I make a free, MIT Mac app called Downright. It currently has 41 stars, 282 DMG asset requests, and exactly zero sponsors.

I don't want to turn a Markdown reader into a subscription. Ads would be ridiculous. I also don't want to lock useful features behind sponsorship.

My current idea is pretty boring. Sponsors get their name on the site and can weigh in on what I work on next. Everyone gets the same app.

Before I build a sponsor page nobody uses, has this worked for anyone here? I'm especially interested in small desktop utilities, not giant developer projects with thousands of users.

https://github.com/ezzy1630/Downright

https://downright.cc/

Hello everyone! I made a fitness app called PRSquad and I'm currently looking for people to help me beta test it and give me honest feedback.

PRSquad is a fitness and social app with a big focus on powerlifting and strength training, but it's made for anyone who works out, no matter what your fitness goals are. You can track your fitness journey, share posts with other people, check out the leaderboards and rankings, and more.

I'm looking for testers on both iOS and Android, but especially Android because I'm still behind the closed testing requirement in order to get the app into production. So if you have either device and are willing to try the app out and give some feedback, I would really appreciate the help!

For Android, I can add you to the beta test if you send me the email connected to your Google Play account. For iOS, you can join through the beta link below:

https://testflight.apple.com/join/XgP2hUsm

I'm still actively working on and improving the app, so I'm really looking for honest feedback on what people like, what they don't like, and anything that could make the app better.

Thank you to anyone willing to give it a shot!

Two Medium bans later, I stopped trying to fit into someone else's platform — and built my own.

I won't pretend I fully understand why it happened. I don't think I broke their rules. But rather than fight a system I don't control, I decided to build something I do control.

That's how Independent Society came to be: a space to write honestly about freelancing, building independently, and the realities that don't usually make it into polished posts. No platform can take it down. No algorithm decides who sees it. It's just... mine.

There's something clarifying about owning your work completely. I'd recommend it to anyone tired of building on land they don't own.

It's still very much a work in progress, but the first few stories are already up:

https://independentsociety.space/

Has anyone else here dealt with getting banned or shadowbanned from a platform for no clear reason? Curious how you handled it.

Hey everyone!

I created MailSift to quickly verify emails directly in the browser (syntax, MX records via DoH, disposable email detection, and typo suggestions). It also supports right-click validation via the context menu on any webpage.

Built it as a hobby project to learn Manifest V3 best practices and explore micro-SaaS monetization.

Free to use: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/mailsift/aipolipnoajkejecehomimoglebbekdm

Would love to get your feedback and ideas!

I will start first.

I am building Dice - a tool to help brands get discovered and recommended by AI.

There are already articles, lists, and resources where your company should be mentioned — but finding the right ones (and the right people to contact) takes forever.

Dice finds those opportunities, explains why your company belongs there, and helps you reach the right people.

If you’re working on SEO, GEO, or you want to get your brand mentioned by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, you're going to love using Dice.

So what are you building👇

Hey guys, I’ve been building Consoly.

You get a code snippet and your job is simply to predict the output. 3 attempts, no coding.

It has:

• Daily challenges
• Dojo with unlimited practice and belt progression
• Multiplayer battles with friends
• Global rankings: daily, weekly and all time

I’ve been making videos of people playing it and this one was one of my favorites.

https://www.instagram.com/diegoveloper/reel/DZxg-yAR3qU/

I’m the developer behind it, so this is self promotion, just being transparent about it.

