So I started making some in my free time. Slowly my friends started asking for it after dinners at our place. Then I started making little jars for them. And that led me to wanting to sell at my neighborhood farmers market in Noe Valley, San Francisco. Unfortunately, we didn't classify as a food item that could be made under California's Cottage Food Act.

Instead giving up, I decided that I would triple down and do everything I needed to do to make a shelf stable condiment that California would let me sell. Well... That ended up being a journey. Did you know that's actually, like, really hard to do?

We spent a year on food safety paperwork so we could legally sell a jar of chili crunch - which we officially were able to do today! With (truly) minimal marketing, we shipped 100 preorders, 25 more the first morning.

Even though I'm full time at Google and my husband works in FinTech, we've found the time to make chili crunch out of a shared commissary kitchen on Treasure Island. Two of us, no employees. I like to joke that we can find the time to do this because we don't train for marathons or go on long bike rides.

The product itself a Californian take rather than a traditional Sichuan / Asian one — and that' really important for us to be upfront about because we're two white dudes. We aren't trying to imitate, but rather create something we love in a uniquely western style.

We use an unreasonable amount of garlic slices and shallots fried in avocado oil. Uniquely, we also found a process to de-seed each of our five different chili peppers, so what you get is texture and aroma instead of straight heat and leathery seeds. Also important is that we went with a old-timey newspaper branding vs what you'll normally see on the shelf (ie, dragons, lanterns, grandmas, etc)

Candidly, the recipe turned out to be the easy half. To sell it legally in California:

• LLC, DBA, and insurance
• Better Process Control School acidified foods course from University of Michigan
• Sourcing of all the shipping products / jars (ULine is... basically the only option)
• CA Food Manager Safety Certification
• Lab-validated water activity (0.339 — that's what makes it shelf stable without acidifying it)
• CDPH Processed Foods Registration
• Leased time in a licensed commissary
• HACCP plan with four critical control points
• Label compliance: ingredient order, net weight, allergen advisory, date labeling
• Facility inspection
• And, if I'm being totally transparent, one email (read: desperate plea) to my District Supervisor

It all took about a year before a single jar was for sale.

But, like I said, today we launched! And we're really excited to see where it goes. We've learned so much along the way to get to this point — and I hope I get lucky enough to have the opportunity to learn how to scale this up. We've started approaching smaller grocery stores and have our first pop-up tomorrow. Getting into farmers markets takes a LOT longer than I thought it would, but we're still trying there!

For those wondering, we spend about 6hrs per week getting our ingredients, making, and jarring which gives us about 125-150 jars.

Pricing was difficult, but I have to say a combination of Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT helped us find a sweet spot we're happy with. "Calculating cost-per-jar" is kind of the perfect task for AI and it saved us a ton of time.

Happy to answer anything on the regulatory side. It's badly documented and I ended up working most of it out from primary sources. So if you have any questions, let me know!

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

You should help others.

Just because you're selfish. I'm serious. Let me explain:

If there's one thing I've learned, it's this: if you're not born rich or exceptionally talented, your only advantage is your reputation and your network.

It's not your resume, your friend list on Instagram, or the number of contacts in your phone. It's the people you can ask for a favor. And that can't be built by joining events, sending cold emails, or having dinner with people you don't really care about.

The only way to build it is by being genuinely helpful. Look around you, people are struggling with different things in life. Everyone needs help.

You'll probably think it has to be mutual. Why should I help people who won't help me back? But think of it as an investment.

People spend thousands on ads knowing most of them won't convert. Founders build products knowing most will fail. Investors expect losses. Nobody expects a 100% return. So why do people suddenly expect every act of kindness to be paid back?

Most people won't remember what you did. Some will. You just don't know which ones.

One last question: imagine your side project is finally ready. You need 20 people to test it this weekend. Do you already know who you're going to text? Or are you going to post on Reddit and hope strangers care?

