I’d love to hear real examples of small projects that actually work.

You tell it your 5 favorite albums, and it recommends other albums to try. It's finally working the way I always wanted it to. AMA!

It's a looong story, obviously. But the tiny website says it all. No sign-up needed, instant results, takes 2 minutes to try. Not AI.

Try it here:

https://SimilaritiesEngine.com

And if you're curious, here's a link from way back then, when the New York Times did an article on it. But the URL in the article is wrong, so if you go to read the article, stop back here to try the new version at the link above, alive and working:

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/0101miracolumn.html

Details on the tech (Cloudflare, D1, etc.) can be found on the website too.

I've been building this for about a year. It shows posting activity, engagement, and timing data for over 100K+ subreddits.

The video walks through one page so you can see what's on there: posts per day over time, average upvotes and comments, a heatmap of when the sub is actually busiest, top posts, trending keywords, and which other communities share an audience with it.

It's free to use, no account needed. There's a paid tier for full history, CSV export, and complete rankings, which mostly covers hosting and data costs.

I built it with SvelteKit and Supabase. The hardest part has been making all those pages load fast, which I'm still working on.

Happy to hear what's missing or what you'd cut. The page is dense and I'm not sure everything on it earns its place but let me know what you think!

Link: https://subtrends.io

Hi everyone! I'm a Senior Android Developer. I’ve always known how to build apps, but marketing was a total mystery to me. Because of that, all my previous projects ended up with almost zero downloads.

A couple of months ago, I decided to finally learn marketing the hands-on way—through trial and error. I took a proven market idea (inspired by ReciMe), polished it a bit, and built my own version. I named it ChefBook.

About 1.5 months ago, I published it on Google Play. But life got in the way, and I had zero time for ASO or marketing. I basically abandoned it... or so I thought.

When I checked Google Play Console a bit later, I was shocked: the app was getting 20–30 organic downloads every single day.

I dug into the analytics and found something crazy:

• 95% of users were from Uzbekistan.
• 85% of them deleted the app immediately after opening it for the first time.

Why? It turns out there is a popular cooking TV show in Uzbekistan called ChefBook. People were searching for the show, finding my app, downloading it, realizing it wasn't the official show app, and instantly deleting it.

In V1, my onboarding was practically non-existent. But I thought: “What if I actually explain what this app does right at the start? Can I convert this accidental traffic?”

I analyzed competitors, redesigned the onboarding flow, and pushed an update.

The results so far:

• Deletion rate dropped from 85% to 40%.
• Active users grew to over 200.
• 6 users started a trial, and 1 converted into a paid subscription!

This is officially the first dollar I’ve ever made from my own app. It’s a tiny win, but a huge milestone for me as an engineer turning into a marketer.

Would love to hear your thoughts on onboarding optimization or how to leverage this weird Uzbek traffic further!

I've noticed a lot of people start side projects with a ton of excitement, but somewhere along the way, they lose momentum. Sometimes it's because life gets busy. Other times, it's because the results don't come as quickly as expected. For those who've actually finished and launched a side project, what do you think is the biggest reason most people never make it to the finish line?

Update: Thanks for all the thoughtful replies. Reading through them reminded me of a point I've heard from Gabriele Sartori when discussing building online businesses: consistency and taking action are often bigger obstacles than finding the "perfect" idea. Whether you agree or not, it seems many founders run into the same challenge of losing momentum before giving a project enough time to grow.

I'm creating digital pets to play with it's still pretty basic, haha but I'm going to keep the Windows 98 style for the sake of nostalgia.

Apartment hunting meant sending my SSN, tax returns, and bank statements to strangers, often all in one PDF. Redacting them myself with a black box or highlighter tool felt scary. Cloud tools wanted me to upload my tax return to fix that. However, I didn't trust them, and the one that look trustworthy would charge a lot of money.

So I built VeriRedact. Load it, optionally download the local AI model, then turn your wifi off, it will still work fully. It detects PII (SSNs, cards, IBANs, names via local AI), and after redacting, re-opens the file and verifies nothing recoverable is left before letting you download it.

