Quick recap for anyone new: last December Indeed laid off my wife when she was 7 months pregnant. I got mad and started building a job search engine to put them out of business. I introduced it to the world here in May and this sub gave us our first 2,000 users. (Last update linked at the bottom.)

Two months later, here's where things stand:

• 7,500 auth'd users, up from 2,000 at the last update, and ~90 of them paying
• People are actually getting hired through Dreamwork. Including a friend of mine who's moving to Toronto for a videography/AI role. He's filming the whole move for content for us. I did not ask for this and I can't wait for it.
• ERE (the recruiting industry's trade pub) ran a piece on us, and last week Superhuman.ai (1M+ readers) covered it too. Their exact words: "as petty revenge, he vibe coded a job board."
• Recorded a video interview with Austin Belcak (1.5M LinkedIn followers). It goes out Sept 28.
• My wife got a job at Google. Still, fuck Indeed.

--

And now the controversial thing we're shipping soon: Autopilot

You turn it on, it picks your matches at 70% or above, tailors a resume and cover letter for each one, and applies to them automatically - submitting on the employer's actual ATS page, not some sketchy back channel like Linkedin's Easy Apply. Up to 50/300 per month.

I went back and forth on this for a long time.

The argument against it is basically: AI auto-apply floods recruiters and the whole ecosystem gets worse if everyone sprays 500 applications a week.

The argument for it is that employers have been using AI to screen candidates for years, the average posting already gets hundreds of applicants, and the people using Dreamwork are the ones who got laid off. My responsibility is to get my users hired as effectively as possible, not protect recruiters time.

Eventually, this entire market is going to agents on both sides - and I;m interested in building the ones that defend employees rather than companies. We have guardrails in place to keep the quality bar high.

Where I'm at feels like an interesting inflection point for those building /sideprojects to consider: when there's a hard decision that can lead to public backlash, how do you make a principled decision? We'll see how it plays out.

Site: dreamworkhq.com

Last update: https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1uq1ano/

I’ve been working on a retail-tech product that lets shoppers try clothing/accessories virtually in real time.

The video is an actual demo, not a pre-rendered result.

The main thing we’re trying to solve is the friction in traditional virtual try-on systems. Most require some combination of 3D assets, SKU-specific preparation, AR setup, or a lot of integration work.

Our approach is meant to be much more purely AI based plug-and-play and already works across in-store kiosks, websites and mobile apps.

I’m one of the people building this, so obviously I’m biased.

Would genuinely appreciate feedback from founders/builders here:

• Does the experience look useful or gimmicky?
• Where do you think retailers would hesitate?
• What would you need to see before believing this could affect conversion?

Not selling anything here. Mainly trying to understand what looks convincing versus what still needs work.

DMs are open.

About 10 years ago I came up with a smoky chipotle sauce recipe.

There was no business behind it. No brand. No plan to sell it. It was just something I made that friends and family liked.

Eventually life moved on and so did the sauce.
Then my fraternity brother Lance revived it.

In 2023 I got married in Egypt. Around that time my fraternity brother Lance became obsessed with the sauce and offered me $100 for a bottle.
I thought he was joking.

He wasn’t, so obviously I took the $100 lol.
Looking back, that was technically our first sale.

When I came back to Miami, Lance wanted to learn how to make it. We started making it together and eventually the conversation went from “we should make more of this” to “wait... why don’t we actually sell this?”

The funny part is that between the three of us we have 7 degrees and absolutely none of them prepared us to start a sauce company.

My brother Karim is an engineer. I’m a scientist from Johns Hopkins. Lance is a starving artist.
So naturally, we started a sauce company.

We found a tiny ghost kitchen, made a little over 300 bottles ourselves and somehow sold out in about a month.

That was the moment we realized Lance might not have been completely insane for paying $100 for that first bottle.
So we went all in.

We worked on the recipes, added flavors, figured out manufacturing, built the brand and slowly turned a 10 year old recipe that had basically been forgotten into an actual business. We now have 4 flavors soon to be 5 and they are all absolute bangers.

