Daniel

Honestly Krabi is the best vacation spot I have been to. The nature, beaches, the blue water, the sunsets are incredibly stunning. People are sooo friendly here. So much stuff to do: island hoping, jungle tours, rock climbing, hikes and more. I’ll be taking the next 2 days off - trying to squeeze in some work feels like a waste of the place. Will be back working on Friday!

Day 10 of 30 building in public > Wrote a new blog post for SEO about why the US wants Greenland, check it out: learnorbis.com/blog/why-does-… > The IG Reel I decided to boost yesterday has kind of taken off. I set up 5$/day for 5 days to try it out. Got 350 followers in the first 2 days > Orbis paywall might need some work. I have a long onboarding and almost everyone who downloads the app gets through it, but then at the paywall the trial start rate is pretty bad. Might look at A/B testing it soon

Day 9 of 30 of building in public! Orbis hit 100 followers on Instagram today! 🎉 Been posting for 3 weeks now. Started with carousels for 1.5 weeks but they got literally 0 reach. Started posting Reels almost daily and got between 250 and 1200 views each plus a few dozen followers. Now decided to boost a reel which was doing decent: spent only 3$ so far but it got me over the 100! Being realistic, I don’t think the quality of the followers is great. Plus I decided to keep the page focused on educational geopolitcs content rather than app promotion, so conversion will not be great either. But it’s my first time posting on social media so I’ll definitely take this as a win 🙌🏻

Taking a 1 week trip to Krabi! Bangkok is amazing but it can also be loud and distracting. Will be taking some time here to think about growth/marketing and my next steps. I also noticed that I was in a tunnel, sitting in front of Claude code all day, and change of scenery really helps me thinking.

🔨 Day 8 of 30 building in public - Worked on Instagram Posts & Reels, started using Meta Business Suite and scheduled some posts - Trying to use Claude Code to automate content creation as much as possible, I think the results so far are really good! - Also released my first blog article for Orbis! This will be part of my SEO strategy: learnorbis.com/blog/why-taiwa…

@buildwithmaya Haven't used Cursor in like 10 months haha but I think you can add any model to it by providing an API key?

@DannyWestside6 Do you know if you can try it in cursor?

This is insane - at this rate Chinese models will blow past Anthropic and OpenAI end of this year. Gotta give Kimi a try again. Last time I tried I was fairly impressed with the model but I still prefered the Claude Code + Opus harness

Day 7 of 30 building in public - Used my app Orbis heavily today, which is fun because testing the app means I am learning about geopolitics. Found a few bugs. - Been reading and learning more about marketing & growth - Started using Meta Business Suite and preparing to schedule IG posts and reels for the next ~2 weeks, so I can focus on other things It's a slow grind, but you gotta show up day after day

Did Anthropic just reset usage limits for anyone else? 🤔

I’ve always been using the latest Opus model with high/xhigh effort because I wasn’t hitting limits and thought the extra intelligence was worth it. Just realised how much of a mistake this was… for simple, small changes or routine stuff I am now using Sonnet 5 on medium effort and it’s just 10x faster while easily still getting the desired results

🔨 Day 6 of 30 building in public Here is my growth & marketing plan for my app “Orbis: Learn Geopolitics” 👇 The truth is I have no idea what I am doing and I realized that rather than having a “big plan” I will just have to try stuff out, assess what’s working and make adjustments. Now for Orbis the good news is that geopolitics is a content gold-mine. There is an endless amount of posts you can make because there are constantly conflicts and news, and even outside of news there are 1000s of posts you can make on history, politics, great empires etc. Since I am figuring these things out for the first time, I will pause my Japanese app Tangoo for now, and fully focus on Orbis. The plan is this: 1) Post on Instagram The platform I am most familiar with and where I already followed geopolitics content for a long time so I have a sense for what works. I already started with a page which is strongly branded, but MOSTLY educational. This was a core decision to make: How much do I focus on my brand and app vs how much do I focus on generic geopolitics content? I went for the latter which means it will be easier to grow, but conversion from followers to downloads will be lower. 2) Start posting on TikTok Among Indie Hackers it seems that TikTok is much bigger and more effective. But I actually never used TikTok in my life, so just created an account which I am warming up and looking at the content there. Will start posting within the next week. 3) A medium-sized launch event Once I have my content engines running I wanna do some kind of launch where I will do Product Hunt plus a few other launch platforms, post on X, reach out to remaining friends etc. Also ask friends for ratings on the app. Get some momentum going. 4) SEO and ASO ASO seems simpler and faster, while SEO is a long-term game but I am very bullish on it: My app has 100s of lessons already, most of which could easily be re-purposed to a blog article. Maybe even a newsletter. So will start doing 1-2 blog articles per week. 5) Conversion & Retention Once I have a couple hundred downloads I will also have enough data to analyze the onboarding funnel, trial conversion, usage and retention data etc. So I will have to figure out where the bottlenecks are, if need to redesign the onboarding or paywall, increase push notifications for retention etc 6) Ads I might start with ads relatively soon, just to see what my CAC is and get some experience with running ads (I only did Google Ads before). But I wanna start with mostly organic, get product feedback, learn what my conversion rate and LTV is etc. Once you get to a point where LTV > CAC then Ads become a no-brainer and the main acquisition channel.

@buildwithmaya Yes 100%, can't say how much of a game changer this has been!

@DannyWestside6 That Claude skills seems like a massive help I might have to do something similar

🔨 Day 5 of 30 building in public Updates from today • My big Orbis update was approved (only took 9 hours on Apple!) • Got 1 trial conversion for Orbis and hit 30$ MRR! • But also got 2 trial cancelations. They were from Angola and Botswana, so I would assume the price might have been an issue? But will send them an email and ask for feedback Also I built a Claude Skill which connects to my Google Analytics, Revenue Cat and Posthog. The skill downloads all the lasted data and writes a report file with insights, trends and comparisons to the previous report. And then you can have a chat with Claude who can also see your codebase and give recommendations. Honestly this is an absolute GAME CHANGER! Would recommend this to anybody!!

I wonder if Apple and Google will at some point just launch a consumer-grade "app builder" on their phones. Where you can describe any type of app you want, it suggests you some designs, you pick the one you like most, and a few hours later that app is ready and installed on your phone. And you can just ask for changes or new feautres and it implements them for you. That would literally be the Indie Hacker's nightmare. But as a consumer its great - free app, custom design and features, you know that your data isn't sold etc

@martinrue Not endorsing a lack of security but its WAY more common than you think

@martinrue You haven't worked at a lot of startups I guess? 😅

If you find yourself in a situation where your agent even /can/ delete your prod DB, you should count yourself lucky your customers haven't yet figured out how incompetent and unqualified you are to be handling their data. And of course they're about to find out.

@__spekulator__ I haven't officialy launched yet so there are no user-reported bug fixed 😅

@DannyWestside6 i'd check which bug fixes were most user-reported. those are the ones that'll keep breaking when you stop touching code.

🔨Day 4 of 30 of building in public Submitted my final update of Orbis today: • Ground News style News aggregator • Daily AI briefing on the home page • Redesinged lessons page • Many bug fixes and UX improvements I will stop building now and only focus on marketing - wish me luck 💪🏻 Will share more on my growth plan soon!