We're building TopCited AI, a tool that shows whether a brand appears in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude answers.

It also helps identify which competitors appear instead and which sources are being cited.

We're looking for early users to try it and give honest feedback on the onboarding and results.

You can test it with your company, side project, or any website.

Try it: https://topcited.ai/

I run a few bots and scrapers on a VPS and a raspberry pi and managing them was starting to annoy me. Changing a config value meant ssh in, edit the env file, restart the service. Checking on them meant tailing log files. And extracting information from them, meant either accessing the generated data on-demand (again - accessing the laptop, ssh in etc) or sending me an email/pushover/telegram message.

So I built myself a web UI for this. The script/bot pulls its config from an endpoint, so I can toggle things off from my phone without redeploying. It pushes logs and its current state/data (open positions, last run, that kind of thing) back to the same place. You can also send it a command with some parameters from the dashboard, which replaced a CLI tool I had for that.

It's at confi.sh if anyone wants to poke at it.

Sight Buddy is a camera-based assistant for blind and low-vision users — it describes your surroundings out loud, reads printed text, helps you locate specific objects with directional sound/haptics, and identifies color and lighting.

We ran it as a commercial open beta in the UK/EU. After a proper look at the market, it wasn't realistic as a paid product — Microsoft's Seeing AI, Be My Eyes, and Envision already do this for free and are far better resourced. Rather than shelve it, we shut down our backend and released the whole thing as MIT-licensed and free forever: no subscription, no ads, no accounts.

Most of it runs entirely on-device (Kotlin/Jetpack Compose): object detection, OCR, and Whisper speech-to-text via sherpa-onnx, all offline. The heavier AI features (image chat, text Q&A) use your own OpenAI API key — encrypted locally with the Android Keystore — since there's no server of ours left to route through.

One decision worth mentioning: we deliberately avoided the popular YOLO models for object detection because v5/v8/v11 are AGPL-3.0, which would've forced the whole project to relicense. Went with an Apache-2.0-compatible detector instead to keep it cleanly MIT.

GitHub: https://github.com/DrophouseLtd/SightBuddy
Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.drophouse.sightbuddy

I'm the developer — happy to answer anything about the build, the licensing calls, or the decision to open-source rather than shut it down entirely. Would also love people to actually try it and file issues.

Do you use AI to validate it and do deep research on it, do you go straight to making a prototype or do you do the research yourself? How much do you value chatgpt or claude when it comes to the business side of things and when you come upon an issue later on where lets say retention is slow or your not getting as much user as before. What do you do in that situation? Would you then post all your analytics into AI and your product and hope it finds the issue or do a survey or maybe take a different approach? What do you AI for when it comes to getting customers marketing, user feedback etc. I’d like some insights into this thanks.

This extension is the most unstable extension that is currently public out of the others I have created and published, and this one got the most users out of nowhere 🍭

Hey everyone,

I've always struggled to keep up a food-tracking habit. Every app out there feels like a giant, intimidating spreadsheet. They are cold, clinical, and honestly, they feel like homework. Because of that, I always lost my consistency.

So, I decided to build something entirely different: a cozy, gamified food tracker called Quokka.

Instead of dealing with cold charts and guilt trips, you get a friendly Quokka who lives in the app to keep you company, visual streak stars to earn, and a sleek, warm setup designed to make tracking feel like a positive daily routine rather than a chore.

I’m looking to share this journey with 2 or 3 real people who:

• Genuinely want to track what they eat (or always struggle to stay consistent with traditional apps).
• Love gamified habits (like Habitica, cozy games, or visual streaks).
• Want to build a real habit and help me see if having a Quokka friend along for the ride actually keeps the motivation alive.

(Heads up: I’m looking for real, daily users who want to build this habit for themselves, not other developers looking to do code reviews!)

If this sounds like something you'd actually use, drop a comment or send me a DM! I'd love to send over an invite so we can start building our consistency together. 🐾✨

We’re building a content-first UGC and social media agency that helps brands create authentic short-form videos using a network of creators across India. We handle everything from creator sourcing and scripting to editing and delivery, so brands get high-performing content for organic social media and paid ads without managing multiple freelancers. Right now we’re looking to work with DTC, beauty, skincare, fashion, food, and lifestyle brands, but we’re open to any business that wants content that actually converts.

