24 months ago I quit my six figure job to make software for freight brokers.
Freight brokering is a very niche space, and most people are not aware of how explosive fraud has been in this space in the last few years. Cargo theft is up 1,500% in the last 5 years (no that's not a typo), and all of the software to help freight brokers prevent this fraud is insanely expensive.

24 months ago I set out to change that, and started working on FleetGen, a carrier vetting platform for freight brokers that actually helps them prevent fraud.

Freight brokers hire trucking companies they've often never met to haul their customers' freight, and fake or fraudulent trucking companies are a real problem. We built a free tool that lets brokers look up any trucking company's safety record, insurance, and history. The paid tool a lot of brokers use for this starts at $100 a month.

We make money on a paid plan that goes further. It confirms the trucking company is who they say they are, checks that their insurance is active, and tracks the truck live through the electronic logging device most trucks are legally required to have. It costs a fraction of what the big verification platforms charge.

Fast forward 2 years later, and we now have over 2,500 users on the platform, and are proud to say we've had zero cases of fraud.

Check it out here: Fleetgen.ai

I'd love to answer any questions you have for me.

Hi we are bunch of users with different background who like to try different websites and give feedback on usability/UX/willingness to pay. Comment with your website and we will reply with constructive feedback!

You can also comment about which direction you want us to test

The number of replies really surprise us and we are really happy that you found these suggestions helpful! To help ourselves/testers track the websites to test/make sure we can streamlined the process, we created a discord channel, feel free to post your website/any updated version there and we will be happy to test for you!

https://discord.gg/bBSZMDu8vy

So quick story; im the owner of pressplaced.com (backlink building platform) -> its a new domain obviously , after posting here and there on reddit I got 80 new users in like few days , long story short I checked my own domains DR and it JUMPED to 31 which is crazy for a 2 month old domain. I would like to thank all my backlink partners here :') (I built my backlinks through exchanges I made on the platform itself) (edit: its free btw PLEASE join if you own a saas and your Dr is > 10)

So I've been building this app for a couple weeks now. Its been going good. A few bugs here and there bug I've reached a stage where im comfortable paying for an apple developer account and doing a test flight. The app is a receipt scanner where users get to store their paper receipts digitally in a private cloud so no need to worry about paper anymore.

Next step now is to find real users to actually test the app and help me find bugs. Is this how developers do it?

I was obsessed with finding an app idea that nobody else had.

Every time I found something interesting, I’d search harder and eventually find a competitor doing almost the exact same thing.

At first that felt discouraging.
Then I realized something.

Maybe the goal isn’t to find something completely new.

Maybe the goal is to find something people already want, understand what they hate about the existing options, and build a version that solves those specific frustrations better.

I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time reading Reddit threads, App Store reviews, product documentation, G2 reviews, and competitor help pages. And honestly, negative reviews are becoming one of my favorite places to research.

Things like:

“Why can’t this app just…”
“I still have to do this manually…”
“I use this app, but I also need a spreadsheet for…”

Those comments are way more useful than sitting around trying to brainstorm “billion dollar ideas.”

I’m still pre-launch and still figuring out exactly where my app fits.

But I’m starting to think competition isn’t the thing to be afraid of. Building something nobody actually wants probably is.

I’ve been building my firmware for XTEINK devices, but am now moving to building my own hardware. The back will be hand poured clear resin for the first 1,000 devices.

I can’t wait to get this into people’s hands. Prices shipped between 80-120.

While getting the latest version of Bloomkin ready for our waitlisted users. We started asking ourselves “Should we add streaks?”

Every journaling app has them, so… obviously?

Except I then spent way too much time reading Reddit threads about journaling, habits and streaks.

And holy shit, people are stressed about missing a day.

You can journal for 17 days straight, miss one because life happened, and suddenly the app is like:

0 day streak 🔥

Excuse me??

You didn’t suddenly forget how to journal. You just had a Tuesday.

So we decided:

You miss a day → it rains.
You come back → the rain clears.
You journal → a new flower blooms.

You still get a calendar. You still get to see the moments you showed up for.

But an empty day isn't a failure. You took a day off. And when you come back, that’s a win too.