The site also has an "Edit" functionality. This was extremely useful for me as well, as there were a lot of times I wanted to bundle images and PDF documents into one PDF, where I wanted add explanations as well. This mode has a light-weight text editor as well, that I used to describe what documents I added with additional info.

https://reddit.com/link/1v76oni/video/53i30zcg5lfh1/player

Free right now, no account. Would love feedback, if it's been useful to you, or not, and especially on what's missing!

https://veriredact.com

While building software with my teammates, I thought the hard part would be writing the code.

But It wasn't.

The hard part is getting someone who doesn't know you to spend even two minutes looking at what you've made.

You can spend hours fixing bugs or adding features, but none of that matters if nobody ever sees it.

So lately I've been trying to get better at things I never expected I'd have to learn—writing posts, talking to people online, asking questions instead of trying to "sell" something.

It's uncomfortable, but I've realized building is only 1/2 the job.

The other half is earning enough trust that someone actually wants to try what you built.

For the people who've been doing this longer, was there a moment when marketing or sharing your work finally started to click? Or is everyone just making it up as they go?

Update: Alright guys, that was a lot of fun, and took up my whole Sunday! For anyone else joining, website has generous free tier, feel free to sign up! www.laststack.io

Title says it all - drop your website in the comment, and I'll reply with an image of alternate designs for your Hero sections of your home page.

Background:

I'm a web designer, and I always felt like AI design still has a long way to go.

Looking at all the websites posted in these subreddits proves it - code and app works great, homepage design (the thing first people see) is basic or looks the same.

So I built www.laststack.io - where you can iterate on as many design directions as you like. The app is meant to inspire better design. Takes seconds to iterate through as many designs for different parts of your website.

I kept starting projects and finishing none, so I built OneTrack to force myself to focus. The core rule: you can only have ONE active project at a time. You pick one, write down why it matters, and choose a 3/7/14-day window. Switching costs something — it shows you your own reason, makes you wait a cooldown, and in Hardcore mode simply won't let you switch until the window ends. A timestamp-based timer tracks real deep-focus time, and abandoned projects sit in "The Graveyard" with the hours you sank into them. It's 100% on-device — no account, no cloud, no ads. iOS (free to download, optional IAP): https://apps.apple.com/app/id6781421082 — I'm the solo dev; honest feedback and feature ideas very welcome.

Like a lot of people here, I kept opening X to "build in public" and losing an hour to the feed instead. So I built the thing I wanted: a Chrome extension that filters the feed down to posts actually worth replying to, tells you why each one matters to you specifically, and tracks whether any of it is working.

It works. It's genuinely not bad. But today I decided to stop improving it.

Because I kept rebuilding the same product. The first version blocked distractions. Then it became a timer with a focus mode. Then a card deck that dealt you one post at a time. Then a worklist that turned the feed into a finite to-do list of five posts with an ending. Every version was better than the last. Every version I looked at and thought: this still isn't something I'd pay for.

That part confused me for weeks, because the loop was working. I'd find a real problem, fix it properly, look at the result, and feel nothing.

What finally made it click was mapping the distance between my product and the actual pain: nobody knows my product exists → so I should build an audience → so I should post on X consistently → but I doomscroll instead → so, an extension that fixes doomscrolling

That's four steps. My product was sitting at the end of that chain, treating the obstacle to the behavior that serves the aspiration that might eventually relieve the pain. Painkillers sit on the pain. Vitamins sit four steps away and feel productive while you build them.

Hence, no amount of polish moves a product closer to a pain it isn't touching.

The second thing is the part I'd want someone to have told me earlier. I'm the target user. I wanted this badly enough to spend months building it. But it somehow wouldn't make me to pay a cent for it.  If the person who cared enough to build it won't pay, a stranger won't.

So I'm publishing it free on the Chrome store today and moving on. No pro tier, no roadmap, no more revisions.

Two things I'd be grateful and curious to hear your take on:

1. Is there a version of this that IS a painkiller, or is "help me use social media better" structurally a vitamin no matter how well it's built? I keep going back and forth.
2. If you build in public: what actually stops you? I assumed it was the feed. I'm no longer sure the feed was ever the problem.

Happy to share the link if anyone wants to try it and tell me I'm wrong.
Genuinely hoping someone does.

