Entrepreneuriat, création de produits et stratégies pour les Indie Hackers.
I haven't seen any new app store analytics data since May 1. I updated screenshots and added new features. However, the data hasn't been updated for 3/4 days now.
Is anyone else facing similar issues?
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dictawiz-voice-to-text/id6759256382
Sorry for my english, it's not my first language. For context, i'm now spending a lot of money in order to understand if i should provide or not a free trial to a user, because of abuses i had last few days.
Ok so just a little bit of context, I have a good traction on all my 4 applications (more than correct MRR regarding the current state of SaaS, and many users that connects everyday), but honestly i am at lost regarding free trial.
I am conviced that my product would be interesting for many users that would need it (like schools for example, we're currently in negociation with 6 on one of our product), so i guess many people would just like to be able to test my product as intented by free trial.
For context, on 3 of our other applications, we completely restricted our free trial to users that will put their credit card. At a certain point, we had so many users that tried to exploit our free trial from Asia that we had to just shut it down.
That being said, we are clearly on another level of investment on our last project, giving 5$ usage to new users (we have approx 100-150 new users per day) is harsh but it's part of our investment.
That being said, as i said before, we have real users that want to use our product in order to reduce globally their spend in SaaS, that's it.
I'll not play the card like i'm here to help everyone and i'm a good samaritan, but i'd rather have 100% of my users that find my product useful instead of having people that creates 10 differents accounts from 10 differents ips and mail in order to claim their 5$ free credit that i'll not be able to sustain until the end of time.
How do you manage free trials other than asking for credit cards (and honestly, even with credit cards, some scammers succeed to use one of my product for at least 3 hours before being rejected, and made me spend some money for him).
I really don't want to stop free trial, i really think every user should be able to see what he will get before having to 100% suscribe to a product, but honestly i'm not sleeping anymore because i'm watching everytime "why are 6 users creating their account in less than 20 seconds" etc..
What's your solution ? I'm currently using Google Analytics, LLM, my db and Discord (to have a trace in real time) in order to accept or not a free trial
EDIT : as some people asked, the project i'm currently speaking about is Agentik. It's one of my project, the issue i have currently is that it's a pay per use project and i'm using third providers API (so i'm paying for it). That means i can't do the same as my other projects, where i'd just put a "free tour" like a full demo of my product, without worrying about free trials that would spend money.
Here i have to provide results related to the user context, so i can't just do a free tour
Disclaimer: When I say India's largest Civic Network this is what I mean: The App currently has all MPs, Cabinet Ministers, MLAs, State Ministers, IAS, IPS, Police Stations, food safety officers and many more authorities all of them mapped according to their jurisdiction boundaries no other app in India has that today hence the claim "Largest".
https://www.accountable.social/download
I'm Tarun, a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft. Like every Indian, I've lived with broken roads, overflowing drains and public services that answer to no one.
At 20, I voted for the first time, in a municipal election, and noticed something unsettling: almost no one around me knew who they were voting for. They voted for a PM's face, a CM candidate, a party symbol. Few could name their corporator. Many didn't even know their ward. Politics is central, but governance is local, and the people who shape our streets are the ones we can't name.
So I started with one simple idea: open an app and see who your leaders are, based only on where you're standing. Today, Accountable maps 15,000+ authority profiles to their jurisdictions, from ward corporators and MLAs to MPs, Union ministers, and IAS and IPS officers.
Then I hit the next wall. Social media gave us a voice, but nobody gave it an address. Civic issues drown under cricket, movies and manufactured outrage. So I built a social network just for public life, where civic posts come first. You post with evidence, tag the authority or company responsible, and credit the officials who get it right. It isn't a grievance portal, and it isn't partisan: every party gets questioned, including yours.
The last wall was isolation. People facing the same problem were fighting it alone, with no leverage against powerful leaders. When your MP answers to about 18 lakh voters, one voice is easy to ignore. So Accountable lets people unite through petitions, movements and communities drawn on election boundaries, from wards up to all 543 Lok Sabha seats. Your location adds you automatically. Alone, you're a complaint. Together, you're a constituency.
Since March, alongside my day job, I've built it solo for Android, iPhone and the web, through Google Play rejection after rejection. Within two weeks of launch, Accountable crossed 10M+ views across X, Instagram and Reddit.
Looking back, I'd been following three words from Dr B. R. Ambedkar all along: Educate. Agitate. Organize.
Accountability shouldn't end on election day. With Accountable, it doesn't.
Hey everyone,
I'm hoping to get some feedback from people who have experience running large-scale cold email campaigns through Instantly.ai.
I recently launched my campaign after spending approximately two months warming up all my email accounts before sending a single cold email.
Here's my current setup:
My concern is that despite investing heavily in the infrastructure, warming up the accounts properly, and ensuring my lead lists are clean, the response rate seems extremely low.
