Who I am: a founder and natural bodybuilding competitor. I have a real left/right imbalance that human coaches could only help if I paid a lot of money for it, and I couldn’t find anything affordable.

What I’m building: an app to help serious lifters find their weak points and fix muscle imbalances. I’m keeping the details quiet for now, but it’s aimed at people who already train hard and want better feedback than the mirror.

Where I am:

• Working version I can test on my own phone
• Backend and security basics done (I wanted that sorted before real users)
• Just finished redesigning the whole app after trying a few directions
• Not launched yet, no paying users

What I’ve learned so far:

• the design changed a lot once I looked at apps my users already like.

What I’m stuck on: how to get honest validation from lifters before launch, and whether I’m aiming at the right price point.

If you’ve launched a consumer app in a niche community, what was the hardest part of the first 100 users?

One thing I've noticed while building my own SaaS is how quickly small subscriptions start adding up when you're running a business.

You've got your website, email tools, design tools, and then another subscription just to schedule a few social media posts every week.

I've been building PostDovo, and while the original idea was to automate content creation with AI, I recently decided to make manual posting and scheduling free.

Basically, if you're already creating your own content, you can upload it, write your captions, and schedule your posts without paying for the scheduling part.

The AI features are still paid, since those actually cost money to run.

Not expecting this to change anyone's life lol, but hopefully it saves a few business owners one more monthly bill.

If anyone wants to try it: app.postdovo . com

Curious how other small business owners are handling their social media right now. Are you scheduling everything in advance or just posting whenever you have time?

I'm 20, building my first iOS app, and I've spent more time figuring out how to get people to use it than actually building it lately lol.

It's called Overdrive. Basically, it turns real-world driving into a map exploration game, kind of like Forza Horizon IRL.

Every road you drive gets colored in on your map, and you slowly unlock your city just by exploring.

Here's where things got interesting.

I tried posting about the app in developer communities.

Almost nothing happened.

0 upvotes, 2 views, removed posts, you name it 😭

Then I made a post in a car community asking whether driving around for fun was becoming a lost hobby.

No fancy marketing. Just a genuine discussion about something I love.

188,000 views. 315 comments. 81 shares.

And around this period, my app started getting more traction.

Some actual numbers:

• 219 first-time downloads over roughly 3 months
• $192 in revenue over the last 28 days
• Multiple lifetime purchases at $29.99
• Around 13 new downloads daily recently

Not exactly life-changing money, but seeing strangers pay for something I made is a completely different feeling.

The biggest lesson so far?

Stop trying to convince people they need your product. Find people who already have a reason to want it.

I'm still figuring out conversion rates, pricing, retention, and pretty much everything else.

But I thought I'd share the numbers because most of what I see online is people claiming they made $50K in a weekend.

Sometimes it's just a 20-year-old making $192 from an app about driving around lol.

For other founders who started from zero, what actually brought you your first paying customers?

We've got a great candidate in Germany but no local entity, and I'm stuck on whether it's worth going through an employer of record now or just holding off until we're big enough to justify a GmbH properly.

The EOR route, going through something like Workmotion or Remote, would get them started in a few weeks, but costs apparently add up fast once you're past 3 or 4 people in the same country, and there's a grey area around how long you can use an EOR before German authorities start expecting a permanent establishment anyway.

So if you've made this call at the 1-2 headcount stage in Germany or another similar European country, what pushed the decision for you?

I’ve been building a local senior-services directory called Senior Support Finder.

It now has 97 providers/resources, eight articles, and enough real usage that I can finally see what people are actually searching for.

In the last 30 days:

318 searches
197 provider views
17 outbound website clicks

The useful part has been watching people expose gaps I never would have guessed correctly on my own.

Someone searching “I’m worried about falls” led me to improve home-safety search.

“Wills and trusts” led to adding local estate-planning attorneys.

“Finding a home for my relative” exposed a senior-placement gap.

Reddit users also caught homepage suggested searches that returned no results, so those got fixed.

I’m at the point where the site probably needs distribution more than features.

