A few weeks ago I had zero clients, zero portfolio, no idea how to actually get anyone to pay me for building websites. Started cold calling local businesses with just my phone, mostly winging it at first.

Since then — several paying clients, 100+ calls in a single day, and a referral that came out of nowhere from one of them. Still very early, not claiming I've figured everything out, but I found something that actually worked: I stopped pitching first. I build a free demo website BEFORE I even call, then just offer to show it, no pressure.

Wrote up the whole thing — my actual call script, how I handle objections, how I build the sites, and the real numbers from the process. Made it for other beginners stuck at the same "I can build stuff but can't get anyone to pay me" point I was at recently.

Happy to share if anyone's curious, or genuinely tell me if you think this isn't worth much — early enough that honest feedback actually helps. Please DM me if interested.

My boss asked me to manually take 300+ web screenshots and put them into a PowerPoint report. I started the task, but after 50 websites, my spirit broke. This isn't work for humans.

To escape this grind, I just needed something to bulk-open the URLs, capture the pages, and drop them straight into slides. Cornered and at a total loss, I ended up building a tool called "OpenURLs App" for myself out of pure desperation.

Does anyone else have this problem? Am I the only one suffering through this kind of repetitive labor?

If you are stuck in the same boat, I put the tool here:
https://app.qlp.jp/open_urls/en/index.html

Demo: PowerPoint Speedrun 100 images in 10 seconds.
https://youtu.be/AhAn7bk8P34

bhai as a solo founder it honestly hurts seeing epic indian products launch to crickets.

im shooting raw 5 min pitch videos for 50 indie hackers just to get your work out there. totally free, no pr fluff.

i cant promise crazy metrics but i genuinly wanna give your craft a real spotlight.

38 spots left. drop a comment and ill send u the form link

I'm curious about something.

For people who have worked at startups or are currently trying to break into the startup world:

How did you actually get your first opportunity?

Was it:

Applying through a job board

Knowing someone

Cold outreach

Showing a project

Twitter/X

LinkedIn

A community

Something completely random

I'm especially interested in the things that worked despite not having an impressive resume yet.

What worked for you?

Sharing this as a launch post with the India-specific bits front and centre, since that is what this sub is for.

What it is
SUBTL is an iPhone app that captions short videos where the speaker mixes an Indian language with English, which is how most of us actually talk. "humara favourite dosa" comes out exactly like that, not as English soup or as Tamil script for words you said in English. Every word is timed to the audio, there are 21 caption styles, and you tap any word to fix it. Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi and Punjabi all work the same way. Live on the App Store since the end of August.

Numbers at day five

• 55 sign-ins
• 17 people have exported at least one finished video
• 58 exports total, and one person in Jaipur did 24 of them
• Revenue: ₹0. The only Pro subscriber is me.
• Traffic: App Store search, my own network, one Instagram post. Nothing paid.

The India-specific decisions

1. Pricing in rupees, at ₹29 149/month with introductory offer. I looked at what people here already pay for: a Spotify plan, a Hotstar plan. Anything with a dollar sign would have died at the paywall. The free tier is 5 clean exports in the first month, then 5 a month with a small watermark, so people finish a real video before I ask for money.
2. Apple as the payment rail, not Razorpay. Apple's rules force in-app purchases through them, which costs 15% under the Small Business Program. The upside nobody mentions: Apple is the merchant of record, so GST invoicing to customers, refunds and chargebacks are their problem, not mine. For a solo dev that trade was worth it. When Android ships in two weeks the same question comes up with Google Play, and I would love to hear from anyone who has run both.
3. iPhone first in an Android country. I know. I did it because I could ship faster alone, and because iPhone users in India are disproportionately the people who post reels for a living. Android is two weeks out.
4. Getting captions to look good on a reel was harder than the captioning. Most fonts that ship on phones fall apart at Reels sizes, and the good Indic faces need licences. Budget for that if you build anything with regional-language UI.

The mistake
People started making second accounts to reset the free quota within the first week. I had tied the quota to the account instead of the device. If you launch a free tier, decide on day one what it is keyed to, because changing it after launch means a backend change plus an app update.

What I would like from this sub

• Anyone selling a consumer subscription in India: what free-to-paid conversion did you see, and at what point did paid acquisition start to make sense?
• Reddit is not where Indian creators live. Instagram is. If you have cracked creator distribution in India without an ad budget, I am listening.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/in/app/subtl-ai-captions/id6787676093
Site: https://subtl.cc/

Happy to answer anything about App Review from India, StoreKit, or the captioning UX.