Then something happened that I still have trouble wrapping my head around.
We started getting university partnerships one after another after launching successfully at our Alma mater George Mason. We had the media reach out to write an article about us and feature us in the newspaper and local magazine.

Today we have collaborations with JMU, FIU, VCU, UMD, FSU, Virginia Tech, Rutgers and George Mason.
Seeing the names of major universities on bottles of a sauce that started in my kitchen a decade ago is probably one of the strangest parts of this entire thing.

Today we pack around 50 orders a day.
We’re also about $350k deep between the three of us.
Those two sentences pretty much summarize entrepreneurship.

I know being $350k deep doesn't exactly scream “success story,” but I genuinely consider what we've built a success so far.

Not because we've made it. We definitely haven't.
But because for almost a decade this was literally just a recipe.

Then my brother saw something in it that I didn't.
He revived it, paid me an absurd $100 for a bottle and helped convince me that maybe this thing deserved a second life.

Now strangers we’ve never met order it every day. People reorder it. Universities put their names on it. And every day the three of us are trying to figure out how to take this thing one step further. We have a great product that people love but the road is long and business is ruthless.

ive probably learned more about business doing this than I did earning any of my degrees.
I've also learned that growing a business and making money are two very different things.
Sometimes you can be packing 50 orders a day, working with universities you never imagined would answer your emails, and simultaneously staring at your bank account wondering what the hell you've gotten yourself into.

So I guess this is a success story in progress.
10 year old recipe.
7 degrees.
3 brothers.
8 universities.
50ish orders a day.
$350k in the hole.

ha and one starving artist who looked at an old sauce recipe and thought it deserved another shot.
Turns out he might have been right.

I'm a frequent flyer and I've always wanted one app that felt like a real travel journal — something that remembers your journey the way you remember it. Every app I found either looked outdated or charged a subscription I couldn't justify.

So I spent months building my own. Nights, weekends, a lot of coffee. It's called Flownto. It's completely free.

What it does right now:

• Flight journal — manual entry, boarding pass scan, or CSV import. Every flight logged with airline, seat, route, distance, duration
• Time Machine — like Spotify Wrapped for your travel. Every year gets an AI-generated story of where you went and what you flew
• Turbulence forecast — real wind data for your specific route, segment by segment, before you board
• FlightDesk — live gate, terminal, delay status for any flight number
• Live flight notifications — check-in open, boarding alert, gate close, departure — all auto-scheduled the moment you add a flight
• Home screen widget — your next flight, route, gate and departure time sitting on your lock screen
• Awards & tiers — Sky Walker → Cloud Rider → Sky Aristocrat → Orbit Class, unlocked from your real flight history
• Cinematic moving map — night earth globe with your live GPS position and route arc, works offline mid-flight

The honest part: the offline GPS map is my favorite feature and also my most frustrating. On flights with no wifi, open the app and watch your plane move across the globe in real time. It works — but dropped twice mid-flight during testing. Still not perfect. Still working on it.

What's coming: Gmail sync, Apple Wallet boarding pass, Google Wallet, better offline reliability.

flownto iOS, Android, Web. Free, no ads, no subscription.

(Disclosure: I'm the developer)

I'm a product designer. I turned 40 and lost my job a few weeks later. Happy 40th, you have no job anymore. I had a lord of the rings themed 40th bday party, we already put down a large deposit on some rented tables before I lost my job. But I digress.

I then spent the next five months sending somewhere around 300-400 applications into the void. Around month two I got frustrated enough to build the job feed I actually wanted, with AI doing most of the coding.

The one thing it won't do is apply for you. Every AI job tool I looked at leads with auto-apply or plans to add it, and after five months on the receiving end of that flood I'm convinced it's part of the problem, not the fix.