For people who have grown a local marketplace/directory:

Would you focus almost entirely on traffic/provider activation now, or continue adding SEO content alongside distribution?

I joined our high school's afterprom committee as a parent volunteer, and the first thing I noticed was how old-school it all was. Paper tickets, a cash box, and a clipboard at the door.

The part that really bugged me came later. Once a kid was inside, nobody outside knew anything. Parents dropped them off and hoped. If a kid left at 1am, mom found out when they walked in the door, or didn't.

I'm a developer, so I did the thing developers do and said "I can build something for this." Online tickets, waivers signed ahead of time, QR check-in at the door, and the piece I cared about most: a text to the parent when their kid checks in, and another one if they leave.

The waivers turned out to be the sleeper hit. Before, it was a stack of paper forms and a line of kids at the door hunting down a parent signature at 11pm. With the waiver built into the ticket purchase, we had 560 kids at afterprom and only 3 showed up without a signed waiver. The committee, and our inflatable company who needed the waivers, couldn't believe it.

We ran afterprom on it in 2024 and 2025. About 14 months ago I opened it up to anyone, figuring other schools might want it.

What I didn't expect was everyone else. Community benefit dinners, a bar, festivals, small nonprofits. It turns out anyone selling general admission tickets has the same problem the afterprom committee had. They're stuck between a cash box and a ticketing site that takes a cut of every sale.

This year I added silent auctions because a customer asked, and we've now run two of them start to finish. One had 86 people bidding from their phones, which was honestly fun to watch live.

And last month I signed my first school district, with a few others asking about it. That one still feels a little unreal.

This week we passed $100k processed. It's customers' money, not mine, but for something that started as a favor for the afterprom committee, it's a big one for me.

Where it's at:

• $100k+ processed
• About 3,600 tickets sold
• 12 paying orgs, including that district
• 2 silent auctions done

Goal is 50 paying orgs by the end of the year, so there's work to do. Right now that means cold email and, as of this month, actual paper postcards mailed to schools. Feels very old-school for a software company, but schools still read their mail. I'll report back on which one works.

Happy to answer anything about building for schools, selling to volunteer groups, or running payments for them.

I just finished writing my tenth case study last week so I decided to do a deep dive to find the most potent takeaways (about 70 hours of research, 132 sources and 87 founder quotes) and thought I’d share it with y’all.

Companies studied:

The ten companies in my dataset so far:

AppArmor (campus safety app), Sour Strips (candy), RXBAR (protein bars), Baremetrics (SaaS analytics), Wirecutter (product reviews), Plenty of Fish (dating), Pura Vida (bracelets), MVMT (watches), Tom’s of Maine (toothpaste) and Base44 (AI app builder).

Every one of them was built and sold to buyers that included Kellogg, Hershey, Colgate, The New York Times, Match Group and Wix.

The Numbers

• $1.7B in combined sale proceeds.
• Acquisition prices ranging from $4M (Baremetrics) to $600M (RXBAR).
• Time to exit between four months (Base44) to 36 years (Tom’s of Maine).
• The median time to exit was about six years.
• 8 of the 10 never took outside investment.
• The median sale price had a 2.6x revenue multiple (for the eight with a proper revenue figure at the time of sale)
• Of the 5 sale prices I could check against the press-reported figures, 4 had cases where the press reported a number that was higher.

Lessons

1. The first distribution channel usually fails

Of everything I learned this was the most common finding. Founders often failed with their first attempt at a distribution channel. It wasn’t until they gave some thought to where their customers were hanging out that the second channel actually led to growth (sometimes magnitudes more than the first channel).

Examples:

1. AppArmor spent years on blog posts and social media before the founders realized the people buying campus safety systems were emergency managers who weren’t on social media at all. That realization led to the switch to direct mail, trade shows and formal tenders and got them to CAD $1M annually.
2. RXBAR’s first wrapper focused on a logo and a catchy tagline. The second try put the ingredient list on the front with “No B.S.” underneath causing a revenue increase from $6.5M to $36M the following year.
3. Base44’s Product Hunt launch brought 15 users and a few thousand dollars spent on ads and influencer marketing did nothing. LinkedIn took it to $1M ARR in three weeks (though he did have an existing following there).

