r/buildinpublic

My friend and I build a wedding planning app called Celebrate in the evenings, after our families are asleep. We're devs, not marketers, and every launch so far has landed with a quiet thud.

Here's what the last 90 days looked like:

• 121 people signed up
• 45 seated at least one guest in the seating planner
• 24 hit the paywall
• 3 clicked upgrade
• 1 reached checkout

The seating planner is clearly what people come for. But it sat behind a signup and then a paywall, so most people put in the work and left with nothing. We got only 4 users that paid all time.

So we moved it to a public page:

1. Drop in your guest list from Excel, or try sample guests
2. Add tables, drag people onto seats
3. No account needed. Your guest list stays in your browser unless you decide to save it

It's free for up to 50 seated guests. Bigger weddings are a one-time payment of [price], no subscription. You only need an account to save, print, or go past 50.

This is a bet, not a result yet. What I'd love your take on:

1. Price: is 25 usd / 80 PLN one-time too much for what the tool does? Or is the problem that the paywall shows up at the wrong moment? The idea was it's not only a seating planner, rather a wedding planning tool, so 25$ one-time for up to 2 years seemed fair to us.
2. Missing features: if you tried it and still wouldn't pay, what was missing? Anything you'd expect from a seating planner that isn't there.
3. Where to put the gate: on guest count, on saving and printing, or somewhere else?
4. Screenshot risk: someone builds their plan on the free tier, screenshots it, and never comes back. Is that just the cost of a no-signup tool?

I'll share what happens either way. Link in the first comment.

Hi everyone,

I'm a developer, building a product is the part that I know. Getting people to us it is where I get stuck.

However, I have studied a fair amount of marketing. Ive been collecting notes from books, videos, and my own attempts: landing pages, cold outreach, pricing, onboarding, etc.

It's a lot, but the last thing missing is a framework guiding me though the right stuff in the right stage of the process.

So, that's what I'm building.

Think of playbooks for launching on Product Hunt, cold email outreach, build in public 😁, TikTok marketing.

But also - and more important - the principles behind marketing, like acquisition, activation, retention, positioning, pricing, conversion, etc.

You should also be able to see how things connect.

I’m still figuring marketing out myself. This is me organizing what I’m learning into something I wish I’d had when I started.

I would love to hear from you: where did you get stuck marketing your last product, and what do you wish you’d had to help you take the next step?

Earlier this year, I started building Aupero, a client-agency collaboration platform with a customizable client portal. The idea came from my experience launching my own creative agency last year.

I eventually had to pause development because of my studies and everything else going on in my life. I finally picked it back up in August and finished the MVP in September.

Honestly, the journey has been exhausting. I'm sure some, if not many, of you can relate to feeling burnt out, constantly fixing bugs, and wondering whether you're ever going to be done. I'm building this entirely on my own, and even though most of the bugs I'm catching now are edge cases, there's always something new to fix.

And on top of all that, I'm preparing for an entrance exam and trying to make an academic comeback.

I'm not making this post to complain about my situation. I genuinely want to learn from people who are going through, or have gone through, something similar.

I'd especially love to hear from fellow students trying to build something of their own.

• Development: How do you organize your development process to minimize regressions and bugs? Do you have any particular workflows, testing strategies, or tools that have made a real difference?
• Time management: How do you balance building a product with studying, exams, and everything else life throws at you?
• Marketing: This is probably my biggest obstacle right now. How are you marketing your software? What has worked for you, what hasn't, and how are you getting your first users and customers?

I'd genuinely appreciate any advice, especially from people building with limited time and resources.

I'll be sharing my journey with Aupero from now on, from the challenges and lessons to the wins, until I reach 1k in MRR. Wish me luck!

Thanks for reading.

Free app, no ads on the core loop. Start a focus session, stay off your phone, earn coins. Spend coins on challenges and bids, or enter the monthly draw for vouchers.
• Free tier does everything you need
• Premium is optional
• iOS version has been live for a while, Android is new as of this week

It’s a rewards model rather than a blocker model. If you’ve bounced off apps that just lock you out, this is the opposite approach.

