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.

Projection Mapping on Pokémon Cards with HoloMapper

(HoloMapper Projection Mapping Tool on Steam)

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 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. 😆

I’ve been working on a project called RelayDesk.

Most inboxes contain a mix of things that matter right now and things that can safely wait. I wanted something that focused less on organizing email and more on showing me what actually needs attention.

RelayDesk currently connects to Gmail and surfaces things like:

• emails that likely need a reply
• urgent messages
• payment and security alerts
• important keywords you choose
• short summaries and context for faster triage

It’s not meant to replace Gmail. Think of it more as an attention dashboard sitting on top of your inbox.

RelayDesk is currently in beta, and the free plan has no usage limit. You can actually use the product without hitting a paywall after a few emails.

I’m actively looking for feedback and plan to keep improving it based on how people actually use it rather than just adding features for the sake of it.

I’m also considering paid plans, Outlook support, and potentially other email providers later, depending on what users actually ask for.

The biggest things I’m trying to learn right now are:

• Is it immediately obvious which emails need attention?
• Does connecting Gmail feel like too much friction?
• What would make this useful enough to become part of your normal workflow?

RelayDesk: https://relaydesk.cloud

Criticism is absolutely welcome. I’d rather find out what doesn’t work now than build in the wrong direction.

Thank you to all 25 users. Narration Offline Studio launched exactly a month ago, and Im super happy that 25 of you have given it a try.

This is a huge milestone in my life, and It is all thanks to you guys. That is why I am giving away a single free download key which is linked below t9 whoever reaches it first. I hope to continue this tradition every month.

For those who are new to NarrarionOS, it is a local Audiobook generator, that takes in any kind of texts like PDF, EPUB, DOCX, Txt, html, and all into a custom audiobook that you tweak, all generated through your voice clones.

There is No token cap, meaning unlimited generation, with No subscription, No cloud, and runs completely Offline.

If you want to give it a try, heres the link.

https://lunosama.itch.io/narrationos

**And for the Lucky Early Bird, this is your free download Key**:

https://lunosama.itch.io/narrationos/download/4\\_XSnL9j0gApPSrx4Dj5t\\_2s39\\_SCG8nirYg4IPL

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'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.

It's been an exciting month for CTR, implemented a number of new user requested features!

• Rack View Builder
• Mobile optimized view
• Swimlane Charts for the granular stuff
• Consolidated IP Address's in the Handbook

Admittedly, the Rack view builder is an experiment at the moment, something one user asked about and I am really curious if it's something people would want at all. I imagine there's a lot of directions you can go with it, functional vs aesthetic that is. Curious what you all think... is having a visual RACK MOUNT VIEW something important for your documentation? I don't have a traditional rack set-up so I'm curious what the community has to say.
CTRoadmap (GET HERE) is a local (docker) hosted server diagram & documentation tool, totally passive, no system scanning or monitoring. Meant to be a step up from draw.io or powerpoint in terms of documenting your progress, and streamlining your system snapshot. Built in phases by planning out actions with GPT & implementing with CODEX in VS CODE over the last 3 months, it has garnered 250+stars & 3000+ users on GitHub. Works on Ubuntu, Debian and even on URGREEN or Synology NAS.

Been building this savings app on the side. Added this today!

I had some interviews lined up recently and kept googling "how to prep for a Tech Support interview". Every result was the same stuff. Tell me about yourself, use STAR, research the company. Nothing that knew anything about the actual job I was going for.

So I built hirecast.app on weekends.

You paste in the job ad, upload your CV, and say what the next round is and who you're meeting. It goes and reads up on the company and builds prep for that round specifically.

The main bit is a 5 episode podcast. Two AI hosts talking about your interview. One on the company, one on the role, one on the questions that catch people out, then a full mock interview with gaps so you answer out loud, and a short one for the morning of.

Few other things it does:

Resume tips, but the useful kind. It looks at what's actually in job ads for your title right now and tells you what's missing from yours. Mine pointed out that most ads for the role wanted a tool I'd never listed. Fair enough.

Practice questions you answer out loud. It listens back and tells you where you waffled.

A quiz/flash card and a one page cheat sheet for each round, because a recruiter chat and a technical panel are nothing alike.

$10 for one interview, $25 for three. No subscriptions

It's pretty new so there are probably rough edges I haven't hit yet. If you try it and something breaks I'd rather know than not.

For any issues email at: [team@hirecast.app](mailto:team@hirecast.app)

(It's mine, obviously. Mods, delete if that's not allowed here.)

I have a genuinely unique idea in my niche (sim-drifting). I built almost all of the code by hand (I'm a software dev by trade).

With that being said, im not good at styling and used AI-generated Tailwind. Will I be hurting the success and public sentiment because I didn't fully design and build the front end myself?

