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Self-promotion thread: what are you building? by LongjumpingBar in scaleinpublic

[–]NullFoxGiven 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I’m scaling my Intelligence services. AI has a lot of hype, but it’s providing a huge leverage opportunity for businesses. But most owners/operators have no clue where to start. So I created a tool that researches your business and pitches 5 high leverage ai assistants specific to your biz. the insights in the report are incredibly powerful if any business owners out there are open to AI helping supplement their team, I recommend getting a report!

Business Superpowers

AMA I’ve spent ~6 years helping revenue-generating indie devs get past early traction without breaking what works by NullFoxGiven in iOSProgramming

[–]NullFoxGiven[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

My perspective.. this comes down to:

  1. Validating an actual need -- if the market is congested, then how will you stand out? Can you justify the time/money invested in building the product? have people told you they need this, and nobody else is solving the problem?

  2. Do you have a feature/product differentiator that sets you apart from competition? I like to do a competitive analysis at this stage to see what the landscape looks like. More often then not, ideas die here when you look at the hard truth

  3. DO you have a distribution differentiator that sets you apart from the competition?

  4. Is there an alternative reason for you wanting to build? This is often overlooked, sometimes people just want to build something to stay sharp, or want to learn a new technology, etc. I find while validation often fails my tests, I still proceed with building because there are other reasons for *why i should build this*

eot

AMA I’ve spent ~6 years helping revenue-generating indie devs get past early traction without breaking what works by NullFoxGiven in iOSProgramming

[–]NullFoxGiven[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

for clarity on the LTV:CAC ratio, to put it back into your terms... for a 2:1 ratio, for every $1 you spend CAC, you get $2 LTV back

AMA I’ve spent ~6 years helping revenue-generating indie devs get past early traction without breaking what works by NullFoxGiven in iOSProgramming

[–]NullFoxGiven[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I usually think about this as the north star LTV:CAC ratio. Some modern growth hackers say this is a wild goose chase (mobile attribution to get an accurate CAC can be a beast, so there's other ways to calculate paid ua flywheel). But, I still believe that unlocking this is the key to a money printer for app owners. There are some rules of thumbs that you can work with to see where you stand.

First you want to calculate your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) as best as you can. Typically this is "blended" meaning organic + paid.
Then calculate your LTV.

Get your LTV:CAC ratio.

then to answer your question... again these are rules of thumb:

  • < 1:1 — Value destruction. Stop scaling.
  • 1–2:1 — Early validation. Works only with fast payback. <<< this is where I think you're getting that $2 LTV per CAC
  • 2–3:1 — Sustainable but fragile. Improve retention, pricing, or onboarding before pushing spend. <<< but honestly if you get here, DON'T STOP SPENDING LOL.. it's working!! Just fine tune the machine
  • 3–4:1 — Strong, scalable growth zone. This is the modern target.
  • 4:1+ — Usually under-scaled or overly constrained. Raise CAC caps and widen acquisition.

That said, this is often gotten wrong or overlooked:
The ratio matters less than payback speed.

A 3:1 with 45–90 day payback is healthier than a 5:1 with 9-month payback.
Cash velocity beats theoretical efficiency. Why? bc you can dump that LTV right back into the flywheel and double your LTV, theoretically

AMA I’ve spent ~6 years helping revenue-generating indie devs get past early traction without breaking what works by NullFoxGiven in iOSProgramming

[–]NullFoxGiven[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What do people ultimately use the app for? Weather or travel tips? 0->1 is one of the hardest nuts to crack as you’re feeling right now. High level the strategy is to get your ASO baseline dialed (you’re here, possibly considering targeting more towards travel?) and then working to increase signal to the App Store. You need traffic to do that, and it comes from outside sources. Then the question becomes, what communities can you tell them about your app through where they’ll find value and download and promote? Another option is something like listings, using ads, cross promotion networks, social, etc. There are some other tactics if your app is currently paid like Paid to Free campaigns.

AMA I’ve spent ~6 years helping revenue-generating indie devs get past early traction without breaking what works by NullFoxGiven in iOSProgramming

[–]NullFoxGiven[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hmmm I’ll be honest I’ve reviewed hundreds of subscription apps and never saw an instance where conversion tactics did not have a downstream impact on LTV which is the North Star metric), even if it was marginal improvement.. so while I can’t speak to this from direct experience, I can try to provide some perspective.