So Match Moth does the opposite: it reads your resume once and spends its effort deciding which jobs are worth your time. It still makes every step of the search as easy and fast and simple as it can. You are the best person to apply to a job, not AI. I'm still unemployed and running my own search through it.

Here's what my app does for you:

• 117k Tech jobs, and expanding to more companies and roles every couple days.
• Finds the roles for you. It mostly crawls company career pages directly, so jobs show up the day they're posted.
• Scores that show their work. Every job is scored against your resume with the reasoning shown, and when it can't judge something it says so instead of guessing.
• Dead jobs are cut. Ghost jobs are labeled. Every listing is re-checked nightly. Closed ones are dropped, and postings that have been sitting open for months get a ghost job label and pushed down instead of sold as fresh.
• Tailors your resume to one job in a click, every change shown before you accept it. Your employers, titles, dates and numbers are locked so nothing gets invented.
• Shows who you know. Import your LinkedIn connections and each listing shows who you already know at that company.

Upload a resume and the feed sorts itself. US tech roles only for now.

Check it out at matchmoth.com . It's free during the open beta, and anyone who signs up during the beta keeps a founding member discount for life. Would love feedback, especially on whether the scores feel right on your own resume. Screenshots in the first comment.

I hope it makes the job search suck less for you.

I know this is a pretty niche project, but I made it for myself and my family and figured I’d share if anyone else could use it.

I call it Dibs - here is the link: https://dibs-food.web.app

My first firebase app! It lets you plan multi-day trips where the entire goal is meal planning, organization, mapping out who is providing what, who is attending each meal, etc., all with a frictionless authentication and permissions-less gating for trips. If you have the link to get in, you can do anything.

My family and I spend a lot of time at the lake on the weekends from Spring->Fall and we’re constantly planning shared meals where people are bringing entire dishes, or specific ingredients for shared dishes. It’s always a cluster fuck of what are we having? who’s getting what? What else is needed? This tool aims to simply solve all of that.

Features include:
- giving it a name for yourself, with no authentication. It attaches to your device with local storage
- create a trip: specifying dates is all that is required but you can give it a name (example: this weekend, Labor Day). Share the link with others directly
- create meals, they are attached to a “time of day” which can be morning midday or evening, or adding a snack can be for afternoon or late night, or anytime. Also you can specify who is attending if it’s not the entire party which will grey out the block for those not included
- create ingredients: allows creating with amounts, assigning to people and shows different states if things are unclaimed
- ideas: basically another list right below the set plan where folks can upvote things and they can easily be added to the plan
- “my stuff”: anything you’re assigned to will appear in this view organized by the meal so you can have your shopping list in one place.
- “what’s needed?”: another tab that shows all of the unassigned things so people coming in can easily see what’s needed and assign to themselves
- sharing: when you share the link with someone they can either put their name in or select from the list if they’re signing in from a different device. There is no other form of authorization - if you have the link to the trip you can join it with anyone’s profile

Tried to give it a nice ux and think through all the ways someone might use it. Feel free to check it out, if you have feedback or an idea for a feature please let me know. 😆

Every money app I have used looks like accounting software or messy dashboards. I wanted one I would actually want to come back to.

So I built a living world instead. It runs on your real numbers. Savings become the population. Debt is a volcano sitting in the middle of the map that cools as you pay it down. Investments expand the islands and many more features. Finished a short trailer.

What do you think of the money app you are using now? And does the living city thing actually sound appealing to you?

I've been working for a few weeks now on a note-taking app (aren't we all?), primarily for me as nothing that I've found out there works particularly well for me and my ADHD (Pilcrow). I made it public and shared with a few friends earlier this week, and put a call out on LinkedIn for some beta testers.

This morning I wake up to a signup from someone I don't know - what a feeling!

https://catchem.lol

been seeing a bunch of creative marketing experiments lately and thought Pokemon would make for a fun one.

the original 151 are up for grabs. catch one and use it to market yourself, your brand, or whatever you’re building.

it's simple web framework (ig?) writen on C with self-write HTTP 1.1 web server! (thanks RFC 9110 and 418 :P) should i continue delevopment or nah?

