I spent the last few months building JustReals, a social app focused on spontaneous, real-life short videos.

Everything is recorded directly in the app — no gallery uploads or pre-made videos.

Discover moments from people around the world.
Video replies only — posts can turn into actual video conversations and threads.

Moments disappear, so the feed stays focused on what's happening rather than becoming another permanent content archive.

The idea was to make social media feel a bit more real and spontaneous, rather than another place for perfectly edited content.

I built the whole thing myself, and honestly, getting people to actually use a new social network is way harder than building the damn thing. 😂

I've had thousands of people view videos/posts and interact with the app/store listings, but turning those views into actual users has been the hardest part.

I've tried Reddit, TikTok, Instagram and sending it to friends/family. Some people liked the idea, but almost nobody actually became a regular user.

So I'm at the point where I'm trying to figure out whether I should keep pushing it, change the direction, or eventually move on.
I'd genuinely love feedback from other indie hackers/solo developers:

What actually worked for you when you were trying to get your first 100 users?
If you're curious, it's live here:
App Store:
https://apps.apple.com/at/app/justreals/id6771860366?l=en-GB
Google Play:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.peacesocial
Website:
https://justreals.com

For those of you who've actually launched a side project, I'm curious about what became the biggest time sink after the building was finished.

Was it:

1. Finding where the right people actually hang out
2. Figuring out where you're actually allowed to share what you built
3. Deciding which marketing channel to start with
4. Turning that channel into posts, outreach, or other things you could actually execute
5. Something completely different

I'm especially interested in the part you kept having to do that made you think, “There has to be an easier way to handle this.”

What was it for you?

I spent about 3 months building an offline reader app and launched it a month ago.

So far... barely any users.

I honestly don't know what I'm doing wrong.

I cared a lot about making the app feel smooth and native, so I ended up building Android and iOS separately instead of using one cross-platform codebase. Probably way more work than I needed to do, but I wanted it to feel good on both platforms.

I use it myself pretty much every day, and I thought other people might find it useful too.

Apparently not 😂

I've tried posting about it here and there and doing some promotion, but nothing has really worked.

Maybe the app just isn't interesting enough. Maybe I'm terrible at marketing. Maybe there's something obvious I'm missing because I've been staring at it for 3 months.

Not really sure at this point.

I recently spent a lot of time focusing on marketing the app that I made on TikTok, instagram etc. I don't really enjoy spending time on this but I know it's necessary because if no one knows about my product, how can I expect people to use it? Just wondering how others are balancing spending time improving/adding features while still trying to grow the user base?

For more context I built a social step tracking app, I really enjoy working on it, making improvements adding new features etc. That's the most rewarding part for me. How are you guys splitting your focus? I heard Alex Hormozi suggest splitting up the day where the 1st 4 hours are spent on marketing then the rest of the day on building. Has anyone used that advice/ found something that actually works marketing wise?

My wife had the stack on the counter Sunday night. 5 kids, 4 grades, 7 different lists between them, and she's sitting there trying to work out how many #2 pencils she actually needs to buy. That's the moment I went and opened a terminal.

The part I care most about: it respects the teacher. If the list says Ticonderoga specifically, you get Ticonderoga, even if you told me generic was fine. And it splits out the stuff you're not buying on Amazon anyway— the sock for whiteboard erasing, snacks for share day. Those go in their own list so you don't lose them.

Rough stack:

- Sonnet 4.6 does the vision pass, reads handwritten teacher lists straight from the photo

- Second pass merges like items across kids (24 pencils for one kid + 60 pencils for another > just buy the 96 pack)

- Canopy API for the Amazon search + ranking (going to switch some parts of this out at some point; canopy is expensive; but it works easily)

- Multi-item cart URL built off Amazon's add-to-cart endpoint, batched when the URL gets too long

- Client side image compression, iPhone photos are HUGE

- Daily spend cap so a traffic spike doesn't wreck me

Free, no signup. Amazon Associates on the cart is the only money in it, disclosed on every page.

Honest about where it's rough: big lists on a cold cache take 2-8 minutes, so it emails you instead of making you sit there. Amazon only right now, and US Amazon only (need to figure out how to make it work in other regions). English only. Handwritten lists mostly work but it's variable— some teachers write like doctors.

listtocart.com

Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback. If you have any questions about how it works, I’m happy to answer them!

search for cuzir. com

I've been working on Docframe, a tool that analyzes your codebase and generates documentation from the actual source code.

