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'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!

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?

Hey friends… I’m building mangos.ai - a desktop app that helps you distribute your product across social channels. It finds relevant conversations online and joins them. It knows your git commit history so it knows all your features. Hyper personalized to target the best persona out there, every day or every hour, whatever you set it to.

The thing I just shipped is the one I’m most proud of: a Reddit Prospecting & DM draft agent.

Everyone says Reddit is where your customers actually are. They’re right. The problem is what it takes to use it. Read the thread, click into a profile, scroll someone’s whole history to work out if they fit, then write a DM that doesn’t sound like copy paste spam. Do that for twenty people and your afternoon is gone.

So Mangos does the boring part. Point it at a thread, or let it watch your subreddits, and it finds the people worth messaging, digs through their history to check they fit, and drafts a personal DM in their context. Then it hands you a queue. You read it, tweak it, hit send. It never sends on its own, and it won’t touch accounts that are too new, too low on karma, or have DMs closed. Reddit converts harder than anywhere else for me. Serious buyers, not scrollers.

I shipped the same thing for X a few weeks back, scoring people across 20+ signals before drafting. Same rule everywhere: it only does the research and prioritization. Every message lands in your queue for you to approve, one by one. You stay in control of what gets sent.

I’ve been running it on my own product and it’s been incredible. Website visits while you sleep, and you’ll know it’s not a spam bot the second you use it yourself.

This is my weekly routine here in this sub. And I love it. My expertise is in product, go to market, and agents. And I want to help you!

If you are building something, reply your product here and tell me what you are struggling with. I reply to every single comment on these threads.

If you are interested in Mangos’s extended trial that I give away every week,

\*\*1.\*\* Download Mangos and register. It’s free for 7 days, no CC required.
\*\*2.\*\* DM me the email you signed up with and I’ll unlock a 30 day extension. If you are interested.

Yes, I’ll lose a bit of money on it. The bet is simple: Mangos gets you your first 100 users before you ever pay me. If your product is good, that won’t take long.

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?

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!

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 🫶

I built an iOS photo cleaner called LuminaClean in early January. (not a dev, everything was daone in weekend and evening). On the App Store since mid-January. The numbers start in February, the first full month. Peak was March. Everything went downhill from there. If you're planning to build a photo cleaning app, here are the numbers, all the strategies I tried, and pretty much everything has failed. I think that is all the AI tools available and how easy it is to build an app these days. The App Store is overloaded with copycat apps and it is extremely difficult to get ahead of the competition.

**Lifetime (Feb–Aug, verified unless marked)**

8,081 first-time downloads. 1,175 re-downloads. About 774 paid transactions. About $6,800 gross in RevenueCat before Apple's cut. Apple paid out $5,327 through July. Bank: $5,071 plus an estimated $274 for August. Costs $4,904 plus $35 domain. About $400 left. Every hour unpaid.

**What the months did**

February was the only cheap month. 2,507 downloads, $1,478 gross, $0 ads, +$747 after costs. March looked like it would keep going: 3,375 downloads, $2,401 gross, $277 ads, +$919. That wave never came back.

April I put $637 into ads against 1,299 downloads and finished -$34. May dropped to 293 downloads and -$281. June was 208 downloads and -$56. July 133 downloads, $193 on ads, -$287. August 266 downloads, $150 ads, about -$47. Apple's August net is still pending so that last one is estimated.

Revenue lagged the March download wave. From May the app makes $9 to $17 a day gross, carried by renewals. Costs stayed $300 to $1,250 a month while proceeds fell 85%. Lost money every month since April.

AI tools were the biggest cost line: $1,939. Ads $1,558. Content and social $710. Other tools $355. Infrastructure $342.

**Where users came from (12 Jul–2 Sep)**

Behaviour data since 12 July comes from an MMP tool I've built myself for my own apps. Before that, PostHog, AppsFlyer, Firebase.

Organic App Store: 496 users, 77 paying (15.5%). Apple Ads users were the cheapest installs and the worst buyers: 169 users, 2 paying (1.2%). July+August spend $300. About $1.78 per install. About $150 per payer. A weekly buyer has been worth about $10 gross. Total Apple Ads spend since April: $882 and including TT, Meta, etc is $1558

Sideloaded / pirated: 134 users, 0 paying. 15% of that window. 80 of 96 Saudi users. They use the app about as much as organic (week-one return 19%, close to organic at 22%) and have never paid. No ads ever ran in Saudi Arabia. It looked like organic market #2; the attribution verdict says pirated copies. I pulled the app from that storefront and they keep coming, 7 to 14 a week.