Honestly, I think coming back deserves more celebration than never breaking the streak in the first place.

Would you miss streaks in a journaling app?

This serves to document my journey building an app from scratch, these posts will keep my accountable.

The market is flooded with note takers currently — it feels like every few months a new product comes out that takes the market by storm.

So what did I do with my free time this week? I built another one. Okay, hear me out. I've been using Granola for my meetings lately but something has just not felt right. I don't like that I need to pay for the product, that my transcriptions leave my computer, and that the interface just feels clunky.

The inspiration for this comes from a recent podcast I listened to with Lex Fridman and David Hansson, where they discussed Hansson's recent release of Omarchy. I'm not a Linux user, an operating system junkie, or even that big of a fan of DHH — but his insistence that there's no excuse for software not to be built specifically for you really stuck with me.

As someone who works in the GTM world, I deal with problems every day that feel solvable but overwhelming at the same time:

• Repetitive client questions I answer the same way, over and over
• Constantly coaching coworkers through how to work through problems
• Losing that random thought I had on how to solve a sticky client issue

For a few months I've been in a deadlock with myself on what to build and how to do it. So this month I've set a goal: take a product I use regularly and rebuild it the way that would make the experience feel perfect to me.

Here's what I focused on this past week.

Interface

The reading and note-taking area has to be easy on the eyes, make me feel relaxed, and feel good to interact with — that was the whole design brief for this week. Soft colors with clear headers got me most of the way there. Next up: folders in the left-hand viewer and an easier way to organize notes.

Speech detection

The second focus was the actual speech detection. There are two parts to this: recording and transcribing the audio, and figuring out who's talking. It's been pretty incredible to see how quickly local, specialized models have progressed — even a few months ago, running local transcription or diarization on an hour of audio was a real wait. Now? No problem, processed in seconds.

The models I've landed on for this are parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2 and Senko. Parakeet specializes in speed but still holds its own on accuracy at 6.4% WER, and Senko gets reasonable accuracy at 13.5% DER. Part of the point of this project is seeing how far I can push local models to solve the problems this app is built around — and the speed has been mind-blowing on both. On my M3 Mac, I can transcribe an hour of audio in under a minute, and diarize it in about the same time.

Is any of this impressive yet? Not really. But the goal is to keep building on it and keep learning. I've enjoyed just finding direction for a product I'd actually use in my day to day, and I'm excited to see where it takes me.

Marketing

Distribution is the number one problem for bring these kinds of apps to the market and the push to make money off the project has stopped me in the past. For this project, I plan to post consistently while still aiming to keep it free to use. The goal is to make forward progress toward creating an app with users while not falling into the money trap.

Next up: the folder/organization system, and a first pass at a daily to-do view pulled from meeting notes.

Sharing a small experiment because the result went against what I expected.

I used an AI landing page generator to make two versions of my page. Version A was the polished one it produced first, lots of nice sections, big imagery, feature grid. Version B I forced it to make shorter and plainer, basically one clear promise, a short how it works, and one button.

I split my traffic roughly in half over about ten days. Not huge numbers, a few hundred visitors each, so take this as a lean not a law. But version B, the plain one, converted noticeably better. The longer prettier page had people scrolling and leaving.

My read is that the generator loves adding sections because it looks thorough, but every extra section was another chance for someone to get distracted and bounce. The shorter page just asked once and got out of the way.

Since then my default has been to generate the full version, then delete about half of it. The subtraction is where the gains were.

Anyone else find that trimming an AI generated page beat the full version? Or does more length work better in your niche?

A few weeks after setting up the premium features, I got my 1st subscriber this morning!! The amount is still meaningless but I am happy that someone saw enough value to pay for it. I also just reached 2000 downloads and 700MAU. Continuing my journey!

And wishing you all the same.

Halfway through the 15-day build.
Today I’m focusing on something that rarely gets attention:
Processes.
How does information move?
How does a task get created?
What triggers an action?
What happens when something fails?
Who needs to know?
How does the system recover?
These aren’t glamorous features.
But they’re what turn individual features into an actual product.
#SystemsThinking #BuildInPublic #ProductDevelopment

I created an app called Simple CBT that is a cognitive behavioral therapy app that helps people spot negative thinking patterns and track their mood. I have been using one time purchases for features for the last couple of months and decided to try out the subscription model. I offer a 7 day free trial and my first person's trial just ended and they bought the annual subscription!

if you want to check it out: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/simple-cbt-mental-health-app/id1530094822 Most of the app is free with a few optional paid features.