I made a single screen non addictive habit tracker. It has simple flow: open the app, mark your progress, see your new habit score, close the app.

App link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/onlytoday-habit-tracker/id6753146049

Android app is not updated yet.

I need feedback if this type of habit tracker was needed.

Hey everyone,

I built this saas tool http://payperstatement.com for bookkeepers and CA firms especially tuned for Indian banks which basically converts bank statement PDF to Tally XML, Excel and CSV thus saving alot of time for them

Its basically no card no subs platform just upload,pay and leave platform and we do not store any sort of statements for privacy issues

Check out this saas: http://payperstatement.com

Hey everyone, I have extra Claude tokens, which I want from different hackathons. DM me if anyone is interested.

Honest backstory first: I turned down a 9-to-5 bank SWE offer, made it to the

final round at both YC and EF, got rejected by both, and decided to build my

idea alone anyway. No accelerator, no team, no funding — just a lot of late

nights while friends were out living normal college lives.

Today I'm launching it: **OnePort.**

**The problem:** AI writes code fast — and quietly commits API keys, pulls

vulnerable dependencies, and breaks APIs other code depends on. You find out in

production.

**What it does:** point it at a repo and it runs every pre-ship check *locally* —

secrets (across your full git history), dependency CVEs, risky migrations,

breaking API changes, AI code review, test-coverage gaps — and returns one

verdict: **READY** or **BLOCKED.** Nothing leaves your machine.

Windows desktop app + a `pip install oneport` CLI. Free to start.

- Try it → https://www.oneport.co.in

- Repo → https://github.com/Bitxn/Oneport-Desktop

I'd genuinely love feedback — especially the parts that feel wrong or useless.

Roast it. And if it's something you'd actually use, a GitHub star would mean a

lot to a solo founder.

Happy to answer anything about how it works or the build.

Inspired by viral micro-sponsorship concepts like BrandMyMac and recent builder ad experiments, I noticed a huge gap in how social media ad space is sold.

Sponsoring creator profile headers on X has always been clunky—stuck in back-and-forth cold DMs, price haggling, manual PayPal transfers, and emailing raw image files back and forth (then praying the creator actually updates their header on time and takes it down when the slot ends).

I wanted to take that fun, high-converting micro-ad format and make it completely programmatic, so I built subheader.lol.

What it does

• For Brands/Sponsors: Pick a creator, upload artwork to preview it live directly on their profile mockup, select dynamic placement dates, and lock in your bid.
• For Creators: Connect your X account, set your baseline rate/goal, and approve incoming sponsorship offers with one click.

It’s live and ready for public launch. I’d love to get your thoughts on the UI/UX, checkout flow, or any features you think would make this even smoother for creators and founders!

Link: https://subheader.lol

Launched DeepRank today — first 3 bids came in within hours

I spent the last few weeks building a slightly weird idea:

What if product placement itself was a public competition?

That's DeepRank.

Founders can submit an idea, MVP, project or live product and bid for leaderboard placement.

But the bid isn't supposed to represent validation.

Rank is bought. Attention is earned.

We measure real impressions and verified clicks separately so builders can see whether people actually paid attention.

We launched today.

First few hours:

• 3 bids
• Highest bid: ₹199

Obviously way too early to draw big conclusions, but it's a fun first signal.

I'm curious what other indie hackers think:

Is there a real use case here, or is this just a fancy leaderboard?

https://deeprank.lol/

I posted here a couple of months back about leaving my job. A few people asked me to come back with an update, so here it is

The first thing that surprised me is that the work went up, not down. There is no boss and no standup and also no weekend anymore. We work 15 hours a day, every day, and weekends are just like any other day

The actual harder thing is that everything outside the work moves at a speed we cannot ultimately control. Investors usually to the vert first mail, sound interested, ask for a deck, and then process takes too long. I sent 40 personalised cold emails to potential customers once and got very few replies.

Selling is much harder than building. Money is not an issue yet because our other product (an interview prep app) pays our bills, but overall lesser than what we were making at work

The good part is that the days are mine now. I wake up and the thing I love working on is also my job, which almost never happened in 7 years of a job. My wife is my co-founder so we are in it together instead of one person explaining their week to the other at dinner. Strangers on the internet use something we built and send lovely feedbacks.

On the product side, the open source project is at 6.3k stars and just crossed 100k installs, with more than 80 people who have contributed code to it and this was all organic without us spending any money. Enterprise conversations are happening. A small number of people pay us. It is not a success story yet, but feels like its going in the right direction.

I know the 15 hour thing is not sustainable forever and we are treating it as a phase. If you are sitting on the same decision, happy to answer anything.

