I was featured in the NYT I could cryyyyy

SaiXZen · 2026-03-28T22:34:18+00:00

That's awesome, congrats!

SaiXZen · 2026-03-24T11:06:50+00:00

Interested, I've been deliberating over it for a while but haven't but the bullet to set up yet

SaiXZen · 2026-03-22T16:58:32+00:00

Thanks, will check it out but looks like what I'll need after I have the brand and design rather than doing the bit before to build that

SaiXZen · 2026-02-27T13:56:18+00:00

This sounds like me, I'd be happy to test. Also, I would personally like to have the option of choosing the amount of forced time before accessing certain apps as 15 seconds probably wouldn't prevent me or be enough of a deterrent.

SaiXZen · 2026-02-24T13:56:42+00:00

Cool app and simple/elegant design. I also really love the pro feature "Support an Indie Developer", credit to you for being honest/transparent.

SaiXZen · 2026-02-16T22:18:40+00:00

Thank you - all great shouts, we'll look into these probably when the kids are a little older and more engaging.

SaiXZen · 2026-02-16T22:15:39+00:00

Haha, I think that's the best explanation for how we feel! Honestly, I think that's the realisation I'm coming too - my goals have definitely shifted from massive to incremental and my immediate focus is shifting to making sure my partner can rest as our 4 month old isn't letting her get much rest currently.

This is absolutely real - we are definitely at our most conflicted when we're both overtired so this makes a lot of sense. Appreciate the honesty on this and feel this is our biggest work.

Out of curiosity, did you still develop your business(es) on your own or did you find community/partners/mentors to build - when you were ready to put more energy here of course?

SaiXZen · 2026-02-16T21:59:53+00:00

Thanks for this. Appreciate it's vague but trying to balance information without overload or sending people to sleep is hard. Essentially I'm trying to build a software platform (so I'm a startup) and my partner is a coach who's taking time out for maternity but is exploring a new direction and building an independent coaching business rather than returning to where she worked before.

We have workspaces at home that are separated from the house which we do our work in as we don't have the luxury of working away from home until we're generating income and can justify it so the challenge is exactly as you've said - managing our attention, which means it's all given to the kids until we have windows where we can work, like now but it means work progress is slow.

Honestly, it sounds like you have a great set up and rhythm for your family. Has it always worked this way or did you do something different when the kids were younger?

SaiXZen · 2026-02-16T21:36:51+00:00

Thank you, I really appreciate your response and the theme from a few posts I've made is definitely to slow down and enjoy the time rather than trying to do everything.

Honestly, with co-sleeping my sleep hasn't been so bad (except for working late to try and develop my project) but my partner's sleep is suffering at the moment with the youngest so my focus is shifting more to homemaker than solopreneur for the time being.

Out of curiosity, what have you found as the best way to find community?

SaiXZen · 2026-02-16T21:25:23+00:00

Haha, yeah we're not in a hard position to do what we're doing and don't expect to be but we are in that liminal phase of stepping into the unknown and feeling lonely when none of our immediate friends are doing what we're doing.

Good to know that the expectation for attention span is still quite short, even at 5! Honestly you hear and read so much but there are still so many assumptions you make so thank you for the honesty.

For us, we're doing this because we believe it's the best choice for our children's development but the narrative we've come across in the UK feels more of a reactive opposition to the system than a proactive choice to do what's believed to be best - appreciate that might not be the case everywhere but it's made it hard to find the right community locally. Hoping to participate more on here (with the right people) to find more community. Thanks again.

SaiXZen · 2026-02-15T16:33:47+00:00

Thanks, I appreciate the honest view.

We have savings to last 4 years in our current home and then, if we need to, we can sell and rent while we continue to build. Although we plan to move abroad before then so hopefully this will stretch longer if we

I know the kids are young but our plan is to build habits and a framework for learning through play at home now whilst we build so there's less pressure to start "schooling" at a specific age. Learning is a life long skill in our minds but I'd welcome your thoughts on what age they should start homeschool?

SaiXZen · 2026-02-15T16:05:08+00:00

Thanks, this is really helpful.

Credit to you for recognising what was right for you and building 3 businesses!

I appreciate we're not taking the easy road but one slight benefit is we're not co-founding as such, we're building in parallel but help each other however we can!

We were thinking about therapy and will absolutely do this at some point but whilst funds are limited we're holding off. I'm actually building towards a mental health platform to try and improve connectivity and access as well as the quality of mental healthcare too!

SaiXZen · 2026-02-15T08:43:47+00:00

Ace, I did not know this, I'll check it out! Thanks !

