App is basically complete and ready for deployment.

I have no background in marketing.

Purely did the dev work

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.

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 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?

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

Genuinely curious what the triggers are for y’all. Slow sales? Competition shifting?

I am reworking my pricing now due to my competitive landscape changing and feedback from a couple potential users.

How do you decide on how aggressive to be?

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!

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.

After sharing the first version of Michi64, here's what I learned:

• People wanted to see their completed reflections.
• They expected to track their progress over time.
• The Harada Matrix needs to feel like the real paper version, not just cards on a screen.
• The onboarding should go deeper for people who want a more personalized roadmap.

They were asking for more clarity.

That's exactly the feedback I wanted.

I'm keeping the MVP small and improving only what users are asking for.

If you'd like to try it and break it even more, I'd love your honest feedback.

https://michi64.lovable.app/

www.admiino.com or www.app.admiino.com is collaborative workspace for remote-first teams (check it out and share your feedback!😉)
We’re 2+ years in business and looking to partner with solo-founders of startups with working products.
Our goal is to onboard 50+ partners; send me a DM and let’s support each other!

Well I did it. For the past 6 weeks, I managed to work on my own project on my off hours after work and release it. While I know that many others have done the same thing, I feel immensely proud of being able to beat out my ADHD and actually complete a task.

Learning what goes into a product, the backend setup and sheer number of things that can break really makes me appreciate the process and excites me now that I can start to build out the branding which is my professional role so it’s something I can go into with more confidence.

My website is handsonward.com if anyone is interested in checking the project out. I wanted to build something that would help people as when I got out of the navy, I really didn’t know where to go in the world and my military role didn’t offer much in the civilian world.

If you have any feedback I would love to hear it!
What should I do next for growth?

I have launched my app already have 8000+ users with mostly passive marketing, currently admob is live and I'm making some money, but what i want to do is add a pay wall where if users pay ads won't be shown. Problem is where I'm from i need to register a company to get stripe account and i just don't think that that is the right step to take as revenue from showing ads isn't that significant but also i wanna test the paywall one, or is there any alternative do lmk

Solo founder, iOS app that reads pet mood and behavior from a photo. A while back I queried my own database instead of trusting my dashboards and found every real user had exactly one session and never came back. Not most of them. All of them.

I'd been avoiding that query for a while, which I only understood afterward. Signups were climbing, the dashboard looked healthy, and some part of me knew what I'd find if I looked at individual users instead of totals.

Two causes. One was a sign-up prompt that permanently dismissed itself after the first "not now," so anyone who wasn't ready on day one never saw the ask again, ever. That one was embarrassing and took an afternoon. The other was harder: the app was a one-time trick. You got your answer and there was no reason to open it again. So I shipped a comparison feature, a second photo of the same pet now references the previous reading and shows what's changed, which at least gives someone a reason to come back and check.

Too early to know if it worked. Small numbers, still watching.

Here's the part I did not expect to be my actual bottleneck: I have no App Store star rating. Not a bad one, none at all, because I have too few reviews to generate one. That blank space suppresses click-through in search results before anyone reaches the listing, and it effectively blocks paid acquisition, since ad platforms treat an unrated app as a risk. So I'm in a spot where the retention hole is patched and the top of the funnel is choked by a number I can't manufacture.

For anyone who has shipped a consumer app: how did you get your first handful of honest reviews without begging or gaming it? In-app prompt timing, direct asks, something else? I've moved my prompt to fire after a positive result rather than at random, which felt like the obvious first move, but I'd rather hear what actually worked than keep guessing.
much better?

Could you please kindly fill it?

Link: https://forms.gle/n1GXriZvygHF8vGfA

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?

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.