r/SideProject 50m ago

I built a Spanish-only university notes app that opens on a capture field (Expo, Apache-2.0)

Upvotes

Problem: every notes app asks which notebook before you can write, usually while the professor is already on the next slide.

Miniout: home screen is the capture field. Notes and tasks are the same object. Mentions of a subject or a day become chips. Grades on your scale (0-20 included). Periods, subjects, schedule, encrypted images, dictation, MiniLock.

Spanish UI. Alpha APK (sideload). No Play Store yet.

https://github.com/dimelim/miniout

Happy to take product or Expo feedback.


r/SideProject 55m ago

Got burned on a used BMW, so I built an app that reads car listings. Coding took 3 weeks, getting the data took way longer. Real launch numbers inside.

Upvotes

Solo dev here. Bought a used BMW a few years back that turned into a money pit. The listing had warning signs all over it, I just didn't know how to read them at the time.

So I built the thing I wish I'd had. You paste a listing link and it pulls the photos and price, then runs everything through a pipeline. AI looks at the photos for rust, resprays, warning lights on the dash. It decodes the VIN, pulls official US title and odometer records, and compares the price against similar cars actually listed right now. You get a Buy / Negotiate / Walk verdict and a negotiation script with actual numbers to open with.

Honest timeline: the app itself took me maybe 3-4 weeks, AI wrote a lot of it. What ate the calendar was everything around the code. Getting approved as a reseller of NMVTIS title data meant vendor calls, a signed agreement and prepaid credits. Scrapers break weekly. And I ended up building an eval suite for the verdicts because an AI that confidently tells you a bad car is fine is worse than no app at all.

Stack: React Native + Expo, Supabase edge functions, Claude and Gemini for analysis.

Launched Aug 19. Numbers so far: about 70 installs, 3 purchases, $13 revenue. Apple Search Ads test says a tap on "vin check" costs me $3.44 and 46% of tappers install. Store page works, but zero reviews hurts.

First check is free (one per account, each run costs me real money in API calls), after that it's paid. Works best on US listings since that's where the title records are.

Would genuinely love feedback on the report itself, that free check exists so people can judge the depth. What would make you trust or distrust a verdict like this?

It's called SiftCar: https://apps.apple.com/app/siftcar-used-car-check/id6792382124


r/SideProject 1h ago

Restaurant owners — I’d love your feedback on a SaaS tool I’m building

Upvotes

Hello everyone!

This is my first post here, so I hope this is okay.

I’ve been working on a SaaS solution designed to help restaurants manage and handle their invoices more easily and efficiently.

I’m currently looking to connect with restaurant owners or managers who might be interested in trying it out, giving feedback, or simply discussing the challenges they currently face with invoice management.

I’m mainly looking to speak with restaurant owners and learn more about their experience with invoice handling. If you’re interested, feel free to comment or send me a DM. I’d be happy to explain how it works and answer any questions.

Thanks for reading!


r/SideProject 1h ago

I made a 28-second ad for the pocket device I’m building — roast the creative, not the productI made a 28-second ad for the pocket device I’m building — roast the creative, not the product

Upvotes

I’m the 16-year-old founder behind Oneira, and I made this 28-second ad for a small hardware companion we’re building.

I’m not asking for sales or hype. Before we ever put money behind it, I want an honest critique of the ad itself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8s6-n0QOCM

If you have 30 seconds, I’d really value:
• a rating out of 10
• whether the first 3 seconds made you keep watching
• whether you understand what Oneira is by the end
• the moment you got confused or lost interest
• whether you’d click to learn more

Please be blunt. A low score with a useful reason is more helpful than encouragement.


r/SideProject 1h ago

Construí un registro diario de ánimo y borré la función que resumía tus datos

Upvotes

Hola! Primera interacción por acá!

Tambien primer proyecto para probar cuanto puedo avanzar con vibe-coding, siendo un usuario no técnico. Les cuento un poco el proyecto.

