Indie & Startups

Still a small number, but seeing 400+ people sign up for something I started building from scratch a couple of months ago feels pretty special.

I built a design tool, basically a visual playground for creating cool effects like ASCII, dither, halftone and a lot more, all in the browser.

I've mostly been building by listening to users, shipping quickly and sharing the journey online.

If you're curious, this is what I'm building: https://ditther.com

No big launch or paid ads so far. Just sharing content on X and improving the app every week.

On to the next milestone: 1,000 users.

I'm starting to focus more on marketing now. For other solo founders, what channels actually worked for you when going from a few hundred users to your first 1,000?

We all know Linus' biggest pet peeve is the lack of system wide middle click autoscrolling. I built a universal solution called midscroll that operates at the kernel input level, meaning it perfectly replicates the Windows autoscroll behavior across every single application on both Wayland and X11. It anchors your cursor, uses the exact same speed curve you are used to, and runs entirely in the background.
FOSS under the Unlicense.
You can check out how it works here: https://github.com/gnhen/midscroll

EDIT: Now with a Settings menu GUI. Supports Hold & Drag as well as Toggle mode. Native scrolling mode supported.

Over the past few months I built GeoSwipe, an iOS app for learning about countries in depth through a more interactive format.

The idea is simple: you discover countries one at a time, swipe left to see another, or swipe right to open a detailed guide when one catches your interest.

Each guide covers basic geography, landscapes, culture, history, language, cities, government, economy, everyday life, and common misconceptions. It also includes audio, flag explanations, regional maps, interactive statistics, and references to the original sources. The content is grounded in reputable sources such as Britannica, the World Bank, and National Geographic.

I also added country comparisons, quizzes, and short geography games, including ranking countries by population, locating countries on the map, and flag and capital quizzes.

I’ve just released it on iOS and included a very short demo here. I’d genuinely appreciate honest feedback from fellow geography nerds.

Back in June I got my first paying customer after months of $0 MRR.

$9.99. $10.49 with VAT.

I know that's not a lot, but that "Woohoo! You made a sale!" email after staring at $0 for months felt insane. Still one of the best feelings I've had building this.

I've been trying to make SaaS work for almost a year. Cloakly is a 1-click screen hider. You hit a hotkey and it hides your windows and desktop icons so you don't share something private on a Zoom call. Simple idea, but I overbuilt it for months.

Windows version, blur modes, selective hiding. I kept telling myself "one more feature then I'll market it" while analytics showed barely anyone visiting. Way too much time building, not enough talking to people.

At some point I realized I was hiding behind dev work, because coding is easier than asking people to use your stuff.

So I started posting on Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and TikTok about screen-share fails. No product pitch, just relatable pain. That's how people found it.

One person signed up for free, actually used it, and gave me feedback on what was broken for his setup. I fixed it. Then I asked him directly if he'd pay once I fixed it. He said yes.

June 12th: first payment - Lemon Squeezy "wooooooo! You been paid!"
Today, Aug 19th: $420.58 total from June 1 to Aug 19

No huge launch. No viral tweet. Just one person with a real problem, talking to him, fixing what he needed.

Biggest lesson: I spent months worrying about SEO, landing pages, pricing. Getting one person to care taught me more than all of that.

Still very early. $420 doesn't mean I figured out SaaS. But it's a start after $0. Now I just need to do it again. And again.

If you're stuck at signups but no pays, talk to those people before building another feature. I wish I did earlier.

How did the rest of you get your first paying users? Was it one conversation like this or something completely different?

Proof: Theres a website where you can upload a read only stripe key, heres mine

The build for this was actually a ton of fun - its an all in one cold email outreach tool. You use AI to filter my hundreds of thousands of leads and then AI generates and starts sending a cold email sequence.

For the lead gen im basically basically mapping LLC filings to contact information I find on the internet, trying to find websites, getting domain registration information etc. At the end the leads are pretty solid and so mapping someones ICP to a few thousand leads becomes pretty easy. It's not cheap to run at this scale but i'm fortunate to have a pretty high paying tech job to fund it for a while.

Im building this solo so it gets lonely sometimes. Basically building and talking to customers every waking hour I have of free time but the $1000 threshold is a little more fuel on the fire.

I love building but dont have a ton of people to share my wins with so posting here to share instead :)

Let me know if any builders out there want to connect I love chatting about SaaS startups and respect the hell out of people seriously trying to create and build.

I got tired of choosing what to listen to, so I built a radio that chooses for me. 🌍📻

At some point I realized I was getting bored with YouTube Music.

Every time I wanted music, it was the same routine:

Find a song → add it to a playlist → choose another song → skip something → search for something else → repeat.

The feeling of just turning on the radio and letting it play.

You don't know what's coming next.

You don't have to build a playlist.

You don't have to pick the perfect song.

You just let it play.

There's something about that random, slightly unpredictable 90s or 20s radio feeling that feels completely different from listening to an algorithmically perfect playlist.

I wanted something you could leave open while you're:

💻 vibecoding
🧑‍💻 working from home
🎮 gaming
🚗 driving
📚 studying
🎙️ streaming

So I built Audioo.

It's a free internet radio player where the main interface is a globe.

Pick a country and a radio station starts playing.

