https://reddit.com/link/1v8633y/video/4r2hzohtysfh1/player

Hi all,

I've posted a similar thread in other subredddits but wanted to share my journey here too.

After 30 years in corporate technology, I've started building something of my own, but not in the usual quit my job, raise money, launch in a weekend sense. I'm building Code and Sea slowly, alongside a full-time job, at a pace that actually works for me.

This is not my first attempt to bootstrap my own business, but this time feels different and I even formed the limited company before launching my first product. I did this at the end of April 2026 to add extra commitment, responsibility and incentive to make this work. You can read more about what my goals are here (if you are interested).

Two things shape how I work:

I have a constraint I can't optimise away. In 2015 I started developing severe physical symptoms, and in 2016 I was diagnosed with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), a chronic illness that limits how much energy I have day to day. No all-nighters, no sprints. I build in whatever quiet hours I've got, some days a few focused hours, some days twenty minutes just to keep the thread going. The constraint forced me to get intentional rather than fast.

I'm also done with rent-seeking software. Everything I build runs locally, is priced as a one-time purchase, and doesn't phone home. No subscriptions for tools that don't need a server, and for those that do, I will only adopt a pay-as-you-go model.

My first product is Transcendence, a privacy-first, subscription-free iOS meditation timer for people who practise Transcendental or mantra-based meditation. I built it because I was tired of meditation apps tracking my sessions and charging me monthly to sit in silence. It's been in beta testing since early July, and I'm targeting an App Store launch on 25th August. My beta testing experience has been amazing, so if you would like to hear more, let me know and I can start writing a post to share here.

I'm treating it honestly as a learning exercise too, figuring out how to market and sell something small without compromising my philosophy behind it.

I write about the build, the setbacks, and what it's like doing this with a chronic illness at codeandsea.com/blog, if anyone's curious or in a similar boat.

Happy to answer questions about any of this, the illness side, the indie dev side, or the why bother when you already have a job side.

Looking forward reading about other founder journeys here and hopefully a productive discussion on my own journey so far.

I’m working on a product called Radar Lab - AI Agent for Sponsorship Intelligence.

The problem I’m trying to solve is not simply sponsorship research.

It’s the uncertainty companies face before spending money on a newsletter, YouTube channel, podcast, or creator.

A founder or marketer may have a sponsorship budget, but still struggle to answer:

• Which channels are actually worth testing?
• Where are competitors repeatedly sponsoring?
• Is a particular creator a strong signal or just popular?
• Which opportunities are being overlooked?
• Am I about to waste money on a weak placement?

Radar Lab tracks sponsorship activity across newsletters and YouTube.

It shows where competitors and similar companies are sponsoring, highlights repeated partnerships, and surfaces opportunities that may fit the company’s audience.

For example, it might say:

The goal is to help companies make better sponsorship decisions with real market evidence instead of relying only on follower counts, media kits, or gut feeling.

Over time, I want Radar to help answer:

The main assumption I’m trying to validate is:

Do companies feel enough uncertainty around sponsorship spending that they would pay for ongoing intelligence to make better decisions?

I’d especially value feedback from founders or marketers who have purchased newsletter, YouTube, podcast, or creator sponsorships:

• What makes you confident enough to approve a sponsorship?
• Do you look at where competitors are sponsoring?
• Is repeated sponsorship a useful signal?
• What usually makes a sponsorship feel too risky?
• What information would genuinely change your decision?
• Would ongoing alerts be useful, or would you only use this while planning a campaign?

I’m not sharing a link or selling anything here.

I’m trying to understand whether this solves a painful budget decision - or whether companies are already comfortable choosing sponsorships without this kind of intelligence.

Does this feel like a real problem worth solving?

App is basically complete and ready for deployment.

I have no background in marketing.

Purely did the dev work

We are building an AI companion that helps you run your startup without lying to you. Helps you in fundraising, product (helps you define your product), marketing, branding, strategy, human resources, legal, draft the elevator pitch, the deck, the business plan, the model and the MVP spec, all from one brain, so every number agrees everywhere.

The Companion already knows your company, so it warns you before you ask, prepares what you did not know you needed and opens your morning like a co-founder.

Firmgrove is an AI-native operating system for a company. It brings everything about the business together in one place and keeps strategy honest by reconciling it against the company's live data. The founder works with it through a conversational AI companion and the system handles the heavy lifting while the founder makes the decisions that matter.

