Lockin

i'm 23, from Switzerland, finishing a degree that's already been outdated by ai. so i teach myself at night and build my own products with what actually works. all of it for one reason: the freedom to answer to no one. doing it all out loud here. the wins, the flops, the real numbers. no dreams sold. come see if a 23 yo can actually pull it off.

@rrhoover @seyitaylor i'm 23, had to look up what dreamweaver was. good to know everyone in here also started by making something ugly

@seyitaylor Made my first website with dreamweaver

what is dead may never die

true once people are actually seeing the post. the first line was never the bottleneck, nobody got far enough to read it. at my size i've started writing posts for a different reader: the person who clicked my profile after seeing me in someone else's replies. they already decided to look. hooks don't do much for that guy. did hooks do work for you from day one, or only once you had a bit of reach to stop?

Before anyone reads your post they decide whether to read it That doesn't only happen in the hook also in how the post looks on the screen aka formatting and structure Nothing else gets a vote until you win that So make the first line hit hard Short hooks stop the scroll better than clever ones Win the stop first Everything else comes after

no, i'm at $0 revenue across everything i've built, so that's an easy no for me. the thing i'd actually watch is what a tier like that does to the field. right now a broke student and a funded team run the same model, and that's the only reason someone like me is in this at all. put a $1000 tier on top and the ceiling goes back where it always was, except the people who can expense it won't notice it moved

if Claude Code launched a $1,000/month plan with much higher Fable 5 limits… would you buy it?

everyone answering this is going to say distribution, and they're right, but that's getting eaten too. i run a cold email setup that ai writes and sends for me, and so does everyone else, which is roughly why it stopped working. whatever's left has to be the part that doesn't survive being copied. taste, or honestly just being a specific person people come back to. what's your read, is distribution still holding up for you or is it getting noisier on your side too?

Everyone has AI now. That advantage expired fast. What's the new advantage?

@victor_bigfield building used to take long enough that you never found out you couldn't sell. now it takes a weekend and you're just standing there with it. i built a whole cold email setup for my web studio. zero clients so far. the machine works fine, i'm the broken part lol

you just coded your saas app with claude code. now you have to sell it. good luck.

the whole timeline is using reelfarm as proof that ai killed the moat. then the founder showed up in the replies and said revenue is low because he hasn't been marketing as much as he should, not because people cloned him. everyone quoted the revenue. nobody quoted that. building was never the moat. it was just hard enough that you could pretend it was. which is bad news for me specifically, because building is the only part i'm any good at so far.

proof more than money is the right frame, that's basically what's keeping me going right now. the bit i'm still figuring out is that at zero you're not proving the product yet, you're proving to yourself that you'll still be here in three months. the customer proof seems to come after that one.

@projetlockin i think in the beginning we're working for proof more than money. once you have 100 happy customers and testimonials, the snowball just keeps growing every day 😀

Founders work 16h/day at $0 MRR 10h/day at $100 MMR 8h/day at $1 000 MRR 4h/day at $10 000 MRR 2h/day at $100 000 MRR More MRR, less grind. Is it true? 🤔

@MAXIMPRESSocial @shergilldotdev @X the clearly defined part is probably the real filter. if someone follows you off a connect post they're following the thing you said you do, so it self selects. the follow back version skips that step entirely, which is why it ends up hollow.

@projetlockin @shergilldotdev @X If your content is clearly defined and your not doing the follow-follow back, then it's assured that it's not a one time follow.

It's my 5th day, and the growth isn't slowing down. It was just 2 days ago when I had 40k impressions. I've doubled and tripled most of the other metrics in 2 days. Thank you so much for all your support. This is why the @x community is unmatched.

yeah the floor is my whole problem, i'm at single digit views on posts right now. the part that stuck with me is what you said about the people though. this space is small enough that the same names keep turning up in each other's replies, so who you end up surrounded by probably matters more than the impression count does.

It's a mix of both, some will interact, some won't. The biggest upside is that you will get involved on more peoples feed, and if the stuff you write is engaging enough people will interact with it. From what I can see, after the impressions and likes I get, I think the algorithm tends to push out my content more. Before the most impressions I would get on a post was like 30-50, now it's like on the lowest end 300-400. Even though the numbers are still low, it adds a lot of value to your posts. Also, the people that ask you to connect are usually super nice and great people to get to know. You can make some actual meaningful connections too.

fair, and the testing history is stuff i don't have. i'll take your word on the SDET thing. where i'd still push back: volume changed. reviewing was always the bottleneck, but producing bad code used to take someone a week. now it takes a prompt. same bottleneck, a lot more pressure on it.