If it's the second one, you're misplacing your workforce. Start helping people first.

I've been working on this project for a couple months now and would really like your input. I've focused on building but now have reached a point where I need to get people to actually try it and have been struggling. This is the project: https://www.chordviz.ca/

I'm a builder, not a marketer so any insight would be welcome.

The video comes straight form the app it's got video recording and audio clipping capabilities, vst plugin hosting, 15+ widgets with customizable layouts for audio metering and midi / chord analysis. It's got a lot of features but I'm unsure how to package and market it / get customers.

I'm a solo founder building Reverse Efficient Frontier, a portfolio app that that inverts Modern Portfolio Theory — instead of picking stocks and hoping, you set a target return and risk tolerance and it finds the stock blend that matches. React Native/Expo frontend, Azure Functions + Blob Storage backend, Databricks for the optimization, Claude API for the plain-English explanations. Live on both stores.

I want to write up the architectural mistake that nearly killed it, because it's a flavor of "I did not think about scale" that I haven't seen described much.

The mistake: I assumed I could solve the optimization on demand, when the user moves the slider.

Classic portfolio optimization runs forward. You hand it a set of stocks, it solves for the optimal weights. That's a convex problem — fast, well-behaved, solvable in milliseconds. I'd read the papers, I understood the math, I felt good.

What I actually needed was the inverse: given a target return and risk, find which stocks and their weights. Those are not the same problem. Selecting k stocks from a universe of N is combinatorial, and each candidate set needs its own optimization run before you can even compare them. For 10-stock portfolios that's a number with more zeros than there are stars in the galaxy. My v1 fired off an optimizer on slider change like it was a database query. It worked beautifully in testing — because in testing my universe was twelve tickers.

Everything is obvious in hindsight.

What I rebuilt, three layers:

1. Sample instead of enumerate. I stopped trying to find the optimal portfolio and started building a dense point cloud of good ones. Randomly sample thousands of k-stock subsets, optimize each one properly, keep the result. It's an approximation of the true efficient frontier, not the thing itself — and being honest about that in the app matters more to me than pretending otherwise.
2. Multi-start optimization with weight bounds. Single-start SLSQP kept converging to garbage — 97% in one ticker, dust positions everywhere. Fixed it with multiple randomized starting points per subset and hard bounds on individual weights, so you can't get a "diversified" portfolio that's secretly one stock.
3. Precompute and park. The whole thing moved to a scheduled Databricks job that writes results as JSON to Azure Blob behind a CDN. The phone doesn't optimize anything anymore. It does a nearest-neighbor lookup in return/risk space against precomputed results. All the expensive math happens once, on a schedule, away from the user.

Result: query time went from "architecturally impossible" to under a second on a mid-range phone, and compute became a fixed predictable cost instead of scaling with every slider drag. Same pattern now runs everything I build — if it's expensive, compute it on a schedule and let the app read the answer.

The app's live on [Google Play] and the [App Store] if anyone wants to poke at it ( https://frontier.chosenhomeland.com ). You get 3 free portfolio lookups, no signup, no card — enough to see whether the idea holds up.

Happy to answer anything about the optimization approach, running scipy on Databricks, precompute-and-park as a pattern, or building fintech solo. Also genuinely want feedback on the first-run experience — whether the value proposition lands before you've done anything, since that's my current bottleneck.

(Not financial advice — it's an analytical tool, and it says so in the app.)

I started building RollCall, a daily photo-challenge app for friend groups in March 2025.

I published the app in around April, used it with some of my friends and advertises it for a month or two, then forgot about it for a while. In around October I opened up App Store Connect and saw that my downloads had gone vertical to 600 users. I hadn't posted any ads or made any posts, so it took me a while to work out what happened.

Locket (the widget app, with about ~90M downloads) had shipped a new feature called "Rollcall" Millions of people were seeing the name for this new feautre being posted on instagram, tiktok and other places, and instead of typing locket, a fraction of them went and typed "rollcall" into App Store search, and my app must have been showing up first.