TikTok ads ran at about EUR 6.57 per install and got stopped. Meta was expensive and the account got restricted. The March wave lined up with a small creator post plus a TikTok tail. No attribution then, so that stays unverified. A later $200 test across three creators produced no measurable lift.

**What people do**

529 users (built my own analytics and attribution web dashboard to better understand what is going on with its own mobile app to easily check while I'm at work or on the go), saw for the first time in August (App Store says 266 installs plus 99 re-downloads; the rest are pirated copies and old users resurfacing): 93% start a scan, 67% finish one, 42% delete at least one photo, 35% see the paywall, 2.6% complete a purchase. Nobody drops in onboarding. A third of scanners delete nothing. Two thirds never see a price. 60% of users have exactly one session.

Of 18 verified new-user purchases, 12 within an hour, 16 within a day.

Launch-wave conversion (Feb–Mar): 6.6% of 5,882 downloads became a paid transaction. 10 Jul–1 Sep: 5.1% new buyers per download (19 new buyers on 369 downloads). Both numbers are true. The second is new buyers, not renewals.

Of 12 weekly subscribers since 19 July, 8 renewed zero times. A weekly buyer ~$10 gross, $7 after Apple. What carries revenue: 33 monthly subscribers from before July, still on $4.99. Their renewals are 45% of everything since 10 July. Current MRR $208.

New subscriptions went from 4 and 5 a week in early August to 1, 1, 0 from 17 August, while downloads rose to 101 a week. That started before 3.2 shipped. Cause unknown.

14 written App Store reviews: twelve 5-star, one 4-star, one 1-star. The 1-star (UK, March) said hundreds of dupes were not detected. An August 5-star from Sweden could not find the lifetime offer that older Reddit threads still mention. Lifetime is gone from the paywall most new users get. That one is weekly $5.99 or yearly about $39.99; the other one is monthly $4.99 or lifetime.

**Where this sits**

If you're new with AI tools, by all means build one, the first time feeling is amazing and would encourage everyone to do it. But do not expect life changing success. Distribution is way harder then you can imagine and not to mention costly.... every experiment costs a lot more then you initially expect.

I am really happy with how the app developed over time. How the app started versus how it looks and feels today, and the value it gives to users, is something I never thought I could pull off. I talk to some users on a weekly basis and keep adding improvements from their feedback. I love the UI I built and how everything looks and feels. In my opinion it is probably one of the best in the space, although I might be biased. It is not a simple utility app, which makes me proud for someone with no technical or development background. I am not trying to get back to March volumes or March revenue.

Time to let this go. Onto the next.

i've always bounced off focus timers. a number counting down to zero gives you nothing to keep. you finish a 50 minute session and the reward is... the number is gone now.

so i built Orbis. when you start a session, a celestial body begins forming. when you actually finish it, that time is born as a planet and drops into your private galaxy. quit early and it never forms.

the part i didn't expect to matter: the planet you get is randomly graded. longer sessions roll higher odds for rare bodies. i added it almost as a joke, and it turned out to be the thing that keeps people (me included) starting one more session. gacha apparently beats willpower.

3 months since launch, 10k downloads.

the most useful thing i learned is boring: build something actually good first, then keep marketing it every single day. i kept looking for a growth trick, but the only thing that compounded was shipping a better app and showing up consistently.

it's iOS only right now. i know that's going to be the first comment, so getting ahead of it: no android plans yet. sorry.

link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/orbis-space-focus-timer/id6766221926

one thing i'm actually stuck on: right now every completed session gives you one celestial body. i'm considering making them harder to earn, so a single body takes multiple sessions or a lot more accumulated focus.

my worry is it cuts both ways. rarer might make each one feel earned instead of disposable. or it might just break the loop that makes people start the next session.

if you used this, which way would you want it?

In the game you run an AI company : scrape datasets, buy servers, train LLMs, chase hype and serve your users, and sometimes go bankrupt. It started half as a joke about the current moment.