If the quality of what is being produced in the first place requires vastly increasing the amount of people reviewing it, then the primary issue is the quality of the code being produced. And lack of adequate testing was around long before AI, when all the engineers in test were ditched in favor of the Insider program and User Voice.

Just putting this out there, but the vibe coding at Microsoft absolutely has to stop. These quality issues across the board are a big red flag that Nadella needs to get a handle on.

@SeHozaifa mostly web stuff for local businesses right now, that one's live. the rest is early enough that talking about it would just be talking. something coming on the way tho. and u what are you building ?

@projetlockin Building in public is the best way to learn. What kind of products are you focusing on right now? Let's connect

i'm 23, from Switzerland, finishing a degree that's already been outdated by ai. so i teach myself at night and build my own products with what actually works. all of it for one reason: the freedom to answer to no one. doing it all out loud here. the wins, the flops, the real numbers. no dreams sold. come see if a 23 yo can actually pull it off.

@Tech_girl same. ten years ago i'd still be in a lab pipetting and wondering what the internet people were up to

@projetlockin I’m just really glad the industry is easier to enter now

We’re in a strange moment. Developers are learning how to work with AI at the same time AI is changing what it means to be a developer. Nobody really has a playbook for this.

that's the clearest answer i've gotten on this, thanks. the connect posts are the part i keep hesitating on, my worry is ending up with a number that doesn't read anything i write. did the people who connected that way actually stick around and engage, or is it mostly a one time follow?

My knowledge is limited, but from what I can see, there's reply impressions which bring in massive numbers and a lot of likes, but rarely convert to followers. And then there is engaging posts on your normal feed, which brings in a lot of positive engagement like comments and followers. From what I can see, you just need to make value for the people reading, so for me it was asking people to connect so we can be friends and go together. That was my original goal, and a lot of people are willing to connect. Just depends on what you're posting.

@thdxr weirdly reassuring coming from you

this shit is not easy guys

what gives it away is almost never vocabulary, it's shape. the too clean parallel, the "not x but y" reframe, the tidy little conclusion that ties it up at the end. humans writing fast don't land that neatly. you can feel it before you can point at it, which is exactly why the detectors are useless.

If you are a skilled reader, you do not need AI detectors or slop meters for content in your domain. One cannot become a highly skilled reader without the ability to think clearly, which is itself extremely rare. Skilled reading is at least as rare as skilled listening.

@kaif9998 that's the most useful and most annoying thing anyone's said to me this week. no shortcut to skip, just the years. still want your answer on the bad months though.

@projetlockin The difference between you and me is just 1-2 years of lock in

i turned down interview invites worth $160k, $220k and $250k this year to run an agency that makes $6k a month in january an AI startup hired me straight off X DMs. i quit that too after 2 months. good money, wrong direction today it's official: bildr studio - the product studio for founders who need it shipped, not pitched this is how we work 👇

@Gelassoldat ha fair. i use it, and i'm not gonna pretend otherwise on an account about being transparent. the qwen part is mine though, i ran it for months. tradingview lineups is actually a solid local use case.

@projetlockin I'm seeing Claude in your response ;). Haha. To verify TradingView lineups.

I'm in the process of installing a local model. I think Gemma seems to be feeling better than Qwen. Here are my specs. RX 9070 XT 48GB DDR4 Ram AMD 5600x. Any thoughts?

the account is called lockin because of one specific thought. i kept watching people my age actually pull it off, and instead of feeling small about it i thought ok, so it's doable. people with no more than i have are doing it right now. that's what moved me. not motivation, proof. the wanting had been there for years, i just never dared to start. lock in was the moment i stopped saying i'd get to it later and actually sat down. still early, still nothing to show for it. but i'm not waiting anymore.

@JonBuildsHQ courses. paid $1000 for one and walked out with nothing i couldn't have found for free in a week. what was being sold was never information, it was the feeling of being close to someone who already made it. still pay for tools without blinking though. what's yours?

What's something you refuse to pay for? 👇