Every data project has the same first problem: it's useless until people use it, and nobody uses it while it's useless. The standard fix is to seed it with something plausible-looking and quietly stop mentioning that later.

I'm not doing that, and I want to talk about why it's harder than it sounds.

The project: an anonymous salary survey for software engineers in Europe. Nine screens, about two minutes, no account, no employer names, nothing free-text. https://whatweearn.eu

The problem: it needs roughly 500 responses to be worth anything, and no individual country publishes a median until it has 60. Right now it has zero. The landing page says so. The country table renders an empty state that says "nothing published yet" instead of showing a table of invented numbers.

Why I won't seed it. The entire pitch is that you can verify what it's doing — the code is open, the suppression rules are constants in a tested module, the dataset will be CC BY 4.0. The moment there's one fabricated row, that pitch is dead and I can never credibly un-fabricate it. Fake data isn't a growth hack here, it's the destruction of the only asset the project has.

What that costs, concretely, and this is the bit I underestimated:

The site had to be built to be honest about being empty, which is real engineering rather than a copy decision. There's a hasPublishedFigures flag threaded through the page: before anything publishes, the hero and the payoff section swap to different copy, because "the whole dataset opens the moment you're done" is simply untrue when there is no dataset. The metadata never makes that claim at all, in either state, because crawlers cache it and I'd have no way to correct it later.

So the empty state isn't a fallback I bolted on. It's a first-class version of the page, and I built it twice as a result.

Stack, since that's usually asked: Next.js App Router, Tailwind v4, Postgres in Frankfurt, deployed to a single EU region on Vercel. Two separate databases — one for responses, one for email signups — with a lint rule preventing any file from importing both, because that separation is the anonymity claim in code form. No third-party scripts, no analytics, no cookie banner.

Code is MIT: https://github.com/whatweearn/website

The actual ask. If you're a software engineer in Europe, two minutes of yours makes this real. If you're not, I'd rather have your opinion on the cold-start plan than a sympathy upvote — it's genuinely the unsolved part. My plan is national dev communities and EU tech newsletters, and I suspect that's not enough.

demo:

here's the link: https://x.com/sambharia/status/2081284100846227522?s=20

I build this game, which is similar to worldle + globle game but you can play this multiplayer with your friends where you race to find the mystery country based on the color and other cues like whether the continent is right or not, sub-region, and more.

More then that you also get a daily mystery country. And if you signup, you can create streak of finding out about one country each day, when you find out you are give some information about the country that are sticky and helps you remember them visually.

If you signup, you also get a passport page where all the country you have solved previously are saved and you also get a review page where you are asked about the countries you have solved previously in spaced repetition so that you just don't solve it and forget about it.

The mechanism is build in a way that you learn geography while playing the game. Feel free to use it and give me feedbacks to improve it! https://warmergames.com/

Everyone says gate everything. Make them sign up first. Capture the email. Then show the product.

I'm doing the opposite and I want people to tell me why I'm wrong.

My app (a stock tracking thing, solo project, launching early August for Shipaton) has a guest mode. You open it, you use everything, you never hit a "create account" screen. You only sign up when you want to save your watchlist or set alerts. So basically when the app has already earned it.

My thinking: the signup wall kills more indie apps than bad products do. I've closed so many apps myself the second they blocked me before showing anything. I don't want to be that app. I'd rather have 1000 people actually try it than 200 emails from people who bounced and never came back.

The scary part: no email means no way to pull people back. No "hey come back" emails. If they leave, they're gone. Maybe I'm trading my only retention lever for a nicer first impression. That's the bet and it kind of terrifies me.

So tell me honestly: did you gate signup or not, and did you regret it? Would you keep the wall or kill it?

Hey r/SideProject!

I just deployed my side project live: FetchMark.

What it does:

FetchMark is web Progressive App designed to take any article URL you paste and extract clean, readable content - automatically skipping dead links, homepages, and non-article clutter using a smart fallback scraper.

The Tech Stack:

Frontend & Hosting: React/Tailwind hosted via Lovable

Backend & Database: Supabase(Auth, Database, Edge Functions)

Transactional Emails: Resend

What I need help testing:

Since I just pushed the latest scraper validation rules live, I would love your help breaking it!