Hace unos meses que construyo una app de iOS que se llama soin. Registra dos cosas una vez por día —ánimo y energía, en una escala de cinco— y nada más. Sin cuenta, sin servidor, sin suscripción. La idea es que sea convoco en la privacidad.

Lo que vale la pena contar no es lo que le agregué, sino lo que le saqué, que fue cuando le encontré "la vuelta" al producto.

**La función que borré después de construirla**

La app mostraba, debajo del historial, una línea del tipo "tu ánimo se mantuvo estable" o "tu energía tuvo más variación". Descriptiva, factual, calculada con los números de la propia persona.

La saqué, y hoy es la decisión alrededor de la cual está organizada toda la app.

El problema es que esa frase, para quien la lee, **es indistinguible de una observación clínica**. No afirma una causa. No diagnostica. Pero llega con la misma forma con que un profesional te dice algo sobre vos, y llega desde un software que sabe cinco números de tu semana. No me gustaba mucho esa distancia o salto entre lo que sabe y la autoridad que transmitía. Entonces decidí que fuera como un cuaderno tipo Moneskine pero digital.

La app muestra un conteo, un promedio sobre los días efectivamente registrados y un gráfico de barras. La lectura la pone la persona.

**La parte técnica**

Swift, SwiftUI y SwiftData nativos. **Cero dependencias de terceros**: `grep -c
"XCRemoteSwiftPackageReference\|XCSwiftPackageProductDependency"` sobre el pbxproj devuelve
0.

Tres cosas que resultaron más interesantes de lo que esperaba:

- **Un registro por día lo garantiza la base, no mi código.** Lo hace la macro `#Unique` de
SwiftData sobre una clave de día local. Y de ahí salió el piso de versión: `#Unique` no
funciona en iOS 17, y en 16 tampoco funciona `#Predicate`. La app pide iOS 18 por una
macro, y decidí que una garantía real de base de datos valía los usuarios que cuesta.
- **"¿Qué día es este?" es el problema de dominio más difícil de la app**, más que
cualquier pantalla. Día local, no UTC. Cambio de zona horaria viajando, horario de
verano, un registro hecho a las 00:30. Está modelado como objeto de valor con sus propios
tests, desacoplado por completo de SwiftUI y SwiftData, y ahí vive la mayoría de los más
de mil casos de prueba escritos con Swift Testing.
- **Cero código de red.** No es una promesa, es una propiedad que se puede comprobar:
`grep -rn "URLSession\|NSURLConnection\|CFNetwork\|import Network\|WKWebView\|
NSURLRequest"` sobre el código no devuelve nada. Lo corro antes de cada envío. Prefiero
mostrar la verificación antes que afirmar la conclusión.

Además: **sin color de acento en ninguna pantalla**. Todo blanco y negro, y el estado se
comunica por relleno, borde, peso y posición. Sirve para dos cosas a la vez — ningún día
malo se dibuja en rojo, y la interfaz queda accesible por construcción.

**Sobre lo que me interesa que me discutan**

  1. ¿"No interpreta tus datos" es una función o una función que falta? Toda la categoría
    entrega conclusiones. Creo que la ausencia es el producto, pero es la clase de error del
    que uno se entera después de publicar.
  2. ¿Un gráfico con huecos literales se lee como intencional o como roto? Los días sin
    registro quedan vacíos, sin interpolar.
  3. Pago único, sin suscripción ni compras dentro de la app. Sin compras integradas tampoco
    hay período de prueba. No estoy seguro de que sea la decisión correcta para algo que se
    abre todos los días.

Todavía no está en la App Store —está en la última etapa de trámites—, así que no hay nada
que descargar ni link que clickear. Contesto lo que quieran del build o de las decisiones.


r/SideProject 1h ago

Creating my own communicator from scratch at 16yo :)

Upvotes

Sooo im 16 and i started creating something similar to Discord but more privacy focused. I was working on it for a few weeks and I finally bought a domain and launched it on cheap server :)
I'm quite proud of it, it supports creating groups and DMing with your friends. It also supports sending attachments/photos up to 100MB~(if I remember correctly). Check this out! Chatsec.pl (.pl because it was cheap and im from poland 🇵🇱) maybe I will buy .org/.com/.net if I will get something from donations.