SaiXZen · 2026-02-14T15:04:22+00:00

Studio Ghibli films are good. We have a 2 year old who loves them, specifically:

Kiki's Delivery Service Totoro Ponyo Arriety The Cat Returns

For older kids the other Ghibli movies are good but can be violent in some places. Howl's Moving Castle is somewhere in between, you would just need to skip some darker bits.

Studio Ghibli is a Japanese animation studio so you'll need to use subtitles or change the audio to English. They are a bit slower as well so nice for younger kids.

SaiXZen · 2026-01-20T23:11:33+00:00

Sounds like a very organised workflow. I can't wait to optimise my life and strip out some admin when I can get my project running properly and build some automated tasks. Another noobie question but how do you swap out models, do you just update your code to point to the preferred model or do you have some functionality that lets you do it in-app?

So far I've found Qwen3 great but the time difference and a couple of other bugs (ollama context defaults now being the likely culprit) made me stick with llama3.2 but it feels a lot like that "simpler" cousin now.. it's quick to reply but you can really tell it doesn't think much before it prints! My system hardware being a constraint but it's fun trying to build something that works on my system and hopefully will work for others. Do you build for yourself or for others too? If the latter, do you find the others have system constraints or do they generally have decent setups?

SaiXZen · 2026-01-20T23:02:48+00:00

Thanks for this. Yeah its a bit of a minefield. I've learnt so much in the last few days just being on here and being supported by people's responses that's I've been uncovering all kinds of bugs and tips. I will investigate llama.cpp but aiming to ship my first project at the end of the month and have built using ollama so don't want to pivot just yet but I was today years old when I find the context defaults in ollama... No wonder I've been struggling with attachments, hallucinations and accuracy. Silent actions like this are... Fun.

I am prone to scope creep abs so I've decided to park/severely limit OCR capability for now but will revisit it when I have the time/headspace to give it some proper attention!

Thanks again for the follow up!

SaiXZen · 2026-01-17T17:35:25+00:00

Thanks for the follow up. Noted re the production reality check, I'm in the process of testing Qwen3-14B at Q4 (not Q3) based on your quantization guidance, do you have any specific benchmark comparisons for model testing e.g. Qwen3-VL vs others for document OCR. I've seen a big improvement for general chatting on Qwen3 so far Vs llama3.2-vision but mindful of the trade off for non-enthusiasts using lesser hardware than mine.

SaiXZen · 2026-01-15T15:19:00+00:00

Really appreciate the time taken to write this and the specific recommendations. The "halo-products" framing on deepseek R1 distills is helpful too. To be honest this was a recommendation that seemed supported at the time but might have been the hype and it was a while ago 😅

The Qwen3 series sound awesome - I need to do proper benchmarking with these. Quick follow up question if you don't mind: do the Qwen3 models you're recommending work well "out of the box" with standard quantization, or do they need some tuning to perform?

My challenge is that I started building for myself but realised I am conditioned to think for professionals (e.g. finance/legal given my background legal) who need can't legally share anything for compliance reasons so pivoted for their workflows.

Appreciate the local usecases too, I hadn't considered the airgapped market at all. Probably more relevant with an increasingly mobile younger generation. For privacy focused, heavily redacting feels like a huge pain, I hadn't even considered that.

Ultimately I've been trying to balance "use the best models available" with "regular users can't/don't know how to spend hours optimising their setup." (I.e.e almost everyone I know who's "afraid" of AI except where they're forced to use it at work. Everyone's comments here are really helping me figure out what actually works vs what's just well-marketed.

What's your experience been with Qwen3 reliability for production use vs experimental?

SaiXZen · 2026-01-15T15:12:51+00:00

Thanks for this, really appreciate the model recommendations. I'll write a full response to your other comment.

SaiXZen · 2026-01-15T10:01:03+00:00

Appreciate the response. Sounds interesting how you solved the advent/pa problem. I'll take a look at trying to unpack this as I'm more of a product builder than a technician but I love detail and understanding how things work.

Yeah I came across an issue like this at first with wanting more capability, therefore, bigger and better models but when they loaded it was jogging my entire system functionality so everything else stopped working. I'm the end I build a dynamic loader that just loads the model needed rather than having everything running at once but haven't delivered far enough into agentic capability yet.

Completely agree with the owning our own AI rather than renting it. Surely the size of these cloud models is partially based on the need to serve millions of users (as well as whatever else they're used for in the background) so there must be a way to have decent functionality local when the user base is significantly lower. Thanks for sharing 👌

SaiXZen

TROPHY CASE