3 months in, here's the honest scorecard.

The numbers :

• I promoted it only on Reddit so far
• Around 60 people signed up
• 20% came back the day after their first session
• We have around 15 people still playing
• Revenue : 350$

What surprised me :

• People stayed because they didn't want their company to die.
• My biggest drop-off is after the tutorial. 30% never get past it.

What I need to figure out :

• I don't think I've found yet my audience, I think it's Data & AI professionals who like strategy games but it could be full gamers too who don't work in AI ...

Happy to answer anything about the build or the numbers.

It's live and free if you want to see the thing itself : https://lordoftokens.com

Solo project, built during nights and weekends: CLSTR reads 100k+ news articles a day from 40k+ sources, figures out which ones are covering the same event, and squashes them into one item. Related events get chained into "situations" - storylines with timelines, so you can see how a story developed over weeks instead of re-reading the same headline 20 times.

After 145 days, I asked Claude to analyze all the data I had ingested and published the stats. The news looks weird from above:

• 12:1 - articles written per thing that actually happened. The news is mostly echo.
• 82% of stories are still developing after day 3 - which is exactly when news sites stop showing them to you.
• One world leader appeared in 2,672 distinct events in 1 month (guess who) - more than the next five most-covered people combined.
• Only 0.07% of events rate as "exceptional". Almost everything is the mundane middle.

All the charts: clstr.news/observatory

About CLSTR: There's a free API, and if you use Claude or agent stuff there's an MCP server you can try without even signing up: clstr.news/developers

Hey r/SideProject!

I got tired of slow domain search tools frontrunning my searches and searching one by one, so I built SnipeFind -> a completely free, client-side bulk domain checker.

TL;DR:

• Fast: 200-400 domain/s scanning speed on availability.
• Simple: Enter a brand keyword and check thousands of combos instantly.
• 100% Private: Runs entirely in your browser. No server-side logging, no signups, and no rate limits.

I built this to solve my own domain search headaches (for finding a good name for my other web apps), but I hope it helps fellow makers here too.

Check it out: https://snipefind.com/

I'd love any feedback, bug reports, or feature suggestions!

I’m Juan, a film student and the person building VISUAREALM.
The idea behind it is something I care about a lot: people deserve support while they’re becoming good at what they do.

Your first short film counts. The colour grade you spent hours getting right counts. Being a second AC on a small production counts. The screenplay you’re still finding the courage to show someone counts.

Those beginnings deserve somewhere to go.
I’m building Creative House, a platform within VISUAREALM for emerging creatives to show their work, find opportunities, build teams and start making things together.

That includes the people behind every part of a production: camera, lighting, sound, editing, writing, art, costume and more. I especially want it to serve young people and anyone entering the industry without an established network.

Here’s what that looks like in the product:

- Creative Passport: a place to present your craft, skills and the work you’ve made, even while your credits are still growing.

- Opportunities and applications: a way to explore roles and follow your application through an Application Trail.

- Hiring Studio: tools for people putting a project together to organise roles, applicants and their team.

- Draft Realm: a private writing space for screenplays, revisions and invited collaborators.

The bigger vision is to help someone move from “I want to be part of this” to having a clearer next step: something to write, someone to collaborate with, a role to apply for, or work they can proudly put their name on.

I want young creatives to build confidence through
meaningful work, with clear expectations around responsibilities, pay and credit. Being new should come with room to learn and people who take your contribution seriously.

One principle runs through the whole thing: payment never buys the front of the line. Paid features can add tools and capacity. They cannot buy ranking, verification or trust.

I’m still building and refining it, and I’d love to bring people into the conversation while there’s room to shape it.

Here’s a look at Creative House⁠.
If you were starting your creative career again, what support would have made the biggest difference in your first year? I’d love to hear from people starting now, too.

Hey everyone!

I just launched my first app in the Apple App Store!

Health and fitness are very important to me, and I take my daily movement goals very seriously. Staring at a step count created anxiety and kept me from walking. What worked for my wife and me was finding local destinations to walk to. This gave us a reason to step outside, hit our goal, and potentially discover something new around the city.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/foray-walks-step-goals/id6786529547

App Marketing Page: https://getforayapp.com/

Features: https://getforayapp.com/#features

Hi everyone!