The takeaway here is that if your first channel isn’t working, that’s normal. Take time to rethink where your ideal customer spends their time and optimize your marketing there.

The second part to this lesson is that almost every company grew on one channel for years before adding a second. That means that years of growth were lost because the original channel wasn’t challenged. In some cases (like those below) they got it right from the start, although this was less common.

Plenty of Fish ran on search and word of mouth for its entire life. Tom’s of Maine sold through health food stores for 13 years before CVS became the first chain to stock it in 1983. MVMT went all in on Facebook and Instagram ads from year two and only added podcasts, Google and YouTube once that was proven.

Most small businesses I see spread themselves across five platforms and do none of them well. Once you find the channel that works, double or triple down.

2. Start where nobody is selling yet

Of the things founders did right, the one that stood out to me is how founders discovered uncontested distribution channels to kickstart growth. Five of the ten (RXBAR, Plenty of Fish, MVMT, Base44 and Tom’s of Maine) found channels where traffic was thin, customers weren’t yet buying their product or service through that channel, or competition was weak.

RXBAR sold door to door targeting CrossFit gyms in Chicago. Plenty of Fish was free when every other service was paid (and marketed on dating forums). MVMT relied on early Facebook ads when it wasn’t yet common. Founders sniffed out the least utilized channels and used it to grow quickly and effectively at little or no cost.

3. Platform risk is real, own your audience

You’ve probably experienced this yourself if you’ve posted content consistently. You’re at the mercy of the platform, algorithm shifts, and being banned. If your brand relies on social media for all of your leads, platform risk is high and your business could take a hit.

Facebook ads got more expensive for MVMT in 2018, the year the founders sold. In 2021, Apple changed its tracking rules across apps (that users could opt out of) and the edge Pura Vida had for finding new customers disappeared just two years after Vera Bradley bought it.

The companies that held up had relationships that wasn’t controlled by a single platform: AppArmor had contracts with campuses, Wirecutter had its reputation with readers, and Maxx Chewning’s YouTube viewers followed him into the candy aisle. It isn’t a guarantee (Pura Vida had over a million email subscribers and still struggled), but getting customers onto an email list, a contract or into a store reduces the risk that a change to an algorithm can’t shutter your business.

4. This wasn’t their first rodeo

What I found inherently interesting was that the majority of founders were not ‘one-hit wonders’. They had built before, sometimes hundreds of different businesses: Josh Pigford said Baremetrics was “probably my hundredth thing to build.” while Jake Kassan from MVMT started a T-shirt company at 17: “I had other businesses that had failed and I blamed myself. I wasn’t going to let that happen.”

Adding to this, very few were actually experts in the area in which they sold. The Pura Vida founders weren’t jewelers, the MVMT founders weren’t watchmakers and Markus Frind from Plenty of Fish wasn’t a dating expert. What they shared was the willingness to try and a few habits: splitting the work with a co-founder who had the opposite skills, working closely with early customers, and saying no to other opportunities to expand the business.

5. Press-reported sale prices are rarely the real number (important if you’re planning to sell)

Digging through the publicly available information was painful for a lot of reasons, but the most annoying was finding the sale price only to discover that it was overstated or just straight up wrong. The official filings from each buyer provided the real numbers that rarely lined up with what the press quoted.

This matters if you’re ever looking to sell and are comparing prices for similar companies. Here are some examples:

• One headline stated that Plenty of Fish sold for $800M; the buyer’s filing said $575M.
• Wirecutter was reported at “more than $30M”; the New York Times’ filing says $25M.
• MVMT was reported ‘up to $200M’, but $100M of that was an earnout that was never paid.
• Base44 was the only one on track to pay out far more than the $80M announced price.

My advice? Treat the press-reported figure as an optimistic estimate and dig deeper to find the actual acquisition price in the buyer’s filings (if they’re public). This has proven to be more reliable in my experience.

