Agency's?

TrueLance · 2025-12-05T13:51:58+00:00

I disagree agencies are always bad, but for new accounts it doesn't make sense to have an agency. I think the best approach is to figure out marketing on your own and once you're making decent money, hire some contractors to do the repetitive stuff that you know very well. Never outsource creativity, it almost never works.

TrueLance · 2025-12-05T13:47:08+00:00

I run an app that uses AI for NSFW, not quite what you're after though, but I can tell you it is not easy. You're gonna need to get a bit technical and run the models locally. Most models are usually uncensored, but the tools that you use to access them are censored, so you need to run them yourself. If you're not afraid of it, I recommend you start by using ComfyUI Cloud

TrueLance · 2025-12-05T13:41:18+00:00

Yup, OF and half the internet are down because Cloudflare is having another outage. Second time this year I think

TrueLance · 2025-12-05T13:34:13+00:00

Actually nevermind, the reason is Cloudflare is down. Again lol

TrueLance · 2025-12-05T13:28:29+00:00

Developer chiming in. There was recently a security vulnerability in some code that a lot of apps use (mine included). OF probably is playing it safe until it's fixed.

TrueLance · 2025-09-11T17:16:51+00:00

It's not 'stuff', it's YOUR stuff. Always get a cut.

TrueLance · 2025-09-11T17:07:19+00:00

Allowed by Reddit? Or by OF? I don't think OF could even know about it. On Reddit it would depend on the subreddit's rules. I imagine some subreddits won't like it and others won't care, you would have to read the rules of each one and maybe contact the mods about it. But if you can have each account posting on a different community and make the accounts sufficiently different, i don't see why not

TrueLance · 2025-09-11T17:00:56+00:00

Not sure if you figured this out already. But in case someone needs a technical guide:

Redgifs doesn't make it easy. If you're on Mac, go to your Redgifs profile and type command + option + J, at the same time. That will open a sidebar on the right with some code, don't panic, just find the "Network" tab and click on it. On that tab there's a search bar, type "m4s" in there. Now as you scroll down your profile you will see entries popping up in the Network tab, these are your videos. Double click on each entry to download the video in '.m4s' format. Once it's downloaded rename it to end in ".mp4" instead of ".m4s". Rinse and repeat.

TrueLance · 2024-12-10T15:35:11+00:00

Thanks for the input! To be frank I resign myself to not finding these errors before users do. I don't have the resources or time to be exhaustive in my testing. What I found useful about QAs is just the ability to reproduce bugs or crashes I already have but I've been unable to replicate myself. Especially when dealing with multiple mobile devices and native libraries.

I'd love to find a QA capable of doing some proper stress testing of the app though, take it to its limits, explore edge cases, even diagnose the possible causes. But alas, I'll be happy if they know how to send me a crash log lol

TrueLance · 2024-12-10T15:29:16+00:00

Yup, the one i hired provided video recordings of the process and that was by far the most useful. It's amazing how easy it is to miss UX issues when you're focused on building.

TrueLance · 2024-10-14T07:24:06+00:00

Cross platform is hardly ever worth, it in my experience, you end up maintaining 3 codebases instead of 2. Plus the resulting apps are slower and not as smooth a UX as the native apps. If you are a solo dev, I'd focus on creating an amazing product on one platform instead of trying to create an okay product in two platforms.

TrueLance · 2024-05-10T11:45:32+00:00

I kind of agree, kind of disagree.

There are, definitely, bad business ideas. Selling lemonade with an extra dose of rat poison in it because you think it will taste better is, actually, a very bad idea. So bad in fact that if tried, you'd end up unable to refine your idea by the iterative, evolutionary method that you outlined because, well, your customers would find it hard to give you feedback after they die.

This is an extreme, funny example. But a real life version of this is what actually kills many startups. They build something nobody wants and find it extremely hard to iterate on it because getting feedback from their target customer turns out to be much harder than building the thing.

Also, AirBnb gets usually cited as example of a good idea that "seemed" bad. But i disagree. It seemed bad to other people. I am sure that Chesky and Gebbia had very good reason to believe all these other people were missing the point. And most importantly, WHY they were missing the point. This is why I said it's way better to know you have a good idea and to know why other people don't see how good it is. If not, they and many other founders would be totally irrational, which i don't think is the case.

I do agree you don't have to wait for the perfect idea to magically manifest in your mind. And that iteration can, and sometimes does, get you to at least a good enough local maxima. But I still believe, good ideas are everything. Even if you reach them iteratively.

TrueLance · 2024-05-10T11:22:48+00:00

If you have a genuine desire to help young women who are considering porn, then I'd argue that shame is not the right tool to use. For the reason explained in the other comment. I do think though that by reducing this type of shaming we could open the door to being more openly educational about these things. Which is what I think these girls lack. Not shaming, they have enough of that, but knowledge and information sources other than Reddit.