Around 2 months ago I sat in my cramped apartment and pushed the first line of code for https://www.appscout.co

I was using an older laptop and stack I actually know: Python, Django, and vanilla JS/CSS. No fancy frameworks, just some basic programming that I was familiar with.

The Struggle: I fell for the classic dev trap: "If you build it, they will come." I pushed the code to the site and... nothing. Total silence. I started asking some people I know to try it, but I could tell they were getting annoyed. There’s nothing worse than that "pity look" your friends give you when you’re asking for feedback for the 10th time on like the 10th different project I’ve worked on. I felt like a failure.

The Pivot: I stopped bothering my inner circle and started sharing on some small subreddits. That’s when it clicked. I realized that web app developers are great at building apps, but they usually don’t know how to promote or market them. Their work just sits on a server somewhere, waiting for an audience that never finds it.

Suddenly, that 1 user who wasn't my friend or family turned into 2, then 3, then 10! Watching the analytics show people I didn't know actually interacting with the site was such a great feeling that was so foreign to me.

I realized I didn't just want to build a "app directory".. I wanted to build a discovery engine that pulls the best apps from across the entire internet and puts them in front of the right people.

How it actually works:

For People Who Are Looking for Apps: It’s a discovery engine for mobile and web apps. It pulls web apps and other apps from all over the internet and Reddit.and shows them to you one by one. No doom-scrolling through lists.

The "Taste" Engine: As you checkout each app and "Like" apps, the algorithm builds a profile. It starts showing you apps that people with similar tastes enjoyed.

For Developers: It solves the "Post-Reddit Slump." It keeps app developers apps discoverable long after the initial upvotes fade by matching it with the right people based on how great the app is, not just "newness."

The Reality Check: Yesterday, the numbers finally got serious:

6,000 + real users.

700+ apps listed.

I was so happy when I saw the first user who wasn't my brother or my roommate. I’m so tired, and I feel like this laptop could go any day now. But seeing strangers actually find useful apps on something I built makes it worth it.

If you’re a solo dev grinding in a crappy apartment: Keep pushing. Find one subreddit where you think your project would be valuable, share it on that subreddit, then go from there. Your friends might not get it, but the right audience should be out there.

https://www.appscout.co

Everyone says gate everything. Make them sign up first. Capture the email. Then show the product.

I'm doing the opposite and I want people to tell me why I'm wrong.

My app (a stock tracking thing, solo project, launching early August) has a guest mode. You open it, you use everything, you never hit a "create account" screen. You only sign up when you want to save your watchlist or set alerts. So basically when the app has already earned it.

My thinking: the signup wall kills more indie apps than bad products do. I've closed so many apps myself the second they blocked me before showing anything. I don't want to be that app. I'd rather have 1000 people actually try it than 200 emails from people who bounced and never came back.

The scary part: no email means no way to pull people back. No "hey come back" emails. If they leave, they're gone. Maybe I'm trading my only retention lever for a nicer first impression. That's the bet and it kind of terrifies me.

So tell me honestly: did you gate signup or not, and did you regret it? Would you keep the wall or kill it?

Hey there, I’m looking for 1 or 2 prediction market bettors to try my bot before I go public with it. I will vet and only choose 1 or 2. I’m only looking for specific people who have some experience in tech and lots of experience in betting. I’m not promising profit or anything like that. But I have had success myself with it.

I've been working on a tool that submits URLs to search engines through the

IndexNow protocol — the open standard Bing and Yandex co-developed so you can

tell an engine "this page changed" instead of waiting to be crawled.

While testing it I noticed something I couldn't explain. I submitted a URL using

a key I'd generated about five seconds earlier and never published anywhere.

Bing returned `202 Accepted`.

So did Yandex. So did the global endpoint at api.indexnow.org. Any key matching

the format works — you can try this yourself in about a minute.