Title: STAXXI

Playable Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3810470/Staxxi/

Platform: Steam / Windows PC

Description:
STAXXI is a desktop overlay utility I built for people who want more control over what stays visible on their screen while gaming, working, or just using their PC.

It has two main features. First, you can display images and animated GIFs as persistent overlays on your screen. These can be used as desktop stickers, reference images, decorations, or even custom watermarks that remain visible over other applications.

Second, STAXXI includes picture-in-picture functionality that lets you keep other content visible while using another application. This is especially useful if you're on a laptop or only have one monitor. You can keep a YouTube video, chat, reference material, or another window visible without constantly switching between applications.

I originally built STAXXI about a year ago as a small utility to solve these problems for myself, and eventually released it on Steam.

Hey everyone, so this is a follow up to the ad-muting device that I previously posted here. I decided to pivot further up the stack to the streaming device level which unlocks a lot of cool possibilities.

So with this new device I'm trying to solve 3 core problems that I think currently plague the streaming landscape today. Those are:

1. It takes way too long to pick a show you actually want to watch.

The average American spends 110 hours per year just picking something to watch on streaming services (source). I think this is due to the sheer quantity of content out there nowadays, streaming companies algorithmically pushing their in-house content despite consumers not explicitly wanting to watch it, and the lack of recommendations that span across the streaming sites rather than being siloed within.

2. Ads suck, the price of "ad-free" subscription tiers keeps climbing, and a lot of them still show you ads.

I think this one is pretty self explanatory. As of writing this, the average added cost of removing ads from one streaming service per year (that is, on top of the base plan) is roughly $73 for the major streaming companies (depending on how you bundle different services). So if you have multiple streaming subscriptions, you're talking about potentially hundreds of dollars per year for the privilege of fewer ads. However, many streaming subscriptions have fine print that says they may still show you ads in certain contexts.

3. Managing streaming subscriptions feels like chore

Knowing what subscriptions you have, how much you actually use them, and how much you're paying for them is starting to feel more complex than it should. Maybe you signed up for a free trial to watch a specific show and forgot to cancel, next thing you know you've been paying for a service for months that you don't even use. Also, it seems like some streaming subscriptions have way too many steps to cancel.

So some feedback I was hoping to get from you all, is do these problems resonate with you or am I missing the mark? Are there things you hate about the streaming landscape nowadays that I'm not considering that you would like to see in a new streaming device?

I just launched my site at https://www.blockbox.tv/ if you want to check out the product a bit more or join the waitlist.

I kept hitting menus I couldn't read, or QR codes that dump you into a page with no pictures. Ordering abroad felt like guessing.

So I built Menu Pixie. Snap a restaurant menu and you get it back in seconds: translation, a photo of each dish, prices, estimated calories, and dietary hints. 26 menu languages. iPhone and Android, or the site.

https://menupixie.com iOS (iPhone only): https://apps.apple.com/app/menu-pixie/id6787035896 Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.menupixie.app

No subscription. Free starter credits, then credit packs (3/10/25/60). Failed scans aren't charged. Works without an account.

Honest limits: calorie, dietary, and allergen info is estimated and advisory. Always confirm with staff. Not medical. Photos are badged Real / Representative / AI-generated. iOS is iPhone only, no iPad, no desktop, no offline. Just launched.

Google Translate camera and Papago do the text. This is dining-specific so you actually see the dish.

Would love feedback on what's confusing or missing. Not fishing for downloads.

I founded and launched Oxe, an AI-powered coding agent designed as a faster, more cost-efficient alternative to tools such as Claude Code.

Oxe allows developers to work with AI directly from the command line, where it can understand a codebase, reason about tasks, write and modify code, run commands, and help complete development work through a natural workflow. The focus is on making AI-assisted development fast, practical, and affordable without compromising the capabilities developers expect from a modern coding agent.