I understand that cold emailing is a numbers game, but 12 replies from 4,000 emails seems unusually low, especially considering the preparation that went into this campaign.
I'm genuinely trying to understand whether I'm missing something.
Is this normal for Instantly users? Could this be a deliverability issue where emails are landing in spam despite the accounts being warmed up?
Or is the business model essentially designed around encouraging users to continuously scale their sending infrastructure to compensate for low response rates?
I'm not trying to criticize Instantly. I'm genuinely looking for advice from people who have successfully scaled campaigns using the platform.
Over the last year, I’ve been using AI coding tools almost every day. They’re incredible at writing code, but often were terrible at maintaining the context of the product. Every new session felt like starting over.
So I built BuildBoard, a local-first Mac app that creates a structured workflow from before the AI starts coding to finished.
The flow looks like: product idea, to requirements, to visual mocks, to implementation plan, then building with an AI coding agent. Everything stays in plain text files, so it works with Git and doesn’t require another cloud account.
I have used my own app to create a couple other ideas, prototype or improve existing projects. It allows me to track, and build on an idea. It helps me establish a shared understanding with my agents and align on the expectations. Also it’s helpful to visualize before building. I found it easier to adjust UI/UX before implementation but right in the planning phase.
I’d love feedback on whether this matches your workflow, what’s missing, and how you’re handling long-term context with tools like Claude Code or Codex.
We put the bundle.social logo on a race car and from what I’ve heard so far our driver took P2 in quali
I’m on vacation so updates are reaching me a bit late but I couldn’t be happier
Both of us are into racing and cars. We do sim racing and I even build cars in my spare time, so this is pretty personal and I will MILK everything out of this. No elaborate marketing strategy here, just something we’ve always wanted to be part of
Pretty surreal seeing our logo on an actual race car. More pro pics coming soon!
TL;DR: My 50/50 cofounder handles development and finances; I handle strategy, design and marketing. I lack financial visibility, which recently caused planning issues. After spending some time this week communicating, I thought we’d resolved things, but he’s now questioning his sacrifices and our partnership because of the burden of explaining things.
The context
We’ve worked together for years and are building an ambitious deep-tech startup with a 50/50 split.
I handle strategy, design, marketing, investors and user testing. He’s a full-stack engineer managing development and finances.
He also runs two businesses established to fund our startup. I helped establish them, but he eventually took over while I focused on our company. My work and future depend on their operations, yet I have little financial visibility. I’ve repeatedly offered to help, but he wants me focused on our startup.
He’s exceptionally capable, works incredibly hard, and I recognise his sacrifices. My concern isn’t his competence, but understanding the financial variable affecting our main company.
What happened
Recently, a project I’d organised materials and external collaborators for was cancelled because we couldn’t afford it. He’d mentioned financial difficulties, but I hadn’t understood their severity. He insists he’d communicated this, but we clearly weren’t aligned. In my opinion this was no one’s fault but a fault of the communication.
We subsequently spent 3ish hours discussing the finances over the past week. He was frustrated explaining things, but I was genuinely grateful and then was happy we were finally on the same page. Those conversations gave me the information I needed to understand our constraints, make informed decisions and plan my work, rather than simply making me feel better.
However, today he’s still upset about those conversations and questioning whether our partnership is worth his sacrifices, despite me thinking we’d resolved things, because he had to communicate what’s happening in more detail and answer my questions. I realise now that while I felt we’d resolved the financial misunderstanding, he clearly didn’t feel we’d resolved the underlying communication issue.
The communication conflict
My background is in creative production, where collaboration and understanding the variables affecting a project are essential.
He works differently. He says he’s communicating to his “absolute maximum” and prefers executing without explaining, citing successful solo projects where communication wasn’t necessary.
From his perspective, he’s already working at maximum capacity, and explaining things takes time and mental energy away from earning money and executing our plans. I recognise how exhausting that must be.
But we’re building a complex deep-tech company together. I don’t need every technical detail, just financial visibility and strategic alignment. As what happens on his side influences my work too.
For example, he’s complained about me contacting him while working on one of the businesses. I deliberately avoided weekends, unaware he now also works on it during weekdays. He’d never told me this. To me, this illustrates why communication matters.
The actual time involved
I wanted to make a calculation of time spent because I was confused by how much of a burden and impact on execution the time spent was:
Over eight months, we’ve spent approximately 10-15 hours discussing finances (not just shared work).
Of 5,840 total hours, subtracting seven hours of daily sleep and 2-4 hours of personal time leaves 3,163-3,650 available work hours.
That’s 0.27-0.47% of available working time.
I understand cognitive exhaustion isn’t proportional to time spent, but how has small amount of time spent brought us to questioning our partnership? Especially when it’s been beneficial for me which means beneficial for the company?
