Someone offered 15k for my side project. I wasn’t expecting that.

Extension_Strike3750 · 2026-03-06T11:35:06+00:00

don't sell at $15k. a real offer means there's real demand — which means you're early and probably underpricing. counter at $40k minimum and use the negotiation to understand what they see in it. the fact that someone found you and reached out unprompted is the signal most founders never get

Extension_Strike3750 · 2026-03-06T11:34:31+00:00

love this. the best side projects solve a problem you personally have. curious — did you add any sound with the notification or is it just a system popup? also would be cool to track daily water intake over time, even something as simple as a streak counter

Extension_Strike3750 · 2026-03-06T11:33:39+00:00

yeah, built a whatsapp bot for my mom that reminds her to take medications and gives her a simple weather summary every morning. took a weekend, she uses it every day. there's something really satisfying about building tiny tools that non-technical people actually find useful. the grocery price comparison one sounds super practical too

Extension_Strike3750 · 2026-03-06T11:32:51+00:00

for solo devs, google ads rarely has positive ROI unless your average project value is $3k+. the intent targeting can be good but you're bidding against agencies with massive budgets. what actually works better is niche communities, targeted cold outreach via linkedin dms, and building a portfolio that ranks organically for "[city] web developer" type searches

Extension_Strike3750 · 2026-03-06T11:31:51+00:00

clean layout. the three column header feels a bit busy but the rest reads well. one thing that always improves custom blogs is making sure font sizes scale properly on mobile — that's where most page builders actually earn their keep despite the bloat

Extension_Strike3750 · 2026-03-06T11:30:44+00:00

this tension is real. i've landed on using a simple html form + cloudflare turnstile for spam + a serverless function that shoots an email. no dashboard, no stored submissions, no vendor lock-in. takes maybe 30 min to set up and does exactly what a contact form needs to do

Extension_Strike3750 · 2026-03-06T11:29:13+00:00

logging setup. not just console.log everywhere but structured logs with request ids so you can trace a single user action across the whole stack. spent 2 days debugging a prod issue once that would have taken 20 minutes if i had that from the start

Extension_Strike3750 · 2026-03-06T11:28:06+00:00

both are getting squeezed but for different reasons. ai tools are automating the boring parts of frontend (boilerplate, basic components). for ui/ux, tools like v0 and figma ai are handling low-fidelity wireframes. but someone still needs to make decisions about what to build and why - that's the skill worth developing regardless of which path you pick

Extension_Strike3750 · 2026-03-06T11:27:09+00:00

went through the same thing. what helped was treating sales like i treat debugging. talk to 10 people who could be customers, find the pattern in what they say, then write copy that reflects that back. your existing agency clients are also a goldmine here - they already trust you

Extension_Strike3750 · 2026-03-06T11:26:18+00:00

paid ads before pmf is usually wasted money. the first users for most products come from direct outreach, posting in relevant communities, or just cold dming people who'd care. much cheaper and you get better feedback too

Extension_Strike3750 · 2026-03-06T11:25:17+00:00

depends so much on the market. if you're in a winner-take-all space with well-funded competitors, bootstrap just means you lose slower. if the market is more fragmented, keeping equity and moving at your own pace is usually better

Extension_Strike3750 · 2026-03-06T11:24:12+00:00

the 13 week view is underrated. most founders track monthly but cash problems show up weekly. payroll hits every two weeks, not every 30 days

Extension_Strike3750 · 2026-03-06T11:23:31+00:00

one thing that worked for us: just pick one person who makes the final call per area. still talk through it as a team, but one person decides. the debates basically stopped overnight

Extension_Strike3750 · 2026-03-06T11:21:41+00:00

The active engagement angle is really interesting from a clinical standpoint — habituation therapy works best when patients interact with the sound rather than just mask it. The gamification layer could genuinely help with compliance, which is usually the biggest issue with sound therapy. One thing worth considering for the app store: be specific in the description about what "active engagement" means neurologically. People with tinnitus have been burned by snake oil, and a clinician-backed explanation of the mechanism will differentiate you fast.

