CRDS.studio

@audiencon Solve problems

two-word advice for new founders?

@iamlukethedev I'm too deep into my current project, but I think next project I'll do this. Rather than a waitlist, I'll have a "purchase now" button that turns into a waitlist or tracks clicks. Waitlist doesn't mean anyone will actually pay, just get some signal that people will, somehow.

Build in public lied to me. When I first shared the idea for ShotSnap, devs loved it. 40 people joined the waitlist. I was pumped. Then I shipped. I emailed every single one of them. Zero replies. So now I’m asking the real question: Were they actually interested or just farming engagement? Is build in public validating ideas or just validating tweets?

@alightinastorm X marketing (at least my feed) is just this now... make an outrageous claim which people will assume is true (who lies on the internet), people get interested and engage, it now reaches more people, gullible people buy said product. It's why I dislike most indie hackers now.

Assuming $100k/month is a true number: - earliest trustpilot reviews is from dec 24, then followed by a flood of ~170 reviews - owner has an IG acc with 14k followers, avg. of 1-2 comments per post and a sus amount of likes - indicates a lot of fake / inactive followers, IG account active since 2024 - It's just one guy who launched his atelier in 2024 - he sells each dog image for $19 (DOWNLOAD NO PRINT) so let's break it down: We can conclude he has dog (lol!) organic reach and he had to turbo-speedrun an ad campaign on Meta/TT Unlikely he had UGC in such a short time. Only realistic target audience (has the budget, does not know chatgpt exists, is lonely enough to impulse buy an image of their dog for $19): Single Boomers on Facebook, maybe IG, definitely shit conversion rate on TikTok Assuming he converts about 1 in 20 visitors and didn't use a cheap ass AI gen model but nano banana pro for $0.15 per img, the numbers: To achieve $100k, - 5k buyers for a digital print, likely mixed with some lone retards buying the framed print for $90 - at a conversion rate of 5% of visitors, that's about - 100,000 visitors in a month - Assume the "free first image gen in low quality" about 40% of visitors - roughly $6k in nano banana api costs - $40k ad spend buying zuck a new rolex - some crumbs for lovable So yea, he could've pulled that off but if it is true, which given anton's chronic lying about revenue is sus: Bros, drop all your startups and sell dog pictures for $19 with the most minimal wrapper possible, abuse the $5 free tier on vercel v0 and get fucking rich cause apparently Anton found an infinite money printer glitch in the matrix Bonus points to the artist for being likely a nepo baby cause that ass of a show he pulled in 2022 for the european parliament was paid by my tax money fr

@yongfook Do you not still think distribution is the hardest part of it all? Or is AI solving that for you too?

AI isn't just lowering the barrier for new indiehackers. It's also extending the shelf life of old ones, like me. Before Claude, I honestly didn't think I would have it in me to code another SaaS. I know what needs to be built and how to do it, but the 12 hour days of grinding / coding / debugging are a young man's game and I've been through it too many times. AI massively reduces that burden. I feel like I've been given another 10 years of indiehacker life to enjoy.

@audiencon The fact that I need to market... One thing is built and making very little money with 0 marketing, another thing is being finished that needs me to start marketing it. — Developer who hates marketing

what’s holding you back right now?

@forgebitz Neither can be done well without guidance.

it's wild that ai is able to build your entire app but can't write a decent reply on x

@levelsio I don't know if I am the only one, but Telegram's UX is just so unenjoyable. I stopped using NomadList's chat because of it.

People have a severe blindspot about Telegram Literally #1 or #2 social app in most of Europe Already for years Above Whatsapp, Facebook, Signal, Messenger, Discord etc.

@illyism Do you use a SaaS for this, or do you code your own? What's the best in the space? What features are required?

99% of blogs are missing this conversion trick: + Exit intent popup + Scroll popup + Sidebar CTA + Bottom banner One site I audited? Zero conversion elements, they're leaving 80% of potential signups on the table Every visitor should see 4 chances to convert 🎯

@levelsio I believe there is a significant disconnect between what developers consider visually appealing and what the general population deems visually appealing or good enough.

Honestly maybe I'm blind but why isn't it a good landing you think? I'm not trolling It explains the features well, has a big CTA, works on mobile? Should it look more flashy with transitions and gradient borders etc?

@levelsio Are you doing any marketing? Assuming no... Also, what is the use case you see most? Just curious how it is still earning so much when Gemini/ChatGPT seems to be enough for most use cases. I am sure there is a use case for Lora based generation, just because of the likeness.