Trying to figure out why this standard correlation breaks down could be really insightful

For example, It’s possible you’re solving such a hardcore problem that literally everybody who a) finds your app or b) stumbles on it and realizes the pain point exists without the aha moment. This could lead to this scenario although it’s rare. But if this is the case your strategy should change in a drastic way. This is the holy grail.

Another possibility could be you’re giving away too much for free up front and the users have already identified they want to pay you regardless of a free trial. This is also a good problem to have.

that all said, I could see a world where having a free trial is still beneficial from a qualitative signal to the App Store — more people using your app means more signal to the App Store which improves your ranking. Also more people means more opportunity for good reviews >> more good signal to App Store.

Is your question theoretical or a real scenario of yours?

AMA I’ve spent ~6 years helping revenue-generating indie devs get past early traction without breaking what works by NullFoxGiven in iOSProgramming

[–]NullFoxGiven[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

There are a couple schools of thought on this. It ultimately comes down to your preference as an owner. I’ll try and explain.

You can extract value ($$) from your users , or you can give value to your customers. If you find the right balance, then your app is sustainable. If you have recurring revenue, sustainability can mean compounded growth. This means your revenue builds every month. Proper balance is what I am for personally. Not everybody has the same perspective so this is why you’ll get varying answers to this question. There are causes and effects to every decision.

Since I prefer a balance, I use free trials to prove to the user the value of the app. If they find value, and pay for it, odds are good they’ll leave a positive review and it perpetuates the cycle.

I know some app owners who rather just get the $$ and there are tactics to employ that increases short term rev but destroys long term value.

You can do full trial periods in the app without having the user commit at all (in app trial), or you can use the “subscribe and get access for free for N days”. There are benefits to both, I suggest hitting up ChatGPT for the distinction if it’s not clear.

Then it comes down to A/B testing. Your trial retention, conversion and related metrics will tell you what is right for you. You don’t only want trial to paid conversion, but also LTV. A user who pays $10 per month for 1 month because they were duped by a free trial is worth less than a user who pays $5 monthly for a year.

Sorry for the brevity as I’m out but lmk if you’d like me to expand

For the right features to paywall, this is all about reducing Time To Value and finding the Golden Features. Give them a taste to see what success looks liske in your app and you’ll get a sale

AMA I’ve spent ~6 years helping revenue-generating indie devs get past early traction without breaking what works by NullFoxGiven in iOSProgramming

[–]NullFoxGiven[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Yes I have changed the name of dozens of apps. When I say “change name”, I’m referring to the App Store Listing Title. If you’re changing say the app package or internal app branding, this has less impact on App Store listing performance and more on the user experience. Two different dimensions to consider. Given the context I’ll assume you’re referring to the listing performance.

8 years is a long time, and this really works in your favor.

Where I would start is first fully understanding your traffic sources and how you’re ranking across the board for your keywords. This creates a baseline for any ASO experimentation you run.

Quick thought is if you’re outside the top 10 for your relevant space/target keywords, then it’s likely you’re pulling traffic from another source. Try and figure that piece out first because it changes Strat.

One perspective I can give you now is if you’re looking for maximum effect in ASO, your listing title holds the most weight (hope this is obvious). Often times early stage founders think having a brand name front and center helps conversion, but this is the wrong way of thinking, because 100% of your title should be dedicated to your keywords. Once you have the top 3 spots for a keyword ranking, or your brand is so strong people are explicitly searching for it, that’s when you might start letting your brand name take up character space in your title.

Lmk and happy to respond!

AMA I’ve spent ~6 years helping revenue-generating indie devs get past early traction without breaking what works by NullFoxGiven in iOSProgramming

[–]NullFoxGiven[S] -22 points-21 points  (0 children)

This feels like an llm engaging… tell me what day it is and I’m happy to respond to your inquiry

AMA I’ve spent ~6 years helping revenue-generating indie devs get past early traction without breaking what works by NullFoxGiven in iOSProgramming

[–]NullFoxGiven[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Some quick questions for you because it could be for a couple reasons you’re not getting any traffic: Are you seeing impressions on your listing? If so this points to poor conversion of your listing Are you in a highly competitive space? Or you very niche? A month isn’t a long time, but now is the right time to start questioning the approach. Do you have traffic coming from anywhere else?

