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.

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.

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?

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It's been a little over six months since I launched and it has been quite a journey. No exponential growth or huge user spikes but rather slow and steady growth. But in my opinion that is the best for building something actually valuable because you can react to user feedback along the way and constantly keep improving the app.

It's so crazy, just two weeks ago I was celebrating 2,000 users here and now I have hit another unreal milestone of 2,400! I can't thank everyone enough. I really mean it, so many people were offering their help along the way.

Of course I will not stop here and I am already working on the next big update for the platform which will benefit all the community. More is coming soon.

I've built IndieAppCircle, a platform where small app developers can upload their apps and other people can give them feedback in exchange for credits. I grew it by posting about it here on Reddit. It didn't explode or something but I managed to get some slow but steady growth.

For those of you who never heard about IndieAppCircle, it works like this:

• You can earn credits by testing indie apps (fun + you help other makers)
• You can use credits to get your own app tested by real people
• No fake accounts -> all testers are real users
• Test more apps -> earn more credits -> your app will rank higher -> you get more visibility and more testers/users

Since many people suggested it to me in the comments, I have also created a community for IndieAppCircle: r/IndieAppCircle (you can ask questions or just post relevant stuff there).

Currently, there are 2402 users, 1969 tests done and 587 apps uploaded!

You can check it out here (it's totally free): https://www.indieappcircle.com/

I'm glad for any feedback/suggestions/roasts in the comments.

Link : https://easeassign.com/

I launched EaseAssign about a week ago after noticing that many students and freshers struggle to find small freelance work without competing against experienced freelancers.

The idea is simple:

People post small tasks.

Others complete them and earn money.

Today I got my first paid requests on the platform and saw users actually completing tasks.

Revenue is only around $3, but seeing strangers use something I built feels like a much bigger milestone.

Built it with GPT + Antigravity and finally bought a proper domain.

I'd love feedback from people who've built SaaS before.

A few weeks ago, I started building Lifto, a video-first product discovery platform where founders showcase their products through short demo reels instead of static screenshots.

Today we reached our first milestone:

• 🎉 100 registered founders
• 🎥 55 demo reels uploaded
• ❤️ Hundreds of interactions across the platform

It might not sound like much compared to huge startups, but getting the first 100 users taught me a lot.

A few things that surprised me:

1. Building was easier than distribution.

I spent weeks coding the platform.

I've spent even more time trying to get people to actually use it.

2. People love giving feedback.

I've received everything from bug reports to design critiques.

Sometimes it stings, but almost every piece of feedback has made the product better.

3. Community is harder than software.

Getting someone to upload their own product is one challenge.

Getting them to also watch, like, and comment on other founders' demos is a completely different problem.

That's probably the biggest challenge I'm working on now.

4. Demo videos explain products far better than screenshots.

This was the original hypothesis behind Lifto, and it's been reinforced over and over.

People understand what a product does in 20–30 seconds of video much faster than by reading a long description.

I'm still very early in this journey, but I'm excited to keep improving the platform and learning along the way.

If you've built a marketplace or community product before, I'd love to hear:

What's the hardest part of getting users to contribute instead of just consume?

When you say "habit tracker" here, everyone lands on the same stuff. Saturated niche, vibe coded, slop, "not another one." The list is long. The main idea is always the same. Don't build another one.

Well, I built one anyway. It was something I wanted for myself. The idea was to replace Notion with something that looks better and has habits built in. It ended up mostly a habit tracker with a bunch of extra features.

From December to now (July) I made €3,158 total. It's a mix of MRR and lifetime deals, so not all of it is recurring.

Some context. Started building in November, launched the web app in December, got my first paying users that same month. Since then I've done marketing every single day. Almost all of it is Threads, posting there basically daily. I've had maybe a handful of days off in 7 months. This was never a quick money thing. It's slow and kind of boring work.

The app does way more than habits, even if that's how I sell it. It's Loggd. Habits, tasks, goals, a Pomodoro timer you can link to a task, a leaderboard, animated characters, a small community. More of an all-in-one, really. I just market the habit side because that's what gets people in the door. Most only find out what it does after they sign up.

