u/chairchiman

Hi guys I'm passionate about rocketry. After failing 2 attempts on attending a rocket competition, I want to try building a water rocket.

I know the principle, although I don't actually know practically. How I will keep everything together with all the pressure. How to pump air with a bicycle pump how to release it after pumping and how to make a nozzle for it I just don't want to use the mouth of the bottle directly... And so on

Any help will be appreciated :)

If your website only offers email signups or magic links, nobody is going to use it. Period.

I learned this the hard way with Lervos. I had 2,000 visits in the first week, yet the only person in the database was me. It felt like a ghost town. I started doubting my own code! Added PostHog and it clicked. Magic links sound cool in theory, but in reality, people just want to click one button and get in.

I spent a little time adding Google OAuth, and within 48 hours, I finally started seeing real signups.

The rate at which people care about your product especially if it is new drops to zero the second they see a "Check your inbox" screen.

If you're building for general users, go with Google.

If you're building for developers, add GitHub.

If it's for gamers, use Discord.

Just don't make them type a password or wait for an email that's probably sitting in their spam folder.

Friction kills conversion. Fix your auth.

Disclaimer: I am the founder of lervos and this is not intended as an ad but respecting the rules here.

"I am an adult.I am supposed to take my own decisions not rely on my mom decision." these exact words came out of my birth women sons mouth. So here I am documenting what happens when I try to take my own decisions. Suppose Me take A decision then I tell my decision to my parents and they listen and doesn't give a solid ans immediately. Then the birth women comes and criticizes my A decision. and suggest multiple decision s and gets angry why I didn't listen to her other decision earlier. Then I say ok let's move on I made my decision it's the final. Birth women acts being convinced of my decision for the remaining day.Then comes the next day from breakfast to meal times to bed she starts her repeated speech telling me my decision isn't right I should have taken her decision that was much better. just because i didn't listen to her my life became like this . From then on she tries so hard to find some fault in my A decision. this goes on for months and so many time years . (point to noted she stays in my room for all day even if i tell her to go )so i am constantly facing her criticism and she's suggesting new ideas and comparing me to others people where they took the same decision my mom suggested me and there life is much better etc. So then I eventually get fed up and I say that ok let's do this then " let's do it how you wanted it to be" .Then again she becomes even more agitated and suggest me to take other decision she suggested before . Then I again agree " ok mom let's do it how you want it to be" . Then the cycle begins again. Telling me to change my decision," no, that's not right one ,take these, no don't take that , you are so going to regret it," She goes on tell other about me that I am not listening and I am making my life worse. When I try to tell those other people why I had to listen to my mom they tell me that " I am a spineless adult that doesn't know how to take a decision and waits for my mother decision." like my brother said ."

If you’re building a dev tool, your best early users are already telling you who they are. They’ve starred a repo adjacent to yours. They care about the problem. They’re not a cold list, they’re a warm one , you just have to do a tiny bit of work to reach them.

The catch is that GitHub hides emails on profiles. But most developers leak theirs anyway, through commits in their own public repos. The author.email field is right there in every commit. That's the seam.

The idea is dumb-simple. Pick a repo whose stargazers are your target audience, pull the stargazer list from the GitHub API, walk each person’s recent repos, read the commit metadata, grab author.email, filter out the noreply@github.com ones, dedupe. No scraping, no sketchy tooling, just the public API and public commit data.

I wrote a bash script that does the whole thing. You need gh (authenticated via gh auth login) and jq. That's it. You run it, paste a repo, set a cap, and a few minutes later you've got a CSV with names, emails, logins, and which repo of theirs you got it from.

./scrape_stargazer_emails.sh

GitHub repo URL or owner/repo: vercel/next.js

Max stargazers to scan [200]: 100

Five minutes later there’s a CSV waiting for you with a hundred real emails of real developers who star projects in your space. The script and the walkthrough are here: https://npad.run/p/how-to-find-emails-of-github-repo-stargazers-hytfnmtgph.

Now the part that actually matters.

This works way better than a Show HN. A launch post gets you two hours of attention from people scrolling past fifty other launches that day. Half of them never even click. But a personal email, written like a human, that mentions something specific from their GitHub, that gets read. Sometimes it gets a reply. Occasionally it gets a user who sticks around and tells their friends.

A few things I’ve learned the slightly harder way. Don’t go wider than 200 stargazers, the returns get noisy fast, more bots, more dead accounts, more noreply emails that slipped through. Don't bulk-send the same template to everyone, because the moment you do that you've turned a warm list into spam, and the recipients can tell. Spend twenty seconds looking at each person's profile and mention their actual repo in the first line. It quadruples replies. Send from a real address with your real name on it, not hello@yourstartup.com. And space the sends out, four or five seconds between each, because Gmail flags bursts and you do not want to land in spam jail on day one.

If you’re shipping a dev tool, this is probably the highest-ROI hour you’ll spend on go-to-market this week. The script is free, the API is free, and the audience is pre-filtered for you. The only hard part is writing the actual email, and you should be writing those one at a time anyway.

Easy way: https://npad.run/p/how-to-find-emails-of-github-repo-stargazers-hytfnmtgph (put this to your claude code, u will get the full working script in one shot, thank me later)

Yeah yeah the same post title you've seen a 100 times before. But I wish someone said all these to me first day I started

I hear you, you've probably decided to build a tool and couldn't find an idea. This approach -as you've seen- doesn't work, no one replies and you don't actually find a good pain point.

But there are some good ways, you can use sites like G2 to find popular software tools with bad ratings, bad reviews..

Go to app store/play store and try to do the same, popular app with bad ratings, even try chrome extensions marketplace.

What to look for is that a niche tool that has a market fit and a customer base so you exactly know people need that thing and are also willing to pay for that. And then you will try to build a cheaper version or sometimes even a simpler version because some of the software are just to "bloated" some guys just need the one core feature, don't care about the rest but has to pay for all because of the bad pricing system not giving they what they exactly wanted. People sometimes just want less instead of more.

And never forget to build in public, use this sub other channels.. just building while promoting, don't promote after building. You can also start with a waitlist which I highly recommend.

Ik you are far more used to just writing code and building things but you also got to put some work, time and energy to this side.

19 year old dev here, trying to build something people actually want instead of guessing in the dark

I'm not pitching anything. I genuinely just want to know what part of running your business makes u go "why is this still so manual in 2026"

could be something small and tedious, could be something that takes hours every week, could be something u've tried 5 tools for and none of them actually solved it

drop it in the comments. the more specific the better. like not just "invoicing" but "i have to manually copy line items from my email into my invoicing tool every single time and it takes 30 mins per client"

that kind of thing

I'll read every single reply and if enough people share the same pain I'm gonna build something for it and give early access to everyone who commented

what's the thing that's quietly killing ur time every week?