I started writing these case studies in early August and have learned more than I ever thought just researching and writing, much of it I’ve applied to my business such as selecting the best channels for distribution and having several failed businesses behind me and using them as lessons to learn from rather than something that holds me back.

My question: has anyone here gotten distribution right on the first try? Or is testing five platforms at once the only way to find the one that works?

PS: the full study is about 4,500 words and free to read. I'm incredibly proud of it. shoot me a DM and I'll send it to you.

I'm currently working on an early-stage startup, and I know that pitching is an essential skill for every entrepreneur. However, I still get nervous when pitching to investors, and I want to improve both my confidence and my ability to present my startup effectively.

How should I start a pitch? Should I explain everything in detail or keep it short and focus only on the most important points? Should I start with a story to grab their attention?

I once tried starting my pitch with a story and even used Iron Man as an example, thinking it would make my idea easier to understand. Instead, I got scolded, and the people listening didn't even understand that I was pitching my startup. 😅

For experienced founders and entrepreneurs, how did you learn the art of pitching? How can I overcome nervousness, communicate my ideas clearly, and make investors interested in my startup?

Hi, I’m from Belgium. I have a podcast on books that is working pretty well and I am developing a podcast on movies. Not a review-podcast but a community podcast where 3 people talk about a topic on books/movies and the conversation unfolds. We try to have as much interaction with the audience as possible.

Now I’m feeling that there’s more to this concept, business-wise. What else can I do with this community? I’m thinking something like Letterboxed or Goodreads, where people can make lists and recommendations, maybe also buy some books or movie tickets and merch? Idk how far can I take this? Maybe some live events? Book fairs? Movie festival? Are there any other ways to generate some extra income?

FYI I’m not the host, I’m the owner of the (small) production company behind it.

For those running Meta or TikTok ads for an app or DTC brand, how many new creatives do you put into a test before you trust the result?

My instinct is that most small teams test too few at once. With only two or three videos, the winner mostly tells you which one was least bad, not what your customers actually respond to. I'd rather run eight rougher versions built around different hooks with a small budget each, and only polish the one that holds its cost per install or purchase for a full week.

The part I'm unsure about is budget. Spread across eight ads, each one gets very little spend, and the platform may never give some of them a fair chance. How do you handle that? Do you cap new ads per week, run a separate testing campaign, or just let the algorithm pick?

I wanted guests to understand how a hostel fitted together before they arrived. Photos showed individual rooms, but looking at each room separately didn’t tell you how the space actually connected. That was the thing I wanted to show.

To model the hostel, I initially cobbled things together using SketchUp, dimensions, and photos. Along the way, I tried free tools that weren’t suitable and looked at paid tools that cost way more than I could justify. Eventually, I did what I always do: I retreated into my comfort zone and built something of my own.

I’m Daniel, and that hostel project led me to build InktoBrick. You give it a 2D floor plan and it turns it into an editable 3D model right in the browser, letting you look around the space and make changes.

Getting the code to work was the part I felt safe doing. I’m building this alone. I launched it three weeks ago, and it now has 300 registered users and 10 subscribers, with almost no deliberate promotion.

Now I need to put more effort into finding the people who need it. And honestly, this is the part I’ve struggled with throughout my career.

On paper, I’m supposed to know what I’m doing. In the past, I’ve built Dondo, Terraes, Octograma, and GEOSAT. I’ve raised US$6 million and went through the YC Fellowship program in 2016. In the startup world, you’re taught to project confidence and “fake it till you make it.”

After a decade of experience, I feel like I should have learned how to distribute what I build by now. I lose sleep over it. When I have to start selling, I feel like a failure all over again.

People tell me I’m hiding behind perfectionism. They tell me to “just do marketing” or hire someone who can sell. Over the years, I’ve tried those things. I know the textbook advice. I know InktoBrick is only three weeks old. But the anxiety isn’t coming from the last three weeks. It’s coming from years of hitting this same wall and not knowing how to get past it.

With this project, I know my use case: I needed to explain a hostel’s layout. But I don’t know how to cross the bridge from my own problem to understanding who else shares it, or how to get this in front of them when they are actually struggling to explain a physical space.