✨ Photo AI just reached a new record of $150,000/mo 💳 2,573 active subscribers 💸 87% profit margin 👌 100% bootstrapped + $0 funding 😊 Employees: 1 = just me on my laptop 🥞 Tech: PHP + jQuery + SQLite on a Hetzner VPS with Nginx and Ubuntu It took 2 years, 7 months, 14 days, or almost 1000 days to get there Photo AI started out in 2022 as Avatar AI (the first app to make those gimmicky avatars which started that trend) Then I pivoted it into Photo AI a year later to take real AI photos of yourself. Because I thought that might be possible next. In a way I was way too early and the photos were actually pretty bad for about 2 years (remember the hands?). Faces were distorted and it didn't resemble you much. I used Stable Diffusion back then and it was the best model but it wasn't so good at people. But with a lot of help from @philz1337x I then built a giant pipeline of models on top of other models to fix faces, hands, and bodies and upscaling it to make it look somewhat good, but still it wasn't great In a way I had product-market-fit (PMF) but without the product. Because I knew the demand would be there but the product, well the technology, definitely wasn't there (yet!) Then in 2024, a new AI image model called Flux was launched and overnight Photo AI was now good enough: the photos actually really resembled you, the quality was high and hands, faces and bodies looked real I now did have PMF! Since then Photo AI has grown a lot and it's now become a highly realistic AI photo and video production studio for content that features real people. There's other AI image generators, but they're not as good with people as mine, because that's my focus and niche Photo AI is now used by fashion designers (to try on clothes), ad makers (for talking videos), marketers (to show people presenting physical products), education companies (to teach people courses), short film makers (making videos with real actors) and game designers (to create 3d characters from people) And even just people who want to do a photo shoot for their social media profile or dating app and can't afford an expensive $1000 photographer (you get 1000 pics for $49, so about 20x-50x cheaper) The app itself is standing on the shoulders of giants, that I am grateful every day for, which are the countless AI models I use and combine which are made by companies like Black Forest Labs, Bytedance, Kuaishou and more recently Google (with Nano Banana) made by very smart AI researchers and my GPU providers FAL and Wavespeed hosting them reliably When I started people kept telling me I just made a "GPT wrapper" (of course it didn't even use ChatGPT), then a "Flux wrapper". I now use a lot more models than Flux, so yes I guess it's more like "shitloads of models duct taped together with a lot of frontend and backend logic added wrapper" but that doesn't roll of the tongue so easily 😂 Most of my traffic comes from SEO and specifically pSEO, there's a lot of sub pages I added (like the photo packs and individual phtoos) which capture a lot of traffic and sign ups. X is about 9% of traffic and even less of paid signups, so a lot less than people usually think. I'm mostly on here to tell my story, X doesn't actually help so much revenue wise. Increasingly ChatGPT etc is becoming a bigger referrer of traffic and paid signups though There's so many other AI apps out there, and mostly we all use the same models, and I guess Photo AI shows there is enough pie for everyone, it's not the biggest either, but it's big for me and it's nice in its own way and I get happy working on it It's been a wild ride, and stressful at times (especially during 2023 trying to get Stable Diffusion to work), but mostly just really exciting to be able to work with groundbreaking technology every day and get paid for it too I remember in 2021 with my businesses Nomad List and Remote OK sitting and thinking "after almost a decade coding, everything is finally kind of stable now, now I am satisfied" but then the AI wave started in mid 2022 and I just knew I had to jump on it and catch that wave and I did with my entire being :D And I caught it I think! 🏄‍♂️ Surf's uppppppppp 🤠

@yongfook I went down the route of Rails + Inertia + React for a little. Unless you have a very interactive frontend, I don't think anything beats the simplicity and speed of development that a monolith (Rails is my choice) offers.

Bannerbear got to $1 million ARR on Rails 6 and jQuery. You don’t need to be on the cutting edge of tech all the time.

@kennnG Hey Ken, found you when I started shifting my projects to Inertia (React) + Rails, and have just been following the journey now. I'm focusing on onboarding/flow/making things look polished. How do you decide on styling/layout/etc? I think this is the foundation for marketing.

I haven't really written any code for the last 2 months and here's why you probably shouldn't either if you're trying to launch your startup.

@petamarket Do you plan your posts ahead of time? I think, unless you are batching your week's posts all on a Sunday and having them post throughout the week, it seems like more hassle than it is worth.

post bridge = good product did i pay = yes did i use it in the last week = no am i churning soon = probably why?

@robj3d3 No (even now). And especially no if I claimed to make millions.

If you were offered $500k in exchange for nuking your reputation Would you take it? 🤑

@TimoBuilds_ Delusional belief. I'll do it at some point if it continues (and move onto something else), but I know I have more to give before wrapping it up.

0MRR Club what stops you from deleting the whole repo?

@framer_x Does this work off of images, or is it all prompting? If I wanted to use myself as the base (via a Lora), would it work?

The best way to learn is by DOING 🫡 Inside Cartoon Hero you’ll create 6 animations. Each one will teach you the skills needed to bring your own ideas into epic AI cartoons. Beginner or pro, you’ll do it with ease & have fun along the way. Here’s what you’ll make 👇

@Adityapandeydev @dresaasy The IDE for cursor is finicky with the hotkeys I use, and "vibe coding" is overrated if you care about the quality of code. Co-Pilot and auto-complete or AI outside the IDE works just fine. Cancelled my Cursor subscription and am happier coding now.

@dresaasy Why?

Is anyone still using VS Code?

Going to be vibe coding (or close to it) my first project. Want to build a personal time tracking app for desktop, have almost no experience with Flutter (open to other suggestions), so it should be fun.

@amrayupon What worked for you? Long form content? Short form content? A lot of pages? Little pages? Long tail keywords? Short tail? CTR is great... very jealous there. Congrats!

Our little site after three years of daily grinding has steadily gained traction with some SEO and word-of-mouth.

@PLBompard A problem of mine. I always thought this was a big reason that a lot of very intelligent people can't cut it as entrepreneurs. It also takes a "who cares" attitude.

what if we stopped overthinking and just did the things?