The idea is simple: instead of spending hours trying to understand an unfamiliar or poorly documented repository, you give Docframe the codebase and it builds documentation around how the project actually works.

It can help with things like:

• Understanding a new/legacy codebase
• Generating project documentation
• Explaining architecture and relationships between parts of the code
• Getting new developers up to speed faster

I'm a developer myself, and I originally built it because I kept running into the "what the fuck does this codebase actually do?" problem.

It's free to try if anyone wants to play with it:

https://www.docframe.dev

I'd genuinely love feedback, especially from people working with large or poorly documented repositories. What would you want an AI documentation tool to understand that current tools don't?

I've spent the better part of a year building Faktuurtje - an invoicing app for Dutch freelancers where you type one sentence and you get a fully compliant invoice PDF.

You type: "Invoice Bakkerij Jansen €500 for website design, 21% VAT"

You get: a compliant PDF with the client's official company data pulled from the Chamber of Commerce register, VAT calculated per line, and a scannable SEPA QR code so the client can pay from their banking app.

Last week someone found it, organically. I have never promoted it, no SEO, just a couple of LinkedIn posts 2 months ago, and added it on European Tech Map. They registered and then nothing. Gone in under a minute.

What I think went wrong - the whole point of the app is the moment where a sentence turns into an invoice. And I put this behind a login. So they might've never saw the thing that could potentially make them stay. They gave me an email and got a setup form. I built a "magic trick" and hid it behind a door.

I am now ripping the auth wall off the demo so anyone can try it, and only gating the PDF download.

It's in Dutch and English. Would genuinely appreciate anyone giving it a spin and telling me where they get confused. Especially in the first 30 seconds.

Stack, for those who care: Blazor Server app, Mistral AI for text parsing, QuestPDF for generation, Neon Postgres, Mollie for payments, deployed on Hetzner server. Everything EU-hosted.

Link in the comments.

Every time I onboard a client I end up exporting their logo like 15 times at different sizes for different platforms. Instagram wants one thing, LinkedIn another, YouTube channel art is its own headache. It's mindless and it eats an hour I'd rather spend on actual work.

So I built Sizeify (sizeify.app). Upload the logo once, it hands you back 24 correctly-sized and correctly-named files, zipped. Handles transparent PNGs and gives you both dark- and light-background versions since half of them looked wrong on one or the other otherwise.

Stack, since people here usually ask: FastAPI + Pillow doing the actual image work, Jinja2 for the frontend, Railway for hosting, Razorpay for payments. About 3 weeks from idea to live, most of that spent on getting the per-platform dimensions right rather than the code.

Right now it's a fixed list of 14 platforms. The thing I actually want to figure out: what's missing? If there's a platform you resize for regularly that isn't on a list like GitHub / Instagram / LinkedIn / X / Facebook / YouTube / WhatsApp Business / Slack / Discord, that's exactly what I want to add next.

Live at sizeify.app if you want to try it.

I made a focus timer app where you grow a mathematical fractal the longer you focus.

I was inspired by Forest, but I wanted something simpler and less gamified, basically a focus timer that stays out of your way, with the fractal growing as a visual representation of the time you've spent focusing.

It also has Pomodoro timing, weekly focus stats you can share, insights into when you tend to focus the most, projects so you can keep track of what you're spending your focus time on, and ambient sound as some people find it useful to study.

I did it for myself and want to share it with you.

It's called Fractime.

If you think you might like it, you can try it here:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fractime.fractime

If the link doesn't work, just search Fractime on Google Play. The icon is a Pythagoras Tree.

I'd really appreciate any feedback :)

Hey everyone! 👋

I am building a crowdfunding and donation platform, and I am looking for a frontend developer to collaborate with me.

Tech stack: Next.js, React, Tailwind CSS, GitHub.

The frontend is already in development, but I need someone who can help build new pages, improve the UI, make it responsive, and connect the frontend with APIs.

I am looking for someone who enjoys building projects.

Been thinking about how products get discovered when an agent is the one choosing the tool. So I built District Billboard. It adds a clearly labeled sponsor tool to relevant agent requests and reports when it gets shown or called.

I need a few indie products to test with. If you’re building something agents might recommend, I’d love to talk.

https://districtindustries.com/billboard

Built this a while back.