I’m tired of pretending I have the answers, so I’m genuinely asking people who have worked through this stage. Your business can be completely different from mine.

Some people are already finding it with almost no promotion from me. But I don’t know how to make that repeatable. If you’ve been here, what did you actually do in the first week you focused on distribution, and what helped you decide where to keep putting your effort?

Last week Search Console showed me 3 impressions. The content was fine, but brand new domain with DR was 17 and nobody linking to it. The options were: Fiverr ($650 for "200 directory submissions" that don't look like a link farm) or do it myself.

So I ran a local agent (Qwen3.8-27B Uncensored, Q4_K_M GGUF, on my M5 Pro, no GPU server). First pass: it scraped ~40 "best AI directories" listicles, deduped down to 130 URLs, checked which ones had a working public submit form, 107 actionable.

Second pass: fusion.delegate. One JSON call spawns 8 isolated workers in parallel. Each gets its own headless Chrome, its own user-agent string, fills the form, handles captcha if there is one, writes a result JSON when done.

4m32s for 8 directories. By hand that's maybe 40 minutes of clicking and typing the same description over and over. Worker-3 hit an hCaptcha. The vision model read K7X2M on the first try, typed it in, moved on. ReCAPTCHA v2 it couldn't do. Three attempts, gave up, logged it, next. 14 waves total, ~98 live or pending and wall time was 1h52m.

TL;DR: local model + parallel workers + one plain description = 107 directories, $0, under two hours.

What I used:

• Model: Qwen3.8-27B Uncensored GGUF (Q4_K_M)
• Agent: Atomic Agent
• Directories list: directories.json with all 107 URLs, comment if you want it dumped here
• Free DR checker I spot-checked with: Ahrefs free tool

I saw the Instagram pages AMA here last week where OP mentioned a tool that sends a free guide to anyone who comments a keyword. I build one of those tools, so I thought the other side of it might be useful here.

Quick background. I've been in cloud and DevOps for 14 years and I still have a full-time job. In April I started building ReelDrop in the evenings. It schedules Reels, and when someone comments a keyword on your post it sends them a DM with your link. It's on the official Instagram API, and we're a registered Meta Tech Provider.

First signup came in April. By the end of July I had 28. This week it passed 1,000.

Here's what the data shows across everyone using it (numbers from our database on 1 Oct):

• 141000+ DMs sent. 1,764 failed. Most failures were people with message requests turned off or an Instagram connection that had expired.
• 36,955 taps on the buttons inside those DMs. Roughly 1 in 3 people who get a DM tap the link, which is a lot better than a link in bio.
• 18,485 people replied to the DM. Most creators don't plan for this. When people answer the bot you get a real conversation, and you need to be there to reply.
• 3,574 follow-up messages couldn't go out because Instagram only lets you message someone within 24 hours of them interacting with you. If your follow-up is scheduled for 2 days later, it never sends.
• 191 automations use a follow gate, where you have to follow the account before you get the link. It works, but people do complain in the comments.

On the business side, it's still small. Net revenue is around $2000 CAD in past 2 months as it was in Beta before that, and most of it came from lifetime and yearly deals. MRR now is around $400. I cut my main price from $19.99 to $9 because most people only want one or two features.

Ask me anything about comment-to-DM, keyword triggers, what gets accounts flagged and what doesn't, the 24-hour window, or building a SaaS next to a full-time job. If you run a page and want me to look at your setup, drop your keyword flow in the comments.

Built a competitor price-monitoring SaaS for small e-commerce stores. Product is done, customers are not. What I've learned so far.

Quick background: I'm a developer. The product is Pricemastr: it compares a store's prices against competitor stores and shows, per product, where it's above or below the market.

Where things stand: live and stable, a handful of free signups, zero paying customers yet. Writing this partly to keep myself honest and partly because the comments on posts like this have been more useful to me than any guide.