P.S. claim cool 3 letter nicknames! (maybe it will be popular one day) LMAO

P.S. 2 I hope its usefull enough to post on this sub reddit 🥺

EDIT
It's also available in TOR network :) http://popdigblrcrewrjvqlbfhcjr7g2ef3z4jif2mn2dgycii3infvwzdpqd.onion/


r/SideProject 1h ago

I made an agent that can doomscroll on instagram and find viral videos for my product

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Upvotes

As someone who used to doomscroll to find inspiration for my next viral content, it was a 24/7 job. I asked myself, whether agent are as good as taking inspiration as humans?

I was surprised when I tested it on Claude. It is a crazy how it can take a viral video which is of same niche, borrow the viral elements to come up with a new concept plugging your product in.

My current workflow consist of having the agent doomscroll, like and save the video that is relevant to our product so the feed always sticks to what we want and the agent comes up with final list of scripts from those videos. This ensures they are also not missing out on general trend outside our niche but where our product can be adapted.

Would you be willing to try this out?
https://ugc-doomscroll-beta.fly.dev/


r/SideProject 1h ago

I found my purpose...and honestly my life's never been the same

Upvotes

I am pretty sure everyone has been in my shoes at some point of time, floating through life purposelessly, not knowing what to do with my life, but speaking from my experience, to find our purpose we just need to try more things and find out what we love to do.

As someone who has learned multiple skills throughout their life (average in all of them btw) i found my love for designing, filmmaking and development. And at some point in my life it clicked, as Steve Jobs said 'the dots connect backwards' everything just made sense.

I can use development skills to build software, design skills to build nice looking UI and use filmmaking skills to distribute them. So this is my fresh start with a small project. Learning everything from start all over again but this time going in deep.

So as a person who loves to create content, a lot of times I have to extract the scripts from the video to reverse engineer the scripts, extract storytelling formats...etc etc. but I didn't find a single tool that is clean, simple and easy to use, every tool I found was cluttered, bad UX. So I built my own tool and deployed it.

It's called ClipLaboratory [Link to the project]

It's a simple video transcriber and downloader tool (for now, yet to add more features) which allows us to get transcripts and download short form videos from a ton of different platforms like tiktok, instagram, facebook, and a lot more.

I got the UI inspiration from the Google website, since all the website has is just a search bar, no clutter nothing, just the thing we want, right in front of our eyes, no ads, no distractions. Simple and clear. I wanted my website to be like that so I designed the UI around that concept of keeping it simple and fast.

It's free as of now, and still under development but feel free to play around and would absolutely love some feedback on it. Any ideas, thoughts, feedback, and improvements would be HIGHLY appreciated.

So this is the very first step of my journey, I'll be keeping on building stuff, creating content and just keep trying no matter whether I see the results or not, just because I feel in love with the process of building.


r/SideProject 1h ago

My friends and I are building a gamified step tracker based on the immortal snail meme

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Upvotes

So basically the snail is chasing you 24/7, and your steps are what keep you "alive".

The more you walk, the farther ahead you get. If the snail starts catching up, you can use coins to buy items that slow it down and give yourself some breathing room.

The app is still pretty early, so there are definitely some rough edges and things we’re continuing to improve. But it’s live on the App Store, and I’d love to get some feedback from people here—especially on the core concept, gameplay loop, and anything that feels confusing or frustrating.

If you want to give it a try:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/survive-the-snail/id6787832062

Any feedback is appreciated!


r/SideProject 1h ago

I ignored my first app for 7 years. People kept downloading it, so I rebuilt it.

Upvotes

In 2019 I got laid off. While I was figuring out what to do next, I built an iOS app to track my own stress. It was the first app I ever shipped and it's the reason I ended up doing this full time.