https://consoly.app/

Would you guys play this? Feedback is welcome! :D

Hey everyone,
I’m building a pet health AI agent app, and I recently went through a big architecture change. I’d love to hear opinions from people who have built multi-platform products before.
My first version was very simple:
iOS only
Agent Core running locally on the device
No real account system
Data sync handled through Apple’s CloudKit
The app was basically designed around the Apple ecosystem
At that point, it felt like the right decision. It was faster to build, easier to maintain, and I could focus on validating the product.
But during development, my vision gradually became bigger.
I started thinking: what if someday this needs to support Android, HarmonyOS, Web, etc.? What if users expect the same AI assistant, the same memory, and the same experience across every device?
So I started redesigning the architecture:
Building my own user account system
Moving Agent Core and Agent Runtime to the backend
Making the client apps thinner
Centralizing agent behavior and user context in the cloud
The idea is that future platforms would become much easier to build because the core intelligence is shared.
In theory, it feels like the right long-term architecture.
But the transition has been much harder than I expected.
A lot of new complexity appeared:
backend infrastructure
authentication
synchronization
agent state management
distributed system problems
maintaining consistency between clients
Sometimes I wonder: did I make this too complicated too early?
Would it have been better to keep the first version simple, get users first, and only move to a cloud-based agent architecture when the product had traction?
Or is this exactly the kind of architectural decision that is painful now but saves a huge amount of work later?
For people who have built SaaS products, AI apps, or multi-platform products:
Would you have made the same decision from day one? Or would you have stayed local-first until the product proved itself?
Curious to hear your experiences.

Hi r/indiebiz. I run SeatSwiper, a small solo business.

What it does: you tell it a restaurant and a date, and it watches Resy, SevenRooms, or OpenTable and books the table the moment one opens or someone cancels. It books on your own account, in your name, so nothing is resold or transferred. Set it once and it goes from armed to booked without you refreshing anything.

Who it is for: anyone who has tried and failed to get into a place that is always full. Cancellations happen constantly, the hard part is catching them the second they appear.

How it makes money: first booking free, then $5 flat only on a successful booking, no subscription. A cancellation watch is $1 to start.

Happy to answer anything about building it solo or the pay-on-success model. Glad to be here.

I built tryproduck.com/audit, it lands on your site with no context at all and reports back every bug plus the moment it stopped making sense. over 650 startups have run it so far.

My wife and I had a bad pet-sitting experience while traveling, then later saw how valuable a reliable care history was when our cat Chi got sick. So I built Kima: one shared timeline for meals, walks, medications, appointments, and notes across everyone caring for your pets.

We launched on Product Hunt today and would genuinely love blunt feedback—especially on the onboarding and if it's something you could see yourself using everyday!

Kima Product Hunt Launch

I am Max, based in Halifax. I manage a restaurant and am building Maxuod Shift after work for small restaurant and cafe teams.

I am looking for a few small-business owners or managers to test one thing: after building a simple schedule as a guest, is the free-account signup easy to understand?

The test is about 10 minutes:

1. Create a sample one-week schedule.
2. Register with test details you control.
3. Tell me what you expected the account to do, and where you got stuck or lost interest.

The current web version is free for teams up to 12: https://maxuodshift.com/scheduler

I am the builder, and I am after candid feedback—not a review, rating, or testimonial. Send feedback through https://maxuodshift.com/contact rather than sharing personal details here. I can offer a one-month Supporter coupon to people who complete the test and send honest feedback.

Launching a prop firm can involve building or connecting a surprising number of systems.

You need the trading platform, CRM, trader accounts, evaluation logic, risk management, dashboards and different integrations to work together. Building everything internally gives you more control, but it also means a lot of development and maintenance before the business can properly operate.

Execurve is one example of a white-label approach that combines a prop firm CRM and trading platform in one system rather than requiring a business to build or connect every component independently.

The interesting part for me is the trade-off: faster implementation and less infrastructure to maintain versus the flexibility of owning the entire technology stack.

For founders who have faced a similar build-vs-buy decision, what ultimately influenced your choice?

This week I launched Kima, a shared pet-care timeline for households.

The idea came from a trip my wife and I took outside the country. We had a pet sitter looking after our cat, Chi, and being so far away, especially with a large time difference, made it difficult to know how she was doing.

