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u/Tight-Shop4342

r/SaaS r/appledevelopers r/AppDevelopers r/SaasDevelopers r/iphone r/Rwanda r/mcp r/vibedesigns r/sideprojects r/vibecoding r/ClaudeDesign r/interesting r/iOSAppsMarketing r/hamishandandy r/BakaNewsJP r/Caldruki r/dryalcoholics r/iPhoneFC r/maybemaybemaybemaybe r/ironclawAI r/SideProject r/microsaas
▲ 1 r/iOSAppsMarketing

stopped running paid UA and put everything into tiktok slideshows. $24k in 28 days.

posting the actual mechanics because most of what gets shared here is either "do ASO" or "spend more on UA" and neither helped me.

background: four apps shipped, four apps nobody downloaded. i kept assuming the product was the problem and building harder. it wasn't. i just had no distribution and no way to find one that didn't involve burning money to discover my creative didn't work.

what changed was slideshows.

not video. photo carousels with text on them. tiktok is pushing them hard right now and the numbers are stupid compared to what the same effort gets you in video. they're free to make, you can produce ten in an afternoon, and people sit through every slide because utility content is easier to consume that way. save rates are the part that shocked me.

the method

  1. narrow your niche until it's uncomfortable. not "mental wellness." not "mental wellness for women." something like "mental state inside a relationship." broad is where you compete with everyone, narrow is where you get pulled.
  2. validate it in tiktok search insights before you commit anything. type the actual problems your app solves and look at real search volume and trend direction. if nobody's searching it, no amount of content saves you.
  3. find accounts already winning that exact angle. this is the part everyone does wrong. do not save an account because one post hit 2M. that post might be the only hit in its history and copying it means copying a coin flip. what you want is daily posting, consistent numbers spread across many posts, and ideally somebody doing it for fun with nothing to sell. an account pulling millions of views with no product behind it is a distribution channel sitting there unclaimed.
  4. take the format apart. hook on slide one, slide count, where the value lands, what makes someone save instead of scroll. that's the DNA. then rebuild it with your app inside it.
  5. run one format across many accounts, daily. if it works on one it works on the others. people get used to seeing it and the brand becomes recognisable off repetition alone.

the thing i'd tell my past self

do this before you build. i did it in the opposite order to everyone's advice and the format handed me my product decisions. it told me which single feature had to exist to make someone stop scrolling. no blank page after launch, no praying, no paying creators to find out what converts.

the research is the grind. finding formats that genuinely repeat took me entire days of scrolling and i fooled myself constantly. i built software for that half, scroll.show, mac only, mine. it finds the accounts, checks them against real filters and pulls apart why their top posts worked.

but steps 1 through 4 cost nothing and by hand they're just slow, not impossible. the ordering is the part that actually changed my numbers.

happy to answer anything about the slideshow side specifically.

u/Tight-Shop4342 — 2 months ago
▲ 1 r/mcp

built an mcp server for tiktok research. no api exists so it drives a local chrome.

sharing this partly as a tool, partly because the no-api problem might be relevant to people here.

what it does

finds tiktok accounts winning in a given niche, verifies them against real filters, downloads their best posts, and breaks down why those posts worked. you ask claude in plain english and it runs the whole thing.

tools it exposes

  • discover_accounts — search a niche with filters. follower count, average views per post, ratio of slideshows to video, posting cadence, consistency across the last 30 days.
  • get_account_metrics — views per follower, engagement, save rate, comment ratio, consistency score for one account.
  • download_posts — one specific post, or top N from an account sorted by views, likes or engagement. every slide plus its metadata, zipped locally.
  • query_library — everything you've already found, searchable. reads come back in milliseconds.

the no-api part

tiktok has nothing public. i tried three third party social apis and they were all stale, incomplete, or just wrong on numbers i could verify by hand. so the server spawns a dedicated chrome instance on the user's machine and searches the way a person does. slower per call, but the data is actually current and nothing leaves the machine.

