Reddit

Those of you who turned a freelance skill into a product - what was the hardest part of the transition?

I do content writing and marketing for clients and I keep thinking about productizing something - maybe a template pack, a course, or a done-for-you content system. The idea of earning without trading hours for money is obviously appealing. But every time I start planning it out, I get stuck. With client work I know exactly what to deliver and when. With a product, everything is open-ended. What to build, who to market it to, how to price it, when to launch. The freedom is paralyzing. I've a...
Reddit

I built an app that checks decisions against your own principles, not averaged AI advice

I'm a solo dev. Reflecting on my own career, I noticed a pattern I repeat every few years - in hindsight obvious, but in the moment it just feels like a normal decision. The knowing was never the problem; recalling it at the right time was. So I built Vernoly . You build up a personal "codex" of your own principles, and before a real decision the app surfaces the ones that apply - including when two of them disagree ("finish what you start" vs. "cut losses early"...
Reddit

Built a Chrome extension that pays users to watch ads they actually choose. Here is what we learned after 10,000 users and 60+ brand partners

Hey everyone, I wanted to share what we have been building and what we have learned so far in case it is useful for anyone here working on something in the advertising, fintech, or consumer app space. The core idea behind Adreva came from a simple observation. The digital advertising industry generates hundreds of billions in revenue every year and the people whose attention makes it possible receive nothing. We wanted to fix that. The product is a Chrome extension where users opt in to se...
Reddit

Why I waited over a year after my first paying customers to launch on Product Hunt

Most people launch on Product Hunt as early as possible. I did the opposite. I had paying customers, the product solved a real problem, but it was too niche and too rough around the edges for a public launch. It worked well for one specific audience but wouldn’t have made sense to anyone outside of it. So I kept building. Added features that made it relevant beyond the initial niche. Polished the onboarding, the UI, the positioning. Waited until I felt like a stranger landing on the page cou...
Reddit

How do you beat the cold-start problem? We built a chat and cam website but it's a ghost town (no users because no users :)

Hey, we're building a social site and running into the wall every social app hits, so we figured we'd share honestly and maybe get some wisdom from people who've been through it. What we're making: it's called Heeyyo , a free website for meeting people through anonymous group chat and video. No phone number, no real name, you just pick a nickname and you're in. Somewhere between Omegle and a group chat. The problem: it's only fun when people are online, but no one stays when it's empty, a...
Reddit

Made my first sale from my project

Hi, Just wanted to share that I got my first customer for my project- https://futrow.live , it's a live world cup api provider, I just had the idea about a week ago built and released it within a couple days and just iterated, didn't overthink or anything, within about 5 days had my first sale, I was so ecstatic, it was only $29, but it meant more than any other money I ever made haha. Just wanted to say don't overthing, it shouldn't be perfect and most people there are quite understanding...
Reddit

What do you wish you knew before launching your first solo app?

I’ve been building my first app alone for about a year now and I’m finally getting close to launching. No team, no funding, just me figuring it out as I go. Honestly it’s been humbling. I thought the hard part was building the thing. Turns out that’s maybe half of it. The other half is everything nobody talks about such as LLC paperwork, D-U-N-S numbers, App Store rejections, trying to figure out marketing when you have zero followers and zero budget. I’ve made plenty of mistakes and learned...
Reddit

Took me 4 years and 3 dead side projects to learn what actually matters

I built my first side project in 2022. It was a habit tracker with a twist — you'd compete against friends. I spent six months obsessing over the UI, the animations, the perfect onboarding flow. Launched it to crickets. Maybe 12 signups, all friends and family. Dead in a month. Project number two was a bookmarking tool for developers. Three months of solo building, this time I even added a dark mode (surely that would help, right?). Same story. Built it alone, launched it quietly, watched it g...
Let’s be each other’s First Users
Reddit

Let’s be each other’s First Users

I've seen hundreds of apps you've shared here and so many of us are willing to help each other out. So I thought we should make it easier. I built 1kusers.com for us to share our own apps, test other apps, and get feedback. The idea is simple: you don't need to chase upvotes to get visibility - the more apps you review, the more visible your own app becomes. Give it a try, and I’ll personally test and review every new app posted. Would love to hear what you think. submitted by &#3...
How to Teach a Small LLM to Suggest K12 Creative Project Ideas
🌍 FreeCodeCamp

How to Teach a Small LLM to Suggest K12 Creative Project Ideas

Recently, I wrote a post about an educational app I'd developed using AI tools, and the design decisions I made along the way. When I showed the prototype of my activity-based learning app to a few ed
Learn Notion Workers
🌍 FreeCodeCamp

Learn Notion Workers

Imagine being able to pull any external data into Notion, seamlessly push updates to your other favorite apps, and automate complex business logic, and do this all without paying for third-party no-co
Reddit

Built a side project to help Instagram creators manage growth and audience in one place

I have been working on a small side project for Instagram creators because I kept running into the same problems while trying to grow pages myself. Right now the idea is to bring a few things into one place instead of using multiple tools: Helping identify the right audience based on niche Tracking follower quality instead of just follower count Content idea generation for consistency Basic growth insights (what type of posts bring better engagement) Simple suggestions to improve rea...
Reddit

5 months building my first app. Have I been doing this wrong the whole time?