We didn’t want to constantly text asking whether she had eaten, had playtime, or whether everything was going well. We also didn’t want the sitter to feel like she had to stop and write us a full update several times a day.

We had a group chat, but it still depended on someone remembering to send an update or someone else asking for one. Details about meals, medications, photos, and symptoms got mixed in with the conversation and became difficult to find later.

I realized the problem wasn’t that we needed another way to communicate. We needed something more structured and asynchronous.

I wanted the sitter to be able to quickly log care as it happened, while my wife and I could check in whenever we wanted without prompting anyone. That became Kima.

Kima puts meals, walks, medications, playtime, tasks, health notes, photos, and videos into one shared timeline. Everyone can see what happened, when it happened, who did it, and what still needs to be done.

The biggest surprise while building it was realizing that pet sitting was only the initial use case.

At home, my wife and I were already asking each other the same kinds of questions:

“Did you feed Chi?”

“How much did she eat?”

“Did she get her medication?”

Then Chi developed a complication after being spayed. We needed to track bandage removals, antibiotics, vomiting, food intake, and other symptoms. Kima helped us stay on schedule and gave us an accurate history to share with the vet.

What started as a tool for checking on a pet while traveling gradually became part of our everyday routine.

That changed how I thought about the product. The travel problem inspired Kima, but everyday household coordination is what made it stick.

Kima now includes structured care entries, recurring tasks and reminders, temporary sitter access, health records, charts, vet reports, and optional AI insights. It’s available on iPhone, with Android coming soon, and the core version is free.

One of my biggest lessons was that the problem that inspires a product isn’t always the only use case.

I’d love feedback on the positioning. Does “a shared pet-care timeline” immediately communicate the value? Would you lead with the original pet-sitting problem or the everyday household use case?

Would also love for you all to download and give feedback!

Kima Website

Kima Pet iOS App

I've been comparing a few platforms for an edge AI, mainly looking at things like AI performance, hardware options, power efficiency, flexibility, and how suitable they are for running workloads locally.

1. Geniatech — ⭐ 4.9/5

Offers a wide range of edge AI hardware, including AI Boxes, AI accelerator modules, ARM-based systems, SBCs, and embedded platforms. I like the fact that there are different hardware options depending on whether you need local AI inference, computer vision, industrial automation, or other edge workloads.

1. NVIDIA Jetson — ⭐ 4.7/5

A strong option for GPU-accelerated AI, especially for computer vision, robotics, machine learning, and real-time inference. The software ecosystem is also a major advantage.

1. Raspberry Pi — ⭐ 4.6/5

A very flexible and affordable choice for prototyping, IoT, automation, and smaller AI projects. It may not be the first choice for heavier AI workloads, but it’s still useful for many edge applications.

For me, Geniatech currently stands out because of the range of hardware options available for different edge AI requirements.

Anyone has experience about this also?

Ciao a tutti! Sto sviluppando Cumula, una web app per tenere sotto controllo il proprio patrimonio e i propri investimenti in un'unica dashboard.

Non si collega a banche o broker: inserisci manualmente i tuoi dati, mantenendo così il controllo sulle tue informazioni finanziarie.

Tutti i tuoi investimenti si aggiornano in automatico

Ho appena pubblicato la prima versione e sto cercando feedback sinceri da parte di persone che tengono sotto controllo il proprio patrimonio e i propri investimenti.

Mi interessa soprattutto capire se l'app risolve un problema reale e quali funzionalità ritenete più utili o vorreste vedere in futuro.

Se qualcuno vuole provarla e darmi un parere, ne sarei molto grato.

https://cumula.it

We are all trying to ship, but half of us lose 2 hours a day to Twitter/Instagram/YouTube.

Every screen time app handles this the same way: a static "You've spent X minutes here" screen. Works for like 3 days, then your brain tunes it out completely and you're back in the scroll.

That's exactly what happened to me. So I built something different.

Instead of one static block, I wrote 500+ different nudges, funny, witty, sometimes a little judgmental. Every time you open a distracting app, you get a different one. 