two things i'd tell anyone building a similar server

the cache tool matters more than i expected. without query_library the model would rerun the same slow search two or three times in a session. once it exists claude reaches for it unprompted and the whole thing gets noticeably faster.

and the skill file did more work than my tool descriptions. i spent weeks tuning schemas while claude returned technically valid but useless results. an account with 800 followers and one viral post matches every filter and is worthless. nothing in a schema tells you that. i moved the pass/fail judgment into a SKILL.md and results got usable with the tools untouched.

practical stuff

mac only, one command to connect to claude code, claude desktop or codex. it's called scroll show, scroll.show, $99 one time. it's mine, flagging that in case paid tools need a disclosure here.

happy to go deeper on the chrome-as-backend setup if anyone's stuck on a similar no-api problem.

u/Tight-Shop4342 — 2 months ago
▲ 5 r/microsaas

I'm a developer who can't design, so I built a vibe-design tool that turns a prompt into a full set of mobile app screens

https://reddit.com/link/1uga44h/video/cu1mi20pan9h1/player

I'm a dev, not a designer. Every side project I started used to die at the design step. I'd open a blank Figma canvas, feel nothing, and quit.

So I built Daisy. You type one prompt, like "meditation app with breathing exercises and a calm green theme," and it generates a whole cohesive set of mobile app screens at once: onboarding, home, paywall, profile, settings, all sharing one design language. Then you export to Figma, to code, or hand it straight to an AI coding agent (Claude Code / Cursor).

The genuinely hard part wasn't generating one nice screen. It was keeping ~15 screens consistent so the result looks like a real app instead of a pile of unrelated Dribbble shots. That consistency problem is most of what I worked on.

Being honest about what it's not: it won't replace a designer for a deeply opinionated brand. It gets you ~80% there fast so you can validate and start building, and the last 20% (taste, polish) is still on you.

Would really value feedback from other builders here, especially what feels off or missing. If you tried it, what would make you actually keep using something like this?

reddit.com
u/Tight-Shop4342 — 4 months ago
▲ 3 r/Rwanda

Looking for a 3-bedroom furnished apartment in Kigali

Hey everyone,

I'm searching for a furnished 3-bedroom apartment in Kigali. Hoping to tap into local knowledge before going through agents.

A few details:

  • Bedrooms: 3, fully furnished
  • Location: Kigali
  • Move-in: Early August

If you know of any listings, or trusted agents, please drop a comment or DM me. Photos and contact info appreciated. Thanks in advance! 🙏

reddit.com
u/Tight-Shop4342 — 4 months ago
▲ 15 r/ironclawAI

My Ironclaw experience

I tried ironclaw and one thing I noticed about IronClaw is how simple it is to use. The platform is easy to navigate, and I didn't need much time to understand how things work.

IronClaw is beginner-friendly even if you're new to managing Ai agents, IronClaw makes it easy for you and operate seamlessly

I also like that participation feels straightforward. You can get involved, contribute, and explore different opportunities without feeling overwhelmed.

Also, Ironclaw makes daily activities much easier by setting up a routine and ironclaw keeps you updated.

And many more.

So far, the experience has been smooth, and I'm excited to see how IronClaw continues to grow.

reddit.com
u/Tight-Shop4342 — 4 months ago
▲ 2 r/microsaas

I quit paying $2k per design cycle and built the thing I wish existed

I want to share the actual reason I ended up building my own tool, because for a while I didn't plan to. I just wanted my app to look good and ship fast, and I kept hitting the same wall.

I've been building mobile apps for a bit now, and the part that always killed my momentum was design. I'm not a designer. I can tell when something looks off but I can't fix it, and that gap is expensive. Every time I had a new idea I'd go through the same loop. Find a designer, explain the whole vision over a few back and forth messages, wait a few days, get the first screens back, realize they understood maybe 70 percent of what I meant, send notes, wait again. And the bill for one decent design cycle kept landing somewhere around two thousand dollars. For one cycle. Not the final app, just one round of getting screens that looked real.