What I got right: building it for a real, boring problem. Checking prices by hand is about 200 lookups for 50 products across 4 shops, so owners simply don't do it, and drift in both directions. In a batch of 18 small stores I looked at, 13 were too cheap on some products and too expensive on others at the same time. That number got more reactions than anything about the product.

What I got wrong: months on the product, about two weeks on finding customers. Cold email works, slowly: roughly 1 in 20 owners replies when the email opens with their own price gap. Brand-page social posts with 50 followers go nowhere. Search ads brought shoppers looking for a price tracker, not store owners.

What I'm trying now: more personal outreach, talking to store owners in communities like this one, and a free plan with no card so people see their own numbers before deciding anything.

Honest question for anyone who has sold a B2B tool to small shop owners: what got your first ten paying customers? Not the first hundred, the first ten.

(Not linking it. If you want to look, it's pricemastr dot com.)

Think about how often things in life happen because two people just happen to cross paths by chance. Someone might talk about a personal project and you realize you could help bring it to life. You might ask a question in an online group and someone introduces you to a person who changes the direction of your career.You could meet someone with a different set of skills and suddenly an idea that seemed impossible becomes something real. The funny part is that neither person was really looking for the other. Most professional platforms are designed around what we already know we want a job, a company, a certain skill. LinkedIn is great for professional networking, and communities like Reddit help people connect over shared interests.Even platforms like Indeed, MeeBoss, Naukri are trying to find new ways to connect people with the right opportunities but I wonder if we are missing out on a different kind of chance meeting the right person before we even know what we could create together. If you could meet one person outside your current network who would you choose? Would it be a founder, a technical partner, a mentor or someone from a completely different field? what would you hope to build or learn together?

Hi everyone. I'm looking for an accountability buddy, somebody to share my calendar with (in very very brief format) every week and then report on how successful I was in keeping to my deadlines.

Basically the concept of having someone to check in with, which will hopefully help me stay on track as I often find myself getting distracted, or taking on new tasks before finishing others.

Is anyone interested in this? For context, I run a digital fashion magazine that is geared more towards B2B guidance, and I am looking to shift completely to a B2B audience in the next 6-9 months.

Comment here or send me a DM, and let's help each other. Maybe we could start a group somehow? I'm not sure how that would work though tbh.

I’m building Noema, short interactive lessons picked for you every day. For a long time the landing had lines like “A universe of personalized conceptual experiences”. sounded nice to me, but people kept asking what it actually is lol

What I changed:

• headline became “Understand one new thing a day”
• called it a lesson. internally it’s an “Experience”, which means nothing to a stranger
• deleted two of my favorite lines because they said nothing
• show small pieces of a real lesson instead of describing it

Not sure it works yet.

for those working in B2B marketing, what kind of LinkedIn content works best for attracting potential clients and building trust if ur targeting SaaS and FinTech founders? Advice

Two years ago I was working a 9-5 in the UK and trying a few ways to make money online. eBay dropshipping was the only one that stuck.

For the past year I've been based in SE Asia, running three eBay stores full time with around 50k listings between them.

It's a lot less exciting than it sounds lol. A VA handles orders and customer service, and software handles a lot of the rest. My week is mostly:

• Listing new products (50-100 a day, some days 300+)
• Checking analytics across all three stores
• Testing and optimising: ad rates, markups, new categories
• Deleting dead listings every month or two

What actually matters (the boring stuff)

• Orders get placed with the supplier the same day they come in. Every day, no exceptions
• Delivery times in the listing are the real ones. Buyers don't mind waiting if they know upfront
• Profit after ALL costs: eBay fees, promoted listings (I run around 4%), store subscriptions, software, the VA. Revenue looks great until you take all that off
• Volume and consistency beat clever. Listing every day for months is what builds the snowball

A few tips for anyone wanting to try eBay dropshipping

• Start with Amazon sourcing for fast delivery, switch to AliExpress later when you know how everything works properly and can manage the orders and everything efficiently.
• List ALL products not just one niche. I started with one niche and I saw significant growth when I started to list a bunch of different things.
• PATIENCE IS KEY. I was getting frustrated in the first few months but it's like a snowball effect. It's slow to begin with and then becomes bigger and more consistent when your daily sales become consistent and ebay trust your account due to having good metrics and doing volume daily.
• Speaking with others in communities and learning was significant in my growth as it helped me learn new techniques and how to deal with scenarios.
• Refresh and delete dead listings; they were stacking up and I was paying for them

Happy to answer questions in the comments :)

Hey guys!