It was dead slow at the start. Picked up recently once the iOS app went into prelaunch, and I just kept showing up. The thing that actually worked was building in public. Posting every number, every user, every euro. People trust that way more than a clean pitch.

So can you make money in a saturated niche? Yeah. Just not fast and not from some trick. Some friends of mine build habit trackers, too. One just hit €1,000 total. It's not a dying niche. It's just work. Show up, talk to people, repeat.

What's next is connecting my app to Claude and ChatGPT through MCP. I live inside Claude all day anyway, so I want to just ask it what's on my list today, throw in a few tasks, check off habits, sort my goals, and have the app update itself in the background. Building that now.

That's it. €3,158 in 7 months, one of the most crowded niches out there, a lot of showing up. Happy to answer anything.

I’m building UrLingo, a personal dictionary/wordbook app for that very specific human ritual where you search “[word] meaning,” understand it for 14 seconds, and then your brain quietly throws it into the ocean.

The core flow is simple:

User searches a word → backend checks auth/quota/preferences → OpenAI generates a structured dictionary entry → frontend streams (will come to the streaming part in a bit) the response.

Simple. Beautiful. Innocent.

Except my app was taking 13 seconds before showing the first useful streamed output.

Initial numbers were rough:

OpenAI TTFT: 8296ms

First frontend OpenAI chunk: 13274ms

Hidden reasoning tokens: 1088

Yes. 1088 hidden reasoning tokens.

For a dictionary response.

Apparently the model needed to assemble the Seven Kingdoms before explaining what a word means.

After profiling and fixing the path, the latest batch looks like this:

OpenAI TTFT p50/p95: 1247ms / 3514ms

First frontend OpenAI chunk p50/p95: 3038ms / 4873ms

Hidden reasoning tokens: 0

Priority tier: true on all runs

So roughly:

OpenAI TTFT p50: 6.7x faster

First frontend chunk p50: 4.4x faster

First frontend chunk p95: 2.7x faster

Reasoning overhead: eliminated

What actually helped:

- Removed reasoning overhead for simple dictionary lookups. No need for Socrates to define “serendipity.”

- Verified `service_tier: priority` was actually being used, because apparently checking that the thing you paid for is turned on remains a valid engineering strategy.

- Added detailed timing logs on both server and client.

- Split metrics into same-clock measurements so I stopped chasing fake delays like a Victorian ghost hunter with a Datadog account.

- Improved the stream path so useful chunks reached the UI earlier, not just backend tokens flapping around in the void.

- Measured backend prep separately: auth, quota, preferences, OpenAI startup, all the tiny goblins hiding before the model call.

The biggest lesson: streaming alone does not make an AI app feel fast.

Users do not care that your backend received a token if the UI is still sitting there like Clippy after a head injury. The only thing that matters is when the first useful thing reaches the screen.

Also, check hidden reasoning tokens. Mine quietly ate the latency budget, stole my lunch, and left 1088 little footprints in the logs.

Still more to clean up, but getting UrLingo’s first streamed output from 13.3s to about 3.0s made the whole product feel different. It went from “is this broken?” to “oh, this thing is alive! (In Phoebe's high pitched voice)”

Small win, but a huge leap forward! Hope you all find this helpful too!

Website: https://urlingo.app/

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/urlingo/id6762142203

I've built a 6-figure portfolio of micro SaaS through acquisitions. I'm very transparent with my numbers and recently recorded a 30 min deep dive into the economics of my most successful acquisition.

The video covers a lot and there are many lessons that can be learnt, especially for developers building "nice to have" micro SaaS that they hope to sell one day.

Since the video is longer than Reddit's 15 min limit, I couldn't upload it directly.

View the deep dive here: https://www.saasdecoded.com/p/lessons-from-a-50k-arr-micro-saas

If you have any questions on anything I share in the video, please write them in a comment below, I'll be more than happy to help.