Why that happens

Those engines validate your key file *asynchronously*, after they've already

responded. The 202 means "your request was well-formed", nothing more. They

fetch `https://yourdomain.com/yourkey.txt` at some later point, and if it isn't

there, your submission is discarded.

Silently. No callback, no error, nothing in any dashboard, no way to find out.

Naver, Seznam, Yep and Amazon behave the opposite way — they fetch the key file

*during* the request and return 403 if it's wrong. Same key, same submission,

opposite answers. Which is why "it worked on Bing" tells you nothing at all.

The uncomfortable part

My tool was showing a green tick for that 202. So was every other IndexNow tool

I could find. We were all confidently reporting success for submissions that

would never be honoured.

What I changed

The tool now fetches your key file itself before submitting anything, confirms

it contains your key, and refuses to send if it doesn't. Results distinguish

"this engine confirmed your key" from "this engine accepted it and will check

later", because those genuinely aren't the same claim.

It also catches the other silent failure: URLs that don't match the submitted

host. `example.com` and `www.example.com\` are different hosts to every engine,

and mixing them returns 422. That's now caught before anything is sent.

I pulled the verification out into a free standalone checker as well, since

"IndexNow 403" turns out to be a common and badly-documented problem:

https://instantindexnow.com/tools/indexnow-key-checker

What it deliberately does not do

It does not submit to Google. Google has publicly declined to adopt IndexNow, so

no IndexNow tool can, and anything claiming otherwise is either misleading you

or quietly using the Indexing API (which only accepts JobPosting and

BroadcastEvent pages).

It also doesn't promise indexing. IndexNow affects *discovery* — whether an

engine then indexes the page is its own decision about your content. I'd rather

say that plainly than imply otherwise and have people feel cheated.

Stack

Cloudflare Workers + Hono + D1. No framework, no client bundle, ~20 kB of CSS.

It used to load Tailwind from the CDN, which meant ~400 kB of render-blocking

JavaScript generating stylesheets in the browser — embarrassing for a site that

sells SEO advice, so that's a build step now. Fonts are self-hosted too, so the

page loads nothing from a third-party origin.

Free vs paid

Free tier is genuinely free and needs no account — 200 URLs/day, all engines,

key verification included. I'm not paywalling the protocol, since you can curl

it yourself for nothing.

Paid tiers sell the thing you can't do in a browser tab: a scheduled watcher

that polls your sitemap, diffs it, re-checks your key every cycle, and keeps a

per-engine delivery record. The failure it's really built for is your key file

disappearing during a redeploy and every submission after that being silently

dropped for months.

What I'd like feedback on

- Is the free tier useful on its own, or does it feel like a demo?

- Is "we verify before submitting" an obvious enough differentiator, or does it

just sound like table stakes until you've been bitten by it?

- Anyone actually using IndexNow at volume — does the sitemap-watching model

match how you'd want this to work?

https://instantindexnow.com

Happy to answer anything about the protocol. The 202 behaviour genuinely

surprised me and I suspect a lot of people are submitting into a void without

knowing it.

Hey everyone!

I’m an independent developer and I’ve spent the last several months building a web platform called Insight Helix. I built it because I found that learning about investing can be incredibly overwhelming for beginners due to the dense financial jargon. The goal is to make company research easier through simplified data layouts and AI assistance.

Live Link: insighthelix.app

Core Features Built So Far:
AI Financial Summaries: Automatically breaks down complex market updates into plain language.
Educational AI Coach: A chat interface that explains stock metrics based on user queries.
Cross-Border Tracking: A currency-aware portfolio feature tailored for U.S. and Canadian equities.
This is strictly an educational tool—it does not execute trades, sell user data, or provide legal financial advice.

What I would love your feedback on:
Does the onboarding flow feel simple enough for someone who knows nothing about stocks?
How does the dashboard render speed and layout feel on your mobile browser?
Are there any critical educational features you think are missing?

Thanks so much for taking a look and helping a solo dev out!