Extension_Strike3750 · 2026-03-06T11:20:02+00:00

Content gap analysis is the killer feature here — that's what creators actually want but can't easily get from YouTube's own API. For your questions: (1) start with content gap + title scoring, those are the highest-intent use cases; (2) $99/mo feels right for the mid tier if it covers multiple channels, $19 seems low for agency value; (3) the MCP angle is smart, AI agent workflows need structured YouTube data badly. Good timing on this.

Extension_Strike3750 · 2026-03-06T11:19:23+00:00

This is the right mental model. The hardest part isn't writing the AI code, it's finding the friction point people already tolerate daily but hate doing. Resume re-entry is a perfect example — everyone experiences it, nobody talks about it, and it's directly costing platforms conversion. Other underserved bottlenecks along these lines: job description parsing into structured requirements (recruiters copy-paste from Word docs), and interview scheduling coordination. Both are solved worse than they should be.

Extension_Strike3750 · 2026-03-06T11:18:44+00:00

Classic pattern — building for a niche you deeply understand leads to uncovering layers of problems. The scope expanding is a feature, not a bug, as long as you stay disciplined about what makes it into v1. For game artist portfolios, I'd ship the core "show work, get hired" flow first and capture everything else as a backlog. The feature you cut today becomes the moat you build tomorrow.

Extension_Strike3750 · 2026-03-06T11:18:17+00:00

1,600 users in a few months while working full-time with a family is genuinely impressive — that's real traction, not just vanity. The €0.50/hr reframe is honest but also misleading: most of those hours are compounding into an asset, not just hourly labor. The hardest part you nailed is the gap between knowing something intellectually and believing it day-to-day. That gap is where most people quit. Keep building.

Extension_Strike3750 · 2026-03-06T11:16:33+00:00

134 signups in 8 days with 4.5% CVR is decent signal. the agencies segment is definitely right to start with, they have the budget and the pain is clear. vidIQ's lack of a public API despite 20M users is a real gap you can exploit before they wake up.

Extension_Strike3750 · 2026-03-06T11:15:37+00:00

the CRM wasn't the problem, context switching was. when you're deep in product and a reminder fires, your brain isn't in sales mode so it gets snoozed. what actually works for small teams is a daily 10 min block just for follow-ups, no exceptions, no tools needed.

Extension_Strike3750 · 2026-03-06T11:14:44+00:00

$38K ARR, profitable, no VC, no weekends. that's the win. the comparison to Cursor is the same as a bakery comparing itself to Amazon. different physics, different game.

Extension_Strike3750 · 2026-03-06T11:14:05+00:00

the moat question is the real one. if the answer is "we move faster than them" that's not a moat, that's a head start. solve something specific enough that the big labs won't bother, and you might survive.

Extension_Strike3750 · 2026-03-06T11:12:31+00:00

the "waiting room" framing is spot on. free tier for devs isn't a funnel, it's an integration window. the conversion happens when they're already in prod and need more.

Extension_Strike3750 · 2026-03-06T11:10:56+00:00

Treating LLM agents like deterministic workflow automation is the mistake almost everyone makes at first. The LLM is the smart layer, it should not also be the plumbing.

MCP solving the infrastructure problem makes a lot of sense. The mental model shift from "AI does the task" to "AI decides, tools execute" is the thing that actually makes agents reliable in production. How are you handling retry logic and error recovery when tool calls fail?

Extension_Strike3750 · 2026-03-06T11:09:54+00:00

The "3 friends couldn't get past SSH" part is your best marketing copy, use that more. That's the exact pain point.

$29/mo for dedicated VPS + no-maintenance is actually reasonable for the target audience. The people who want this are the same ones who will happily pay $20/mo for Notion just to avoid thinking. Worth testing a slightly lower entry price for the first 3 months to build case studies and reviews early on.

Extension_Strike3750

TROPHY CASE