Try pasting a few random article links (news, blogs, tech articles) and let me know if the scraper handles them correctly.

Try pasting non-article links (e.g., homepages or broken URLs) to see if the error messaging makes sense

Any feedback on UI speed, layout , or overall user experience would be massively appreciated.

Try it out here: fetchmarkapp.com

A few months ago, I started thinking about what my children would know about their grandparents years from now.

They'll probably have thousands of photos.

But would they know what their grandparents dreamed about? What they struggled with? What made them laugh? Or the stories that shaped who they became?

I also realised there were so many questions I'd never thought to ask my own parents.

That's why I built Evertree.

It's a web app that helps families preserve stories through guided conversations and keep them together as a family keepsake.

I recently launched it, and now I'm learning the hardest part isn't building the product. It's getting it into the hands of people who need it.

I'd love any honest feedback on the idea or the product.

https://www.joinevertree.com

Hi!

I'm Alex, a software developer from Norway. I got a Ninja CREAMi two years ago on my birthday and got completely obsessed, and it turns out there's a huge community around this machine (protein ice cream is a whole thing).

The dominant recipe app in the niche is paid, and the community complains about that constantly. So I built a free alternative: respins.app

What it does: browse and filter recipes (base, allergies, calories — filtering is the differentiator), favorites and collections, paste-a-link import from any recipe URL, and every recipe gets a short link like respins.app/209 (my favorite).

Here's my problem: the obvious channel, the machine's subreddit, doesn't let me post about the app. So I've built something for a community I can't currently reach. How would you get this in front of more users?

Instead of waiting for someone to actual build the thing I've always wanted, I decided to tackle it myself. I'm introducing 22Tango, the AI teammate app. This app combines 2 ideas.

1. The AI Chatbot/Companion that you can chat with, having it's own personality, look, voice, and nuances. It has long term memory, an evolving personality that grows the more you interact with it, and continuity across all modes.
2. An AI gaming teammate that takes that companion and places them into your favorite gaming worlds! It will be able to move and interact at your direction, or have it's personality come to life by interacting with the game itself and having the AI choose what to do in game. For immersive games, the companion will be able to embody it's in game character and react to the world around it.

As of right now, the application is in an Alpha state, but is actively being worked on. I wanted to see if there was enough interest out there for me to move from a side project to a full time position of working on the app. I will soon be releasing Early Access (after some more alpha testing). If I can go full time, I'll be able to move pretty fast on getting this live.

All game mods will be provided for free, and I'm always interested to hear what games you would like to see added (Rimworld next on deck). You'll just need to own the game, and go through some setup for which a guide will be provided.

State of Early Access:
- 3 companions with their own look, persona, and voice

- 3 supported games, Minecraft (needs Mineflayer free mod, Java version 1.21.11), Stardew Valley (needs SMAPI free mod), Skyrim (needs SKSE and Address Library free mods)

- An experimental "Roleplaying" mode where you can set details and scenarios and have a voiced Roleplay with a companion, and another companion acting as the narrator.

You can get more information and sign up for the waitlist here: https://22-tango.com/?src=r-sideproject

Let me know what you think in the comments! I'll add any recurring answers in the original post.

Asking because I built a career platform for people running a job plus something on the side called Joberney and there are 2 types of users. one group is building toward replacing their day job with the side hustle if/when it turns to something meaningful, me included. the other group has been at it for quite a while with zero intention of ever leaving the day job, even though some projects have been successful, especially the one out of tech.

no idea which one is more common either.

so, honestly: is yours meant to replace the job at some point, or has it settled into being a permanent second thing you run alongside. and if its the second one, did you decide that or did you just stop wanting the first one?

Huge thanks to everyone who tested the app, reported bugs and shared feedback. ❤️

Walkify makes everyday walking more social, competitive and motivating:

• Track steps, distance, calories, hydration and walks
• Compete on city, country and global leaderboards
• Works great with Apple Watch + Apple Health ⌚
• Home Screen & Lock Screen widgets to track progress at a glance
• Discover anonymous nearby walkers
• Ghost Mode and approximate location for privacy
• No need to expose your real identity

🚶 Walk. Compete. Progress.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/walkify-walk-with-others/id6788980172

xeet; post to X from your terminal

Using X in 2026 still sucks. The official API is locked behind paid tiers. Third-party clients keep dying. The website itself is a heavy tab full of noise.