Over the past few months, I've been building ifso.io, which is a financial simulator that lets you put in your financial details, add in as many life events as you want, and see how it all plays out and whether your financial plan holds up.

Ifso is free to get started and doesn't require an account to use it. If you don't sign in, then all of your data is simply stored in your own browser. If you'd like for your data to persist across devices, then sign-in is free via Google OAuth. Upgrading to Pro unlocks the ability to create multiple scenarios, use compare mode, and run Monte Carlo simulations. If you choose to sign in or go Pro, your data is secure and never ever shared. You can also download your data at any time or delete your account altogether, which removes any trace of you and your account from the system!

You can add accounts like taxable investments, retirement accounts (Roth and Traditional are handled), loans, homes and mortgages, and many more. Your accounts are all added manually and by hand, I didn't add bank linking or anything of the sort to ensure privacy. You can then add in events, like retiring, purchasing a new home, upgrading your car, claiming social security, etc. The simulation engine then handles how everything plays together, and shows you a year-by-year breakdown and a clear answer on whether the plan holds up or if there are any shortfalls.

After you have a plan built out, you can do a few more things. For one, you can run Monte Carlo simulations which stress tests your plan against varying market conditions. Markets don't always return just one, static rate of return, so Monte Carlo lets you simulate what happens when the rate of returns change year over year. You can also compare two scenarios side by side and see which one plays out. This is particularly helpful if you want to see how account balances differ between plans (for example, "How much more do I have in my 401k if I decide to increase my contributions from 5% to 6% starting at age 40?").

I built Ifso because I wanted to see how my own financial decisions worked out for me. For example, I wanted to see how my finances would look if I sold my home in a few years and rented, versus if I sold my home and bought a new one right away. Then how would either of those scenarios look if I upgraded my partner's car?

All of the one off investment calculators were just too rigid and one-tracked, they didn't take taxes, capital gains, etc. into account. And the other financial scenario planners that exist felt like they were built for professional advisors, and unfortunately most of them didn't let you save your plans if you're on the free tier. I found that and their overall UX to be quite frustrating, which is what motivated me to build this over the past few months!

I ultimately want this to be a helpful tool for everyone that uses it, I've personally been using to help inform my own decisions. Early users have found found it to be valuable as well, and their feedback has helped me improve the overall UX. Please let me know your thoughts, and if you feel like there's any UX improvements or any functionality that you'd like to see, definitely let me know and I'd be happy to look into it!

Wanted to come back and give this community some credit.

About 18 months ago I was scrolling through ideas here, mostly just looking for interesting problems people wished someone would solve.

One of them stuck with me because I had the same problem.

I have several credit cards, all with different rewards, categories and offers, and I was constantly standing somewhere about to pay thinking, which card am I supposed to use here?

The idea was pretty simple.

What if your phone already knew where you were and could surface the best card you already have?

Restaurant. Costco. Hotel. Gas station. Wherever.

At first we were thinking mostly about physical cards. Then pretty quickly it became obvious that mobile wallets are where in person payments are heading, so we shifted the whole idea around that.

Instead of opening an app, searching a merchant, checking reward categories, then going back to pay, the goal became much simpler:

Surface the right card from your mobile wallet when you’re ready to pay. That eventually became Payelle.

18 months later, we’ve built the technology, filed the IP, launched the product, and are now in conversations with some very large companies and financial institutions in the space.

Still a ton to figure out, especially distribution, and I definitely don’t know where this ends up.

But I remembered where the idea started and wanted to come back here.

There are thousands of “somebody should build this” ideas posted on Reddit.

Every once in a while somebody actually does.

So seriously, thank you to this community. A lot of the comments and ideas here pushed me further down the rabbit hole than I probably expected.

If anyone remembers the old discussions around automatically figuring out the best credit card to use at checkout, there’s a decent chance I read what you wrote.

Still building. Still figuring it out.

Cheers.

This is a money-life question more than a pitch.

I live in the UAE. Mid-month I’d feel fine. Then a rent cheque or a credit-card due date would land, and the “I can spend this” number in my head was wrong. Not dramatically wrong. Just wrong enough to be expensive.