You can jump from USA to France to Brazil to UK and discover hundreds of stations around the world.

And the globe keeps slowly rotating while you're listening. There is a toggle for band where you can drag the band and change the station for that particular country.

It's completely free. I just wanted to build the kind of radio experience I wanted to use myself.

Spin the globe.

Pick a random country.

Don't choose the song.

Just let the radio decide what's next. 🌍📻

And tell me: what country did you land on?

http://zorpads.com

Looking to refresh my website and looking for feedback! Most orders come from Amazon but the margins are a lot better if I drive more sales to my Shopify store. I try promoting ads on Meta but the conversion rate is very low. Looking to reduce friction at checkout and any tips or suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!!

Pitch your product in 1-2 lines - and drop a link here.

I'm building a community where makers can share what they’re building and get fair visibility. Here's the link: https://vibecodedit.com/

Classic tech founder mistake 101.

We spent a lot of time building. The product kept getting better, but traffic stayed more or less where it had always been.

"If the product was genuinely useful, people would eventually find it", we kept telling ourselves. In the process of building, we were also obsessed with perfection. Till few months before, we had a decent product, occasional organic purchases, use/purchases from people whom we initially interviewed before building, manual reach-outs (non-scalable) to new potential customers, lot of free/discounted offers to make people use. We clearly had signs of people wanting it, willing to pay for it but nobody knew us and there was no trust.

At some point I had to accept something I had been conveniently avoiding, distribution. Something that didn't come naturally to me.

So I started doing work I never imagined myself becoming obsessed with. SEO. Search Console. Keywords. Blog topics. Search intent. Landing pages. Internal linking. Content structure. Competitor pages. What questions potential customers are actually typing into Google. Why one article gets impressions and another disappears into nothing.

Approaching marketing like how I approach coding was a huge blunder on my part. Thankfully, realisation came just in time. Built an internal CMS on our admin panel and started writing & publishing blogs consistently along with clear topic pillars, manual value driven write ups, AI for structural improvements. No AI automation in article creation and posting. The GSC ticker slightly started moving after 1 month of consistent efforts (which I will be continuing).

Not yet cracked SEO. Not even close but favourable results motivates. Content is actually teaching us things about the product too.

Zero ad spends so far though we intend to take that route. But before, next thing to get obsessed about will be Instagram content creation and building product trust. (where bulk of our customers hang-out)

Looking to read experiences from founders/marketing teams on how you approach (read as 'get started with') Instagram content creation and distribution for a SaaS tool. Lot of our competitors have taken a traditional route of professionally crafted premium informational content, something I'm not fully aligned with.

What sort of content do you plan and execute for your SaaS tool on Instagram and what is working?

No Promoting here. Not a AI slop :)

6 months ago I left a decade of fintech engineering in London to build Lyra solo ,a Mac writing assistant that fixes your writing as you type, in every app.

The problem I built it for: everyone I worked with had the same ritual. Type a message, re-read it four times, paste it into some tool, fix it, paste it back, tweak the tone, send. Multiply by 50 messages a day. And the tools that "help" all have the same flaws — they live in a separate window, they interrupt you with underlines while you're mid-thought, and they sand everyone down to the same polished-robot voice, whether you're messaging your boss or your best mate.

So Lyra works differently: you just type. Pause, and a small pill shows a better version — press Tab, done. No panel, no copy-paste, no clicks. It works in Gmail, Outlook, Slack, WhatsApp, your browser, wherever you write. And it learns how you write to each specific person, so your message to a client and your message to a friend don't come out sounding like the same press release.

Launched quietly in July. Show HN flagged my post. Reddit: silence. X: silence. Then one person paid ,a guy in France. I was thrilled for about an hour, which is how long it took him to uninstall: Lyra was freezing his Mac every minute.

Here's what that month taught me. I assumed the worst (memory leak), built instrumentation, ran controlled tests on identical hardware and my confident assumption was wrong. The real cause was a design decision I'd shipped without questioning. Fixed it, the freezing died, and he told me he'd reinstall ,he'd called Lyra "a really great product" while uninstalling it, which is the strangest compliment I've ever received.

Since then: fixed the biggest issues my ~30 early users hit, rebuilt the rough edges, made a proper demo. Relaunching today.

Mac only. 14-day full trial, free tier after, $9.99/mo for Pro.

Happy to answer anything , the debugging saga, why the first launch flopped, what one uninstall taught me that 30 signups didn't, or the unglamorous reality of marketing as a solo dev.

Try Lyra here Get Lyra

Hi r/iosapps!

About four months ago, I shared the first version of Hibi here. Many of you liked the app for its design and gave me great feedback, which I already implemented. I kept building, and version 3 now feels like a completely new app since you can now customize your calendar!

What it does (Answer): Hibi turns your existing Apple calendars and reminders into paper-like daily pages you can customize.

Why it’s different (Better): You can draw and write, customize the paper, arrange each page, create stickers and washi tape from your photos, and use Apple Pencil on iPad - so you remember your days.

Cost: The app is free to download, with no subscription. There’s an optional $6.99 lifetime in app purchase to unlock premium app icons and home screen widgets.

I’m the developer, and I’d love to hear what you think of how far it has come!

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hibi-calendar/id6762520622