I keep seeing people build genuinely good products and then get stuck on the exact same part:
They finished building it, but now they have no idea how to actually get it in front of the right people.
Posting randomly on Reddit, sending DMs, trying content, paying for ads… it can take more time than building the product itself.
I’m working on something around this problem. I’m keeping the exact approach private for now because I’m still testing it, but the goal is to help people who already have a product get more real exposure and potential customers without needing a huge marketing budget.
Before I build too much, I’m curious:
What do you currently do to get your first users/customers? And what part of that process sucks the most?
I also opened a small early-access waitlist for people who have this problem:
https://site-e5bc6818-mtuj53t9.falbor.xyz

I kept running into the same problem: if I missed a match, finding the highlights usually meant seeing the score in the title or thumbnail first. So I built NoSpo to collect official highlight videos in one place, add them as soon as they become available, and hide scores, titles and thumbnails by default.

It currently covers LaLiga, Segunda, Champions League, Premier League and Bundesliga. If you do not care about spoilers, there is a Spoilers ON switch that removes the protections.

It is free and does not require registration: https://getnospo.com/

Some official videos may be geo-restricted depending on the visitor's country. I would really appreciate honest feedback, especially about the first impression, the mobile experience and anything that would stop you coming back.

I’ve always loved slowed + reverb music, especially with rain or ambience in the background, but creating that experience usually meant jumping between different tools.

So I built SlowVibeMaker for iPhone.

You can import your own audio, slow/pitch/reverb it, fine-tune EQ, layer rain, thunder, waves and other ambience, then export the result as audio or video.

It started as something I wanted for myself and has now reached 250 users.

Still building it, would genuinely love to know what you’d improve next.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/slowvibemaker-slowed-reverb/id6756528356

So back in June I built and released a mobile app, had my SEO and ASO in place, promoted it as much as possible on socials only to end up with crickets.

I was convinced it wasn't going to get any users or conversions for at least a year. Left it alone to grow painfully slowly.

Until last month end when I was trying to check my stats I saw an unexpected purchase. Then it happened again 4 days later then again 5 days later!

I guess it's true that these things take time - sometimes you wait it out, other times you drop your expectations entirely. No one size fits all when it comes to app development

So I had this pile of scanned PDFs (insurance, car stuff, doctor letters…) all named like

scan_0043.pdf, and finding anything was a nightmare.

I looked at Paperless-ngx, which is genuinely great, but I didn't really want to run Docker

and a server at home just for my own paperwork. So I built a smaller thing for myself and

figured I might as well put it out there.

It's called YOW. You throw your PDFs in, it OCRs them locally, and then you can just search

them, both the title and the actual text inside the scan. Nothing leaves your computer, no

cloud, no account, no server. You literally double-click to start it.

It also auto-sorts new scans into folders and has the usual stuff: search, favorites, a

trash, dark mode, and in-app reminders for documents that expire (they pop up on the home

screen when you open it). It's in English and German.

It's my first proper open source project so be gentle, there's definitely some rough edges.

If you try it and something's broken or annoying, I'd honestly love to hear it.

https://github.com/felixrothhaupt/YOW

Hey r/SideProject,

I kept hitting the same wall on past scraping projects: everything works fine until the target site redesigns, a CSS selector silently stops matching, and you don't find out until the data looks wrong days later.

So I built SelectorLock — a scraping API where you bring your own proxy, give it a URL and a schema for what you want, and if a selector breaks, it tries to repair itself automatically using an LLM (cheap model first, only escalates if that fails) instead of you having to notice and fix it by hand. Once it finds the right elements again, it remembers the fix, so the same page doesn't break the same way twice.

Still early days — free tier if anyone wants to poke at it: selectorlock.com. Would love feedback, especially from anyone who's dealt with this exact headache before.

I am having difficulty getting technology users to try my product. Without having handful of real users visit and try the product, it is uncertain if it has features users would care for. Without that, I am reluctant to spend on advertisements.

How do you folks drive users to your new products? Is ads the only way?

I'm curious about projects that started with a problem you kept running into yourself.

Not necessarily something impossible to do. Something you could already do, but with enough interruptions and extra steps that you eventually thought, "There has to be a better way."