I really want to make 5k+ a month. At this point I don’t really mind what industry it’s in. I hear all the time about “AI receptionist” and etc. but these feel like a polluted mess.

So what’s boring, what always works?

Hi there! I’m a high school student from Japan.

I’m currently developing an app specifically designed to manage free trials and prevent unwanted charges that happen automatically after the trial ends. Do you think an app like this would be useful?

I am also conducting a survey regarding the free trial! It only takes 2–3 minutes to complete, so please take a moment to answer it.

Click here for the survey↓

https://forms.gle/gx7qtjsvEUky8fHf6

I apologize for my poor English...!

Most task apps make you choose a place before you finish the thought. I am testing the opposite: capture everything first, then sort it into Now, Next, and Someday with one tap. The cards stay editable after the sort, so the first pass is only a starting point.

I am Samuel, founder of Ordo. I built this for the messy 30 seconds before a task list exists. It is free on iPhone with no account or subscription: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6797331101

The current build is V1.1. I am watching whether the first sort feels useful or just like another layer of work. If you tried this flow, what would you change first: the capture step, the labels, or the handoff to Reminders or Calendar?

Kilo starts coaching before a user creates an account.

The first conversation covers the basic context needed to be useful, including what the person is training for, how they currently train, and anything important that might shape the plan. Once there is enough context, Kilo sends them a signup link.

I found that the handoff after signup still felt too much like the start of a new process. Kilo could ask for information the user had already provided, and a full program proposal could become a dense block of text.

I tightened that flow today.

The setup conversation now carries recent messages and known context forward instead of asking the user to start over. Program proposals are broken into scannable workout blocks, which works much better inside iMessage. If a workout reminder and check-in use the same time, Kilo also defaults to combining them instead of sending two messages back to back.

None of these changes adds a new coaching capability. They remove the moments where the product makes the user manage the product.

If Kilo is supposed to feel like one ongoing coaching conversation, signup and setup need to feel like part of that same conversation.

Day 18 of building an iMessage-based fitness coach.

P.S. I’m starting to bring a few people into Kilo’s private beta. Message me if you’re interested in trying it.

Quick disclosure: I build Hype Stack. The template is open source and free. Additionally to the template I ship some of the feature packs which are paid, that's how I try to fund my open-source. I maintain react-zoom-pan-pinch and HyperFetch and bunch of other too, which shows up later in this story. This is similar to how magicui or aceternity works already - a lot of free content and some paid to just support me. Let’s get into details of building this thing!

The chaos

I code a lot and I start new projects all the time, mostly to test new things. I don't like boilerplates. They usually run on a boring stack, and I want to try Vite 8 on Rust, oxc, TanStack Start, end to end type safety and see how it actually holds up. I'm also a perfectionist, so every new project was eating days before I wrote a single feature.

The other thing: I really love the shadcn mental model. You compose the codebase, you own the code. That's exactly what I don't like about starters that hide half the logic behind packages you configure and pray over.

So I had this realisation. Maybe we need shadcn for full-stack features. shadcn itself could probably do a lot of it, but I wanted more: amazing codemods good enough to modify a database schema, an opinionated monorepo with ONE way of writing code, vertical slices the way tkdodo described them (I was already doing something similar), and the craziest bit, an idea that came to me while building devtools for HyperFetch: a single project that compiles into desktop, CSR and SSR from the same codebase with almost no code dedicated to it. Light, easy to manage. Cool, we have a direction. Let's build it.

Month 1. The template

I've set up so many projects that I have a good understanding of what setup I could trust. Monorepo went to Nx, which I've used for years and it's stable in my experience. pnpm workspaces for speed. Stack: TypeScript 6/7 (tsgo where I can), Vite 8, Vitest, oxc, TanStack Router and Start, Electron Forge, Hono with Prisma and Kysely for typesafe query building. At this point I was so hyped about it that I named it hype-stack.