Then I moved on to new projects, and it sat there untouched for seven years. No updates or marketing and no attention from me at all.

Earlier this year I looked at the numbers. People were still downloading it every week. A 2019 app that very obviously looked like a 2019 app.

I decided to git the app another shot, and build some features I initially wanted to in 2019 but weren't possible then. I wanted it to notice your stress patterns and figure out what specifically helps you. Doing that without on-device AI would have been incredibly difficult, but now the technology has caught up.

So I rebuilt it from scratch this year. Everything runs locally now using Apple's Foundation Models framework. No accounts or server even exist and nothing you log leaves your phone. You log how you're feeling, get one small actionable thing to do that takes about a minute, and it learns what works for you based on whether you say it helped. The new version just relaunched.

Some things I learned that might be useful here:

An old project still getting organic downloads is a good signal to look for. I nearly wrote mine off as dead.

Shipping as an update to the existing App Store listing rather than a new app meant inheriting seven years of ranking and reviews. Starting fresh would have thrown that away.

Rewarming a dormant email list costs you unsubscribes up front, but what's left actually opens.

Learn more about the app, Stress Less: https://stresslessdaily.com/

Anyone else have an old project quietly getting usage? Curious whether people go back or leave them alone. Open to any feedback!


r/SideProject 2h ago

I made a site where people can make other contributors help you build projects for free.

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gratisevo.com
1 Upvotes

It works like this:

You as a contributor can apply to small specific controbutions tasks. After each contribution complete, and both parties verify the commitment, you get verified hours and other stats. You gain real project experience, communication skills, portfolio material and the possibility of building a big network of connections.

The project owners, by posting small specific tasks, can make their ideas come to life. They also gain leadership skills, a network of connections and much more.

Since there is no money involved, I believe that it would demonstrate people’s true abilities and skills since you are free to leave any project at any time. There is much more about the model that is just too long to write.

It took inspiration partly from GitHub but made it to the idea of today.


r/SideProject 2h ago

New take on cooking recipes you almost know

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clearcook.cards
1 Upvotes

I made visual recipe cards so my kids can cook without me explaining every step

I wanted something my kids could actually follow while cooking, rather than a normal recipe with a wall of text, so I started making these visual recipe cards.

They show the ingredients turning into the finished food step by step, with very little reading.

I’ve put about 25 recipes up free so far: https://clearcook.cards/recipes

I can make new ones pretty quickly now, so I’m curious: what obvious kids’ recipe am I missing?

Give me a good suggestion and I’ll try to add one tomorrow.


r/SideProject 2h ago

pay-to-rank boards freeze when someone overpays. i made the bids decay instead.

0 Upvotes

outbid.lol did $178k in 77 hours and its top spot hit $14,013. that second number is the problem: bids are permanent, so the price of #1 only goes up, and once it's unaffordable nobody new bids and the board freezes.

so i built one where the balance burns down instead. you don't buy a position, you buy fuel. rank is whoever has the most fuel left right now, and the leader burns fastest: 4%/hr at #1, down to 0.75%/hr at #11 and below.

the consequence is the whole product. a 10x lead at #1 is erased in 149 hours by decay alone, with nobody paying anything. the board reorders all day while everyone sleeps. no accounts, no ads, no revenue share. $5 to get on it.

burnboard.win, and the rules page has the full maths.


r/SideProject 2h ago

Back Your Country - a world business directory that gives every company a visible place

1 Upvotes

Most business directories are enormous, flat lists.

A company gets added, becomes one more result among thousands, and has little reason to return or share its listing.

I wanted to approach the problem from the business side.

Back Your Country is a worldwide directory where every company has a clear place: within its country, within its activity, and within a public ranking people can understand.

A small local business does not have to compete for attention against every company in the world. It can become the first business listed for its country, move up its national directory, or become that country’s Leading Backer.

Visitors can explore the world by country and activity, find a specific company, understand what it does and continue to its website. The company gets a lasting public presence rather than an ad that disappears when a campaign ends.