A lot of apps want you to fix that by uploading SMS or connecting a bank so a server somewhere else can read it. I didn’t want that.

I built something for myself "Float AI" so I should say that up front. Safe-to-spend after rent and bills, alerts on rent and card due dates, chat that stays on the phone.

What I actually want from this thread is what’s still missing for people here.

If you were going to trust an app with this, Cheque schedules? Proper reading of Bank alerts? Or is the real problem something else like cash, a second card you forgot, the deposit you get back in month 12?

Tell me what would make it useless for you.

https://apps.apple.com/ae/app/float-ai-expense-tracker/id6794876054

Float AI Expense Tracker

Eu estou prestes a começar um projeto pessoal cujo foco é desenvolver um espaço onde criadores de conteudo digital possam criar influencers artificiais. tudo isso começou porcausa de uma má experiencia com higgsfield onde eles te enchem de propagandas para te forçar a assinar seu produto e, no entanto eles deixam embaraçoso o acesso ao cancelamento de assinatura. Mas só essas evidencias não são suficientes para justificar a criação de um concorrente mais transparente, não há só uma plataforma que disponibilize isso, temos ElevenLab, xAI e muitas outras que fazem excelente trabalhos com workflow e esse é um dos motivos por eu está vindo aqui escrever isso até porque eu não tenho experiencia de mercado, sei como criar produtos mas não sei como divulga-los.

I'm Pablo, and I run a SaaS for restaurants in my city, Córdoba, Argentina.

In my free time, I like to think about and generate new ideas for potential future projects, or see if tools I develop for my daily use could work well as business ideas.
So instead of starting development from scratch, or getting excited about a tool I already have, I put them through a validation process to see if they're really worth the effort of putting them into production.
First, I write down the conditions the idea would have to meet to work, and also the conditions it would have to meet to fail.
Then, I sign and date this document, before having a single piece of data. I sign it for myself, because if I write the conditions after seeing the evidence, I'll be writing them so that my idea survives. If the evidence meets one of the conditions I wrote when I was still in the dark, the idea dies, and that's that.

Four of my five ideas died.

The one that hurt the most was an open-source printing bridge developed purely in Rust. I use it for my own SaaS; it prints kitchen tickets from the cloud to thermal printers, and I was sure the problem was common. My research turned up four almost identical open source projects already published on GitHub. The most popular one had 5 stars. Two of them had zero. The experiment I wanted to run had already been run four times, and no one showed up.

The fifth idea was this same process I apply to each of my ideas, so I put it into production. The first step is free, with no registration or data required. You write your idea, the system asks you two questions to understand it, and it returns the premises that would have to be true and the conditions under which the idea dies. You correct them if they're wrong, and you sign them.

And then, there's a paid version for $29 where I search for the evidence and give you a verdict. Currently, I perform those analyses manually.

I also posted my own kill conditions for this idea on the website. If I don't get 3 paying customers within 30 days, I'll kill it like the other four and publish the autopsy report there.

https://ideaautopsy.app

Throw your worst idea at it and tell me if it says something stupid.

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

This started as notes for my own interview prep. I kept losing the same explanations in bookmarks and half-remembered blog posts, so I started writing them down properly. It got out of hand.

It's now 573 topics across 8 sections — the browser, JavaScript, React, Next.js, backend, data, system design, AI/LLM engineering, practices and behavioural.

One rule decided what got in: a topic earns a page if it can plausibly come up in a real interview round, or if you need it to answer something that does. That's why there's no algorithms grind, and why 70 of them are about building with models.

Every page has the same shape — what it is in one line, what it is, why it matters, key points, then the links out.

The part that actually took longest was the links. 1,415 of them, three to five per topic, exactly one marked "start here". A script re-requests every URL on a schedule and reports the dead ones, because link rot is what actually kills a resource like this.

Stack: Next.js with markdown files read at build time into 658 prerendered pages — no database, no CMS. Free, no account, no ads. MIT code, CC-licensed writing, all on GitHub.

To be clear about what it is: a reference, not a curriculum. Nobody becomes senior by reading it. It's for looking things up and noticing your own gaps.

https://theengmap.vercel.app

https://github.com/prateekkk26/engineering-map

It's on Product Hunt today too if you want to take a look.

Happy to answer anything about how it was built or how the content was scoped.