Eva

For those meeting me for the first time, nice to meet you! 👋 Here's a little background on how I ended up here: I decided to become an indie hacker 6 years ago So I packed my life into 2 suitcases, quit my SF tech job, and off I went to Taiwan! 🥳 Why? A few reasons: 1. Autonomy. I wanted freedom over my time & future 2. Creative freedom. I wanted to build my own projects after years working in B2B 3. Future-proofing. I have profound and progressive hearing loss. I didn't dare gamble my future on employers So no matter how I sliced it, indie hacking was the path that made the most sense to me. And I had some craving for Taiwanese lu rou fan too As for the next 6 years......ummm, yeahhh, I wish I can say I have a bunch of success stories and hacks to share. But it's just me making every classic dev mistake. Several times over. 🙃 Allow me to share some of my greatest hits: 1. I love going all-in → Spent a year building each project. Without validation 2. I love learning new things → Spent half the time learning the next shiny new tech 3. I love building perfect products → Never shared my work until they're nearly "perfect" I know, I know, I want to go back in time and smack myself too. Anyway, here's my track record so far: 4 failures 1 small win (took 4 years to reach $500 MRR) 1 in progress (Conteflow) Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. One thing I did different this year was make an X account. For context, I am a super introvert who avoided social media for over a decade. But I was really tired. Of building stuff no one wants Of projects not getting any visibility Of not having any feedback So yeah, screw my comfort zone. I'm not the most prolific poster But I LOVE chatting with people who comes by my little corner and becomes a friendly face. So feel free to drop a hi sometime! 👋

So true, it’s really quite different psychologically to be on the other end, being asked a question really triggers this urge to respond 🤔 Closest I can think of would be like b2b AI chatbots to collect data from users or b2c AI companion apps but these are still pretty different haha Haven’t really found that middle ground, a b2c AI interviewer-like app for productivity/creativity/work

@evactivate Yes! I’ve always wondered when I was going to see a chatbot that is the one initiating mostly everything. The infinite possibilities of what you can ask I think overwhelms people and there are so many whose default mode is being passive and receptive. Anyone else doing this?

Since a month ago, I noticed a tiny but extremely engaged group of users using my app differently They've basically ignored all the social media & content creation features (you know, the whole point of the app 😅) Instead, they're ONLY using the AI chat feature. Like, multiple times a day, every single day So here goes nothing… I’m going to extract that feature into its own standalone AI chat app and see what happens 👀

@rcwhiteley I feel like there’s definitely a niche for this kind of app! Especially in education or something

@evactivate I thought about making a Socratic method AI, it just keeps asking you "why" so that you can get to the root cause of something.

@kelvongx I emailed them a few days ago and found out a couple are using it for creative storytelling or academic exploration and brainstorming

@evactivate Might make sense to jump on a call with them and find out what makes it tick for them?

@rcwhiteley Apparently some people like having an AI that does nothing but ask you questions 😆 It’s not a typical AI chat that you can prompt, cuz it’s an AI designed to prompt YOU for answers

@evactivate Lmao, what are they using it for? I guess you can survey them. Maybe they're copy/pasting into another app.

@ziyan_abbas Whooo, congrats! 🎉

ig we haven't celebrated 700 members. Thanks to all of you guys. To 800.....

@dmytro_omelian Retention has been my biggest challenge for a while so it’s nice that there’s one thing they like 😭

@evactivate at least that's great you have smth they use 😅

@Digital_Reverie Dang, make sure you get the rest you need!

@evactivate They’re saying probably three months! Bit of a reset for sure…

got the iv taken out I feel so free, one arm fully usable again lol I will never take having usable arms for granted ever again

@tom_antok @AbdulRafey13321 Definitely planning to target LinkedIn and the other channels too! Just starting with TikTok cuz it’d be the fastest to experiment on

@evactivate @AbdulRafey13321 Titok always worth experimenting. But what about Linkedin? IMO for such kind of product as you are building it has great potential.

Suddenly getting a lot of love from Google Play and I still have no idea why 😳 Users that discovered the app through Google Play literally jumped from <10 users a week to >200 a week

@AbdulRafey13321 Tbh, I haven’t done any marketing for the past couple months due to working on major app updates but I’m planning to start with TikTok soon. Currently, most of my traffic is coming from play store search and the rest seems to be organic word of mouth on various social platforms

@evactivate Hi Eva, Can you kindly tell which platforms you are using for your app marketing?

@Digital_Reverie Ouch, that sounds pretty bad man 💀 How long will it take to heal completely?

@evactivate Broke a bone in my arm! But just had surgery for it so should be back to normal in a while. Could always be worse so counting my blessings haha

@b3nhatch I hated tailwind for the first 2 weeks before loving it afterward 😆

I am trying to give Tailwind a chance. But as someone who is only accustomed to vanilla CSS, I am not loving it so far. Do I just need to learn more and give it a chance? Regular CSS just feels so much more organized and makes sense to me.

@Hritik7742 @enggirlfriend 😆

@evactivate @enggirlfriend No, you are too early to try.😅

hi do any girls follow me?? i think there’s like 10 of us right in this sea of dudes i wanna get your thoughts on my app (that’s only for the girlies) pls comment and i’ll DM you!!

@Alexander_333_ And also 10x more stressful with live users around haha 😂

@evactivate Oof I’ve had to do that before because of a bug in notification code. Feels so bad, but hey, at least you have users!

Currently writing an apology email to some users because of a dumb mistake Being the cheap person I am, I tried to stay on inngest's free plan for as long as possible until I couldn't So I finally upgraded to their pro plan and unleashed thousands of backlogged scheduled events that I didn't even know were there 😱 Thank goodness I had SOME guardrails so only 24 users were affected instead of hundreds But they got flooded with like 20-40 push notifications from my app in minutes So yeah, personally emailing every single person right now 😭

@ziyan_abbas 😭

@evactivate Oops

@wilbertliu Thanks Wilbert, it's all good now! inngest also later reached out with generous credits + looking into root cause too so that's really nice of them!

@evactivate OMG... Hope all is well now. Sometimes that's inevitable 🤷‍♂️

Well that escalated quickly (in the best way!) @itstonyhb (inngest founder) reached out personally with 6 months of credits and looking into root cause. I already liked inngest a lot as a product but your founder customer support is amazing too! 💙

@itstonyhb Just saw this, thank you so much for reaching out! Just replied to your email

@evactivate we're going to give you 6 months credits and reach out so that we can make sure you and no one else would ever be in this position. emailing you now