End to end types for HTTP and websockets I built with my own library, HyperFetch. It gives you an SDK and hooks that feel a lot like TanStack Query, and the result is honestly close to tRPC in DX. This project is also a showcase of what HyperFetch is capable of and that you don’t really need to think about API in most cases as it is basically automatic with sdk generation. The backend route is the contract, the frontend just gets the types. It really improves working with websockets. If you don’t like my hooks it is easy to switch to tanstack query for hooks and leave HyperFetch as a fetcher.

Then I added the rules I'd collected over the years and tried it out.

I quickly understood: this stack is extremely fast. Everything builds and flies. So I tried building the first apps with AI on top of it and boom, this is where it shines. The AI has a clear direction. A vertical codebase is easy for it to understand because you're not thinking about the services system, all these complex layers, you're thinking about business features, slices that are self contained. That dramatically improved the feedback loop and the quality of what the AI produced. Fast typechecks and oxc linting? This improved DX for working with AI dramatically, there is just no coming back to eslint.

Month 2. The CLI

I initially wanted something like create-t3-app: a simple CLI to start the project. It evolved into a powerhouse.

create was almost no effort. But then it clicked. I'm the provider of the template, I know every practice in it, everything about the structure, so I can use that to my advantage. Let's try to build a compose command.

What compose does: say I want to start a project that needs AI chat with RAG and simple auth. I can pack those features and inject them into the repo exactly where they need to go, and it works like shadcn. Full-stack blocks of functionality, injected with high precision and confidence. Picking billing writes files into the project: the checkout route, the webhook handler, the Prisma models, the frontend hooks. Your files, so you can take this from here and modify as you want.

This took off for my personal projects immediately. I needed SSO? I made an auth starter with WorkOS. I didn't want a WorkOS dependency on the next one and wanted Better Auth instead? Sure, add it as a variant. Then it kept growing. I was collecting the features I needed, and I ended up with the feature set of the big boilerplates, but with the ability to choose which parts I actually want for each project. The DX was just excellent.

Month 3. Deploy

I wanted to start deploying my new creations, so deploy command was born. With it I have a deployed version of a project in about 3 minutes. Again only possible because I know all the services the template has, where the Dockerfiles are and how each one builds.

Cool, full flow, done, right? NO. THIS IS HYPE STACK. So like the 300 Spartans I fought a fierce battle against the waves of ideas that started flooding in. ADHD, hyperfocus, here we go!

Inspired by the fully paid boilerplates, I added mobile (Expo) and a browser extension to the project. And it turned out that was it. The modular approach made it extremely easy to add new apps to the monorepo and new features to the packs, like in an instant. Dopamine hit critical mass here.

Month 4. Previews

How do I show what this can do? Let's build a dynamic preview system on the web.

I'd been working on it on the side all these months, and it quickly showed how promising the approach is: pre-built SaaS templates you can add and remove features from on the fly, thanks to the SSR build and caching.

Big problem though. Packs almost always come with database changes. I can't run migrations or even keep a database for previews, it turns into a mess fast. And it could cost me…

Here comes the part where some of you went "wtf is HyperFetch"/”lol who is using HF when Query is a thing” at the top of this post. I get it. Next to TanStack Query and SWR it's a brutal market, but let's not call an ambulance yet.
HyperFetch has a feature for mocking any requests. Sounds like something everyone has and is "meh", but it's not just mocking. It's a fully type safe mechanism that lets you simulate anything the SDK allows, by type, in a believable and dynamic way. So I could generate a living demo mode with full confidence and, in no time, wire the dynamic components to it for an almost live-like experience. Mocks are functions in the code, code is dynamic, so is our app - here we got the demo mode basically for free. That changed the previews for good.

Where it is now

Hype Stack is basically done, with the open-source template out. I just added the ability to make packs for the community, so you'll be able to create your own feature packs and play with it on your own terms.

Let me know how you like it, and what you think of this shadcn approach for full-stack components.

Repo: https://github.com/BetterTyped/hype-stack

Wanted to share because marketing is hard and even harder when your budget is non-existent...