The money was one thing but the speed was what actually hurt. I'd have an idea on a Monday and feel completely cooled off on it by the time I could even see what it looked like. The whole point of building fast is that you stay excited and you ship before you talk yourself out of it. Waiting a week for screens does the opposite. By the time they showed up I'd already moved on in my head.

So I started trying the AI tools that existed. And some of them looked impressive for about five seconds in a demo. But the second you actually tried to use the screens, it fell apart. They just had no taste. Everything came out looking vibe coded, that specific kind of AI slop where it's technically a design but every choice is slightly wrong. Spacing all over the place, colors that don't go together, components dumped on the screen with no sense of hierarchy. The kind of thing where you look at it and immediately know a human didn't make decisions, a model just guessed. And the worst part is the screens weren't even usable. A real user would open that and have no idea what to tap. It looked like a design but it didn't work like one.

I kept thinking someone would fix it and I could just pay for it and move on. I really did not want to build a design tool. I wanted to build my apps. But after enough months of fighting the same problem I realized the thing I wanted didn't exist yet, at least not the way I needed it, and I had enough of an opinion about what was wrong that I figured I should just try.

The core thing I was obsessed with was making it actually look like iOS from the first screen, not after twenty rounds of fixing. You type what your app is, it gives you real screens that look native, and you can redo them one screen at a time until they're right instead of regenerating the whole thing and praying. From there you export to Figma if you want to keep editing, or straight into whatever AI coding agent you're using to build. That last part mattered to me a lot because the design was never the final goal, shipping was. A pretty screenshot that you can't build from is useless.

And that's the part that actually changed how I work now. Because the design step stopped being a bottleneck, my whole timeline collapsed. These days I can go from an idea to a live app on the App Store in under three days. I'm not exaggerating for the post, that's genuinely the loop now. Day one I prompt the screens and get the look right, export them, and start building with my coding agent off the real designs. Day two is wiring up the actual functionality. Day three is polish, screenshots, and submitting. The thing that used to eat a week by itself, just getting screens that looked real, now takes me an afternoon. When the design stops being the thing you wait on, everything downstream gets faster too, and you ship while you still care about the idea instead of after you've lost interest in it.

It's not perfect and I'm not going to pretend it is. It still has moments where I ask for something specific in a layout and it doesn't quite get there and I have to redo a screen. But the core thing, the part where it looks like a real app and not vibe coded slop, it gets that right, and that was the entire reason I built it.

I'll drop a few designs it made below so you can judge for yourself rather than taking my word for it. Duolingo for learning how to cook

Mostly I'm curious whether other people hit this same wall, and how you solved it. Did you just pay the two grand and accept it? Find a designer you trust and stick with them? Use a tool I never found? And if you're shipping fast too, I want to know what your idea to App Store timeline actually looks like, because for years mine was measured in weeks and I assumed that was just normal. Genuinely curious whether it was just me.

reddit.com
u/Tight-Shop4342 — 4 months ago
▲ 3 r/SaaS

I quit paying $2k per design cycle and built the thing I wish existed

I want to share the actual reason I ended up building my own tool, because for a while I didn't plan to. I just wanted my app to look good and ship fast, and I kept hitting the same wall.

I've been building mobile apps for a bit now, and the part that always killed my momentum was design. I'm not a designer. I can tell when something looks off but I can't fix it, and that gap is expensive. Every time I had a new idea I'd go through the same loop. Find a designer, explain the whole vision over a few back and forth messages, wait a few days, get the first screens back, realize they understood maybe 70 percent of what I meant, send notes, wait again. And the bill for one decent design cycle kept landing somewhere around two thousand dollars. For one cycle. Not the final app, just one round of getting screens that looked real.

The money was one thing but the speed was what actually hurt. I'd have an idea on a Monday and feel completely cooled off on it by the time I could even see what it looked like. The whole point of building fast is that you stay excited and you ship before you talk yourself out of it. Waiting a week for screens does the opposite. By the time they showed up I'd already moved on in my head.