I always was picky for email clients

I have posted a year or two ago I was looking for something to switch from Spark, so eventually I have switched to Canary. But overtime, I got tired of it too, I wanted something cool, new, good looking.

When I couldn't find any, I decided to make one for myself.

Turned out many people wanted it too, loved it, and switched their main email clients to ByteMail

Here is the feedback I got, pasting in the comments without editing:

Just grabbed the lifetime deal I hooked up one email address and it’s already just so much better than this shit I’ve been dealing with for the last 20 years! Killer job🙌🙌

After running pre-order for few days and seeing demand, I have launched the app on twitter and instantly started to get sales. Usually when I launch new project, I provide a generous lifetime deal, so it was like this:

$19 pre-order - 10 slots

$29 released app - 100 slots

$49 - 50 slots

$69 - 50 slots

$99 - currently ongoing until November 1

Everything was gone in few days after launch. Then I have posted about the app in r/macapps it went viral and made $4.4K in a day, the next day - $10K was already achieved.

This was my fastest $10K in my indie hacker journey.

hey everyone!

i currently run a small B2B animation studio creating strategic explainer videos for SaaS, FinTech and tech businesses, handling the entire production process from concept development and scriptwriting to storyboarding, voiceover, animation and sound design

i’m now exploring LinkedIn ghostwriting as an additional service!

i recently offered 5 free LinkedIn posts to a few founders through Facebook and received some interest, so i thought i’d extend the opportunity here too

the posts can cover your business, new products or features you’re launching, company updates, industry insights or even your own thoughts and experiences. you can mix and match topics, and i’ll handle the writing so you have one less thing to worry about

i’m looking for 3 more SaaS, FinTech or tech founders who’d be interested in trying this out, completely free!

if you’re interested, comment below with what your business does and what product or service you offer. i’ll personally reach out to discuss the details!

So I got about 8 mins to write this before I gotta go to a church get together.

Since my last post I explained that I was stuck on the logo, and wasn't sure about the branding.

Well after a few days of messing around with it, I finally came across a visual identity that I like. It's quite simple, and most importantly it is cohesive with the niche my app is for AND it also makes sense.

The elements aren't random, they are placed with intention.

Fast forward after that, with the logo taken care of the next steps were really just finalizing things, and making sure my app passed all of Apple's ToS, rules, etc.

What I did was just download all of the relevant PDF's fed them into ChatGPT and had it audit my app, I'm sure this process isn't perfect but it gets everything off the ground and I can refine it later.

I've also figure out my instagram handle for the app, bought a domain and put up a simple website.

So lots done!

Once we publish the app my attention moves to marketing which is really my bread and butter.

Marketing wise I think I'm going to have a serious account and a silly account, both promoting the app. I think the silly account has a lot of potential to catch on, especially since social media and marketing is relaxed with how you approach it.

So yeah, that's where we're at. One thing I'm finding important is not to get distracted with other ideas and apps. I have a lot of ideas in my head and it's really easy to just want to do other stuff too.

Like for example, I kinda want to start a Youtube channel with like a Minecraft Lets Play (I know SUPER saturated market lol), and yesterday I spent some time brainstorming how to pull that off, but then I realized, like I have my app. I don't need another thing to focus on.

That's not to say I can't do a Youtube channel for fun, but it shouldn't be looked as starting a business, it should just be some silly thing I do to blow steam off.

That's about all I got.

Looking forward to part 3 where we go into the marketing, and hopefully our app gets accepted to the Apple store.

Edit: Monetization wise, I'm thinking of the app being paid right from the start. (I think). It doesn't make sense why someone in the niche I'm targeting wouldn't pay for the app. Free is nice for more users, but meh, I think paid right off the start is the way to go.