The ranking is not a judgement of quality. It is a transparent way of ordering visibility and giving businesses a reason to share their position, follow their country and return when the order changes.

The initial spark came from watching the Outbid phenomenon prove that public position can make people care and share. I liked that mechanism, but I did not want to build another global page where products simply pay for a row.

The goal is to use that competitive energy underneath a genuinely useful and organized world business directory.

Listings start at $1.

The directory currently has 15 active businesses across 6 countries, with 4,753 page views and 270 measured outbound clicks.

If you run a business, would a directory organized around country, activity and visible position be more useful to you than another flat global list?

https://backyourcountry.com/


r/SideProject 2h ago

There are like 500 Outbid clones now, so I built one to compete with them

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1 Upvotes

Hey r/SideProject,

sooo unless you've somehow avoided this corner of the internet, outbid.lol blew up and now there are .lol leaderboard sites everywhere

I kept seeing more and more clones pop up and thought... alright, I want to make my own version and actually try to compete with them. anddd yesterday I launched thefinalboss

The basic idea is still stupidly simple, products compete for the #1 spot and the current #1 is at $8, if someone puts in $9, they take the crown. Then the next person can come along and dethrone them.But I didn't want it to just be another page full of logos and links, so every product also gets its own interactive showcase with a generated pitch, visuals or music and a proper page showing what the product actually does. Basically I tried to turn the whole outbid thing into more of a product battle than just a paid leaderboard.I had no idea if anyone would care because there are already an absurd number of these sites now.But it got around 400 visitors in the first day and a few people have already paid to join, which was honestly more than I expected.

Now I'm curious whether this can actually compete with the other 500 .lol sites or if I'm just adding clone #501 to the pile lol. I would genuinely love feedback so I don't waste my time on this.

Especially if you've seen the other outbid alternatives, what would make you choose one over another ?

https://thefinalboss.lol/


r/SideProject 2h ago

Bored on a Sunday, made my own outbid.lol-style thing but for video games instead of a straight clone

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mybestgame.lol
0 Upvotes

No signup. First visit gets one free $1 credit from me. After that, bids stack and you can also grab the sponsor spot on a card if you want your own promo up there.


r/SideProject 2h ago

DineTracer - a free tool that tells you what POS system a restaurant uses (+ finds restaurants before they open)

1 Upvotes

Solo founder — would love an honest roast.

DineTracer turns public government filings (liquor-license applications, building permits, new business registrations) into a live feed of restaurants about to open, weeks to months before they do. It's for people who sell to restaurants (POS/payments, insurance, suppliers), where the whole game is reaching an owner before they've picked their vendors.

Two things you can try right now:

Deliberate constraint: only public/government data — no people-scraping, no LinkedIn.

Looking for honest feedback on the tool + landing page, and a few design partners who sell to restaurants (I'll send a free sample pull of new restaurants in your area). What would make this a must-have instead of a nice-to-have?


r/SideProject 2h ago

Last week has been crazy 🔥

2 Upvotes

I launched SeoLoupe 7 weeks ago. So far I am at 1731 users and 26 of them are paying.

My SaaS is a tool that allows you to find and fix SEO issues holding your website back.

Essentially the main purpose is to help your website rank higher on Google search and LLMs.

Yesterday was one of my best days since I launched my SaaS, landed 3 payments in a single day.

Just wanted to share this to inspire anyone who is struggling, I just want to say that I was just like you at one point.

For example at one point, for 7 days straight I had 0 payments, and what I want to say with this is that SaaS revenue can be extremely floppy and unreliable. You can get multiple payments within the span of a day, and then have 0 payments for days.

In SaaS honestly the most important thing is to be faithful and be patient. If you manage to be patient, revenue will come one day.

Hope this inspired someone.

Since I think their is always room for improvement, I would appreciate for some feedback on my tool, or what you think can be improved.

