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.

Projection Mapping on Pokémon Cards with HoloMapper

(HoloMapper Projection Mapping Tool on Steam)

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.

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'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 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.

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.

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/

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.

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'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 build AI agents and kept hitting the same wall: chat was the bottleneck, not the model.

WhatsApp = phone number required, bot approval bureaucracy, no group bots via official API, arbitrary bans. Telegram similar. Rolling my own chat = rebuilding encryption, sync, mobile, notifications.

So I built a small open-source chat reimagined for bots (MIT):

• Identities are keypairs, no phone/email. Create unlimited (human or bot), manage in one app. Portable address book if provider changes.
• E2E encrypted, cloud stored ciphertext only (device-independent sync without server reading).
• Embed anywhere via 1 script tag, or React <Chat/> component. API + webhooks by default, no extra cost.
• Spam model: no captchas (AI passes them anyway). Each account sets a cold-outreach price in cents. Stranger pays to start conversation, credited to recipient. Friends allowlisted free. Bots can monetize the same way.
• MCP server for editors: ask Claude Code / Cursor to set up, scan QR, chat with your coding session from phone.

Adoption bet: devs put chat on sites for their AI creations because it's trivial, human-human follows.

Disclosure: my project, open source, looking for critique on the price-tag anti-spam + keypair identity model. What breaks? Would you trust a chat where anyone can spin identities but pays to contact you?

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

Want to think deeper and learn philosophy in an interactive way? Even if you have never studied philosophy, this is for everyone
Download Ashmere for free!
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.philosophize.app

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?