Indie & Startups

Entrepreneuriat, création de produits et stratégies pour les Indie Hackers.

Promoting is harder than developing an app
▲ 4 r/growmybusiness+1 crossposts

Promoting is harder than developing an app

​

Developing an app is hard. But there is something harder: Promotion. There are ways to promote. But it takes time to learn. It will take time to learn... 

Here is my app:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mindjournal.app

This is our first app.

It took two months for us to develop.

We used Cursor AI.

It's a journaling app with AI support.

We had to buy MacBook Air and iPhone 16e for developing the app for App Store side. It was the biggest expense. 

Hope it turns out well. Thank you. 

u/MyNameCimbom — 3 hours ago

Considering quitting my dev job to go full time on my side project, no revenue yet. How did you know it was the right time?(i will not promote)

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.

reddit.com
u/Aydevils — 3 hours ago

What are you building and how did you validate market fit?

I'm curious how did you validate your last idea before building. I mean maybe you jumped right into building if so how did that workout?

what did you actually do, not what you'd recommend? Curious to see what worked didn't work.

reddit.com
u/xtarsy — 2 hours ago
▲ 12 r/iOSDevelopment+8 crossposts

App was available on the App Store for a few hours, then suddenly became unavailable in all regions

Edit: After several tests, it has become clear that the app is available in the USA and the page does not open in the EU. However, you can search for and download the app from the list in the EU, but you cannot click on it. Thanks to everyone.

Hi everyone,

I’m hoping someone here has experienced this before.

I recently launched my very first iOS app. The app was approved by Apple and the status in App Store Connect is currently “Ready for Distribution”.
For the first few hours after release, everything worked perfectly:
The App Store page loaded normally.
Users could open the product page.
The app could be downloaded.
However, a few hours later, the App Store page suddenly stopped working on all iPhones.
When users tap the app in the App Store, they either get:

“This app is currently not available in your country or region”

or

“The page could not be loaded. Please try again.”

Things I’ve already verified:
App status is “Ready for Distribution”.
Distribution method is Public.
The app is available in 175 countries, including Belgium.
No pre-order is enabled.
No changes were made after release.
The App Store URL exists.
“View on App Store” from App Store Connect opens correctly.

Example App Store link:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/elsy-shared-collections/id6773616091

I’ve already contacted Apple Developer Support, but haven’t received a response yet.
Has anyone experienced something similar? Could this be an App Store propagation issue or some hidden regional/storefront problem?

Thanks a lot!

u/EggplantSalty2486 — 3 hours ago
▲ 34 r/Names+5 crossposts

got roasted, shipped every complaint in a week. three things it taught me

Been building namestrace.com, a baby names site where every fact is cited to official

records. Posted v1 for feedback recently and it went badly in the most useful way

possible.

Three things I took away:

  1. Domain experts find in 30 seconds what you miss for a month. My "origin" data was

plain wrong (I was showing the languages a name is USED in and calling it the origin).

Weeks live, nobody noticed. One redditor who knows Hebrew names checked 4 pages and

caught it instantly.

  1. Ship the complaint, not your roadmap. Everything I built this week came straight

from that thread. My own todo list turned out to be wrong about what mattered.

  1. Mobile is a different product. I built everything on a desktop screen. Every

confusion complaint came with a phone screenshot attached. Spent as much time on

mobile layout this week as on the new data.

Basically zero traffic so far, just got indexed. Long road.

namestrace.com
u/chadbigd — 3 hours ago
▲ 16 r/Appstore+3 crossposts

Made a no-nonsense Sudoku app because every other one annoyed me

Every Sudoku app I tried had ads, popups, or some streak thing nagging me to come back. So I made my own.

It's called Calm Sudoku. Free daily puzzle plus 30 to start, and if you like it there's a one-time unlock for the full set (300 puzzles, three difficulties). No subscription, no ads, no accounts, works offline.

All the normal stuff (notes, undo, check, reveal, history) is free. I'm not paywalling how you play, just how many puzzles you get.

Made it mostly for myself, but figured some of you might want the same thing. Would love to hear what you think! 🙂

Calm Sudoku on the iOS App Store

u/nscons — 2 hours ago
▲ 69 r/japaneseresources+1 crossposts

I wasn't learning from Duolingo so I built my own Japanese learning app

I've been trying to learn Japanese for ~2 years or so, primarily on Duolingo (streak of 500+ days!). I realized that I honestly wasn't learning anything. Every time I tried to write something from scratch instead of just tapping tiles, I couldn't.