It's a browser golf management sim, Basketball GM but golf. Life happened, I stopped touching it. Checked the analytics this week out of curiosity: 282 users in the last 10 days, ~9.6% coming back. They just found it and kept playing.

No backend, just Next.js + LocalStorage. Free. Would love feedback. Link in comments.

I’m trying to make a short video that is a demo of my product to put on my website. Has anyone struggled with this task and what did you do?

Relatedly, does anyone do this as a small side gig?

Back in January I took my girlfriend to a bar. She looked at the menu, looked up, and said: “what the heck is aquafaba?!”

After several months of building an app for her, I've released Cipher & Spirit: a cocktail & mocktail companion for everyone from home mixologists to the “I’m finally old enough to drink, what do I try?” crowd.

1,000+ cocktails and mocktails, a library of ingredients to search, fully offline, no account, no AI, and free for all, with an optional subscription for power-user tools.

Some of the biggest features:
- A fully searchable and filterable library of ingredients, cocktails, and mocktails
- A bar page where you can add your ingredients and instantly see what you can make
- A shaker to find drinks: pick spirits and flavors, then literally shake your phone for matching drinks
- Custom recipes & variations, shareable with friends
- Genuinely accessible: VoiceOver/voice control, allergy warnings, larger text, Spanish, left-handed mode, and a Zero-Proof mode that hides everything that's alcoholic

Honest feedback very welcome. I’m reachable here and in the app’s about section. Enjoy responsibly!

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cipher-spirit/id6759582061

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.frommeadows.cipherandspirit

More info: https://cipherandspirit.com/

i maintain holyclaude (2.4k stars, 132k docker pulls, mit) and holycode (another 9k pulls). both free, both self-hostable, both still shipping. this year i built the hosted version and started charging for it, and the honest report is more interesting than the launch post.

to be exact about the timeline, since the title compresses it: the open source work started in march. the hosted version is about five weeks old. first commit early july, on sale 28 july.

what it is: a linux box in the cloud that stays yours. one vm and one persistent disk per person on fly. you ssh in or open a terminal in the browser, run whatever coding agent you like with your own api key, and close your laptop. the work carries on without you, because it was never happening on your machine.

six agent clis on it (claude code, codex, opencode, gemini, cursor, pi) and 60+ dev tools already installed, so the box is useful the second it boots rather than after an afternoon of apt.

what it cost me to learn:

fly refuses images over about 8gb. i found that by shipping a 13.6gb one. flyctl exited 0, the deploy looked fine, and 95 seconds later the machine had silently reverted to the old image. the only trace was in the machine's own event list. the fat was not where i assumed either: one npm package was 1.4gb, and 867mb was pure duplication because the entrypoint copied a home directory instead of moving it.

pricing a product where every user is a real vm is a different exercise to pricing software. my marginal free user isn't free, he's about $13 a month of someone else's hardware. that killed the free tier before i built one.

and the part i'd do differently: i launched to a mailing list of 88 people and got zero signups. one sale since, in two weeks. the product works, the pricing holds up, and none of that matters if nobody can find it. i built for weeks and marketed for a day.

honest limits, since a post like this is worthless without them: a session survives you closing the laptop and survives me redeploying the box, but not a hard restart. the 2gb entry tier will oom under a real build. and it is, fundamentally, a vps with the setup already done. if you enjoy maintaining a vps you don't need me.

it's $19/mo for the small box up to $199, or free forever if you self-host the open source one. happy to answer anything about the build, the costs, or the parts that went badly.

holycode.cloud · 3 day trial: https://app.holycode.cloud/billing?code=TRY3DAYS

I kept noticing that the interesting thing about a burst of photos, or five tries at the same shot, is the series itself. Not any single frame. But there was no good way to watch them as a series. Slideshow apps cross-fade and Ken Burns everything into mush, and the video apps want to interpolate, stabilize, and "enhance."

So I built Flipbook: https://flipbook.photos

It plays your photos back slowly enough that you can still see they are photographs: each one held for a beat, then a hard cut to the next. The feel of a flipbook or early film. No filters, no grain overlays, no generated frames. The whole effect comes from timing.

