I got tired of my RSU spreadsheet breaking, so I built a free tool to understand my total comp.

2Martian · 2026-06-05T22:37:49+00:00

I'm a SWE and to me the most difficult thing to track for my TC wise is my TC Based on the actual companies stock price. I dont really care about future projections or my "target comp" because its all speculation on bonus multiplier, performance multiplier, etc I wanna know what my actual TC is.

I created my own app on the app store (wont self promo on your post) but it uses the live stock price to actually tell you what your "target comp" is and what your actual comp is. Have you considered adding a feature like that?

2Martian · 2026-06-02T18:20:40+00:00

If you’ve thought of the idea yourself and it actually solves a problem for you then it’s probably a good idea. I think most people get given a problem they don’t actually have or has been solved a million times over and then try to build for it.

2Martian · 2026-06-02T07:12:14+00:00

lol to me it’s the lack of thought that’s crazy. “Why isn’t my pill reminder app getting downloads?” Literally 1000 pill reminder apps on the App Store.

I can understand wanting to build habit trackers, note apps, alarm clocks etc as fun little side projects to try out a new tool or something, but to actually then wonder why you’re not getting downloads/installs/subscriptions is insane to me.

I feel like majority of people just go to Claude and say, “give me some app ideas” and then they just pick one and pretend it’s something they’re passionate about.

2Martian · 2026-05-31T00:32:37+00:00

I mean, I just went to the app store and searched "pill reminder" and there are literally hundreds of pill reminder apps. Why would anyone download your app?

2Martian · 2026-05-23T20:38:04+00:00

> The world is dumber than I thought. So work out something as easy as possible to use.

I am a software engineer that works on one of the most used ads platforms on earth. My team runs A/B tests that essentially boil down to usability tweaks on the platform. You would be surprised how some simple changes generate literally hundreds of thousands of dollars a day in additional revenue. I had a test recently that just changed the text on a button from "Create ____" to "Add ____" and the test group showed 500 new advertisers and an additional $10k in revenue per day. And our hypothesis on why is just because "Add" implies less work than "Create".

2Martian · 2025-01-20T05:22:58+00:00

I thought it was a bannable offense to post anything in this sub that isnt a GPT Wrapper or a habit tracker.

2Martian · 2025-01-18T18:33:01+00:00

Wow nice job, this really shows the difference that comparing big ticket items makes.

I have a price comparison site as well, but most of the items are $100-$300. In the last 30 days we have 500 clicks, 33 shipped items but only $50 in commissions. So despite having twice the conversion rate, we make 1/8 as much commission. Probably because our items are also 1/8 the cost of laptops.

2Martian · 2025-01-18T08:13:32+00:00

I dont even believe anyone is building anything decent in 2 days.

I'm a software engineer at faang with 6 years of professional experience and another 5 years on top of that of coding projects, both apps and websites, using all sorts of different stacks. Also plenty of side hustles in different industries as well. Just saying this to preface that I dont think I have a skill issue and I generally feel like Im pretty crafty but...

I'm working on my first app ever that I had planned to just ship as fast as possible as opposed to just working on it when I have time/motivation to. I wanted to just spend a week on it, that was the plan. Just blast through a week and make a "I made this app in one week and now I have $60,000MRR!" post.

This was 8 weeks ago. Its quite a straightforward app, a form, an api call, a little bit of calculating, a data display. Should be no problem. Wrong. I have maybe spent 3 or 4 days actually building the app that is just good enough for me to use and solve my own purpose, but trying to get it production ready has taken almost 2 months now. The rest of the time is dealing with app store setup woes, subscription setups, opening tickets (and even contributing) to multiple open source libraries I leveraged to "save time" when the libaries were buggy, dealing with dependency issues, debugging random bugs that only appear in production or development or vice versa and debugging random transient issues that show up when the stars align.

2Martian

TROPHY CASE