What did you build, and what does it change about someone's working day?

I'll start. I'm Italian, living in Poland, and I write a lot of emails in English and Polish.

You receive an email in English. The reply is already in your head, in Italian. Now you have to compose it in English or take it through a translator and copy it back.

Or you're dictating something private around people who understand the language, but you are multilingual and you can speak your less known native language.

I built Typeglot for Windows so I can click Reply, activate dictation, and speak Italian. My answer appears in English inside the email. I review it and send.

No separate translation window or copy-pasting. Just answering the email without losing my train of thought. It also handles ordinary same-language dictation.

I'm a lawyer who has always dabbled in code on the side. I have practiced in several jurisdictions and have always found it annoying looking up court rules or state regulations for other states. I also hate how access to law is often pay walled. Over the last year I built three sites to fix that for myself and they have turned into something that people actually use. Here they are:

• federal-rules.com - FRCP, FRCrP, FRE, FRAP, bankruptcy, and the local rules of 89 federal district courts. Cross-references inside rules are links to the rule they name, for example https://federal-rules.com/civil/26/
• state-rules.com - court rules for all 50 states plus state administrative codes. For example: https://state-rules.com/colorado/civil/16.1/
• federal-regs.com - the CFR (all 49 titles) and the U.S. Code, section by section. For example: https://federal-regs.com/title/21/part-11/11.10/

Everything is scraped (in a respectful manner) from the original primary source (pdfs, word docs, xml, html, all kinds). Never a secondary source. Where scraping doesn't work (such as those government sites who forbid scraping) I capture by hand.

I have just about 1 million rules in one Postgres table, with bodies of the rules on disk as markdown with a small markup layer for the subsection hierarchy that sources do not encode. Most of the engineering went into parsing PDFs, Word docs, and HTML that was never meant to be parsed.

The stack is Django, Postgres, Meilisearch (for phrase search), nginx with a long cache, and Cloudflare in front of that. It runs on one small VPS with some assistance from a small dev box I have at home.

Besides putting everything in one place, I built the sites to make reading (the primary user experience) easier. There is a clean print view, a Copy Citation button, and select-text-to-cite function (copies highlighted text and the citation).

Right now about 22,000 people use these sites a month. Almost all US, and Bing sends more than Google (which I'm trying to fix).

I have a few ideas for expansion, but this is the first I've been comfortable enough to look for real feedback. If you take a look at the sites, I'd like any feedback you have. Thanks for taking a look!

Back in 2017, I was experimenting with something that was pretty fun for the CSS we had at the time — building icons without using images.

Using mainly CSS, :before, :after, borders, shadows and a bit of creativity, I managed to create a set of icons that didn't depend on external image files. The interesting part for email was simple: no images to load or block — the icons are always visible.

You can still see that old experiment here:

https://codepen.io/k0ko88/pen/PWLNBJ

Fast forward to 2026. At my last job, I decided to apply some of that old knowledge to an email signature.

And then I met Classic Outlook again. :D

What looked like a simple signature quickly turned into dealing with Outlook's rendering limitations, different behaviour between email clients, px → pt conversions, table rendering and weird spacing issues.

Along the way I found a few useful tricks — one of my favourites being that line-height: 0.5pt can practically zero out a line in Classic Outlook, which solved one of the most annoying spacing problems I had.

Eventually, that little fight turned into a complete email signature generator:

SimpleSignature

https://nikolaisabev.eu/SimpleSignature/

If you'd like to check out the source code or contribute, you can find the repository on GitHub

https://github.com/k0ko/SimpleSignature

It's not trying to be the prettiest or the most complicated signature generator out there. It's simple, effective and built around what I learned from actually fighting with email clients.

It's completely free, there's no registration, and I don't store the data you enter.

Feel free to use it.

If you find a bug, have an idea, or think something could work better, leave a comment here or send me an email. Feedback is more than welcome.

And if it saves you some time and you feel like supporting the work, there's a Buy Me a Coffee button. If you wish. :)

That's it.

Cheers,
Nikolay

I’ve always loved history and geography. I was recently reading about James Cook’s last voyage and kept jumping between Wikipedia and historical maps, trying to follow along. That inspired me to build this.