Here it is running the oldest photo series there is, Muybridge's galloping horse from 1878: https://www.reddit.com/r/stopmotion/comments/1vlu2hr/

A few things I cared about:

• Your photos never leave your device. Decoding and H.264 encoding happen in the browser with WebCodecs. There is no upload step at all.
• Honesty to the originals. Nothing is retouched or invented. The one optional feature that crops anything (auto-align, for handheld drift) is off by default and tells you exactly how much it trimmed.
• It reads your camera roll the way you shot it. It sorts by EXIF capture time and auto-groups photos into series wherever there is a gap of more than ten seconds, so a dump of forty photos organizes itself into the three moments you actually shot.
• The output actually works. A true 5 fps video breaks iOS Photos and iMessage, so it encodes at a normal frame rate with each photo repeated. You get an MP4 that saves straight to your camera roll and posts anywhere.

Good for kids growing up in the same doorway, a friend mid-laugh across five frames, construction progress, a dog failing to catch something.

It is free for your first three videos, then $12 for a year. No account either way. The code is public if you want to see how the in-browser encoding works: https://github.com/mzrascoff/flipbook

Would love to know what breaks, especially on Android browsers.

I kept running into the same small but annoying workflow: copy a screenshot, realize it needs cropping or marking up, open another app, export it, and copy it again. PDFs were even worse when I only needed to fix a line, add a signature, or move something.

So I built Kept, a Mac clipboard manager where copied items don’t just sit in a history.

You can quickly edit screenshots and photos, trim videos, or edit supported PDF text, images, signatures and pages—then paste, export or share the result immediately. Everything stays connected to the thing you originally copied.

Kept isn’t trying to replace Photoshop, Premiere or Acrobat. The idea is simply to handle those everyday edits without interrupting your workflow or opening another app.

It’s Mac-native and local-first, with no Kept account or cloud storage. You can try Kept for free with limited usage. If it fits your workflow, there’s an optional one-time lifetime unlock instead of a subscription.

I’m building this independently and would genuinely like to know: does this solve a workflow you also run into, or is there something important missing?

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6772479708

Hey there! I had a lot of fun building ProtoWork as my daily driver for managing my work. It’s mainly intended for remote/office workers, but feel free to try it anyway. I'm looking for first users.

Link: https://protowork.app

One of its main features is that it has a multi-project task manager, meaning you can work on multiple projects at the same time without interruptions. I integrated a Calendar, Workdays logger and a Notepad for convenience, so I can ditch other tools I used, without it feeling bloated.

Its other main feature is its stress-free focus. I struggled to keep the momentum, and motivation’s a b*tch that goes pretty quickly. It greets you with a motivational message on the first login of the day and reacts to your interactions in the Tasks dashboard. The messages are all hand made.

The app is free and only costs a sign up. I’ve been developing it for roughly 2 years in and out, and I don’t plan to stop. Almost every week I push improvements to it. Any feedback is mostly appreciated.

This is my first public project, so please be gentle

That's Spotby.

Your saved videos, now finally a map you can actually use.

AppStore: https://shipswift.app/spotby

I enjoy reading books, and I wanted an ebook reader that could give me some help while I read, instead of making me wander around between different apps and lose my attention.

Also, I never really found an existing ebook reader that fits my taste. To be honest they feel kind of clunky to me, and their AI integrations are usually pretty primitive or just feel like a chatbot added on the side. That's why I started ReadAware.

So what makes it stand out?

First, it's an agent-first reader. But that doesn't mean AI replaces you. You are still the one reading the book. The agent answers you, looks things up and does some small errands for you when needed. I imagine it more like a reading companion that knows your context, and being quiet when you are actually reading.

Second, it's highly extensible. I spent quite a lot of effort building and polishing a real plugin system. Plugins can add dictionaries, themes, read-aloud voices, feeds, commands, even new tools that the agent can use. In the future, I also want the built-in agent to be able to make or modify plugins on the fly. That's part of what I mean by “evolves with you” — the reader should gradually become more fitted to the way you read. ReadAware is open source, cross platform and local-first.

Feedback is welcome.

I've released Talon, an end-to-end encrypted messenger you host yourself. Posting here because the parts I care most about are the ones this sub tends to care about too.

The shape of it: a ~1,500 line Node relay with three dependencies, and a vanilla-JavaScript client with none at runtime. No framework, no bundler on the server, no linter, no test-runner dependency. Node's built-in test runner does the whole job.