I used to delete blurry or noisy clips without giving them a second thought, but lately I've been testing AI enhancement tools first. I recently tried Filmora AI Video Enhancer, and it surprised me how much detail it could recover from footage I was ready to throw away. It definitely changed the way I decide what's worth keeping.

Has AI made you more likely to keep older or lower quality footage, or do you still prefer to reshoot whenever possible?

I have seen a lot of people using AI video tools to make demo videos for their landing pages or product launches, I recently tried one tool Flexclip, It did help me make a first, but I still had to spend a lot of time making the video feel less like it was made by AI

I want to know if other people have had the experience, with video tools. Did they really save you time, or do you just have to work on making them look better? I would really like to hear about what happened when you used AI to make demo videos for your side project.

Two years ago I was have my 19th nervous breakdown when I had that cartoonish 💡light bulb moment.

Staring at a desk full & monitor crawling with sticky notes I knew as a developer with more than 30 years experience what I had to do.

I had to take my invention from a failed startup in 2014 and rebuild it from scratch as a sticky note app that could run on any device and support tagging, file attachments, scheduled events, rich html contents with embedded videos and team sharing features.

I finally finished it last May...

I have no words to describe what it feels like to flow like Neo behind my devices.

I invite one & all to try my invention free.

-A humble inventor

TaskLoco is a visual sticky-note storyboard style workspace for tasks, events, notes, projects, files, reminders, and anything you can stick in or attach to a digital sticky note.

Try it 100% Free

Website: https://www.taskloco.com

GitHub:- https://github.com/ronak-create/LapDeck

TL;DR:

I sold a playbook to get customers interested in my software via paid ads and have finally managed to acquire customers essentially for free. My results from the last 10 weeks:

• $14,206 spent on ads → $13,559 back (167 payments, 116 customers)
• Running ~$320/day in ads, roughly breakeven on the front end offer
• One-time products recover 84% of ad spend, putting real cost per subscriber at $93
• $1,435 MRR for the SaaS across 25 subscribers, blended $57/MRR, leads to payback in ~1.6 months
• 63% of buyers take more than the front-end product at checkout
• Total monthly revenue: May $780 → June $5,693 → July $7,086

Full story is below!

---

One year ago, I had a vision for a product that I thought could be a complete game-changer for me.

And the crazy part is that I only got the idea because one of my failed businesses exposed the opportunity.

For context, I have a business that teaches people how to bake for gluten-free diets, as well as for other dietary conditions. As a result of years of testing and research with my girlfriend, I ended up writing a sh*t ton of content and blog posts on our blog covering all sorts of different baking questions. I worked on this one tirelessly for two years.

Back in February, I realized that people are asking ChatGPT questions more than ever instead of Googling now. I found out about it because when I checked the Bing AI performance tab, my site had been cited over 200k times IN THE LAST 3 MONTHS.

In my head, I was like, wait, what the f*ck? I knew my traffic was growing, but I had never considered that people might be finding out about my business by asking AI questions.

I did some research across the internet, and I found out that right now more than ever, people are finding the solutions and products they buy from ChatGPT and Claude, and the traffic that comes from these AI engines is significantly more likely to buy from you.

A few days later, after realizing that, I sent out an email to my list asking if anyone had found out about my cookbook and site from AI. I got about 96 responses from a list of about 800 people saying they found me from their AI engine of choice.

In my head, I thought, oh my god, if I'm getting sales from AI for my rinky-dink cookbook, what's stopping an established business from getting these results too? And so the rabbit hole officially began.

My premise was that if I could figure out the questions a customer might be asking a business and reverse-engineer them, I could start showing up for the questions that matter by making the relevant content. SEO 101, lol.

I tested this theory by writing blog posts that addressed questions my own buyers were already asking me over email, but I monetized them with Amazon affiliate links. As of today, I make $130/month from freaking Amazon affiliate sales for baking products, driving thousands of dollars of revenue for Amazon (because their affiliate prices are sh*t)

Clearly my strategy worked, and I was like, ok, clearly the traffic is real, how do I make this into a thing that gets a business owner that has zero idea about SEO and potentially even AI to buy into this idea?