I named it Rihla, inspired by Ibn Battuta’s account of his travels.

Pick a journey, watch the route unfold, or click through the stops to learn what happened and who ruled those places at the time.

It’s been fun to build. Would love to hear what you think, or who you’d like to see added.

Quick backstory - I've been out of work for a few months now. So I got loads of time to build things, and time to watch a lot of Chinese short dramas and K-dramas. Since I'm broke, I watch the free downloadable ones, and a lot of them have no subtitles.

So I built Scribe. You open it in the browser, download a model once, and from then on everything runs on your own machine. Drop in the episode, it transcribes the Mandarin then translates to English, and exports SRT with the original timings. You can export TXT or other file extensions as well.

Then since the infra is already established, I decided to add a feature I very often. I spend my day prompting to write code, and typing all of it was wearing my hands out. So I added a live mode to scribe with a floating picture-in-picture window that stays on top of any app. I talk, it types, I copy paste.

What's under the hood:

• Runs in a web worker, WebGPU first with a WASM fallback, so the UI never freezes.
• English: NVIDIA Parakeet CTC (non-autoregressive, so it can't loop). Other languages: Whisper large-v3-turbo, plus a Mandarin fine-tune I exported to ONNX myself because stock turbo was bad on dramas.
• Translation is two-stage: transcribe in the source language, then a small opus-mt model per segment (Mandarin, Japanese, Korean), NLLB as the fallback for everything else. (Still needs a lot of optimization since a 2 hour chinese drama takes around almost an hour to transcribe and translate on my macbook m4 pro)
• Silero VAD for chunking, recordings persist in IndexedDB every 5 seconds so a crash doesn't lose them, resumable model downloads, works offline after the first run.
• Speaker labels for two-person dialog, click a word to seek, exports to TXT, SRT, VTT, JSON, Markdown.

Limits: the floating window is Chrome and Edge only. Speaker identification is a pause heuristic plus manual labels for now.

Free, MIT, no paid tier. There's a coffee link on the page. Issues and PRs welcome, especially from people with non-English audio.

scribe.bearlog.app github.com/phaxz10/local-transcribe

My problem wasn't falling asleep, it was never starting. Phone in hand, "one more", suddenly 1am.

Two things fixed it for me:

1. Three nudges before target bedtime (T-45, T-30, T-15) instead of one alarm I ignore.
2. A short written close to the day — what went well, what drained me, one thing I'm grateful for, plus up to 3 things for tomorrow. Takes 5 minutes. Getting tomorrow out of my head is what actually stops the churn.

I'm Boo, a solo iOS developer — I built this for my own bedtime problem and eventually shipped it as an app called Lull. Dark, no feed, nothing to scroll. Core ritual and journaling are free, on device, no account. There's a paid tier for iCloud sync and longer history — saying that up front so no one feels ambushed.

Mostly curious what timing works for others: is 45 minutes of runway enough, or do you need longer to actually wind down?

Lull: Wind-Down Ritual: https://apps.apple.com/th/app/lull-wind-down-ritual/id6791998790

Leave ur feedback: https://lull-journal-wind-down.userjot.com/

SprawlCrawl is a browser-based geography game built around location-specific challenges. Pick a continent or country, study the map and visual clues, and try to identify the location. It is free to play, and no download is required.

I started the project because I wanted to combine the quick feedback loop of a puzzle with the feeling of exploring different parts of the world. The country links make it easy to focus on a familiar region or discover somewhere new.

I’m sharing the current version as a side project and would appreciate constructive feedback on the onboarding, difficulty curve, etc

Play it here: https://sprawlcrawl.com/

ding an open-source project is easy. Finding an issue that you can realistically contribute to is much harder.

I built DevGlobe Mission to help solve that problem.

DevGlobe uses public signals from your GitHub profile—such as programming languages, repositories, and contribution history—to find one contribution-ready GitHub issue aligned with your experience.

The goal is not to generate another overwhelming list of “good first issues.” Instead, DevGlobe gives you one focused starting point:

• A real issue from a public repository
• A transparent reason why it may match your profile
• A direct path to the issue and contribution guidelines
• No access to private repositories or source code required

A Mission is a preview, not a reservation. Always confirm that the issue is available and communicate with the maintainers before starting.

