u/Aydevils

I’m a full time software developer, and I’ve been building a side project (a consumer app) in my spare time. No revenue yet, still focused on organic growth and getting real feedback before touching monetization.

The problem is I only have so many hours after work, and I feel like the product needs more focused attention than nights and weekends can give it.

For people who’ve made the jump from a stable job to full time on their own thing, what told you it was actually the right time versus just excitement talking? And if you waited, what signal made you finally pull the trigger?

Not trying to romanticize the “quit your job” thing, genuinely trying to figure out if this is a smart risk or just impatience.

Hey everyone! I’m u/Aydevils, a founding moderator of r/EarlyStageApps.

This is our new home for people building apps in the early days — before the funding, before the users, before you even know if it’ll work. We’re excited to have you join us!

**What to Post**
Post anything about the app you’re building: progress updates, questions you’re stuck on, marketing/growth experiments, tech decisions, or even small wins that feel dumb to share. Self-promo is totally fine here, just add context instead of dropping a bare link.

**Community Vibe**
We’re all about being friendly, honest, and constructive. Feedback should help, not just critique. Let’s build a space where it’s okay to share stuff that’s unfinished or unproven.

**How to Get Started**
**1.** Introduce yourself in the comments below — what are you building, and where are you stuck?
**2.** Post something today! Even a simple question can spark a great conversation.
**3.** If you know another early-stage builder, invite them to join.
**4.** Interested in helping moderate? Reach out to me directly.

Thanks for being part of the very first wave. Together, let’s make r/EarlyStageApps a place people actually want to post in.

Hey all, wanted to share what I’ve been building since this is exactly the stage this sub is for.

Backstory: My sister had her engagement party and I took a bunch of photos/videos to send her the next day. sent them through whatsapp and other social apps like I normally would, and the quality got absolutely destroyed. compressed, blurry, video quality tanked. for something like an engagement party those are memories you actually want to keep, not some compressed mess. that’s basically what pushed me to start building this.

So Lumea is a file sharing tool that keeps your original quality (no compression like most messaging/social apps do), and the file self-destructs after it’s been viewed once, with screenshot protection built in too.

Kind of positioning it as the ephemeral alternative to stuff like Privnote/OneTimeSecret, but built for actual files/images/videos instead of just text, and without the quality loss.

Lumea App

Still early stage, so genuinely curious:
• Would you ever use something like this, and for what?
• What would make you NOT trust a tool like this?
• anything similar you’ve tried that failed or worked well?

Not trying to hard-sell it, just want honest reactions from people who get the “building something new” struggle.

Grew up pretty religious, practiced regularly, prayed, the whole thing. At some point in my 20s I kind of drifted away from it, not in a dramatic way, just slowly stopped practicing.

Looking back, one of the biggest differences I noticed wasn’t really about belief itself, it was interpersonal relationships. When I was religious I had this built in community, people checking in on you, a sense of accountability to something bigger, even just simple stuff like seeing familiar faces regularly. Once that was gone I had to rebuild a lot of that structure on my own, and honestly it took a while to find something that filled the same space.

Not trying to start a debate about whether religion is “true” or not, more just curious how other people experienced this. Did you notice similar shifts in your relationships or sense of stability when your relationship with religion changed, either direction? Wondering if it’s more about the community/structure part or the belief part that actually creates that sense of peace for people.

Hey all, wanted to share what I’ve been building since this is exactly the stage this sub is for.

Backstory: my sister had her engagement party and I took a bunch of photos/videos to send her the next day. Sent them through whatsapp and other social apps like I normally would, and the quality got absolutely destroyed. Compressed, blurry, video quality tanked. For something like an engagement party those are memories you actually want to keep, not some compressed mess. that’s basically what pushed me to start building this.

So Lumea is a file sharing tool that keeps your original quality (no compression like most messaging/social apps do), and the file self-destructs after it’s been viewed once, with screenshot protection built in too.

Kind of positioning it as the ephemeral alternative to stuff like Privnote/OneTimeSecret, but built for actual files/images/videos instead of just text, and without the quality loss.

Still early stage, so genuinely curious:
• would you ever use something like this, and for what?
• what would make you NOT trust a tool like this?
• anything similar you’ve tried that failed or worked well?

Not trying to hard-sell it, just want honest reactions from people who get the “building something new” struggle.

For a while I didn’t even clock that this was happening. I’d scroll through people’s pages and start comparing my own relationships (friendships, family, romantic, whatever) to what I was seeing online. Like why doesn’t my friend group look as close as theirs, why don’t I get tagged in stuff like that, why does my relationship not look like that.

Eventually I realized most of what I was comparing myself to wasn’t even real, just the highlight reel version people choose to post. But by the time I figured that out I’d already started resenting people close to me for things that honestly weren’t their fault, just me measuring us against some curated version of other people’s lives.

Took a while to unlearn that. Stopped scrolling as much and started actually just being present with the people I already had instead of measuring them against strangers online.

Curious if anyone else went through something similar, and how you snapped out of it.

Grew up pretty religious, practiced regularly, prayed, the whole thing. At some point in my 20s I kind of drifted away from it, not in a dramatic way, just slowly stopped practicing.

Looking back, one of the biggest differences I noticed wasn’t really about belief itself, it was interpersonal relationships. When I was religious I had this built in community, people checking in on you, a sense of accountability to something bigger, even just simple stuff like seeing familiar faces regularly. Once that was gone I had to rebuild a lot of that structure on my own, and honestly it took a while to find something that filled the same space.

Not trying to start a debate about whether religion is “true” or not, more just curious how other people experienced this. Did you notice similar shifts in your relationships or sense of stability when your relationship with religion changed, either direction? Wondering if it’s more about the community/structure part or the belief part that actually creates that sense of peace for people.

Learned this one the hard way a few months into managing social for a client.

I used to batch everything, send like 5-6 posts at once for approval, then wait. Problem is clients don’t look at it right away. So it sits for 3-4 days, then they finally open it and want changes on half of them, and now I’m scrambling to fix everything the night before stuff’s supposed to go up.

Switched to sending one piece at a time instead of batching. Also started attaching a deadline to it, something like “posting this Thursday, let me know by Wednesday if you want changes, otherwise it’s going up as is.” Sounds small but it completely changed the dynamic. No more sitting in approval limbo, no more last minute scrambles.

Only downside is it takes more discipline on my end to actually stay ahead and send things with enough lead time. But way better trade than losing a week to revisions every month.

Did social for an HVAC client for about 8 months. A few things I learned that might save someone the trial and error.

Access: Get added as a manager on their Meta Business Suite, don’t let them just hand you a personal login. Cleaner, safer, and looks more professional off the bat.

Approvals: I used to just drop content in a shared Drive folder, but I’ve switched to using Lumea for sending clients drafts now, no permission settings to mess with, and the files auto expire after they view them so I’m not leaving hi res content sitting in a folder forever. Then I just text them something like “posting this Friday, lmk if issue.” Half the time they don’t even reply. Once you’ve posted a few good ones they just trust you and stop checking.

Pricing: Keep social completely separate from production work. I bundled it in early on and got hit with scope creep fast, “can you also respond to comments,” “can you also do stories,” etc. Flat monthly fee just for social fixed that overnight. If it’s not in the flat fee, it’s a separate conversation.

AI captions: Personally skip it. Captions need to sound like an actual human, especially for something like garbage bin cleaning, that kind of business lives and dies on personality and humor in the content. AI written captions kill that instantly.

Recurring clients like this end up being the best kind of client once your systems click. Curious what others are doing differently, especially around approval workflows.