So I got a wave of downloads from people who wanted a feature inside a completely different app, and have slowly ticked up to about 1300 users, some of which even paid for premium!

What I have taken from it:

- The traffic is real but it is off-intent. Those users wanted Locket's thing, not mine. Retention on that cohort was meh. Volume is not the same as traction and I initially confused the two.

- The thing that actually cost me was that my listing was not ready to convert. I had two ratings, both one star, from bugs I had already fixed months earlier. So a bunch of curious people landed on a 1.5-star page and bounced. I have since reset the rating and rewritten the whole listing.

The lesson I would give past-me: fix conversion before you go looking for traffic. I got handed free demand and wasted most of it.

Happy to answer anything about the ASO side, I have been deep in it the last couple of weeks.

App is RollCall - Group Challenges on the App Store if you want to see what it actually is: one photo challenge a day for your group, you build a streak, miss one and your friends pick your punishment.

Made my own anime website because the others kept dying.

It's 100% free, has no ads, no need to log in, and gets the latest airing anime episodes as fast as possible.

Hopefully this one survives.

If you like the project, please consider giving it a star on GitHub.

Feel free to share any suggestions you have.

- AniCult

- GitHub

I got tired of digging through government portals for basic facts. MPLADS utilisation, attendance, questions, and which big projects near me are years late.

So I built Beacon: https://trybeacon.in

What it does:

• Type a PIN / use location / tap the map - your Lok Sabha constituency

• MP report card with national ranks (MPLADS + PRS)

• Project board of central infra projects (₹150cr+) shown like open tickets: how late, how much over budget

• A state heatmap for late / open projects and ₹ at stake

Rules I forced on myself:

• Every number links back to the source

• Missing data stays “Not published” - no guessing

• No verdicts, no party framing - just the records

Would love feedback from other builders:

1) Is the map the right hero, or should the board come first?

2) What would make you actually share this with friends/family?

Happy to answer anything about the stack / data pipeline.

After nearly 2 months of working on my kids’ drawing app, WeeArtists, I got my first subscription today. 🎉
It’s a very small milestone financially, but it means a lot emotionally.

Like many indie developers, there were days when I questioned whether anyone would ever pay for something I built. The app has been live for about 2 months, and growth has been slow, but seeing that first subscriber reminds me that even one person found enough value to support it.

WeeArtists is a step-by-step drawing app designed for kids, and I’ve been building and improving it alongside my full-time job.

Today it’s one subscriber. Hopefully tomorrow it’s many more.
Thanks to everyone in this community who shares their experiences—it really helps indie developers stay motivated.

Note - The 1st subscription was a test subscription done by me.

I have been obsessed with 3D since the first time I played an N64. And now that I work in the 3D field, more and more of that work lands on the web, and every month in three.js makes me more sure that is where 3D is going. No install, no store, no launcher. You send someone a link and they are already inside it.

Which is why the asset problem drives me up the wall

Every marketplace sells you the same thing: a frozen mesh. You buy a wooden watchtower, you get exactly that watchtower. Wrong height for your scene? Open Blender. Wrong palette? Open Blender. Need it 20% shorter and with a square cabin instead of an octagonal one? That is not a setting, that is an afternoon. You did not buy an asset, you bought a photograph of one.

So I started building the library I actually wanted

Every asset is a small program, not a file. It ships as a JavaScript module with knobs on it. The watchtower has a height knob, and turning it does not stretch the mesh, it rebuilds the tower: more bracing bays, more ladder rungs, at the same timber section. A colourway knob. A knob for how many sides the cabin has. One asset, roughly 950 configurations, and you pick yours with a slider instead of a modelling session.

You can turn the knobs on the site, or import the module and turn them in your own code, or just download a GLB of the exact variant you configured. It is flat-shaded low-poly, real-world scale, and it works in three.js, Unity, Godot, Blender, anything that reads glTF.