So I built Shinme! It's a from-zero course which focuses on developing actual Japanese writing skills. Each lesson comes with its own vocab and grammar content. In order to completing each lesson, users need to complete a set number of translation exercises which are graded.

Shinme fully supports custom deck/card management too, so learners can import what they already know. Exercises are generated dynamically, so that exercises are tailored to what the user already knows.

The first six lessons are out right now!

It's in beta right now and the costs are on me, so there are some usage limits while I keep the AI costs sane. I would love feedback: what is confusing, what broke.

https://shinme.app/

u/taisukete — 5 hours ago
▲ 603 r/SoftwareandApps+27 crossposts

I built FaceGate — World's first macOS app locker with on-device Face Unlock (Open Source)

If you hand your laptop to someone for a few minutes, they can still open Messages, Photos, Notes, Mail, WhatsApp, browsers, password managers, and other personal apps. I wanted a way to protect specific applications without constantly locking my entire Mac.

I looked around for solutions, but most were outdated, paid, abandoned, or didn't feel native to macOS.

So I built FaceGate.

FaceGate is a native macOS app that lets you lock individual applications and unlock them using Face Unlock, Touch ID, or a password.

A few things I focused on from day one:

  • Everything runs locally on your Mac
  • No cloud processing
  • No accounts
  • No telemetry
  • No subscriptions
  • Fully open source

Features:

• Face Unlock powered entirely on-device using Apple's Neural Engine - little impact on cpu and gpu resources.
• Fast authentication with very low memory and CPU usage
• Liveness detection to prevent photo and video spoofing attacks
• Touch ID and password fallback
• Per-app unlock timers
• Automatic re-lock on sleep, wake, or screen lock
• Custom schedules for automatic lock/unlock periods
• Tamper protection that prevents FaceGate from being quit, disabled, or uninstalled without authentication
• Runs quietly from the menu bar with minimal system impact.

The entire project is written in Swift and designed specifically for macOS.

This is still actively being developed, and I'd genuinely love feedback from Mac users.

Some questions:

  • Is app-level locking something you've wanted on macOS?
  • Which apps would you personally lock?
  • What security or privacy features would you like to see added?

Website: https://facegate-applocker.vercel.app/

GitHub: https://github.com/dweep-desai/FaceGate-Mac

If you think I did a good job, please feel free to leave a star on my github repo - means a lot to me.

Feedback, feature requests, bug reports, and contributions are all welcome. I'd love to hear what you think.

u/AceReviewer — 9 hours ago
▲ 17 r/webdev+1 crossposts

[Showoff Saturday]I rebuilt AOL Instant Messenger in the browser with real-time messaging

I built WebAIM — a fully browser-based recreation of AOL Instant Messenger, the chat app that defined the internet for a whole generation.

Sign in with a screen name, build your buddy list, blast someone with a "lol brb," set a cryptic away message quoting your favorite band, pick a buddy icon, join a chat room, and actually talk to real people in real time — all with the authentic Windows 98 look, classic door-knock sounds, and every bit of the nostalgia.

What's under the hood:
- Real-time messaging powered by Firebase
- Buddy lists, groups & online presence
- Away messages with auto-reply (and the classic %n, %d, %t variables)
- Buddy icons & editable profiles
- Group chat rooms
- The actual AIM sounds
- Full Windows 98 desktop UI — taskbar, desktop icons, start menu, the works

webaim.xyz
u/RancidMilkMan — 2 hours ago

Drop your product! Let’s get you next 100 users

Hey friends… I’m building mangos.ai - a desktop app that helps you distribute your product across social channels. It finds relevant conversations online and joins them. It knows your git commit history so it knows all your features. Hyper personalized to target the best persona out there, every day or every hour, whatever you set it to.

The thing I just shipped is the one I’m most proud of: a Reddit Prospecting & DM draft agent.

Everyone says Reddit is where your customers actually are. They’re right. The problem is what it takes to use it. Read the thread, click into a profile, scroll someone’s whole history to work out if they fit, then write a DM that doesn’t sound like copy paste spam. Do that for twenty people and your afternoon is gone.

So Mangos does the boring part. Point it at a thread, or let it watch your subreddits, and it finds the people worth messaging, digs through their history to check they fit, and drafts a personal DM in their context. Then it hands you a queue. You read it, tweak it, hit send. It never sends on its own, and it won’t touch accounts that are too new, too low on karma, or have DMs closed. Reddit converts harder than anywhere else for me. Serious buyers, not scrollers.