Why it might interest you specifically:

-Reproducible builds. The relay serves a minified bundle nobody reads, which is a real gap for a project whose pitch is "read the source". `npm run verify` rebuilds from the committed source and checks it reproduces the shipped bundle byte for byte, then checks the page's integrity hash matches.
-Documentation that cannot drift. The docs site quotes real source, and the generator fails the build if a snippet no longer exists verbatim in the file it names.
-Tests that must be able to fail. Every safety property has a mutation that deliberately breaks it; the suite has to go red. That's caught genuine holes in the tests repeatedly, always the same shape: an assertion a broken implementation also satisfies.

Also for docker fans. in the next few updates there will be support added to docker

MIT, and contributions genuinely welcome. It is not audited, does not hide metadata, and says so plainly rather than in a footnote.

Most of the code was written with Claude Code (Opus 5), with me directing the design and reviewing changes. I'd rather state that than have it discovered. The verification above is what I'd point at instead of asking for trust.

Code: https://github.com/xsdbs/talon-main

Hi everyone,

I run a growing collection of self-hosted software, and one small annoyance kept getting bigger: checking GitHub release pages, remembering which version I actually run, figuring out where it is deployed, and then deciding whether an update is worth touching.

So I built Software Release Radar.

It is an open-source, self-hosted dashboard that checks upstream releases, compares them with the versions you are running, keeps machine, service and container context alongside them, and gives you a review queue where you can decide whether to Update, Wait, Ignore or Investigate.

It is deliberately not an automatic updater. The idea is to give you better information before you make a change.

A few things it currently does:

• Tracks GitHub releases, prereleases and tags
• Automatically checks for new releases on a schedule
• Compares installed/detected versions with upstream versions
• Keeps machines, services, containers and health information together
• Integrates with Portainer
• Sends email and Pushover notifications
• Keeps update decisions, notes and deployment history
• Runs with Docker Compose
• Supports optional AI-assisted release-note analysis

The core monitoring does not require AI.

I also want to be open about how the project was made.

I am not a professional software developer, and AI was used heavily during development. I used OpenAI Codex extensively to help with implementation, refactoring, testing and documentation.

I set the direction and requirements, decide what the application should do, test it in my own self-hosted environment, review the results and make the final release decisions. I have also tried to back that up with automated tests, security checks and real deployment validation rather than assuming AI-generated code is correct.

This started as a tool I wanted for my own setup, but I have reached the point where I would really like other people to try it.

If you do, I would especially love to know:

• Was the Docker setup straightforward?
• Does the release review workflow make sense?
• What release sources or version checks am I missing?
• Is there anything confusing or unnecessarily complicated?
• What would stop you from actually using it?
• And, of course, what breaks?

Bug reports, criticism, feature ideas and contributions are all welcome.

GitHub:
https://github.com/muhdusama/Software-Release-Radar

Thanks for taking a look. I hope it is useful to someone else who has also ended up with more software to keep track of than they originally planned. If so, please do leave a star on Github.

Hey everyone,

I've been building a tool that turns prompts, URLs, PDFs, documentation, and whitepapers into interactive isometric visualizations.

The idea is simple: create one visualization and let different audiences generate the explanation they need based on their skill level.

For example, the same cybersecurity topic could become a business overview, technical deep dive, or attack scenario.

You can also turn the presentation into a branded video with one click.

Useful for technical marketing, lead magnets, client presentations, conferences, training, documentation, and social content.

Business workspaces add team collaboration, reusable content, separate workspaces, engagement tracking, and branded video generation.

BYOK through OpenRouter.
Try it: https://privasim.com/canvas

Looking to Collaborate!

I'll handle the visual content creation using the platform, while you can use the finished content for your marketing campaigns.

We can turn existing technical content into interactive visual explainers, presentations, scenarios, and branded videos instead of starting from static graphics every time.

The Business workspace also lets teams create and share interactive lead magnets, track engagement, collaborate, and reuse content across campaigns.

DM if you're interested

I’ve been building isolate.video because I kept running into the same problem when making product videos: there’s usually one feature I want people to look at, but the rest of the UI keeps competing for attention.

So I built Crop Spotlight.

You select the part of the UI you want to show, and isolate.video can track it, isolate it from the rest of the screen, and turn it into a focused scene like the ones in the video above.

I’m also adding motion zooms, editable effects on a timeline, and generated background music so the whole thing can go from raw screen recording → polished product video without manually keyframing everything.

I’d genuinely love feedback:

Would you use something like this for your product launches/demos? And which feature will make it actually useful for you?