Hi.. I often find myself overwhelmed by tasks that I have to do and can't decide which task deserves my attention first. Every task, for me, are equally important. I would spend 20-30 min to write down the tasks, and another 15 min to take out what I have to do first

Built DailyDo, currently MVP, which takes your brain dump and converts it into prioritized, task tree. The tasks are broken down into smallest executable steps to start the task easier and get the flow.

Link: https://dailydov8-0.onrender.com/. And pls, give me feedback
Do you also have this problem? How often?

Shipped my first solo app to the App Store yesterday. It's an iPhone focus timer where your hours carve a marble statue. The paid tier includes a weekly letter, written by a model on a schedule and stored, same letter for everybody, so it costs me about four cents a week to run no matter how many people read it.

Later the same day I went to check the archive and there was one letter in it. There should have been two.

The cron was set to Monday at 06:00 UTC. It had fired that Monday and written nothing. And when I looked at the timestamp on the one letter that did exist, it was the previous Friday afternoon, which was me running it by hand when I first deployed. So the scheduled job had never produced a letter. Not once. The feature I was selling had been broken since before launch and I had no idea.

The reason I couldn't see it is that I built it that way on purpose. If the letter fails to generate, the code swallows the error and leaves last week's letter up, because someone opening the app during an outage should read the letter they already had instead of an error message. That's still the right call for the user. It also meant the only way to notice was for a human to read the archive and count.

What actually diagnosed it was a billing page. My API balance was fine, nearly five dollars, so my first theory was wrong. But the spend for the month was four cents, which was exactly the cost of the one letter I'd written by hand. Meaning the two scheduled runs since had billed nothing at all.

That's the whole diagnosis, and it's the bit I'd pass on. A job that fails after calling the API still costs you money. A job that fails before it, on auth, costs you nothing. Zero spend across two runs told me the requests were never reaching the model, and with the balance healthy that left the API key. It had gone bad. Rotated it this morning, and the next run wrote the letter.

Two changes came out of it. The cron is daily now instead of weekly, which sounds wrong for a weekly letter but isn't: the week is the letter's identity, so once a week has its letter every later run is a no-op. It only ever means a failed Monday gets retried on Tuesday instead of being lost for seven days. And that change is what let me verify the fix in five minutes rather than waiting until next Monday to find out.

What I'm still sitting with: I made the failure invisible deliberately, for a good reason, and that was the bug. Nothing anywhere tells me a week was missed. I haven't built the monitoring yet.

So the question. For those of you running unattended jobs people are paying for, what do you actually use to notice when one quietly stops? I don't want a status page or a pager. I want the smallest possible thing that makes a missed week loud.

For context, since the rules ask: the app is free with an optional subscription, it's on iOS only, and the bust artwork was generated with an image model and then processed by a script I wrote to derive the marble variants. Everything else, the app and the server, is mine.

I’m building The Social Circle Network, a social platform made up of five connected “Worlds” for different kinds of online interaction.

There’s long-form social, short-form conversation, photos, gaming/streams, and video, all connected through one account.

I’ve been building it largely solo, and for a long time most of my attention went toward the obvious question:

Can I actually build this?

Eventually the answer became yes.

The platform is live. The core systems work. People can register, create profiles, post, interact, follow/friend people, share media, and move between the different parts of the network.

But now I’m dealing with a completely different question:

Can I turn something that works into something people actually choose to come back to?

Right now we have 37 registered users, with 35 that I count as real traction users rather than myself/test accounts.

Of those:

74% verified their accounts
46% completed a first meaningful action
26% reached our activation threshold

We’ve also seen some encouraging historical retention, but the sample is way too small for me to call it product-market fit.

So lately I’ve actually slowed down on adding features.

I’m spending more time on:

finding the right first audience
improving activation
retention
community density
creator adoption
figuring out which part of the product should become the initial wedge

One of the biggest lessons for me has been that building more isn’t automatically progress.

Sometimes the next problem isn’t another feature.