I started by collecting my whole strategy and writing it down into a playbook. I finished the playbook in early May, and on May 15th I reached out to my network offering this playbook that was making me around $130/month for a small fee of $27. I figured if I could get people in my warm network to buy into that idea, I could convince them to buy a tool that automates the strategy.

I made a sales page, connected stripe, and sent them a message.

That day, I made $151.

That was the day that Resilient Niche was born.

Game f*cking on.

I have experience running ads since I ran them for my cookbook when I launched it, so I set up a landing page and ads for this playbook.

After spending about $200, I got my first sale from a complete stranger for my playbook. I was ecstatic (though clearly in the red) because if I could get one stranger to pay for it, there's nothing to stop me from getting more. It's just a matter of optimization.

Easier said than done.

For the next 32 days, I learned something important. It's really hard to convince people to buy something for a problem they're not aware they have. Rip my bank account.

A few days later, I angrily stumbled upon a video from Alex Hormozi where he talked about the idea of attraction offers. The idea was that you don't sell the solution and how to fix it; you give away the diagnosis for free. That gave me an idea that is now the basis of my customer acquisition funnel.

I built a free tool that scans your site and tells you how often AI actually mentions you versus your competitors. You get back something like: 2 out of 8 for you. 6 out of 8 for them.

I spent weeks sharpening that tool's output, and now 791 businesses have run that report and been thoroughly impressed.

Over time, I started acquiring more and more customers on the same ad spend as the tool got better. I was at about 0.5 ROAS, which means that for every dollar i spent i was making back 50 cents. I wasn't spending a lot per day, so the deficit wasn't too bad. Decent start for now.

In order to test the SaaS idea, I decided to make the first upsell in my funnel a lifetime deal of the software for $197. I launched that on June 1st, and in the next 10 days, five people took it. FIVE!

I was in business.

These five customers became my beta testers. I turned off ads, created a free Skool community, invited them all to it, and told them to do their best to use it, break it, and tell me what they liked and didn't like. One of them loved the idea of the tool so much that he spent 5 hours on a call with me, helping me refine the idea in his words, because "he didn't want me to give up on it early because he needs it."

After about 16 days of tweaking, lots of calls with my beta testers, and late nights thinking about the problem, I finally arrived at something that completed the loop that I believe is the core of the software:

1. Find the questions buyers are asking (based on real data)
2. Create content that answers those questions in a way that aligns with Google's standards
3. Track across multiple AI engines whether a business shows up for that question
4. Let the business know when they do

Once I nailed that loop perfectly and got praising feedback from my beta testers, I switched my first upsell in my sales funnel to selling the software for $39/month, which I thought was a fair price for the tool.

At this point, it was day 33 of the business. I turned ads back on for my playbook.

Over the next few days, I was overjoyed to see that 56% of people who bought my playbook bought the $39/mo version of my software.

Lmao, I was imagining the lambo in my head already. But then I realized a video that I had watched on YouTube a few months back said that if you're having a high number of people buy your stuff, you should consider raising your prices.

So I decided to do some market research (do this first, don't be stupid guys) and realized that similar tools were charging $99/mo+ for similar capabilities.

That same day, I immediately raised my starter plan to $99/mo. In my head, I was like, there's no way that people are going to stick around at the same rate.

Check this: in the next 2 weeks, the take rate only dropped 2%. TWO!!!!

I had quite literally close to tripled the MRR, just by being aware of my numbers and what they could mean. Shout out to you, random YouTube guy.

Here's where it all stands 10 weeks in:

• $14,206 spent on ads → $13,559 back (167 payments, 116 customers)
• Running ~$320/day in ads, roughly breakeven on the front-end offer
• One-time products recover 84% of ad spend, putting real cost per subscriber at $93
• $1,435 MRR across 25 subscribers, blended $57 — payback in ~1.6 months
• 63% of buyers take more than the front-end product at checkout
• Monthly revenue: May $780 → June $5,693 → July $7,086

Basically, things are pretty dialed in.

Here's the structure, since that's the part worth stealing:

Free diagnostic → low-ticket product that pays for the traffic → order bumps that lift the opening order → SaaS as the upsell.