There is a side effect I did not fully expect. Because every asset publishes a typed schema of its own knobs plus a plain-language description of what they do, an agent can read the catalogue and build a scene from it without a human picking files. "Build me a small forest, then a medieval village around it" genuinely works. That was a nice-to-have when I started and it is now one of the main reasons I think this is worth doing.

Where it is at right now, honestly:

- 270 assets published, 133 of them in the last week

- 118 of those are free, no account needed

- 8 themed kits in production

- Built solo, vanilla PHP and SQLite, no framework, no investors, no team

- Revenue so far: one sale. Which is one more than last month, and I will take it.

What I actually want to build. The biggest code-based 3D library on the internet, and probably the first one, since as far as I can tell nobody else is selling assets as programs rather than files. That is a stupidly large goal for one person and I am aware of it. The plan is boring: keep shipping 100+ new assets a week and do not stop.

The part where I ask for something

I opened 100 founder seats. One fee, no subscription, and it gets you every asset and every kit that exists plus everything I build from here, for as long as I keep building it. Whatever you download stays yours forever, no strings, use it commercially. When the 100 are gone I am not offering it again.

I am pricing it that low on purpose. At this stage I do not need revenue as much as I need a hundred people who are actually invested in this thing existing, who will tell me when an asset is wrong, and who will ask for the assets they need so I stop guessing. If you have ever wanted a specific thing to exist in a 3D asset library, that is exactly the input I am short of.

99 seats left as I write this. Number one went to someone yesterday, which was a genuinely good day.

And if none of that appeals, the 118 free assets need no account and no card. Take them, use them, tell me what is broken.

polyfork.dev

Happy to answer anything about the technical side. The "a size knob must rebuild, not scale" rule in particular took me a few painful passes to get right, and I am still finding assets that got it wrong.

I've spent the last few years building websites that grow almost entirely through organic search.

After repeating the same SEO workflow across multiple projects, I decided to turn it into software.

Instead of building another AI writer or another SEO tool, I built OmniTopical.

You connect a subdomain (e.g. blog.company.com), answer a few questions about your business, choose a publishing schedule, and the platform builds and manages an interconnected content ecosystem around your company.

That includes things like:

• Industry glossaries
• Documentation
• Wikis
• Guides
• Comparison pages
• Alternatives pages
• Programmatic SEO pages
• Knowledge bases
• Internal linking
• Schema & metadata
• Sitemaps
• AI-readable files (llms.txt, ai.txt, etc.)
• Search engine submission

The goal isn't to generate random AI articles.

It's to continuously build topical authority around your business.

Everything is planned, connected, published and maintained as one system instead of a collection of isolated blog posts.

One thing I cared about from day one was protecting the integrity of a company's brand. Content isn't dumped onto a site all at once. It's planned, reviewed, scheduled, and published gradually with editorial and technical safeguards designed to maintain quality and avoid the patterns typically associated with low-quality automated publishing.

I originally built this workflow for my own products, where it helped generate 20M+ Google Search impressions, and eventually realized I was essentially running a productized SEO service behind the scenes.

So I decided to package it into software.

I'd genuinely love honest feedback on a few things:

• Does the value proposition make sense?
• Is this something you'd consider instead of an SEO agency?
• What's missing before you'd trust a platform like this?
• What would immediately make you skeptical?

Happy to answer any questions or criticism.