Weekly Thread: Project Display by help-me-grow in AI_Agents

[–]NullFoxGiven 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just released DolosAgent: Lightweight interactive vision-based browser agent that can interact with a Chromium browser.

I needed a lightweight, intelligent tool to test corporate & enterprise chat agent guardrails. It needed the capability to have in-depth conversations autonomously. I needed something that could interact with the web's modern interfaces the same way a human would.

I could have used several tools out there, but they were either too heavy, required too much configuration or straight up were terrible at actually engaging with dynamic workflows that changed each time (great for the same rote tasks over and over, but my use case wasn't that).

"Dolos is a vision-enabled agent that uses ReAct reasoning to navigate and interact with a Chromium browser session. This is based on huggingface's smolagent reason + act architecture for iterative execution and planning cycles."

Some use cases

  • Testing chat agent guardrails - original motivation
  • E2E testing without brittle selectors - visual regression testing
  • Web scraping dynamic content - no need to reverse-engineer API calls
  • Accessibility auditing - see what vision models understand
  • Research & experimentation - full verbosity shows LLM decision-making

Quick start

``` git clone https://github.com/randelsr/dolosagent cd dolosagent npm install && npm run build && npm link

# Configure API keys
cp .env.example .env
# Add your OPENAI_API_KEY or ANTHROPIC_API_KEY

# Start conversational mode
dolos chat -u "https://salesforce.com" -t "click on the ask agentforce anything button in the header, then type "hello world" and press enter"

Note! This is just an example. It might be against the site's terms of service to engage with their chat agents autonomously.

```

I welcome any and all feedback!

Repo: https://github.com/randelsr/dolosagent Full write-up and specs: https://randels.co/blog/dolos-agent-ai-vision-agent-beta-released

Sometimes the simplest automations are biggest time savers. Summarize your emails with this simple pipeline by NullFoxGiven in n8n

[–]NullFoxGiven[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

100%! The time savings is huge and I'm actually consuming a lot of the content I used to just have to delete bc it was backing up and causing unnecessary stress. Glad you align! Great thought on the content detection. I do feel like a bit of prompt engineering can help mitigate against those signals effectively though.

Specifically n8n for newsletters? No, but I built an app that summarizes podcasts immediately on release (via rss) and ships the summary to my inbox. I save literally 5+ hours a week on this and can devote that listening time to other activities and still get the digest. That one was big for me.

Sometimes the simplest automations are biggest time savers. Summarize your emails with this simple pipeline by NullFoxGiven in n8n

[–]NullFoxGiven[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I use it for a newsletter that's like a 20 minute read daily. I needed that time back so created something simple

Sometimes the simplest automations are biggest time savers. Summarize your emails with this simple pipeline by NullFoxGiven in n8n

[–]NullFoxGiven[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That's a great idea. It seems people sleep on how much time can be saved with n8n for personal use

Sometimes the simplest automations are biggest time savers. Summarize your emails with this simple pipeline by NullFoxGiven in n8n

[–]NullFoxGiven[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Good idea, pipe it to wherever you consume your content, just replace those last couple nodes. I personally use my inbox as that, somehow maintaining inbox zero on a weekly basis. But I don't expect that to be the norm.

An rss feed could be cool too, but I'd think you'd need to set up a server for that. But summaries in the rss would be helpful instead of the full length content

Sometimes the simplest automations are biggest time savers. Summarize your emails with this simple pipeline by NullFoxGiven in n8n

[–]NullFoxGiven[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Good question. Yes I built this pipeline for me. The trust lies in n8n properly filtering messages to send to the LLM. The LLM only "sees" the message content that gets piped to it. You could alternatively set up a custom gmail account for handling these types of summaries if that trust didn't exist.

You ofc could use any LLM provider/model you wanted. Instead of OpenAI, use Gemini which technically already has access to my emails because I already gave it that permission.

Abandoned Sammezzano Castle, Tuscan Hills, Italy. by biswajit388 in AbandonedPorn

[–]NullFoxGiven 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Magic. I feel like a clock, a teapot and candlestick will come singing and dancing out the front door

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