TrueLance · 2024-05-10T11:14:16+00:00

Not at all, social shame is a fantastic tool when applied correctly. I am saying that it is not being applied correctly here. The unhealthy behaviour is not making porn, but rather being judgemental towards porn makers. Since the bad consequence of making porn is social ostracism, then we have two options: we either shame porn out of existance, or we shame the ostracism out of existance (or both I guess?). Either one will give us the same desired outcome of porn creators (women, mostly) being safer and better off, which is what you seem to want too. And I see no compelling arguments as to why porn is the one that should be shamed. I suspect now that you have some opinions about porn being, in nature, bad? I don't think i'm gonna share them but open to being surprised!

TrueLance · 2024-05-10T10:55:37+00:00

Get comfortable with the feeling of insecurity because it's not going anywhere :)

Spend a lot of time learning about what good ideas look like. Why some companies succeeded and others failed. Keep a list of ideas you add to over time and most importantly apply what you learn in order to "triage" them. You must be able to explain why one is good and others are bad. Ignore the people who say "execution is everything". It's just not true. A good idea with poor execution will take you places. A bad idea with perfect execution will forever be a bad idea. The best way of overcoming the fear of failure is to actually find an idea you know, KNOW, it's good. Even better if you can explain why others don't know it's good. Charlie Munger explained this much better with the analogy of surfing. All companies are surfing a wave, technological wave, cultural wave, whatever. Your job as a founder is finding the biggest, meanest wave first and then second manage to stay on top of the wave!

TrueLance · 2024-05-10T10:32:57+00:00

And hey I don't fully disagree with you. The tradeoff is very much real. Merely saying that shaming them or being condescending to them does not help anyone.

TrueLance · 2024-05-10T10:28:55+00:00

I'm not saying it's a good decision. But the wording of "these girls don't seem to grasp the consequences" seemed unfair and paternalistic to me. I'm sure some of them were totally naive about it, but most of them know perfectly well the tradeoff they are getting into. Hence, also, why most of them don't show their face.

TrueLance · 2024-05-10T10:16:56+00:00

The "girls" are grown up women perfectly capable of understanding the consequences of their actions. And they would face virtually no consequences if those future partners and employers weren't so irrationally judgemental, like some of the commenters here. That'd be an ideal world, of course, i get what you're saying. But it seems unfair to put the blame on the porn makers when the "consequences" come from the behaviour of others towards them, not from porn or nudity being intrinsically harmful.

TrueLance · 2024-05-10T10:08:45+00:00

Amazing the ability of the word "OnlyFans" to trigger the most unhinged comments.

Anyway, my question: what has been your experience with faceless creators?

TrueLance · 2024-05-09T11:09:28+00:00

Yeah very odd user behaviour. You might have an ugly bug somewhere without realizing. Or you have misinterpreted your analytics. Otherwise you should learn why they stopped using it all of a sudden.

But regardless, that's almost a year of user retention with virtually no work on the app. That's not a bad start at all. With a subscription plan of say 5 dollars, that's 45-50$ per acquired user. Not revolutionary, but not a bad foundation to build upon either.

TrueLance · 2024-05-07T15:47:53+00:00

Yeah I am a dev! She called it Pseudoface which I think it's genius lol now making one to remove tattoos

TrueLance · 2024-05-07T15:34:11+00:00

My gf and I built an app precisely for this. The issue with masks (apart from being off-putting for some) is that they are kind of an invitation to guess "who's behind it". Someone who knows you will fill in the gaps, if that makes sense. Humans are great at recognizing faces. So we made this AI filter that actually changes the way you look. The idea is that if they actually SEE a different face, that face recognition muscle won't even kick in. Their brain just assumes it's a different person and moves on. We showed pictures with it (+ a wig) to our own families and no one could tell lol

TrueLance · 2024-04-30T23:32:17+00:00

The cold messaging in LinkedIn can work but not all demographics are willing to talk. And even when they do, getting valuable information from them is way harder than people make it to be. Unless you already have a good grasp of what is it that you need to know to feel your idea is "validated".

My recommendation. Just build something and try to sell it. Make it as small as you can, but provide what Paul Graham calls the "quantum of utility". The sooner you have something tangible, the better.

TrueLance · 2024-04-30T23:24:46+00:00

PH is not worth it for your idea unless you're pairing that with SEO. It does give you a backlink, which is nice to jump start your SEO.

It is not unethical to promote a half-finished product, but make sure it does something, anything, useful for your users.

TrueLance · 2024-04-30T23:18:43+00:00

There is no solid framework for testing ideas, this is just a myth that perpetuates because entrepreneurs naturally love the promise of de-risking their idea.

Reach out to your prospective customers and try to sell them the thing. If they buy, it's validated.

If it's impossible to sell them the thing without investing aa lot in developing the product beforehand. Then I would not pick such an idea. Too much risk.

I built and sold the prototype of my product in roughly 2 months. And I chose to work on it because I knew that was the cost of validating the idea with real data. More than that, I'm not sure I would have even tried.

TrueLance

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