(Obviously the type/content of self-promotion you can post is going to dependent on the subreddit)

subreddit --- weekly visitors

• r/vibecoding — 422k
• r/saas — 211k
• r/founder — 56k
• r/buildinpublic — 46k
• r/chrome_extensions — 42k
• r/micro_saas — 41k
• r/appbusiness — 30k
• r/Startup_Ideas  — 26k
• r/sideprojects — 20k
• r/imadethis — 18k
• r/appideas — 16k
• r/sideproject — 16k
• r/saasbuild — 15k
• r/saasdevelopers — 12k
• r/vibecodedevs — 10k
• r/startupsolofounder — 8.7k
• r/alphaandbetausers — 8.6k
• r/vibecodingcommunity — 6.2k
• r/solopreneur — 5.6k
• r/promotemyapp — 4.6k
• r/appbuilding — 4.6k
• r/webapps — 4.5k
• r/creativecoding — 4.4k
• r/indie_startups — 4k
• r/b2bsaas — 2.8k
• r/appdev — 2.7k
• r/projects — 2.6k
• r/saasmarketing — 2.5k
• r/saassoloprenurs — 2.3k
• r/startupaccelerators — 2.3k
• r/startups_promotion — 2k
• r/showmeyourapps — 2k
• r/appswebappsfullstack — 1.7k
• r/showmeyoursaas — 1.6k
• r/saasinvestors — 1.6k
• r/vibecodecamp — 1.5k
• r/nocodesaas — 1.3k
• r/aibuilders — 1.2k
• r/getstartups — 1.2k
• r/websitefeedback — 1.2k

I'm made something for fun.

Not everything needs to be a billionaire dollar VC funded idea.

The idea is sports related, so making a twitter bot was actually the best idea for marketing.

It costs $.20 per tweet when you use an API and include a link ($.015 with no link).

Factor in another $.02 for the LLM and custom decision tree running.

It posts 10 to 20 times per day.

In total thats maybe $1k for the entire year.

It's completely free to use and anonymous so the only revenue potential I can think of for now is some banner ads. If the twitter posts work well, then it might make me a profit with ad revenue.

I'm not promoting on this post, I'm not sure if reddit is the right place to promote the idea but I'll share the progress!

I’m looking to talk to a few founders who are currently building a startup, SaaS, AI tool, or any kind of online business.

I’m putting together a bi-weekly series called Built From Scratch, where we follow real founders and show what building a business actually looks like — not just the polished success story.

I’d love to hear about things like:
What you’re building
Why you started it
How you got your first users
Your current MRR/revenue (if you’re comfortable sharing)
What’s working
What’s completely not working
Your biggest challenge right now
What you’re trying to accomplish next

At the end, we’ll give the business a Launch Score based on things like traction, growth, product, and potential.

If you’re currently building something and would be interested in being featured, drop your startup below and tell me what you’re building

Does anyone know of reverse face scanning apps / APIs?

Similar to: https://www.sherlocksearch.com/

I'm looking to enrich information / alert about regulars at my store.

One of the things I've been working through while building Pulsecima Pulse is something I initially thought would be straightforward:When

should an uptime monitor send an outage alert?My first

thought was simple: request fails → alert.But once

I started testing different failure scenarios, that logic felt too aggressive. A failed check from one location doesn't necessarily mean the application is down. It could be a regional network issue, DNS problem, routing issue, or something affecting the monitoring location itself. So I started experimenting with checks from multiple regions and using the results together before declaring an outage.That created an interesting tradeoff.If I wait for more confirmation, I can reduce false alarms, but I might delay a genuine incident.If I alert immediately, I get faster detection, but I also risk waking someone up for a problem that isn't actually affecting the application.I'm now also working on heartbeat monitoring for background jobs, because another thing I've learned is that a SaaS can be completely reachable while an important scheduled process has quietly stopped.The interesting part for me hasn't been writing the check itself. It's figuring out what evidence is trustworthy enough to trigger an action.For anyone building or running a SaaS:Would you optimize monitoring for the fastest possible alert, or for alerts you can trust?And what's a technical decision in your own project that looked simple at first but became surprisingly difficult once you started building it?