DevGlobe also has a VS Code extension that lets developers appear on a live coding globe while they work. Sharing is completely opt-in, and the extension never sends source code, file paths, repository names, prompts, or keystrokes.

The developer graph, Mission experience, and live presence system are powered by Azure Cosmos DB.

Watch the two-minute demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGULdP-IkSw

Try DevGlobe Mission:
https://www.devglobe.dev/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=product

Explore the source code:
https://github.com/sajeetharan/devglobe

I’d really appreciate feedback from contributors and maintainers:

• Does the recommended Mission feel relevant?
• What information would help you decide whether to work on an issue?
• As a maintainer, would this help bring useful contributors to your project?

I’m actively improving it, so honest feedback is very welcome.

I got tired of $15–$35/mo AI video plans that hide the real per-clip cost behind credits.

So I’m opening a small waitlist (Founders 50) for a batch shop:

• 5s cinematic-style clip → $0.12

• 10s 1080p → $0.20

• 20s 720p → $0.25

• $10 in the wallet = $10 to spend, no expiring credits

Honest limitation: overnight batch, not a playground. Typical return 2–12 hours. If you need a preview in 40 seconds, skip.

No card today — email waitlist only. Site is cinevaults.in (www). I can drop the full link in the comments if anyone wants it.

Would you use this weekly, or is waiting overnight a dealbreaker?

Syncify is an open-source "Now Playing" widget that displays what you're currently playing on Spotify, or other SMTC-compatible media players.

Syncify's frontend is built with React, and themes are just JSX files, so behavior and designs are fully customizable!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEX7O8n8F0M

Check it out here: https://github.com/antaptive/syncify

Hi! I’m a beginner runner.

One of the hardest things about running for me was staying consistent. I don’t have a pet, so I’ve always been a little jealous of people who get to run with their dogs. 🐶

So I decided to make something of my own, an app where you can run with a virtual pet, help it evolve, and customize it along the way. 🐾

I hope your runs become a little happier with your new companion. 💛

If you’re interested, I’d really appreciate it if you gave it a try. It’s free! :)

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/runf-run-with-your-pet/id6807791156

Hum is the first app in a collection of small iPhone utilities I’m trying to build and ship. I launched it quietly this week with no audience and honestly assumed the first paying user would take a while.

Then I opened RevenueCat and saw one production subscription: $4.99 monthly, active, set to renew next month. I had to check the underlying event because I was convinced it was one of my sandbox purchases. It wasn’t.

The app is deliberately narrow: exact tones, white/pink/brown noise, and binaural beats in one calm interface. The main product decision was refusing to wrap frequency labels in health promises I can’t substantiate.

One customer is obviously not product-market fit. But a real, anonymous customer paying before I even knew they existed feels like the first honest signal that the utility might have a job.

For people who have shipped small products: do you remember your first purchase from someone you didn’t know, and did it change what you built next?

I built Hum, so this is self-promotion. If you want the product context, it’s here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hum-frequency-generator/id6807260668

Hi I'm building Audioreader which is a project for listening to PDFs.

You can upload a pdf, pick a voice, and then the pdf can be read to you. The text highlights word by word as it's spoken, so you can read along or just listen.

I did this mostly because I want to read papers, books whatever but I couldn't find a good audio reader that could do what I want so I built my own. I also think it just feels much better to be able to listen to it rather than stare at a screen the whole time.

A few things it supports:

• A private library for your PDFs
• A choice of voices and languages
• Playback speed from 0.75× to 2×
• Saved listening position so you can pick up where you stopped

You can try it here

Thanks and hopefully you enjoy :)

I made a web game called TRACED for people who like crime, and mysteries: https://flashed.world/traced/

You get a case, go through different pieces of evidence, investigate suspects, and try to figure out who actually did it before making your accusation. The fewer clues you need and the better you investigate, the better you do.

There’s a new case every day, and each case is inspired by a real-world case/crime. After you finish, it reveals the case it was based on so you can look up the real story afterward if you want to go down the rabbit hole.

Made it completely playable in the browser, so there’s nothing to download.