So I started trying the AI tools that existed. And some of them looked impressive for about five seconds in a demo. But the second you actually tried to use the screens, it fell apart. They just had no taste. Everything came out looking vibe coded, that specific kind of AI slop where it's technically a design but every choice is slightly wrong. Spacing all over the place, colors that don't go together, components dumped on the screen with no sense of hierarchy. The kind of thing where you look at it and immediately know a human didn't make decisions, a model just guessed. And the worst part is the screens weren't even usable. A real user would open that and have no idea what to tap. It looked like a design but it didn't work like one.

I kept thinking someone would fix it and I could just pay for it and move on. I really did not want to build a design tool. I wanted to build my apps. But after enough months of fighting the same problem I realized the thing I wanted didn't exist yet, at least not the way I needed it, and I had enough of an opinion about what was wrong that I figured I should just try.

The core thing I was obsessed with was making it actually look like iOS from the first screen, not after twenty rounds of fixing. You type what your app is, it gives you real screens that look native, and you can redo them one screen at a time until they're right instead of regenerating the whole thing and praying. From there you export to Figma if you want to keep editing, or straight into whatever AI coding agent you're using to build. That last part mattered to me a lot because the design was never the final goal, shipping was. A pretty screenshot that you can't build from is useless.

And that's the part that actually changed how I work now. Because the design step stopped being a bottleneck, my whole timeline collapsed. These days I can go from an idea to a live app on the App Store in under three days. I'm not exaggerating for the post, that's genuinely the loop now. Day one I prompt the screens and get the look right, export them, and start building with my coding agent off the real designs. Day two is wiring up the actual functionality. Day three is polish, screenshots, and submitting. The thing that used to eat a week by itself, just getting screens that looked real, now takes me an afternoon. When the design stops being the thing you wait on, everything downstream gets faster too, and you ship while you still care about the idea instead of after you've lost interest in it.

It's not perfect and I'm not going to pretend it is. It still has moments where I ask for something specific in a layout and it doesn't quite get there and I have to redo a screen. But the core thing, the part where it looks like a real app and not vibe coded slop, it gets that right, and that was the entire reason I built it.

I'll drop a few designs it made below so you can judge for yourself rather than taking my word for it. Duolingo for learning to cook app

Mostly I'm curious whether other people hit this same wall, and how you solved it. Did you just pay the two grand and accept it? Find a designer you trust and stick with them? Use a tool I never found? And if you're shipping fast too, I want to know what your idea to App Store timeline actually looks like, because for years mine was measured in weeks and I assumed that was just normal. Genuinely curious whether it was just me.

reddit.com
u/Tight-Shop4342 — 4 months ago
▲ 2 r/SideProject

I'm a developer who can't design, so I built an AI that turns a prompt into a full set of mobile app screens

I'm a dev, not a designer. Every side project I started used to die at the design step. I'd open a blank Figma canvas, feel nothing, and quit.

So I built Daisy. You type one prompt, like "meditation app with breathing exercises and a calm green theme," and it generates a whole cohesive set of mobile app screens at once: onboarding, home, paywall, profile, settings, all sharing one design language. Then you export to Figma, to code, or hand it straight to an AI coding agent (Claude Code / Cursor).

The genuinely hard part wasn't generating one nice screen. It was keeping ~15 screens consistent so the result looks like a real app instead of a pile of unrelated Dribbble shots. That consistency problem is most of what I worked on.

It's live here if you want to poke at it: https://daisy.now

Being honest about what it's not: it won't replace a designer for a deeply opinionated brand. It gets you ~80% there fast so you can validate and start building, and the last 20% (taste, polish) is still on you.

Would really value feedback from other builders here, especially what feels off or missing. If you tried it, what would make you actually keep using something like this?

u/Tight-Shop4342 — 4 months ago
▲ 0 r/Rwanda

About to finish high school and want to live on my own. Where do I even start?

Hey everyone 👋

Random question that's been living in my head rent-free lately. How does someone actually start living on their own?