So I built this app where you photograph any clothing item and it finds the same style for cheaper. Been working on it for 5 months and I’m close to launching. The scanner works but honestly it’s not that good. I have GPT-4o, FashionCLIP, Marqo all working together and it feels like a lot of moving parts for results that are only really accurate on the top matches. The rest aren’t great. It also doesn’t search Depop, Grailed or Poshmark which is kind of the whole point. Someone told me to b...
I built a thought journal for capturing moments — no account, no subscription
Reddit

I built a thought journal for capturing moments — no account, no subscription

I've been working on this for a while now and I'm really proud of it, so I wanted to share it here. It's called Fleeting — a journal app for iOS (Android coming soon) built around one idea: capturing thoughts in the moment without friction, and rediscovering them later. I've always been someone who has thoughts I want to hold onto — a feeling, something I noticed, a memory — but by the time I've opened an app and navigated to the right place, the moment has passed. Fleeting is my attempt to ...
build nodex - local first rust based vim like NOTES TAKING APP with local AI models RAG on top of it.
Reddit

build nodex - local first rust based vim like NOTES TAKING APP with local AI models RAG on top of it.

i got a random idea of why should we sacrifice our privacy by keeping notes in apps like notion, etc. so thought of building a simple local first rust based vim like notes taking app with local AI models integrated in it for RAG. is it a good idea? the demo video is uploaded above, check it out and lmk. should i release it for one time payment of $5? or just open source it? open for all kinds of feedback.
I built a tool to find the Reddit and Hacker News threads where my product actually fits (and open sourced it)
Reddit

I built a tool to find the Reddit and Hacker News threads where my product actually fits (and open sourced it)

A big part of how I get early users is being genuinely helpful in the subreddits and HN threads where they already hang out. the problem is that finding the right threads to reply to by hand is a slog, and I would usually miss most of the good ones. So I built a tool to do the finding for me, and it is called ThreadHunt. How it works: - You tell it what you are building and the kinds of conversations you care about. - It watches Reddit, Hacker News, X, Indie Hackers and dev. to on a schedu...
Reddit

I built a free, ad-free app for running football prediction leagues with your mates

Every Premier League season, my friends and I run a prediction competition, everyone calls the scorelines, points get tallied up, and the winner gets bragging rights. The problem was that it always lived in a messy WhatsApp group with someone tracking scores in a spreadsheet that inevitably ended in an argument about who got what. So I built Punditz to handle it properly. You predict scorelines, spin up a private league with your friends, and it does the scoring and leaderboard automatically a...
Reddit

One year progress

https://json-to-excel.com started out at RapidApi. II got over 100 free users so decided to build out the site and add subscriptions. I’ve been a software engineer for over 10 years so the technical side is the easy part. The difficult part for me is time and marketing. Like many I have a family and a full time job so finding time has been difficult. It may be a couple of days or month or two that passes before I get a chance to spend a couple of hours on it over the year progress has been sl...
Reddit

I built a World Cup site for people who don't follow football

I've been following the 2026 World Cup but I don't really know the teams and play styles. I built a simple website that's easy for casual viewers to follow and understand a bit more. Would love any feedback! https://world-cup-simplified.vercel.app
Reddit

Made something that's probably been made a hundred times before

I made a booking/appointment management SaaS. Not a big deal, I guess. I built it using Lovable and tried not to make Al slop.The coding part was only one piece of the puzzle. Pricing, billing, permissions, subscriptions, edge cases, onboarding, database design, and all the little details took much longer than I thought. Every time I fixed one thing, ! discovered three more things to learn. The project is ZenSched. It's a booking management platform for businesses that need appointment sched...
Reddit

Built a free calculator for 220+ electrical engineering formulas (would love feedback)

Hey everyone, I just graduated EE and I'm starting my Masters in September. The whole degree I kept getting annoyed that there was no good place to just plug in numbers and solve a formula everything online is either a static PDF or some ugly outdated calculator from 2008. So I built one myself: EE Formula Hub 220+ interactive formulas across circuits, machines, power electronics, control systems, signals, and more. Pick a formula, enter what you know, it solves for the rest. There's also ...
Rotatris - Tetris, but the board rotates when a piece lands.
Reddit

Rotatris - Tetris, but the board rotates when a piece lands.

Rotation mechanic: when a piece falls to the right, the board rotates to the right, and vice versa. If it falls to the center, it will not rotate. I saw a cool concept by the creator Freya Holmér where the board spins, but figuring out how to clear the blocks was left open. I wanted to turn that idea into a full game, so I designed my own way to make the pieces disappear. After testing a few concepts, I narrowed it down to these three modes: Avalanche: You clear blocks by filling a sp...
I built an Android launcher to help me fix my bad phone habits so I can focus.
Reddit

I built an Android launcher to help me fix my bad phone habits so I can focus.

Hi Everyone, I needed to fix my phone habits and stop doomscrolling, especially during focus hours. Yes I can delete the distractions, but some social apps are the only way I communicate with certain friends and family members. I needed them on my phone, I just needed them out of my way at certain times. So I built a custom launcher for myself called KapsL. Instead of a regular home screen, it lets you group apps together into "capsules" that you can lock down at certain times. ...