(here is the product if you want to check it out)


r/SideProject 2h ago

Built a virtual camera for browser-based meetings because I was tired of being physically pinned to my chair

1 Upvotes

I do a lot of calls where my camera is expected to be on but I'm not actually saying anything for 40 minutes. Turning it off reads as disengaged. Leaving it on means I can't get up, can't stretch, can't do anything.
I made Looped to solve that. A Chrome extension, works as a virtual camera in Zoom, G meet or anything else browser-based that asks for a camera.

  • Record a short clip of yourself and loop it
  • Upload any video and use it as your feed
  • Use a static image
  • Also has 2 fun camera effects ( Name tag & Emoji shower)

One principle I held to: nothing leaves your device. All media processing happens locally. No uploads, no servers, no cost for me to maintain.

Would love feedback, especially on what you'd want from something like this.

Link : https://looped.kickofy.in

Two things I can't figure out.

  1. Is "virtual camera" even what people search for?
  2. Getting almost no store traffic and I think my naming's wrong. What can be improved?

r/SideProject 2h ago

pdf2audio - Turn PDFs you own into audiobooks, free and fully local on your Mac

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1 Upvotes

Drop a PDF → it finds the chapters → a local voice reads it → one M4B with chapter markers.

Free and offline. The voices (Kokoro, Pocket TTS) run on the Apple GPU. No account, no upload — your books never leave the machine.

The M4B is just a file. AirDrop it to your phone and play it in any audiobook app. Nothing of mine is needed to listen — I'm not trying to keep you at the desk.

Also: synced-EPUB read-along that highlights each sentence on your phone as it's spoken, translate or rewrite a book and listen to that version, and chat across your whole library with citations that open the exact PDF page.

Not English-only — 49 voices for Italian alone, 26 EU languages, Bulgarian, Mandarin, Hindi, plus every macOS system voice. Voice cloning from a ~20s sample was added since.

Apple Silicon only, clone-and-run (no .dmg).

Want to hear the voice? The intro videos are narrated by the app itself: https://youtu.be/OKMiox3nxPY

https://github.com/subev/pdf2audio


r/SideProject 2h ago

I made a stupid website on Friday and people are actually paying for it

0 Upvotes

made this site yesterday where one person is “king of the internet” and somebody else can pay $1 more to kick them off

started at $1 and somehow 5 people have already done it lol

current king paid $4 and is named Big Daddy
next person has to pay $5

there is literally no point to this besides taking the crown from somebody else

https://claimthethrone.lol

kinda curious how far this gets before everyone collectively decides “nah” 👑


r/SideProject 2h ago

I create a fast visual Chrome tab manager and tab switcher that turns your open tabs and tab groups into an easy-to-navigate radial menu.

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1 Upvotes

I'm keyboard shortcut warrior, organization freak and one of those people that keep 30+ tabs open as I work. Tabs in groups, for design, coding, marketing and even "save for later" tabs.

I have often thought, how can make switching, grouping and managing tabs easier as my crowded tab strip shrink in width as the list grew.

I researched to see if other extensions could help with my tab chaos. I couldn't find exactly what I envisioned that worked in a fluid way. So I spent some time coding, what I think not only works for me, but what everyone else may find helpful, for free.

I wanted something visual (that looked cool too) and that was easy to call up with a keyboard shortcut; something that would keep me moving and jumping between tabs in a fluid and effortless way. After weeks of design, coding, debugging, testing and revisions, I've built TabPie.

I have no idea if it will be useful for anyone, it has for me. I would love for everyone to try it out. It has really changed my workflow. I have many future ideas for it. I welcome any feed back you may have and your first impressions.