I shipped the same thing for X a few weeks back, scoring people across 20+ signals before drafting. Same rule everywhere: it only does the research and prioritization. Every message lands in your queue for you to approve, one by one. You stay in control of what gets sent.

I’ve been running it on my own product and it’s been incredible. Website visits while you sleep, and you’ll know it’s not a spam bot the second you use it yourself.

This is my weekly routine here in this sub. And I love it. My expertise is in product, go to market, and agents. And I want to help you!

If you are building something, reply your product here and tell me what you are struggling with. I reply to every single comment on these threads.

If you are interested in Mangos’s extended trial that I give away every week,

**1.**	Download Mangos and register. It’s free for 7 days, no CC required.   
**2.**	DM me the email you signed up with and I’ll unlock a 30 day extension. If you are interested. 

Yes, I’ll lose a bit of money on it. The bet is simple: Mangos gets you your first 100 users before you ever pay me. If your product is good, that won’t take long.

reddit.com
u/rakeshkanna91 — 3 hours ago
▲ 25 r/ProductivityGuide+2 crossposts

A launch video gets your product way more attention than screenshots. So I built a tool to easily make them yourself.

Static screenshots get scrolled past. A few seconds of motion makes people actually stop and look at your launch, your landing page, your ads.

Problem is that usually means hiring an agency for 10k or learning After Effects. Built Raylight so you can just do it yourself. Browser based, drop your product shots on a timeline, add cinematic effects, and export. The film above was made 100% in Raylight just animating shapes and images.

u/Horror_Turnover_7859 — 6 hours ago
▲ 53 r/speechtech+21 crossposts

I’ve been working on Murmur, a local text-to-speech app for Apple Silicon Macs.

The new feature I’m building is called Projects / Story Studio, and it solves a problem I kept running into:

TTS tools are fine for one-off clips, but messy for actual audio projects.

If you’re making a podcast segment, audiobook chapter, course lesson, ad, or game dialogue, you usually need multiple speakers, multiple takes, pauses, reactions, music, edits, exports, and a way to come back to the project later.

So I built a project-based workflow:

Write a script → assign voices → generate dialogue → edit clips on a timeline → add music/SFX → export final audio.

It supports things like:

  • multiple scripts inside one project
  • Host / Guest / Narrator / Character speakers
  • inline tags like [pause], [laugh], [chuckle]
  • per-block regeneration
  • timeline editing with waveforms
  • media lane for music and SFX
  • ripple editing and gap tools
  • WAV/M4A export
  • transcript and stem export

Everything runs locally on Mac, so long scripts and voice samples do not need to be uploaded to a cloud service.

I’m still polishing the workflow and would love feedback from Mac users, especially people who make podcasts, audiobooks, courses, YouTube narration, or game dialogue.

u/tarunyadav9761 — 8 hours ago
▲ 3 r/SaaS

I think my AI startup is ready for its next chapter.

A few months ago I started building an AI startup because I believed there was room to make AI feel more useful and enjoyable.

I spent countless late nights building, fixing bugs, redesigning the product, and wondering if anyone would actually use it.

Then something unexpected happened. People started finding it, sharing it, and using it every day. In less than three weeks after launch, it grew to over 1,200+ users, which honestly exceeded my expectations.

Now I'm thinking a lot about what comes next. There are so many directions I could take it keep bootstrapping, grow a team, pursue partnerships, or something else entirely.

I'd love to hear from founders who've reached this stage. What was your next move, and what would you do differently?

reddit.com
u/Careful_Jackfruit_25 — 4 hours ago
▲ 209 r/VibeCodeDevs+5 crossposts

After 3 Months of GRINDING... I hit 7k in revenue!

Still a bit stunned typing this. Three months ago I was refreshing Stripe hoping for one sale. Now there's a small but growing group of people paying every month to keep their apps from leaking.

CheckVibe is a security scanner for vibecoded apps shipped fast with AI tools. You paste a URL or hook up a GitHub repo and it surfaces what's leaking: secrets in the frontend, open database rules, missing headers. Two of us, fully bootstrapped, no funding. Three months in and we've done about $7k in gross volume, 200+ all time paying customers, 5k signups. Public Stripe link in case anyone's seen too many fake numbers: https://profile.stripe.com/checkvibedev/ZumatA0Y

A few things that actually worked:

TikTok slideshows have carried us. Aesthetic Pinterest-style backgrounds with tool names overlaid, five slides, no branding on the account. One hit a million views and is still quietly sending signups weeks later. 15 minutes to make. As a 2-person team that can't afford to spend hours on content every day, this format is unreasonably good.