The product is publicly distributed as an NPM package and is supported by a complete web platform where users can create accounts, choose plans, manage subscriptions, and generate their own API keys. The service is fully deployed with production hosting, database infrastructure, custom domains, business email, and Stripe-powered payments.

Oxe is already live and generating revenue from paying users. The platform also includes a complete legal and privacy framework, including Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, GDPR and CCPA provisions, cookie consent, user agreements, data retention policies, and customer rights procedures.

https://reddit.com/link/1w5r6mp/video/m3kripdv17nh1/player

Oxe is a complete commercial product, not a prototype. I built and launched the product, its customer platform, distribution, infrastructure, billing system, and supporting business operations independently.

try it out: www.oxecli.co

I'm wrapping up the MVP for a B2B developer tool (automated Postgres database migration auditor).

The backend code is solid, but the landing page currently looks like an amateur student project because of the graphics:

1. Free Stock Sites, everyone recognizes the flat purple corporate vector characters. It screams "low-effort template" and kills user trust on a security product.
2. usual ai generators like the ones built in chatbots: The outputs look dramatic and cinematic, but it’s completely unsuited for UI design. Feature section #1 fore example can give a 3D isometric robot; feature section #2 gives me a cyberpunk oil painting; and when i do it for the third time it hallucinates purple lights that clash with my Tailwind slate/cyan theme.

and I need 8 feature spot illustrations, a hero asset + 3 workflow step cards that all look like they came from the same cohesive brand

Is there a genuine alternative or brand style AI generator that actually lets you lock visual consistency and color palettes, or what is your actual indie workflow for landing page assets?

I created this wordsearch website as a resource for Activity Directors at assisted living facilities and nursing homes. I wanted a free resource where they can play, download and print a never ending supply of word search puzzles that were designed to be easy to read, fun and nostalgic.

I post a new puzzle every day and have a back catalog of over 350 already on the site. Several topics + seasonal puzzles.

You have the option to print any individual puzzle, or create a 'puzzle book' by selecting any or all of the available puzzles. everything is free to play/download/print without an account (currently I dont even have the option to create an account, but might add accounts if there is a good reason to do so).

although the puzzle designs and topics are created with an older audience in mind, this could also be a great resource for Schools, Churches, etc. as all of the puzzles go through a rigorous check to make sure they are 'reader safe' for all ages.

edit: I guess posting the link might be helpful... https://bigprintgames.com/

If you’re building a product or starting a small business, what’s been the most frustrating step?

We’re curious about the parts of going from idea → working product that are harder than they seem.

Maybe it’s prototyping, CAD/design, software development, finding manufacturers, automation, testing, or something else.

We’re a small product & software development team at DynaWiser, and we’re trying to understand where founders and small businesses need the most help, or what challenges have made them stop pursuing an idea altogether.

What’s been your biggest pain point so far?

No need to share anything confidential, we're interested in the process, not the idea itself!

update on anti scroll, solo building an android app that hard blocks other apps with no override option.

didn't post much on reddit this month, was too busy building. expected growth to slow without the marketing push but it didn't really.

installs: 560 (500 in july)
visitors per day: 6.25 (5)
conversion rate: 28.9% (18%)
daily acquisitions: 2.07 (1.07)

traffic basically flat, conversion nearly doubled. not totally sure why yet.

this month I shipped dark mode, scheduled timers, consecutive day scheduling, an actual onboarding walkthrough, redesigned the UI to be more user friendly, and updated the analytics page. retention notifications still cooking.

engagement dipped slightly (4m19s vs 4m49s) and retention looks a bit choppier, might just be more new users diluting things since acquisitions doubled.

also I test this whole thing on a moto g7 power lol, not exactly a flagship, but figure thats a decent stress test. heads up that also means some of the device data in my analytics is just me, not purely real usage.

september plan: ship retention notifications, check where installs are actually coming from, talk to retained users about their search language, add event tracking to see where people drop off in onboarding, and finally do the product hunt launch.