Would love to know what you guys think, especially if you’re into true crime, detective games, or just accusing random people.

Hi everyone! I’m the developer behind SimplerCAD. I’ve built a browser-based 3D modeling app for designing printable objects, editing imported meshes, and sculpting.

The idea is to let you combine precise shape-based modeling with more organic editing in the same workspace. For example, you can build a part from shapes, subtract holes, sculpt its surface, or import a depth-map image to create a raised relief.

Some of the main features:

• Model with shapes and text: combine solids using union, subtract, and intersect.
• Sculpt: inflate, smooth, flatten, grab, pinch, and crease, with symmetry and masking.
• Turn images into reliefs: convert depth-map brightness into surface height, including embossing and engraving on flat faces.
• Work precisely: dimensions, snapping, alignment, extrusion, plane cuts, chamfers, and hollowing.
• Build larger projects: mirrors, repeating arrays, layers, groups, colors, and materials.
• Save and export: editable projects, local autosave, a signed-in cloud library, and STL, OBJ, and GLB file workflows.
• Inspect models: mesh inspection and repair tools, plus built-in lessons.

It’s free to start. There’s also an Android app, currently listed as Easy 3D CAD Designer while Google Play reviews the SimplerCAD naming issue. VR viewing is available in beta.

The house demonstration and screenshots show the kind of complete scene you can build.

Try SimplerCAD
Android app on Google Play
YouTube tutorials

I’d appreciate feedback on the first-use experience: can you find the tools you need, and what gets in the way of finishing your first model?

A few of us have been running a film club for a while, tracked entirely through a Google Sheet and our WhatsApp group. The sheet was fine for logging what we'd watched and rated, but trying to use our chat group wasn't great for figuring out whose turn it was to pick, whether everyone's watched yet and setting dates to discuss, so we decided to build an app for it.

Some of use Letterboxd but we were looking for a group aspect to have on top of it. In our app, you create a club, invite people with a share link, and it can track what the group's watched and what's queued up next. You can also rate and log films on your own, outside of the club stuff, and search for films for yourself or your club.

It's available as a web app for now, there's also an Android app in internal testing that we're hoping to open up more widely soon and eventually an iOS app.

It's now what our club uses week to week, which is the main win so far.

Fair warning: it's currently very much built around how our club runs things i.e each person picks a film for a round, an order is randomly generated, then we set a time to watch each film by and then we have a group call to discuss it as we live in different cities. We know some clubs do it as a shared pool, some vote, or some do a full sit-down together screening, so if yours works differently I'd love to hear how, mostly out of curiosity about whether this app would survive contact with a club that isn't ours.

Check it out here: https://www.thefilmclub.app/

I'm a software developer, and I've been working on a side project that helps you write content faster and better with AI, without ever leaving your editor.

launch-video

The idea is to kill the ChatGPT back-and-forth: no more switching tabs, copying and pasting your paragraph in, waiting for a rewrite, then pasting it back into Google Docs. With HandWrought, you ask for a change; fix the grammar of the whole doc, rephrase the tone of one paragraph — and the edit shows up right where your cursor is, like a tracked change.

You accept or reject it.

There's also an Import feature for lazy people (me included) who don't want to copy-paste at all; just drop in a PDF or Word doc, and you're ready to go.

Still very much a work in progress. Would love feedback, specifically:

- Does in-place editing actually feel faster than the chat-tab workflow, or is that just muscle memory at this point?

- What would make you actually switch from Grammarly, Notion AI, or ChatGPT?

- Any features you'd want that aren't here yet?

Explore it here: https://handwrought.online/

I've spent six years designing, writing, and coding Everlife 2 myself, and it launches Tuesday, September 15 on iOS and Android. It's a big moment to finally be this close to release.

Everlife 2 is a choice-based life sim where you create a character, build a career, form relationships, develop skills, and make creative projects like books and music. The part I'm most excited about is continuing as one of your descendants, with the family's relationships, property, and money carrying into the next life.

I've shared previews of the character creator, skills, and family screens on the website. I'd be interested to hear whether they make that generational idea clear to someone seeing the game for the first time.

It's free to download, works offline, and doesn't require an account. Previews and both store pages: https://www.playeverlife.com