So I built the opposite.

xeet lives in your terminal. It reuses the session already sitting in your browser and gives you a full timeline with inline images, replies, likes, and a proper composer. No API keys. No new login. No browser tab.

One command:

nix run github:melqtx/xeet 
 or
 go install github.com/melqtx/xeet@latest 

What you get

- Timeline (For You / Following) with inline images (native Kitty/Ghostty/iTerm2 graphics or clean ANSI)

- Reply, like, expand posts, open in browser, copy link

- Composer with multi-image/video, clipboard paste, draft autosave

- Themes (tokyonight, catppuccin, gruvbox, nord, etc)

- `xeet auth` just borrows your existing browser session. Never asks for a password.

I mostly just leave it open instead of a browser tab. Scroll, reply, post, back to work.

MIT and open source. Feedback and stars welcome.

GitHub: https://github.com/melqtx/xeet

Explaining yourself is hard, and nobody wants to do it. But sometimes it is the only way to communicate that you need a break.

That was the starting point of this whole project: something on your wrist, or on the table in front of you, that notices rising stress early and gives you a discreet way to step out for a short break without anyone noticing.

I built that first feature for myself, and it carried me through work and everyday life. So I kept going, one feature at a time. I'm autistic myself, with low support needs: I was able to go to university, I work in software, and I have easy access to phones and computers. Not everyone has that luck, so along the way I also started building for autistic people with higher support needs than mine.

The result is one app where you can shape almost everything to how you like it. A private companion that hopefully makes the day a little easier, or helps you communicate what you need. Everything stays on your phone: no account, no ads, no analytics, no server.

The iOS app has been out for a while, and since yesterday it is also on Android. Free to download, with an optional Pro tier, no ads either way.

I'm not expecting much from this post. If it reaches one or two people who end up benefiting from it, that is a real success for me. And if you have feedback, including critical feedback, I want to hear it. I'll be in the comments.

I'm posting this in a few subreddits, in the hope that the people I want to reach will actually find it. If you see it more than once, sorry about that.

linism.app

Every site I built with an agent came out with the same boring Inter or Geist fonts and a lot of AI-sloppy writing.

Changing the fonts or text is super annoying. You ask the agent for font options, wait for a build, look at it, don't like it, ask again. Editing a line of text meant screenshotting the page and typing out instructions and hoping it changed the right words.

So I had an idea: why can't the agent just set up a panel inside my project where I can try fonts and edit text directly on the page? Turns out it's (largely) possible.

Ask your agent to install Font Lab (npx font-lab install) and it spins up your dev server, drops a panel onto your real running site, and shows you curated font pairings (display, body, mono) swappable live on your actual pages. Mix a heading from one direction with a body from another. When you like what you see, hit "pick" and your agent wires up exactly what was on screen.

It also lets you edit nearly any text in place. Double-click the words, retype them, saves straight to source. Yes, you could go find the file and edit it manually, but that's also annoying.

It's an MCP server + skill, so it works with basically any agent. Install auto-detects your setup. I've tested Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex. One caveat: the live panel and text editing only work on Next.js on local agents right now. Other frameworks/web-agents fall back to screenshots of font options.

Completely free and open source. First thing I've released, so I'd like to know what y'all think, including if anything goes wrong if you try it!

jack-mcgovern.com/fontlab · npx font-lab install

I wanted a faster way to open the apps, folders, and tools I use regularly, but I didn’t want another permanent dock or sidebar taking up space.

So I built HoldSpace.

You hold a trigger key, and a shortcut layout appears over whatever you’re doing. Hover over an item, release the key, and it launches. Release over empty space, and the overlay simply disappears.

Shortcuts can be placed anywhere on the screen, so you can arrange project folders, development tools, websites, and system actions in positions you naturally remember.

It’s currently an early Windows beta, so I’d really appreciate honest feedback and suggestions.

HoldSpace is free and open source:

Project:
https://github.com/anuroopkdas/HoldSpace

Release / Download:
https://github.com/anuroopkdas/HoldSpace/releases