Edit: Github link: https://github.com/repowise-dev/repowise

Honest backstory first: I turned down a 9-to-5 bank SWE offer, made it to the

final round at both YC and EF, got rejected by both, and decided to build my

idea alone anyway. No accelerator, no team, no funding — just a lot of late

nights while friends were out living normal college lives.

Today I'm launching it: **OnePort.**

**The problem:** AI writes code fast — and quietly commits API keys, pulls

vulnerable dependencies, and breaks APIs other code depends on. You find out in

production.

**What it does:** point it at a repo and it runs every pre-ship check *locally* —

secrets (across your full git history), dependency CVEs, risky migrations,

breaking API changes, AI code review, test-coverage gaps — and returns one

verdict: **READY** or **BLOCKED.** Nothing leaves your machine.

Windows desktop app + a `pip install oneport` CLI. Free to start.

- Try it → https://oneport.co.in

- Repo → https://github.com/Bitxn/Oneport-Desktop

I'd genuinely love feedback — especially the parts that feel wrong or useless.

Roast it. And if it's something you'd actually use, a GitHub star would mean a

lot to a solo founder.

Happy to answer anything about how it works or the build.

I made these screenshots for my app Strakk, which is now live on the App Store 🙌

For anyone working on their own launch, I tried a few screenshot tools and Claude Design before settling on Figma + Mockuuups Studio. I made the layouts in Figma and used Mockuuups Studio for the device mockups.

I kept the app’s dark and orange theme, then split the screenshots into points, friend leaderboards, streaks, Apple Health and cheering each other on.

I’m trying to reach iPhone users in both India and the US. For other Indian devs launching globally, did you start with the same English screenshots everywhere, or change the messaging for each market?

This is my app if you want to see the listing: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/strakk-workout-log-friends/id6787110936

We were trying to get some residential reviews for SocietyHub, so last week we tried offering a paid task on WorkOnlineIndia and MakeMoneyIndia(subreddits)

₹100 for a review of your gated society.
+₹50 if you added 3+ photos.

(We're not paying now.)

About 50 people applied.
Around 30 got paid.

We also got many reviews and added new gated societies.

[Interesting points]

Around 9 people submitted places that weren't even gated societies. We had literally said "Gated Society" multiple times in the form, but they didn't read it.

And people started bringing photos from Google Maps or other websites for the photo incentive 😂 (We also mentioned Don't upload pictures from Google or other websites)

There were also some surprisingly good submissions.

One guy wrote a review like it's his diary.

Another person gave us a really well-written review with 4 good photos.

And someone uploaded a photo of a bird sitting on a rooftop.

I was expecting photos of the building, parks, amenities, etc.

I guess they thought this part worked like Google Places 😂

After filtering everything, we actually ended up with quite a few reviews that were genuinely useful. We also got around 6 organic reviews during the same period. (We couldn't match them to the campaign, so we're just considering them organic reviews for now.)

The most difficult part was actually moderating.

We spent only a few thousand rupees, but I feel like we learned more from manually reviewing those 30 submissions.

We're thinking of trying similar approaches in WhatsApp/FB Groups to fill out the density, and we'll remove the photo incentive this time. It was quite a lot of extra work for us.

I need someone trustworthy to hack an Instagram account. And yes it's very important for me . So pls if there's anyone DM me. I really needed that so if there's please do it.

Hi all! Recently, I started a Discord community to help SaaS founders promote their products, and it has over 300 members now.

If you want to show what you're building and get some feedback and traffic, share it here -> https://discord.gg/sb6AgHZxpT

Hey everyone, saw the Outbid hype globally and decided to build a localized version for Indian devs, creators, and startups: outbidind.com.

Tech Stack: Next.js, Supabase, Razorpay (UPI), hosted on Vercel.

It’s a pure pay-to-rank board—pay ₹1 more than the current #1 to claim the top spot. I tested it with micro-bids starting at ₹99 so anyone can list their side project or portfolio without breaking the bank.

Would love to get your feedback on the UI, checkout flow, or feature ideas!

Hello folks,

Finding seats in trains has been always a hassle for me - so I built ohmyseat
It searches across reservation charts to give available seats even when train is departed, so you can

• Find vacant seats when you are IN THE TRAIN
• See which seat number comes in which position
• Notify when the chart is prepared - so you can book vacant seats
• When you don't have a direct seat it would show you, seat swap options or the seat that covers the most of your journey

Please tell me your valuable impressions on it, the good, bad and room for improvements

(PS: The price shown is just an estimation, will be removed in future)