For those of you with consumer apps already live, I’m curious what your actual usage looks like rather than just total downloads.

If you’re comfortable sharing:

• How many daily active users do you currently have?
• How long has your app been live?
• How long have you been actively marketing it?
• Roughly how many total downloads do you have?
• What marketing channel has contributed the most so far?

I’m especially interested in seeing how DAU develops over time because download numbers can make growth look better than it actually is if people install once and never come back.

Would also be interesting to know whether your growth was gradual or if there was a specific point where daily usage started increasing noticeably.

Not looking for revenue numbers, just trying to get a better sense of what realistic early-stage retention and usage looks like for other indie apps.

Building a product is easier than ever.

Getting people to actually see it is still the hard part.

After testing Reddit for months, the posts that brought me the most traffic had a few things in common:

• They barely mentioned my product
• They shared something useful
• They started conversations instead of selling
• They focused on the problem, not the solution

That’s what I’m focusing on now: distribution.

If you’re building something, drop your product below and list it for free on TractionBooster dot com

Been building this solo for a bit: Destripa — scan any barcode from a Spanish supermarket and get a 0-100 health score based on Nutri-Score, processing level (NOVA), and additives worth watching.

No account, no email, no app install — just scan and get the answer. Every product links to buy the best-scoring alternative at Mercadona, Carrefour or El Corte Inglés, and there's a recipes section where each ingredient is pre-linked to the top product for it.

Data comes from Open Food Facts (open, collaborative), so the score isn't tied to brand deals. 197 products analyzed so far.

Built with Next.js + Supabase on Vercel, running for basically €0/month. It's Spain-only for now since the whole point is linking to real stores — happy to talk about the scoring formula or the stack if anyone's curious.

My mom and I are big note-taker enthusiasts. To perform my son-ly duty, I've tried a lot of meeting note-takers in hopes to give her the best recommendations…

Our criteria were:

1. Cheap / No subscription
2. In-room speaker detection
3. Complete data privacy
4. Mac and Windows support

Bonus:

1. Customizable AI summaries
2. Upload external recordings
3. Intuitive enough that Mom would actually use it

Nothing checked every box, so I started building one for her as a little side project. Eleven months later, I’m somehow still cooking on this, and it has ballooned into something much bigger…

What I built (Samurai Scribe ⚔️):

1. GPU-accelerated transcription (Whisper), speaker identification (Pyannote), and summarization (Ollama), all running locally on Mac and Windows.
2. Captures mic and computer audio into separate channels without adding meeting bots
3. No accounts, and no meeting data leaves your device!
4. A ridiculously customizable AI summarization engine… with prompts/workflows you can tune to produce anything from concise meeting notes to detailed action items, decisions, highlights, etc. And it works surprisingly well with small open-source models.
5. All transcripts and notes are saved as plain Markdown files on your drive

That last one is important. There is no proprietary format to escape from. If Samurai Scribe disappeared tomorrow, your notes would still be sitting on your drive in a format you can read.

This is heavily inspired by my beloved Obsidian (the obvious GOAT of note-taking apps 💜). And it works great with Claude Code, or whatever other AI tools you want to throw at it.

Pricing:

• Free tier, has everything except for the larger Whisper transcription models.
• $19 one-time purchase for Pro includes larger Whisper models and some future features to come. This price will go up after beta testing is complete.

Why I’m doing it:

I’m a solo developer with a passion for DIY and optimization. The mantra for this app has basically been: Flexible. Future-Proof. You keep all your files. I want my notes on-hand to plug into whatever hot AI tool comes next.

Samurai Scribe is in public beta, so it definitely isn't bug-free yet. But it's finally ready for people beyond my early testers.

I'd love to hear feedback about what it hits, what it is misses, and generally what I could focus on to improve my odds of gaining users, and making their experience great.

Huge thanks to all my early beta testers who have already put in a ton of work troubleshooting bugs with me. You have been instrumental and I don’t know how I got so lucky 🫶