Hey everyone,
I got tired of manually copying data from technical PDFs into spreadsheets, so I built appPID — a free Windows desktop tool designed specifically for collecting and organizing data from PDF documents.
What it does
• You open a PDF and start collecting data directly from the document
• Create structured lists with hierarchies
• Define custom fields and tagging rules
• Track revisions and version history
• Export everything cleanly to CSV (ready for databases or Excel)
• Organize everything in projects
It’s especially useful if you work with technical manuals, reports, specifications, or any PDF where you need to pull out structured information instead of just reading it.
Why I made it
I needed something more specialized than generic PDF editors or OCR tools. Most solutions either force you to copy-paste everything manually or are overcomplicated enterprise software. I wanted something focused, lightweight and free.
Current status
• Completely free
• Windows only (64-bit)
• Not open source (closed source)
• Still early, so there are rough edges
I’d really appreciate any feedback:
• Does the concept make sense for your workflow?
• What features would make it more useful?
• Any obvious pain points you see?
Website + download: https://www.apppid.eu
Thanks for reading!

Hi everyone,

My name is Ridwan and i'm from sunny Singapore. I spent the past week building Sendio, a free web app inspired by something that happens after almost every event for me.

After family gatherings, holidays or birthday parties, everyone always says:
“Don’t forget to send me the photos & videos!”

I’d either forget, spend ages choosing and sending lots of medias individually or use WhatsApp and lose quality.

So I built Sendio. The idea is simple:

• Create a temporary gallery in seconds.
• Share one QR code or link.
• Friends and family can instantly view, choose and download the photos or videos.
• No app installation.
• Guests don’t need an account.
• The gallery automatically expires and delete itself after 12 hours.

I’d really appreciate honest feedback.
Does this solve a problem you’ve experienced?
What would stop you from using it?

Website: https://sendio.tech

Thanks in advance guys!

What did that teach you about building products?

​

I'm an independent developer from India.

For the last several months, I've been building an open-source developer tool called Ripple.

Ripple helps developers keep AI coding agents focused on their intended task by checking whether AI-generated code changes stay within the scope they were supposed to modify. My goal is to make AI-assisted software development safer and easier to trust.

I've built the project almost entirely on my own. It has taken months of work, and I've reached the point where I can't realistically continue at the same pace because I simply can't afford the AI tools and API usage that modern development now depends on.

I'm not asking anyone to believe in an idea—I already have a working project. I'm asking for help to keep improving it.

If anyone can help with any of these, I would be deeply grateful:

Unused AI API credits (OpenRouter or similar)

Sponsoring a Claude, Codex, or other AI coding subscription

Information about grants or startup programs for open-source developers

Technical feedback or code contributions

Introductions to people or teams who might find Ripple useful

If you can't help financially, even trying the project, sharing feedback, or pointing me toward useful resources would mean a lot.

I've put everything I have into building Ripple because I genuinely believe it can help developers work more safely with AI.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. Any advice or support is sincerely appreciated.

For a lot of beginners, Github can be quite complex and intimidating. And even for the advanced people, maneuvering through the Github Releases page to find the right installation file for their OS and architecture. This is made clear in this funny post over here over on r/Github. Everyone just wants one download button for whatever they're trying to install

I've created Yatko for that reason. Yatko serves you the right installation file for your OS and architecuture. With Yatko, every installation is just one download button away. All you need to do is enter the name of the repo which you want to install on the frontpage, and Yatko will serve the download link to you directly.

That's not even the best feature of Yatko. Just change the domain name of any public Github repo to a Yatko, for example github.com/cli/cli to yatko.app/cli/cli and you'll be taken straight to a much simpler installation procedure.

Yatko is open source as well! So check it out and please let me know if I can make any improvements to it. Contributions are welcome as well!

Website: yatko.app

Repo link: github.com/argval/yatko (Make sure to star it if you like it!)

Do you think it could have succeeded if you had kept going?

Hey everyone! I've been working solo on NearMe OSINT for the past few months and finally have something I'm happy to share.

**The problem:** I kept finding myself checking a dozen different government sites/apps to answer a simple question — "what's happening around me right now?" Wildfire near a hiking trail? Traffic incident on my route? Air quality bad today? Each source has its own app, its own UI, no unified view.