Cold outreach worked, but only the version where I scanned the prospect's app first and DMed them what I found. Generic pitches got ignored. Useful findings got replies almost every time.

Paywall design was a 3x lever. The first version blurred all results, which felt clever and barely converted. Switched to one that just shows the count of critical issues with the actual findings locked. Conversion tripled. Curiosity beats obfuscation.

What nearly killed me was mobile activation tanking compared to desktop and not catching it for weeks. Onboarding had too many steps on small screens. Cut two and the gap basically closed overnight.

If you've shipped something with AI tools and haven't really checked what's exposed, checkvibe.dev runs in 30 seconds. Scan for free, only pay if you have issues. Almost every app I've scanned came back with something.

u/funfunfunzig — 9 hours ago
▲ 9 r/SaaS

Launching my first SaaS in 2 days. Any advice?

I’m launching my first SaaS in 2 days, and I’m both excited and nervous.
For those who’ve launched before, what’s the one thing I should definitely do and one mistake I should avoid?
Any tips or lessons learned would be greatly appreciated.

reddit.com
u/codewithashfaque — 7 hours ago

How do decide what's next?

So, first a bit of context. I have a website and some organic users, some new and some returning. But what to do next? I am not earning anything currently. My website isn't holding a very valuable feature yet. So, I want to make some new features, some new tools. I have time currently too. But every keyword I search is already filled with competitors who are there before me. I don't have enough backlinks to rank among them organically. Neither is there much demand. I can't decide what to build next. I tried getting feedback from my current users but they ain't having enough free time to even press a yes or no on "was it helpful" popup.

I tried reading some blogs. But most of them are just marketing focused, or questionable, like some random generated AI blog who have no idea what it's talking about.

So, reddit users, my fellow redditors, how do you decide what to do next? what to build next?

reddit.com
u/Neat_Conclusion_1548 — 8 hours ago

As a non-native English writer, I got tired of AI making my work sound like everyone else's, so I built my own

I'm not a native English speaker. Everything I wrote for work, proposals, one-pagers, LinkedIn posts, used to go through ChatGPT or Claude first. It came back polished and obviously AI. The kind colleagues can spot in about 3 seconds.

So I spent a weekend (plus a few nights) building my own instead of complaining about it. Not a wrapper. I actually wanted to understand how the pieces work.

What I built:

- memory system: Titan v2 embeddings, per-project scope, importance × cosine × recency ranker, top-K cap so context doesn't flood with stale facts

- context assembly with real precedence rules: project instructions beat distilled facts beat uploaded files beat chat history. no guessing which wins

- eval pipeline: 141 real production prompts × 6 frontier models, cross-family GPT-5.5 judge, 8-axis rubric. public dashboard at rawreply.com/observatory/audience

- parallel candidate generation + synchronous judge before it returns anything, best-of-N not first-of-N

the part I actually care about: my proposals feel like me now. my one-pagers read like the version i'd write if i had 3 hours instead of 30 minutes. brainstorming feels like actually thinking with someone.

I don't call it a reply generator or a growth-hack tool. it's a writing tool that keeps your voice, which matters more if english isn't your first language and you're tired of everything coming back sounding like a press release you didn't write.

next thing i'm building is parental controls. my kid brainstorms stories and ideas and I want a version I can hand her where I know she's getting a real thinking partner.

happy to answer anything on the memory or eval architecture, that was the fun part to figure out.

reddit.com
u/Common_Dream9420 — 5 hours ago
▲ 14 r/SaaS

One Reddit thread brought me 13 paying customers in a week

One thread I posted here last week got me 13 paying customers in about 5 days.

But this thread only got 3 upvotes. Top comments called me a snakeoil seller and said I made up my customers. 39k views, mostly "nice try buddy".

I just kept replying. Stayed calm, answered everyone, even asked the ones roasting me what they'd actually want to see.

And the whole time it was quietly outselling everything else I'd posted.

My guess is the people buying were the quiet ones watching how I dealt with the ones going at me.

One spike though, mostly dead after 48h.

Anyone else pulling real customers out of Reddit, or did I just get lucky once?

u/hlpb — 5 hours ago