Where we stand
Today, he questioned whether he should continue sacrificing financial opportunities to build something together when he has to explain things which obstructs execution, and whether I’d make the same sacrifices.
I was shocked.
Of course I would. We’ve supported each other’s ventures for years and share a long-term vision. I trust him enormously and see communication as part of building our company together, not a meaningless personal sacrifice.
Am I unreasonable for expecting transparency and strategic alignment?
How do other founders balance communication with execution?
How can we resolve this?
I’m genuinely open to opposing perspectives. Thank you.
I finally got my SaaS to a point where I'm happy with it, and now I'm realizing building the product was the fun part lol.
SEO just feels like an endless rabbit hole. Keyword research, metadata, backlinks, writing content, getting pages indexed... every time I think I'm done there's something else.
For people who've launched a SaaS from zero users, did you actually bother with SEO early on? Or did you focus on getting your first users elsewhere?
Curious what's actually worked for you guys
Curious to know millennials or older genz ciders' opinion of people who have claude code everything for their applications. Do they develop a good sense of code via that and does that have a future?
If debugging the best when they don't know how to write code in the first place?
I have mixed opinions myself but would like to be challenged and change my view/reservations about this.
I have been through multiple payment gateways and all of them had unique problems. Razorpay was the first where I came to know that paypal is needed to accept international payments as the platform doesn't allow it.
Then I tried Paypal. While the development process, all of a sudden, they ban my account citing that I was doing some suspicious activity. While I clicked the link to open the sandbox checkout page at that time. I do not whether opening the sandbox checkout page was the reason of banning or something else.
Then I thought of using Stripe payments. Unfortunately, stripe is invite only for India. Stripe has a product Lemonsqueezy. This is the platform whom I clearly don't remember why I felt the need to leave it too.
Then, finally, I came with Dodopayments. There were people who recommended the platform and AI too recommended it. But, recently, I came to know about people on reddit complaining that dodopayments is holding their payment by some means and not allowing them to withdraw their payments. I still haven't got monetized, and now I am a bit skeptical about it.
I also thought of Gumroad for digital product but, gumroad has does not allow direct bank transfer but it only has paypal linkedin options.
I was currently working on a digital product and wanted to launch and market it. But, I have experienced different problems with all the big ones.
I need your advice, for now, I want to launch my digital product and later would be my saas or more digital products.
What payment gateway to choose for accepting payments?
Is dodopayment really holds payments or was it something like a bug?
Or at least it seems that way. For example I still remember e commerce and dropshipping in the beginnings people made the most basic websites no targeted marketing or brand building still being profitable like 2015. Nowadays no chance getting sales that easy. Same with apps in the AppStore, back in the day people discovered you just by scrolling in the AppStore. Today you need to do heavy A/B testing data analytics with ads influencer marketing Ugc etc.
Every new niche or topic fills up so quickly, because of social media and because everything is so easy to copy. My question is: is it harder to make it today than like 10-20 years ago? Like not from a standpoint of possibility. Of course you can build everything with ai have more information and just need a phone. Thats not the point. The point is from gaining customers without that much effort. Today it seems marketing is much more important than having a good product and the barrier to entry is much lower but the barrier to succeed is much higher.
I know people still make it but just wanted to know what you guys think and what you experienced.
I sell shadcn/ui templates and admin dashboards. Since early September sales have dropped quite a bit, and Google Trends for "shadcn" is going down too. Nothing changed on my side, so I'm curious if others selling templates, UI kits or dev tools are seeing the same thing. Is it AI tools replacing templates, a seasonal dip, or just me?
I've been curious about something and wanted to hear from people who are actually doing it.
With tools like Claude Code, Cursor and other AI coding tools, it seems much easier to get a first version of an app or SaaS up and running.
But I'm wondering what happens after that initial stage.
For those of you who have tried building a product with AI:
I'm particularly interested in the experience of people without a software engineering background.
I'm trying to understand what people currently do when they hit a technical wall, and whether there's still a gap between what AI tools promise and what people can realistically build and launch with them.
Would love to hear about your actual experiences, including things that worked and things that didn't.
It's been a month since I built my SaaS.
So far:
- 250+ users
- 110+ projects created
- ~$18 in total revenue
I've spent most of my time building, shipping updates, and iterating on the product. I initially offered a lifetime deal, which I've now removed. Now I'm shifting my focus from building features to marketing and getting paying customers.
Currently, I promote on X and YouTube, but most of my traffic comes from AI search, especially ChatGPT. For those who've grown their SaaS from scratch, what marketing channels would you recommend I focus on next? And what would you do in my position to get the first few paying customers?
I'm adding Arabic language support to my form builder, MyKayd
I'm a native Arabic speaker, and I've already had a few potential customers reach out on LinkedIn asking about it
I'm curious if anyone here has tried expanding their SaaS into the Arabic-speaking market
How was your experience? Anything I should watch out for beyond just translating the UI?