It’s getting 10 people to care enough to return.

And then getting 100.

I’m curious how other people here handled this transition.

If you built something technically complicated first, how did you know when it was time to stop improving the product and start focusing almost entirely on distribution and retention?

And if your product had multiple use cases, did you market the whole vision or narrow down to one wedge first?

I'm building Pijnhol solo. You pick people, teams or topics you care about, and it texts you a short line when something actually happens. No feed, nothing to download.

I reckon it's a good alternative to newsletters like TLDR. TLDR is great if you want a daily roundup of everything in tech. But most days I only care about a handful of things, and I'd rather get one text when one of them actually happens than skim a whole email hoping it's in there.

Progress this month:

Live in the US, Canada, UK, Australia and NZ. Getting a number approved to text in the US took a few rounds, and it's finally done.

I posted it in a couple of subs, and an AI/tech Instagram page found the post and turned it into a reel. Small page, but it's the first time someone I don't know shared it without me asking.

Lessons so far:

1. Sending less was the fix. Early versions texted too much and it felt like spam within a day. Now it only sends when a story clears a bar and there's a daily cap. Fewer texts made people keep it on.

2. "New" is harder than "relevant". Finding stories about a topic is easy. Knowing whether this is actually new or just the same story reworded by 15 outlets is most of the work.

3. Short beats clever. Texts got better once I cut them to one line on what happened plus a link. Anything longer people skipped.

4. Trust is the real signup hurdle. People are wary of handing over a phone number. The first thing commenters said on an early post was "this looks like a scam". The product matters less than looking legit.

Where I'd love feedback:

What would you actually want texted to you? Some topics work far better than others and I'm still figuring out which.

If you saw this, what would make you trust it enough to give it your number?

Link in comments if anyone wants to try it.

I’ve spent the last several weeks building a side project called The Unassigned Reading Group (TURG).

I’m not a developer. I just had an idea and wanted to see if I could bring it to life.

The concept is simple: a reading community where people can discover books, read at their own pace or alongside others, and participate in meaningful discussions without the pressure of traditional book clubs.

I’ve built four interconnected automated systems that handle book discovery, reading groups, discussions, and community operations.

The biggest challenge has been making everything work together reliably. I’ve learned a lot about automation, troubleshooting, and how fixing one thing can somehow break three others.

I’m currently testing everything ahead of the October 15 launch, and I’m learning that sometimes you have to stop building and actually let people use what you’ve created.

For those who’ve launched side projects: How did you decide yours was ready? Did you launch with the essentials or wait until everything felt polished?

Would love to hear your experiences!

I am trying to Email everyday and wondering at the same time if it works or if it’ll work.
Procuring the Right Email
Creating a short and to the point template
Subject
And all takes time plus you don’t know if you’re doing it right
I really want to understand if there’s a way I can automate this Email thing
Or if I can’t then how can I do it better.

I'm the dev. Beatstack is a Mac app for planning a screenplay: acts, sequences, scenes and beats on a board, then it helps draft the pages. $39.95 one-time, 15-day free trial, no account, project files stay on your own disk.

What's happened since the r/SideProject launch post two weeks ago:

• 24 posts on the blog (beat sheets, loglines, second acts, how the trial is priced)
• comments in the screenwriting-adjacent weekly threads
• one stranger claimed the trial on day ten. No paying customers yet.

Lesson so far: the product is easy to explain and the craft audience is easy to find, but turning that into installs is the whole game. My untested levers: search-traffic blog posts (slow, compounding), paid search ads, and cold outreach to screenwriting newsletters and podcasts.

For anyone who has taken a niche, one-time-purchase Mac tool from zero to paying users: what actually moved the needle? If you had $300 a month and ten hours a week, where would you put it?

I’ve been looking for a mind mapping tool to use for brainstorming, but I haven’t found one that really clicks with me yet.

There seem to be plenty of options, but surprisingly few that fit what I’m looking for.

What tools do you use for mind mapping or brainstorming? I’d love to hear your recommendations!