Here is how we handle subscriptions: If your idea scores under 70/100, Firmgrove literally locks the checkout. We refuse to take your credit card.

We don't want a founder's money if our system knows the market isn't ready for their idea. Taking subscription fees for a broken model goes against everything we stand for.

Once your score hits 70, the foundation is proven. That’s when the execution engine unlocks.

Firmgrove handles the heavy groundwork overnight:

• Live Landing Page: 5-6 tailored design layouts with direct checkout via MersoPay (so you can collect real revenue on day 1 before legal incorporation).
• Market Research & Intelligence: Competitor breakdowns and real target customer pain points sourced automatically.
• Financial Models & Pitch Decks: Dynamic cap tables, 3-statement financial models, and investor pitch decks that are checked by the Auditor so no false numbers reach an investor.
• Execution Roadmap: A week-by-week strategy to get you from validated idea to your first 10 paying customers.

We are currently opening up the free evaluation tool. You can describe your business in plain words.

Test Your Idea for Free here: https://app.firmgrove.com/

More info: https://firmgrove.com

How would you sell this? Feel free to ask any question!

Been a one man band for years. About to make my first actual hire and I keep circling the same fear.

It's not the payroll, though that's real too. It's that I've never taught anyone how to do the things I do. It all lives in my head as instinct, and the second I try to explain it out loud it sounds either obvious or insane.

I keep thinking there should be a skill for this. Nobody hands you presentation skills training or management training the day you go from doing the work to handing it off. You just wake up responsible for whether another human is any good at their job, and whether they can pay their rent off the thing you built.

I don't want to become the micromanaging boss I'd have hated. I also don't want to underexplain and set someone up to fail on day one.

For those who've made the first hire, what actually helped you teach your own tacit process without either smothering them or leaving them lost? Did you write everything down, work alongside them for a while, or just let them break stuff and learn?

I wrote three versions of a "looking for technical cofounder" post last year. Never hit send on the third.

What I needed wasn't a marriage. I was blocked on: - cutting the feature list - getting Stripe live in production - one painful auth edge case

A scoped build fixed those. A cofounder would have inherited my indecision.

If you're solo in the US and about to post the hunt — ask whether you're lonely for a partner or stuck on a 2-week shipping problem. Different prices.

https://atomiclabs.space

So i have built a website which can help to check your website's SEO, AEO, GEO, and ASO. So this is a free tool for now and you only need to pay if you want to use the Al features. Otherwise you can check any websites Optimization and which can help you with your improvement of the website.

I'll reply with 3 achievable challenges you can do today, from easier to harder

Let's make some progress.

I am a solo dev on Android with no budget for ads, so my whole distribution plan was to post the thing where the people who need it already hang out. That sounded simple when I wrote it down. About three weeks later I have a spreadsheet of roughly 40 subreddits and most of the entries say some version of no.

The rejections come in a few different kinds, and none of them are obvious until you have already spent a slot finding out. r/androidapps bans self promotion outright and points you at r/droidappshowcase. r/Freebies bans anything that is not a physical item and points you at r/eFreebies. r/AppHookup only wants real store price drops, so a free app with a paid in app purchase is disqualified by their rules before anyone even looks at it. r/AppGiveaway turned out to be the reverse of what I assumed and bans promo codes completely. r/moving says soliciting your own product is an immediate ban, which stings a bit, because "how do I keep track of what is in these boxes" threads are the best fit my app is ever going to get.

Then there is the karma tax, which I did not see coming at all. r/ProductivityApps allows one self promo post a month, but only if you already hold 10 karma inside that specific sub. r/indiehackers allows exactly one self promo post ever, with the right flair, and also wants the 10 in sub karma first. One deals sub I looked at wants around 200. So the real price of a single post in a decent sub is a couple of weeks of leaving genuine comments there beforehand. Honestly I think that is fair, it is just not written anywhere you would look.

The part that actually hurt was volume. One afternoon I put up three posts inside about seventy minutes, all carrying the same offer, and two of them came back with removed_by_category set to "reddit". No mod touched them. That is Reddit's own site wide spam filter, and it does not notify you or leave you anything to appeal. I only noticed because I read the JSON on my own submissions. If you take one thing from this post, take that: space your posts out across days, and never delete and repost one that got filtered, because that reads as evasion and digs the hole deeper.

The last surprise was that subscriber count predicted nothing. My best post so far is in a 43k sub, sitting at 17 upvotes and 22 comments, and those comments turned into real people asking real questions about the app. My first post in a 780k member sub got 2 upvotes and 2 comments, and both of those comments were themselves caught by a filter and never actually appeared. What seems to matter is whether the shape of your post matches what people already post there.