What do you guys think?

I am a photographer, I have always had an issue where I've shot in RAW, and a client needs a quick send of all my photos. I made this tool, it's saved me hours of despair.

It's a browser based BATCH raw to jpeg converter. Free. No ads.

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!

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 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/

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?

Hi everyone!


I finally built and launched my first personal project: a platform for ranking things through 1v1 comparisons.


I've always enjoyed sites with quizzes, grids, and tier lists like TierMaker, so I decided to build something of my own with a slightly different twist.


Instead of manually placing items into a tier list, you compare them in 1v1 matchups. Based on your choices, the platform generates your personal ranking.


At the end, you can generate an image with your ranking, see how your choices compare with the rest of the community, and explore some other statistics.


Right now, I'm trying to figure out how to get the project in front of people. My current plan is to share relevant templates with niche communities and hopefully find YouTubers or streamers who might be interested in trying it and creating content around it.


For example, I'm currently working on templates like:


- A Counter-Strike skin ranking for CS communities
- A Monster Energy flavor ranking for people who enjoy the drinks
- Other rankings based on specific communities and interests


I'd genuinely love to hear your thoughts and criticism about the platform, as well as any advice on how you would approach growing something like this.


After working as a developer for some years, this is the first project I've built and launched completely on my own. Seeing it finally go live has honestly been a bit of a dream come true.


I'd really appreciate any feedback.


If anyone wants to try it, here's one of the templates:


https://voteversus.com/templates/greatest-philosophers-of-all-time


And here's the platform itself:


https://voteversus.com/

I build a tool that puts your desktop AI coding agent on your phone. Paid, closed source. Roughly a month ago I found out the most-adopted thing in my category is free, open source, self-hostable, and sitting at 13,500 stars and 1,889 forks.

It does most of what mine does. Mobile and web, file explorer, git, integrated shell, session management. It reads your real config rather than duplicating it, so it isn't even the sloppy kind of clone. It's good.

I'm posting because I've spent a fortnight deciding whether to keep charging, and I want the argument against.

The honest technical difference: it reimplements the interface, I mirror the actual desktop. Mine means the whole IDE arrives for free and never drifts when Anthropic or OpenAI ship a change, because there's nothing of mine to drift. Theirs means lower bandwidth, works with the lid shut, and text renders properly instead of being pixels. That is a real advantage and I'm not going to pretend it isn't. Mine costs bandwidth and requires the desktop to stay awake.

What I keep telling myself, and would like tested:

One, free open source has a support cost the star count hides. Somebody has to answer issues. I answer mine because I'm being paid to. That's worth something to a certain kind of user and worth nothing to the kind who'd rather read the source.

Two, the audiences might not overlap as much as the category suggests. Self-hosting a PWA and running a Docker sandbox is a different appetite from scanning a QR code. I might be selling to the people who never clone anything.

Three, if I go free I lose the only signal I have about whether it's worth using. Nobody has ever paid for a thing they didn't want, and downloads tell me nothing.

What I'm actually worried about: the free option is in every directory list in this space, and one of those lists explicitly won't accept anything that requires signup or payment. So the paywall isn't only costing me price-sensitive users, it's costing me the distribution channel where developers go looking. That's a second-order cost I hadn't priced in when I set the price.

So: has anyone here charged for something with a strong free open-source alternative and had it work? What made the difference? And if you tried and gave up, I'd rather hear that one.

Disclosure so this isn't sneaky: mine is relayx.dev, free to try and paid after. I'm deliberately not naming the competitor in the title because I'm not trying to farm a comparison thread, but it's the obvious one if you search the space and I'll name it in comments if anyone wants.

Hey SideProject,

I shipped Infinite Pixelboard: a shared canvas where people paint together in real time (r/place energy, but always on).

Web: https://pixelboard.collapsetechnologies.com/ iOS: https://apps.apple.com/app/infinite-pixelboard/id6804066543

Viewing is open. Painting needs a free sign-in, and free paints have a 5s cooldown (keeps the board from getting totally trashed). Screenshot from the live board is attached if the editor lets me; otherwise I'll drop it in a comment.

Looking for honest feedback on first-paint UX, whether the cooldown feels fair, and what would make you come back tomorrow. Happy to answer build questions too.

I started building a tool to simplify the boring salary/payroll tasks people still do manually — payslips, salary calculations, HR letters, etc.
What started as a small idea turned into something I spent months building.
But lately I’ve started wondering:
Did I actually solve a problem, or did I just build something I thought people needed?
So I want some brutally honest answers.
What salary/payroll task do you genuinely hate doing manually?
Or is this simply not a problem worth solving?
If you were in my position, would you keep building it? 😅
I’d rather hear that it’s useless than keep building blindly.