So I'm finishing high school this year, and ever since the idea of graduating became real, I keep wondering what life looks like once I step out of my parents' house. I'm still a teen, but I've been hustling and pulling in around $5k a month, which isn't huge but it's mine, and it's got me curious about whether independence is actually within reach.

The thing is, I've lived under my parents' roof my whole life, so the "outside world" feels like this giant mystery. I genuinely wanna know what it's like, cooking my own food, paying my own bills, figuring things out solo. But I'd rather learn from people who've done it than walk in blind and get humbled in week one 😅

So I'm curious:

  • How do people actually find rentals here? Brokers? Facebook groups? Just spotting "to let" signs around town?
  • I'd love something furnished, ideally around 3 bedrooms (thinking of splitting with roommates to make it work). Is that realistic on a smaller budget or am I dreaming?
  • Which neighborhoods are good for someone young just starting out?
  • What costs caught you off guard? Deposits, water, electricity, internet, the stuff nobody warns you about.
  • And honestly, what do you wish someone had told you before you moved out?

Not trying to rush anything, just genuinely curious and want to plan smart. Any stories or advice would mean a lot 🙏

Thank you!

reddit.com
u/Tight-Shop4342 — 4 months ago
▲ 31 r/vibedesigns+3 crossposts

built a thing that turns a prompt into mobile app screens

so i can code fine but every time i open figma to actually design the screens i kinda want to throw my laptop out the window. spent way too long just avoiding that part of building apps, so eventually i caved and built this instead of doing it the normal way.

how it works: you type what the app is. like "meditation app with breathing animations" or "recipe planner with grocery lists" and it generates the actual screens for you. onboarding, home screen, the whole flow. then you can export it to figma if you wanna keep tweaking, or straight to code/agents if you just wanna ship.

demo's attached. it's a real run, not really sped up or faked. took me a few months to get the output to a point where it didnt look super generic, that was honestly the hardest part. early versions looked like every other AI design thing and i hated it.

still figuring out what's actually missing though so feel free to roast it. what would make this something you'd actually reach for instead of just messing with once and forgetting about?

u/Tight-Shop4342 — 4 months ago
▲ 2 r/microsaas+1 crossposts

https://preview.redd.it/ogsjofkzqoyg1.png?width=814&format=png&auto=webp&s=96281a303ea558e54e09cc93ac769f9c7c1d4b18

i didn’t set out to build a startup.

i was just frustrated.

every time i shipped an app, the most annoying part wasn’t coding, it was making app store screenshots that actually look good and convert. it takes time, design skills, and a lot of trial and error.

so i built something for myself.

a simple tool called appshots that takes raw app screens and turns them into app store-style screenshots automatically. i used gpt-image-2 for the image generation and hacked together a basic version in about 3 days.

at first, i added a free trial because it felt like the “right” thing to do. but honestly, it didn’t convert well. people tried it, but didn’t commit.

so i removed the free trial.

that’s when the first payments came in.

i posted it on twitter with little audience. just a simple post showing what it does.

first few hours were quiet. then a few people started interacting. then someone paid. then a couple more.

in the first 48 hours, it made $171 in gross revenue.

no refunds so far. all payments were from strangers.

it’s not a lot of money, but it changed how i think about building products.

a few things i’m noticing:

  • people don’t really care about the tech (gpt-image-2, etc). they care about the outcome: “will this make my app look better and get more downloads?”
  • removing the free trial actually increased commitment. fewer users, but more serious ones
  • feedback is very specific. people are already asking for things like brand customization, better layouts, and exports for different app stores

what i think i did right:

  • built something i actually needed
  • shipped fast (3 days) instead of overthinking, leveraging claude code
  • showed the result clearly instead of explaining the system

what i did wrong:

  • onboarding is confusing
  • positioning isn’t clear yet
  • landing page is pretty rough

right now i’m just talking to every user and trying to understand what they actually want before doing anything else.

just trying to figure out if this is a real problem worth going deeper into.

reddit.com
u/Tight-Shop4342 — 6 months ago