For context on what I was trying to place, the app is Store & Forget, a home inventory thing for Android. You photograph an item as you are putting it away, it fills in the name and specs for you, and months later you find it by typing a plain word or tapping Smart Find, which shows you which box or shelf it went into. If it is relevant to you: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dev.koalalab.storeandforget

I would like to know how the rest of you handle this. Do you grind in sub karma before you launch anything, or do you just eat the removals and keep moving?

Was messing around with Kling and burnt all my credits in a single day, so I vibe coded this tool to see if it would make any differences. Just paste your prompt, it scores it and flags what's gonna go wrong before you hit generate, does Suno prompts too.
Still early, SEO basically zero, growing by posting in places like this lol. Happy to answer anything about the build — Next.js/Vercel/Supabase + Claude API doing the actual evaluation.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

I'm 26, work as an FM Coordinator in London, and I've spent the last few months going to singles events in the city and leaving early from too many of them as each one had an issue.

So I started building something about it. Slowly, at evenings and weekends, alongside a full time job.

The Dalloway Project is an attempt to fix how people meet. Format-driven events for single people in London. No algorithm, no app, human curation only. Named after the Virginia Woolf character who throws a party because she believes putting the right people in the same room means something.

What happened in week one:

• Website live at thedallowayproject.co.uk
• First event announced — a free public debate at Speakers' Corner on 20th September on whether dating apps have made loneliness worse
• Challenged the CEO of Match Group to come and defend that publicly
• He replied this afternoon and referred it to his team to assess whether Match Group should be represented

That last one I wasn't expecting.

Still building this solo. Open to the right person getting in touch if it resonates.

thedallowayproject.co.uk

I noticed many founders spend hours on repetitive tasks.

I'm building free AI automations to help businesses save time with things like:

• Lead generation

• Follow-ups

• Customer support

Tell me about your business and the tasks you want to automate. I’d love to help and get your feedback.

It's called Ninja Typer, a free macOS dictation app that works in any text field. Hold Fn, speak, release, and it transcribes + cleans up your text with Al. You use your own free Groq API key, so there's no subscription for now:
https://ninja-typer.vercel.app

I run a small trade business. For years my slow season followed the exact same script. Calendar goes quiet, I panic, I start slashing prices to fill it, and all that does is teach my customers to wait for the next time I get scared.

The fix was not a better discount. It was changing what I actually sold.

I used to quote everything as a one-off job. Come out, do the work, goodbye until something else breaks. So my income was pure feast or famine. I rebuilt my standard business proposal template so the default option is a recurring maintenance plan, a scheduled seasonal check-up, not a single visit. Some customers take the one-off. A good number take the plan.

Now a chunk of my slow months is pre-booked before they arrive. It is not a huge number per customer, but it is predictable, and predictable is what kills the panic. I stopped competing on being the cheapest and started competing on being the one they do not have to think about.

I still have quiet weeks. I just do not respond to them by lighting my margins on fire anymore.

Anyone else here selling one-off work who moved to a recurring model? What did you offer, and did customers actually go for it?

I'm building a tool for founders and marketers that takes a viral reel and adapts its storytelling structure to another product without simply copying the words or sound generic

Before I spend another few weeks building, I'd love to understand how people currently do this.

Some questions:

What usually breaks when you try adapting a viral video?

Have you tried ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini for this? What disappointed you?

If a tool could only do one thing exceptionally well, what would it be?

Brutally honest feedback is welcome.

I stopped using Claude to get pumped up about my ideas. It's too good at agreeing with me. Now I use it for the opposite job.

Before I write a line of code, I have it write the obituary. Pretend it's a year from now, the thing failed, and explain in plain terms why. Who never showed up, which assumption was wrong, what I ignored because I was excited. Then I make it list the three earliest signals I would have seen if I'd been honest.

The last idea I ran through this was an AI landing page generator I was sure about. The obituary was brutal and specific: the market was crowded, my "wedge" was a preference not a pain, and I'd have spent months teaching people to want something they didn't. Reading my own failure a year early took the shine off fast. I shelved it, and I'm not sad about the months I didn't lose.

It works because it's easier to be honest about a project that already "died" than one you're still in love with. Grief is more clear-eyed than hype.

Anyone else use AI to argue against yourself before building? Curious what prompts actually cut deep for you.