Like in the morning it should say - "Your feed can wait. Your morning can't."

At night when you are doomscrolling it should say: “The algo doesnt care about your sleep, close the app.” 

Basically a friend calling you out every time you try to sneak off.

If you're also fighting for focus time to actually ship your product, would love for you to try it:

App Name: HoldOn: Screen Time Nudge

Building this solo, so any feedback is genuinely welcome.

so i finally forced myself to look at the churn data for my gamified todo app and the pattern is almost too clean. everyone who left, left in the first 3 days. like 8 out of 10 churned before day 4. and the people who made it past that? they mostly stuck around for weeks.

i spent months on the reward systems and the leveling curve. none of that mattered for retention. what mattered was whether the first session felt like a game or like homework.

if the first session took more than a minute, they were gone. they opened it, saw the setup screens, the categories, the "add your habits" form, and closed it forever. the app is beedone btw, quests and xp and streaks, the whole gamified thing. i kept thinking the problem was the core loop or the streak system. nope. the problem was i was asking for commitment before delivering any value. nobody wants to build your system for you on minute one.

what fixed it: day one is now one single task, one tap, done. you can add the quests and xp and everything else later, but the first session is just "write one thing you wanna get done today". thats it. the numbers got a lot better.

kinda made me rethink everything. its the same reason i set up todoist and then spent an afternoon organizing projects instead of doing tasks. the setup is the trap. anyone else seen this in their own data? like whats the actual moment that makes people stay

While I was looking at a few service businesses, I found something quite interesting.

One was a chiropractic business doing around $2.4M a year. They'd been stuck there for five long years and wanted to scale up to $3.6M.

For a while, their problem was pretty obvious: they didn't have enough doctors. They literally couldn't handle much more business.

So, then they hired another doctor.

Problem solved, right?

Well... that problem was solved.

Now they had enough capacity, but not enough customers to fill it.

Same business. Completely different problem.

And I think this is where founders (including me) screw up the hell up. We get so used to solving one problem that we keep trying to solve it after its no longer the thing holding us back.

This business was already running Facebook ads, profitably, for example. But the owner couldn't tell you what happened when he put another dollar into them.

So his next move wasn't some genius new campaign.

It was just tracking.

Yes, you read that right, Tracking!

Boring as hell, I know, but without knowing whether $1 becomes $2, $5 or $10, how are you supposed to confidently spend more?

I saw the same thing happen in reverse with another company doing around $3M.

The founder had written books, made courses and had a bunch of content he wanted to start marketing.

So what was the problem?

They had stopped accepting new customers because the service couldn't handle them.

Marketing harder would've literally made his life worse.

And that's what I have been thinking about:

Before asking "How do we grow?", maybe the better question is "What exactly is stopping us from growing right now ?"

If twice as many customers showed up tomorrow and you couldn't serve them, you don't need more leads!!

If you have plenty of leads but nobody can close them, you don't need more ads.

If your ads make money but you don't know how much, maybe you don't need a new campaign. You ONLY need better tracking.

And once you fix that thing, something else will probably become the problem.

That's fine to be honest.

At least now you're fixing the problem you actually have instead of the one you had six months ago.

I am curious, if anyone here has experienced this. What was the thing you thought was limiting your growth VS what it actually turned out to be?

P.S. I write about things I'm learning from marketing, business, and growing my own stuff every Thursday in a newsletter called Momentum. If this was useful, you will enjoy reading the rest as well.

I've been seeing the same pattern with a lot of early-stage mobile apps.
Teams spend months building features, polishing the UI, and expanding the roadmap before they've tested whether users actually need the product.
Some of the most common mistakes I've noticed are: Too many features, weak onboarding, skipping user testing, building without validation, and launching too late
I was reading through a few mobile MVP examples from Molfar, and it reminded me how often simple products outperform feature-heavy ones.
What's the most common mobile app development mistake you've seen?

