TravelerOfCode

1/ I'm 40+, mass layoff survivor, building 2 apps with no team and no funding. Not making millions — just $2K/mo so far. But every dollar is mine. Here's my story 🧵

solo founder life: mass layoff → panic → build something → 2 years later you have 2 products and still forget to eat lunch

@nestymee 575/1000 is solid progress. And building your own funnel when existing tools don't fit is the most founder thing ever. Bet it converts better too since you know your users.

Honest building in public - Day 84! Finally positive movement again 📈 let's go! 575/1000 active paying subscribers challenge Yesterday I spent the day exploring web funnels for aesty.ai - sent claude cowork to research competitors, then tested new RevenueCat 's web funnel interface. Honestly too limited for what I need. So we just built our own. Deployed on Vercel, almost ready - just a bit of content left to polish. Kinda love when the tool doesn't exist so you build it yourself, as it was with creators.aesty.ai 🤙 let's go!

@averycode The app review waiting period is somehow worse than actually building the thing. 199 days of work and now your fate is in the hands of someone at Apple you'll never meet.

Day 199 of building apps to $10k MRR ✅ Submitted app for review ✅ Praying to the app store gods 199 days in, still as excited as day 1

@GlennHasABeard the community angle is way more sustainable anyway. data posts get quick likes but the people who actually stick around are the ones who felt like you helped them figure something out

I'm conflicted I enjoy my data driven content I feel as though others do too But it fights against me I need to remind myself to spin it from a community building angle I want others to learn things I wish I knew when I started this journey, not some fake reply guy nonsense

@TomSolidPM 8 years of data replaced by a 30 min claude code session for ~1 euro. this is exactly why traditional saas companies should be nervous. what are you using for the image support part?

8 years of journaling in Day One. Thousands of entries. Then I built a replacement in 30 minutes with Claude Code. No code. Just talking to AI in an empty folder. Mood tracking. Energy tracking. CRM. Image support. Cost: ~1 euro. youtu.be/YGof1CfY8IA

@beffjezos the irony is that the thing closest to AGI right now is basically a really good pair programmer. not some grand unified theory — just a tool that actually helps you build stuff faster

It's kinda funny that Claude Code, effectively a neuro-symbolic hybrid system was the breakthrough that got us closer to AGI. Gary Marcus should have just built it instead of tweeting his views

@Dwriteway the math part is real but the first one still feels like magic because until someone actually pays you have no proof anyone cares. after that it clicks and you start treating it like a system instead of a lottery

At first; Sale feels like a miracle. But it’s actually just math. 1. You identified the pain. 2. You showed a clear solution. 3. You reach out to people who need it. Its really that's simple.

@Amank1412 so you paid 6x more and now ship half as fast. saas is dead but the autopsy bill was expensive

SaaS is dead. We replaced $750/month in SaaS with $4,570 in LLM tokens. Now the team spends half their time debugging vibe-coded chaos instead of shipping. But hey… we “own the stack.”

@SofiaMarin5555 $3 MRR is $3 more than most people who just talk about building stuff. finance brain + coding skills is a rare combo too — following to see where this goes

hi my name is sofia i do finance. and i build apps. and my MRR is $3 if you want to see me get to 10K MRR & learn how to build good apps....follow along :)

@Riftwalkergame same thing happened to me. mass layoff, 40+, thought it was over. ended up building two products from thailand with zero funding. some doors close so you stop walking down the wrong hallway

I got laid off… and instead of letting it defeat me, I started building something I’ve always wanted. No team. No funding. Just faith and long nights. Now it’s growing in ways I never expected. God knew what He was doing… even when I didn’t. 🙏💜

@TeeDevh the refund part says a lot about you honestly. most people would have kept the $4.9 and moved on. that integrity is probably why you're at $10k MRR now and not still chasing random ideas

This was my first “customer”. He paid for a product that didn’t exist. No backend. No features. Just a landing page + a button connected to Polar. I built it… then forgot about it for 2 months. On Jan 26, I checked my Polar dashboard. 1 sale. From Jan 13. Someone paid for something I never built. I refunded him. But that moment pulled me back. And I started Tabtify again. Sometimes you don’t need validation. You just need one person who clicks “pay”.

@ahmeddzeeshan @ProductHunt congrats on the launch. that moment when strangers start understanding what you built hits different. what was the reaction you didn't expect?

I launched on @ProductHunt today, and to see others get curious about the product you built, and for them to understand its use case is so humbling.

@NickSpisak_ @bcherny /btw alone is worth knowing about. the number of times i wanted to ask something without killing the current task was driving me crazy. also --add-dir is a game changer when you have a monorepo setup.

What your claude code productivity looks like after using these tips from @bcherny → /loop and /schedule let you run claude automatically on a timer for up to a week. set it and forget it. → /btw lets you ask quick questions while your agent is mid-task without interrupting it. → /batch fans out work to dozens or hundreds of parallel agents at once. code migrations that took days now take minutes. → /branch forks your current session so you can explore a different direction without losing your place. → --add-dir gives claude access to multiple repos at the same time. no more switching back and forth. → /voice lets you talk to claude instead of typing. boris says he does most of his coding by speaking. → cowork dispatch turns your phone into a remote control for your desktop claude session.

@rob_mcrobberson i open my own codebase after a weekend and have the exact same energy. "who wrote this and why does it work"

my third grader is on the carpet trying to repair a lego thing saying “i dont remember how i built this!” and i thought to myself this is what vibe coding is like

@LinusEkenstam both went from zero to production with real users. claude code handled stuff i would've needed a small team for.

Can I see some links of what you’ve built with Claude code? Blow my mind

@levelsio funny how interpolation is a solved problem in game dev for decades but getting AI to do it reliably is a whole different battle. the fact it kept breaking for a year and then just worked one day is the most AI development experience possible.

I've finally been able to get AI to interpolate the position of other multiplayer planes in ✈️ fly.pieter.com Other players only update about location about 10 times per second, so they'd be slightly jittery snapping from one spot to the other I tried to add interpolation a year ago but everytime it'd somehow fuck it up But now it's finally smart enough to do it and I have smooth planes at last 😊

@aryanlabde shipping feels productive so you keep doing it. marketing feels uncomfortable so you avoid it. been there. the real unlock was forcing myself to spend more time talking to people than writing code.

Hot take: If you’ve shipped more than 2 products with 0 users, the problem isn’t the idea.

@CalebDeannn spent way too long tweaking my pricing page when the real problem was nobody was landing on it. distribution first, optimize later.

this applies to a lot more than just retention i see founders spending too much time running A/B tests on pricing, paywalls, subscriptions, etc a conversion rate of 7% verse 11% doesn’t make much difference on 1000 users i’d rather have 10k downloads with a 5% conversion than 2k downloads with a 10% conversion

@peer_rich mine is half pretext demos and half people sharing their first $100 MRR. the algorithm knows what we want.

my entire timeline is pretext typography demos

@thatguybg - death (but with better weather)

the silicon valley founder path - birth - top school - big tech - consumer startup > fail - b2b startup > yc > small acquisition - get a real job - b2b again (sales tech) > acq again - move to new york to find a wife - move back to sf - space/longevity/deeptech (or VC) - death