I've always loved the story of the Million Dollar Homepage as the creator made the website to pay for his tuition fees so I got inspired from him and made this to pay for mine. Story: I finished my masters in CS with a first class degree but couldn’t graduate this July because I couldn’t pay the fees.
Anyways,
How it works: you buy a rectangle of pixels and fill it with pixel art, text, or an image. The twist is you don't pick where it goes. The highest paying tile sits at the dead center of the canvas, and everyone else spirals outward by how much they paid. So your position isn't permanent if someone outbids you, the whole canvas re-sorts and your tile physically slides outward. Amounts are hidden on the canvas itself, so you can only guess who paid what from where they sit. There's a top 10 leaderboard that does show the numbers.
Browsing is free, you can pan and zoom the whole thing without an account: thepixelorbit.com
Happy to answer anything about the packing algorithm or how it's built. Also genuinely want to hear what's confusing about it I've stared at this too long to see it clearly anymore.
Hey all,
Before we pick next year’s marketing priorities, I want a proper look at what our competitors are doing: conferences and events, paid, influencers, AI SEO, social and content.
How do you handle this at your startup? Do you use one tool, a mix, or keep a spreadsheet updated by hand? I’d like to hear what actually works and what turned out to be a waste of time.
Has anyone used Claude skills for this? If they worked for you, which ones would you recommend?
[I'm not working for a competitive intelligence tool; neither do I want to promote them]
Now adays with Ai people are saying the saas is dead because instead of buying a subscription they can just make the same app with Ai .
but I have question have you forget what all the economy was about ? and the specialization.
everyone needs A,B,C ...
so everyone is doing those for themselves
person X , can do his A very good in less time and better quality . so he do his from some other people in the group in return he get his B,C .... from the specialized ones of the group so he can work half the day and get everything in best quality .
you know : "work for each other and pay each other money."
now for software and saas ,
lets say the subscription for saas product X , is 10$/m ... and your Hourly rate is 20$/m
and you said why paying 10$ I will make it myself and you spend 50h creating a lesser version that is enough just for you . by less I mean , there is no payment gateway or multi-user login or scaling backend . and lets say for you it works as good as the paid saas one .
but those 50h you spend . if you have spent them on a paid work you would have made 1000$ . today. while spending the same hours on the saas copy you saved 10$ this month . and still 990$ left . after 8.2 year of using your vibe coded app only them you would make ROI .
and in this 8.2 the app mush work flawlessly if you spend just half an hour on maintenance of the app that month no longer counts .
all that and we did not factor in the lost opportunity. like those 1000$ if they got invested with 10% return yearly . so after 8 years that would be 2000$ . so you need to use the app another 10 more years . and by then to total will be 5500$ .
so factoring in lost opportunity you would never make an ROI of your "saving" and you did not save any money actually.
I dont see a way where the person inhouse vibecoded alternative can win financal and really saves him money , unless he will make it in very short amount of time , or his hourly rate is really low like he is unemployed .
thats on small one person scale . now in corporate environment , do you think any company will accept stacy from HR running her vibecoded app , and kevin from accounting running his vibecodeed accounting app . can you imagine what miss that would be .
After around 3 months of building and growing SeoLoupe, I’ve decided to explore selling it so I can focus on learning more about coding and IT.
Some numbers:
SeoLoupe helps website owners find SEO issues and improve their websites. The product is largely built and operational, so the next owner can focus on growing it rather than starting from scratch.
I'm asking US$5,000, but I'm open to hearing reasonable offers.
Listing and more details: https://trustmrr.com/startup/seoloupe
Happy to answer questions about the product, revenue, traffic, or handover.
Most SaaS advice says: get the email first, everything else later. We went the opposite way with our side project and I'm curious what you think.
What we built: a browser game site (pp2hub.site) – 9 games so far, multiplayer included. Zero signups, zero downloads. You open a game and you're playing.
What "no account" forced us to solve:
Multiplayer without users. No friend lists, no profiles. Instead: one person creates a game, gets a 5-letter code, friends type it in. The server only handles the code, the game itself runs between browsers. Turned out to be simpler than accounts ever were.
Progress without a database. Scores and unlocks live in the browser's local storage. Downside: switch devices and it's gone. So far nobody has complained.
No email list = no retention channel. This is the real cost. We can't ping anyone when a new game drops. Our bet is that people come back through the games themselves and short videos, not through newsletters.
Every extra click hurts more. Without a signup wall there's no "sunk cost" keeping people around, so the first 10 seconds have to deliver. We cut menus down to one button.
What I'm unsure about:
- At what point would you add an optional account (sync progress, friends)?
- How do you build retention without collecting emails at all?
Would love to hear from anyone who's run a no-signup product – did you regret it later?