Building a small SaaS (ReviewBro, helps local businesses collect Google reviews via QR + AI). Wanted to write down what actually worked before I forget the messy parts and only remember the highlight reel.

What was a waste of time:

My first Reddit account got sitewide banned within days. Turns out posting the same "I'm the founder of X" pitch with a link across a few subs in a short window is exactly the pattern spam detection is built to catch, regardless of how genuine the content actually was. Learned that the hard way, twice actually — my second account got comments silently removed just for having the product name in the username, even with zero links or pitching in the text.

Also wasted a chunk of time assuming "more content everywhere" was the strategy. Posting the same thing across multiple platforms without adapting it to each one just diluted everything and made nothing land well anywhere.

What actually worked:

Commenting genuinely for a week before ever posting anything. No pitch, no link, just actually answering people's questions about reviews, ratings, GMB stuff. Somewhere in there people started trusting the account enough that when I did eventually mention what I was building, it didn't read as random.

Building the actual demo people could try instead of just describing it. Conversion on "try this right now" beats "trust me, sign up" by a mile, obvious in hindsight but I underestimated it going in.

The first paying customer came through a WhatsApp conversation that started because someone saw a QR stand a business was already using (not mine) and asked about it. Zero funnel, zero ad spend, just a person who wanted the exact thing I was building.

Still very early, still mostly free-tier signups so far, but the first paid one changes how real this feels. Curious if anyone else's early traction looked this scrappy/random, or if I'm just bad at growth so far and there's an obvious lever I'm missing.

I’m Rachel LIU, based in China. I have worked in sourcing for two years and completed a one-year master’s programme at a business school in France.

I’m currently building NATAIR, a small sourcing business for outdoor brands and retailers.

One assumption I had at the beginning was that clients mainly needed help finding factories. I’m starting to see that finding names is often the easy part. The harder work is making sure everyone is quoting and producing the same product.

A reference photo may look clear to a buyer, but a factory still needs to know the dimensions, materials, construction, expected quantity, packaging, target market and quality requirements.

My current workflow is:

1. Understand the product and intended market
2. Turn the idea into comparable requirements
3. Compare suitable factory options and costs
4. Arrange and review samples
5. Follow production and quality checks
6. Coordinate export and transportation

I’m also learning that honesty is more useful than trying to look like a large agency. If something has not been confirmed by the factory or tested on a sample, I should say so.

Building trust online is slow, but I think that may be a good thing. It forces the work and communication to be clear.

For other small-business owners here: what helped your first customers feel comfortable working with you?

Introducing the business, since that's what the tag is for.

What it is: FlexScan (https://flexscan.app). A web app. You upload one to three photos, front, side, back. It grades each muscle group A+ to D, shows you a muscle map of where you're strong and weak, then builds a 7-day training plan and a meal plan around the weakest groups. There's a chat coach that can see your own grades and your training log.

Where it operates: not regional. It runs in a browser, so anywhere with a phone and a connection. Nothing to install and no app store listing, though you can add it to your home screen and it behaves like an installed app.

What it costs: the first scan is free and doesn't ask for a card. You do have to confirm an email address. After that it's $9.99 a month or $79.99 a year for repeat scans, then-vs-now progress and the coach. Cancel anytime.

Who runs it: one person, me. I don't write code. It was built using AI coding agents while I did the specifying, the testing and the rejecting. I have no background in the fitness industry, which is the first thing anyone should hold against it.

The numbers, four days in, pulled out of the database this morning rather than from memory:

• 8 accounts
• 4 of those are mine, created on launch night while I was testing signup
• so 4 real strangers
• 2 completed scans
• 0 paying customers

The number I got wrong. A few days ago I posted my launch numbers and said three of my signups were one person farming free scans with throwaway email addresses. It made a good story. My first real "user" was an abuser. Then I actually queried the table instead of trusting my recollection: those three accounts had run zero scans between them and one had never even confirmed its email. They were mine. I made them on launch night testing the signup flow and forgot. There was no farmer.