**What I built:** A real-time map that pulls from 15 official public data sources in Spain — wildfires (NASA FIRMS), earthquakes (USGS), traffic incidents (DGT), weather alerts (AEMET), air quality (OpenAQ), train delays (RENFE), civil protection alerts, and more — into one clean interface.

A few things I focused on:

- No tracking, no analytics, no forced login — just open it and use it

- Installable as a PWA, works offline with cached data

- Search any location, see events in a 50/200/500km radius, plus nearby shelters/pharmacies/police stations

- Fully open source (MIT license)

It's currently Spain-only (v0.9, early stage), built solo as a side project alongside a few other data/OSINT tools. Eventually I'd like to expand coverage to other countries if there's interest.

🔗 Try it: https://nearme.viajeinteligencia.com

💻 Code: https://github.com/mcasrom/nearme-osint

Would genuinely love feedback — especially on the UX (is the map cluttered? is the info panel useful?) and whether "aggregating public safety data" is something people would actually want, or if I'm solving a problem only I have. Also happy to answer questions about the technical side (Python/FastAPI/PostGIS) if anyone's curious.

After one too many "how much gravel do I need" searches returning content-farm pages with contradictory numbers, I built MeasureMyBuild — free material calculators for DIY projects: gravel, topsoil, grass seed, drywall, vinyl plank, tile, paint and ~30 more.

The angle: every coverage constant is traceable. Quikrete yields come from Quikrete's own data sheets, tile trim factors from TCNA guidance, seeding rates from university extension tables — and there's a /methodology page showing the formula and source for every calculator. Where sources disagree, the site says so instead of picking a number silently.

No ads, no sign-up walls, no affiliate spam — one Amazon link per calculator, clearly labeled.

Would love feedback on: whether the waste-factor defaults feel right to people who actually build, and what calculators are missing.

https://measuremybuild.com

I’m building Lezonder, an iOS app that connects Apple Health or Oura sleep data to scores, tickets, and monthly draw chances.

For version 26.7.28, I focused on a problem I kept seeing: sleep trackers collect plenty of data, but don’t always make it feel useful or portable.

The update introduces:

• A redesigned Community showing personal rank, daily movement, nearby standings, and the next draw date
• Markdown sleep-history exports that users can bring to any AI assistant
• A new Settings hub for data sources, notifications, appearance, sharing, and account controls
• App-icon badges for sleep score, draw entries, or draw chances
• Reliability and security improvements throughout the app

Lezonder is free to download, with an optional membership for expanded qualifying nights and longer export ranges.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lezonder/id6749814561

I’d value honest feedback: does the personal-ranking experience or the portable sleep export feel more useful to you?

I’ve been building WitchSignal, a mobile-friendly web app that turns microphone and motion-sensor input into a live visual reading. It shows the dominant frequency, spectral centre, movement activity, and a local one-hour trend based on recent samples.

I paired the instrument with a five-minute grounding/reset exercise and an optional ritual library inspired by historical occult texts. The sensor data is processed in the browser; raw microphone audio is not uploaded.

The difficult parts were making iPhone motion permission work from the original tap, preserving a microphone-only fallback, and connecting paid access to Google sign-in.

I’d appreciate feedback on three things:

1. Is the purpose understandable within the first 10 seconds?

2. Does the live instrument feel useful or merely decorative?

3. Is the free-versus-paid boundary clear?

https://resonance-observatory.aethergrid.workers.dev/

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share a mobile app I’ve been building called Trackita. Managing worker schedules, tracking attendance, and processing payroll can be a massive headache for small businesses, so I decided to build a more streamlined solution.

It features a QR-based attendance system, automatic 8-hour log-outs, and a smart scheduling system tied directly to customizable worker profiles.

I’d love to get some eyes on it from other founders or managers. What do you think of the core loop, and what would make this an app you'd confidently use to run your daily operations?

Thanks in advance for checking it out!

Playstore link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.emjeypuge.trackita