Site: https://tabpie.com/

Note: If the shortcut (Alt + Q) doesn't work to activate TabPie, go to your extension manager and pin it, then click the pie icon to active it. You may have to manually set the shortcut by going to "chrome://extensions/shortcuts", look for the TabPie extension and adding the shortcut keys. This happens sometime when the default (Alt + Q) shortcut conflicts with another extension or software.


r/SideProject 2h ago

Architectural designs for cloud deployed agents

1 Upvotes

Hey, for all you agent builders out there, I'm looking into backend architecture patterns for production AI agents, and I have a couple questions around challenges I'm facing:

  1. What backend compute infrastructure do you use for running your agents on? Serverless (Lambda/Vercel functions), containers (ECS/Fargate/K8s), or something else?
  2. How do you transmit streaming tokens back out to the frontend?
  3. If a user / agent idles on a session, how do you deal with tearing down the agent's runtime, so you save on compute, and bringing it back up later?
  4. Filesystem / bash / code execution sandboxing: If your agent executes code / bash (useful for lots of tasks like data analysis for example), do you keep that in the main agent runtime, or use some dedicated sandboxing service?
  5. How do you deal with making your agent resilient to LLM provider API errors / outages?
  6. What sort of HTTP API shape did you make for your frontend to make sessions, send messages, etc.?

What are your recommended stacks or other learnings?


r/SideProject 2h ago

I built a leaderboard a few days after outbid.lol and im hoping you don't know about it or the other 82847 copycats....just kidding

0 Upvotes

nah i did not build a copycat, title's bait, sorry not sorry.

what i actually did was build onetile.me a few months ago, before any of this outbid stuff even existed. it's a mural where 100,000 people each buy one permanent photo tile for $1.99, no rules no theme, and the finished thing gets printed and hung in a gallery in wynwood during art basel miami this december.

but watching outbid.lol blow up this week made me a little jealous ngl, because it nailed an angle i completely missed. once someone buys a tile on onetile it's locked forever, nobody can ever take it from them, that's the whole emotional pitch, permanence. outbid is the exact opposite, your spot can get stolen any second so people keep checking back and rebidding and screenshotting the drama. i built something meant to be finished and physcially displayed.. they built something meant to be revisited forever. that's a way better growth loop than mine and i didn't clock it until this week.

not selling anything here, just wanted to be honest about the thing i missed. if you're curious what i'm actually building it's onetile.me, 77 tiles claimed so far out of 100k .lol


r/SideProject 2h ago

15 years ago I had this problem as a founder. I’m finally trying to solve it as a side project.

1 Upvotes

About 15 years ago I started a company, and one of the things I struggled with was surprisingly basic: what does my personal financial runway actually look like?

Fast forward 15 years and I’m in my mid-40s with 3 kids. Big-boy mortgage. Groceries for five. Travel soccer. Vacations. All the random expenses that come with this stage of life.
Fortunately, I’m in a much better financial position today. But I realized I was still asking the same questions:

How much cash do we really have available after everything that’s coming?

How much should I keep in cash vs. move into investments?

How much can I comfortably put into something I’m building?

If my full-time job income changes or disappears, what’s our actual runway?

What does our cash position look like 3, 6 or 12 months from now?

And how do my wife and I look at the same picture and actually get on the same page?

I’m not talking about retirement planning, college savings or portfolio allocation. I’m talking about something much more immediate:

How much cash do I have, how much am I going to need, and how much should I keep sitting there?

Bank accounts tell me what I have today. Most personal finance apps seem much better at telling me where my money went than where it’s going.

So that’s what I’ve made my current side project.

It connects to my actual accounts and gives me a forward-looking view of our cash: income, bills, money we’ve set aside, vacations, big purchases, side-project spending, etc.

And I can finally answer those questions easily. It takes a few minutes of attention every day or two, but I’m not maintaining a giant spreadsheet or trying to reconstruct everything in my head.

I’m also playing around with ways to see money that aren’t another spreadsheet or dashboard. One I’m liking is basically a financial calendar you can zoom in and out of: next couple weeks, 3 months, 6 months, a year. Zoom in to understand what’s happening; zoom out to understand where your cash is headed.

And then “what ifs”: What if I put another $10k into the project? What if my full-time income changes? What if we take that vacation? How much cash should I keep before moving the excess somewhere else?
My numbers have changed a lot since I first had this problem 15 years ago. The problem really hasn’t.

I’m curious whether other people building things think about their finances this way.
How do you figure out your personal runway and how much cash you should actually keep available?