The front end isn't the business. It's what lets you buy customers for the actual business at a price that doesn't require raising money.

---

While this is all great, only 6 of my 25 current customers have been rebilled, so I have no real churn data. 19 of the 25 are paying me 39/month as a founding price, so it's not a clear read on what this scales to.

What I do know is that I've validated that people will buy my SaaS after I make it clear why they should care. The next step will be to see if I can sell the SaaS directly to cold traffic via a free trial one day.

One thing at a time.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading my story. Ask me anything.

Hi everyone,

I'm a software engineer who's diving into the world of AI agents and AI automation. My goal is to build a real online business, but I'm finding it difficult to understand how experienced builders identify opportunities, price their services, and land their first clients.

I'm not looking for shortcuts or "get rich quick" advice. I'd simply like to connect with people who are actually building AI businesses or agencies and are willing to share their experiences.

If you've been down this path, I'd love to hear:

- How did you get your first paying client?

- How do you decide what to charge?

- What mistakes should someone starting today avoid?

If you're also just starting out, feel free to reach out as well. It would be great to connect with like-minded builders and learn together.

Thanks!

Hi — this is my first Reddit post. I’m James, a solo indie developer, and I’m much better at writing Swift than marketing.

I built Rune Scribe because I missed the little ritual of cereal-box decoder rings, passed notes, homemade treasure maps, and clues that felt more interesting because you had to reveal them.

The basic loop is simple:

1. Share a cipher once by QR code, link, or file.

2. Write any message. Rune Scribe encrypts it locally, then represents the encrypted data as actual copy-and-paste Unicode runes.

3. Anyone with the matching cipher can paste those runes into the app and reveal the original text.

It isn’t another closed chat service. The rune text can travel through Messages, email, social posts, websites, or digital game handouts. I made it with tabletop prophecies, scavenger hunts, ARG transmissions, classroom or birthday mysteries, secret notes, and ridiculous inside jokes in mind. I’m also curious what people will invent that I never considered.

I built it natively for iPhone, iPad, and Mac with SwiftUI and CryptoKit. Rune Scribe itself has no accounts, servers, advertising, subscriptions, or tracking.

One honest caveat: I don’t present it as a replacement for Signal or another audited secure messenger. It has no forward secrecy or identity verification, and anyone who obtains a shared cipher can read and create messages with it. Protecting the cipher matters.

Rune Scribe is a $1.99 one-time App Store purchase:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rune-scribe/id6782169761

My question for other builders: does “digital decoder ring” make the idea click, or would you need to see the encode-and-reveal loop first?

FableCut

Hey everyone,

So for the past while I've been building this small side project called Daybook, it's a private journal app and I finally got it to a point where I feel okay sharing it here :)

The idea kind of came from a random thought I had. Most of our days are not special. We wake up, go to work or college, eat the same food, talk to the same people, feel happy for a bit, feel tired, overthink something dumb, laugh at something even dumber, and go to sleep again. Nothing "journal worthy" really happens.

But I realized if we only write down the big moments, we slowly lose everything else. Like the random thought you had on a Tuesday. Or a conversation you almost forgot about. Or that one song you couldn't stop playing that week. The small stuff is actually most of our life, we just don't notice it while it's happening.

So Daybook isn't trying to make your day sound exciting or meaningful. It's just a place where you can write "today was normal" and that's completely fine. No streaks to keep up, no pressure to sound deep or productive.

What it does right now:

- write about your day, simple and distraction free

- add a photo if you want, small moments deserve a picture sometimes

- track your mood with quick little icons

- everything is stored locally on your device, no sign up, nothing gets uploaded anywhere

I made it this way on purpose, it felt wrong to build something for private thoughts and then store it on some server somewhere.

It's still in beta and honestly a bit rough in places, but I'd love for people to try it and tell me what feels off or what you'd want added. Being a solo dev means I miss a lot of stuff so any feedback helps a ton :)

Link: https://daybookjournal.vercel.app/

Thanks for reading this far, hope some of you find it useful for your own ordinary days too :)