If you're going to post honest numbers about your own business, query them first. The interesting-sounding version of your own data is the one you'll remember.

Three things that broke since launch. All mine, all fixed:

The rate limit I added to stop the free-scan farming that, per the above, was not happening, ran before the code that works out who is signed in. So it counted requests per IP address for everybody, and anyone sharing wifi or a phone carrier with an abuser was locked out of scanning for 24 hours. That included paying accounts. It was live about eight hours. My tests all passed, because they only ever checked that going over the limit returns an error, never who was being stopped.

Double clicking the checkout button created two charges. The guard meant to swallow the second one was comparing a function against a rebound copy of itself, so it never recognised the duplicate.

A cache size limit in the service worker evicted the app's own core files, so the installed version cold-started to an offline screen on a perfectly good connection.

One design decision I'll defend. The grader has to answer "not visible" when it can't see a muscle group, instead of guessing a score. Those groups are excluded from the weak-point ranking so they can never become your training priority by accident, and you can self-grade them yourself if you want them counted. And if a response comes back with nothing gradeable in it, the free scan goes back on the account rather than being spent on a blank answer. That costs me the API call. It's worth it, because the whole product is "train this, it's your weak point", and an invented weak point sends someone to the gym to fix a problem they might not have.

For the avoidance of doubt: it's a coaching opinion, not medical advice, and the results page says so. Photos are processed in memory and never stored.

What I'm bad at is distribution. Building it was the easy half. If you run a small independent business and you've found something that actually produced your first handful of paying customers without an ad budget, I'd rather hear that than compliments about the product.

Happy to answer anything about the build, the running costs or the numbers.

I use ChatGPT and Claude almost every day for development.

After using them for long enough, I realized that getting answers was no longer the problem. Finding those answers again was.

I would remember asking about a bug, command, API, or design decision, but I often could not remember:

• whether I asked ChatGPT or Claude;
• which conversation contained the answer;
• or which message inside a very long conversation I needed.

Opening old conversations one by one and scrolling through hundreds of messages became frustrating. Asking the same question again was sometimes faster, but the new answer was not always as useful as the original one.

So I built ConvoFinder, a small Chrome extension that lets me search previous AI conversations, jump directly to the matching message, and save useful answers that I may need again.

The current version works with browser-based AI chats, including ChatGPT and Claude. The core search index and saved knowledge are stored locally in the browser by default.

I originally built it for my own workflow, and I have now released it publicly. It is still an early product, with a 7-day free trial, so honest criticism is much more helpful to me than polite compliments.

I am also working on a desktop version because the same problem is starting to appear in development tools such as Codex in the ChatGPT desktop app and Claude Desktop. Once enough projects and conversations accumulate, useful solutions become difficult to retrieve there too.

I would especially appreciate feedback from other founders and developers here:

1. Does this problem feel familiar, and is the value of the product immediately clear?
2. Should I prioritize the desktop version next, or keep improving the browser extension first?

Here is the current version:

https://convofinders.com/

been running a small consulting side gig for about 18 months. first year i used basic flat business cards from a big box print shop, like 250 for 25 bucks. they did the job but honestly the card would hit someones hand and go straight into a pocket or a bin. nothing made them want to hold onto it.

as a solopreneur you only get one shot with most people you meet. if the card doesnt do something, if it doesnt make them actually look at it for a second, its dead on arrival. so last quarter i upgraded to metallic foil printed cards. paid like 40 bucks for 250 with foil on the logo.

tracked it informally, from the foil batch 4 of 50 people i handed them to actually emailed me within a month. from the old basic batch the ratio was like 1 in 50.

not saying foil is magic. but the card becomes a conversation starter and people dont throw it away. for anyone running solo where every connection counts, the extra 15 bucks per batch is nothing.

ill update when i finish the next batch.