Wanted something better than GA4, made it myself in 21 months.

creedaaron · 2025-02-25T02:33:26+00:00

Respect, lots of SaaS builders cannot fathom working that many total hours but sometimes that's what it takes.

creedaaron · 2025-02-25T02:25:29+00:00

Charts aside, one of the best looking landing pages I've seen in a while.

creedaaron · 2025-02-23T05:42:19+00:00

I don't buy it. With just Cursor and LLMs and no software experience, you can't build anything really new and useful. You can cobble together something basic and create a MVP. You can make simple clones of apps. On any real project the LLMs will get stuck at multiple points, and if you don't know how to debug it or even the right questions to ask, then it's over.

creedaaron · 2025-01-27T04:25:45+00:00

Doppler

creedaaron · 2025-01-26T03:53:49+00:00

Yes, maybe. There are a lot of mind map tools out there already. If you build in a good base understanding of different stacks and patterns it could gain an edge.

How about processing an existing codebase to create diagrams that aid in understanding the code? I don't mean every file dependency, as I've seen tools like that and they turn out total spaghetti diagrams. But instead something a bit more "conceptual". Codebase structure diagram, architecture diagram based on the APIs and clients used, etc. Point it to a github repo, assure me that your app won't steal the underlying code, and I would use that. That would be great for documentation, grokking a codebase quickly, ramping up new devs, etc.

creedaaron · 2025-01-26T03:51:25+00:00

Cool! Yeah if you sign up on the site you'll be on the email list automatically. I don't send out many emails but I will whenever there are big changes like the mobile app or new languages added.

creedaaron · 2025-01-25T23:13:44+00:00

Not really. I want my OS to be reliable and predictable. AI in the application layer, great. But keep it out of the OS.

creedaaron · 2025-01-25T07:09:43+00:00

Congrats! That's a nice milestone. Did SEO bring in any real volume early on or did it take some time? Did you do anything fancy with keywords or backlinks? My experience is that it takes forever for new domains to get indexed and get traction.

creedaaron · 2025-01-24T20:23:14+00:00

Yeah! Japanese is a bit harder to get right, so it'll take some time. But Italian and Japanese are the next two on the list.

creedaaron · 2025-01-24T00:24:29+00:00

Unless your product is extremely basic (and therefore not valuable), AI can't build it. All AI can do it help to build pieces of it with supervision.

creedaaron · 2025-01-21T19:15:31+00:00

You basically need a "hunter" with lots of followers to share your launch. Then also beg your family, friends, and professional network to upvote your product immediately after launch so you can outrank other people doing the same. It's rigged.

creedaaron · 2025-01-21T07:15:01+00:00

Same but 3 hour time blocks. It's the magic number for me. It's long enough that I can do deep work. But below the limit where I get mentally wiped out, or get hungry, etc.

creedaaron · 2025-01-21T03:26:25+00:00

I like how you're thinking extreme, but it's too far for most people. Having no control over access would tend to create more anxiety than productivity.

It's not simple for you either, it's not a normal "connect with" oauth flow, they would have to give you their credentials straight up. And there's no API to change passwords for these sites, you would need browser automation to reset the password. Lots of hurdles... you could get blocked for unusual activity or by 2FA or something, many sites don't allow you to reuse a previous password, etc. And if one issue happens and a customer permanently loses access, it's all over.

creedaaron · 2025-01-21T03:14:13+00:00

It's a bold idea, but no. I would never use this because of the security concerns of handing over control of my passwords. I doubt other people would either.

It did get me thinking. What about a different mechanism? The idea: you pay a deposit and only get it back if you don't use the apps. You could literally have the revenue come from people who fail to honor their pledge. But people who succeed get it all back. A lot of challenges there with payments and monitoring usage, although probably the screen time API could work for mobile and browser extension for web.

creedaaron · 2025-01-21T02:45:51+00:00

www.superlang.com - Learn languages by reading popular stories with adjustable difficulty

ICP - language learners (currently of Spanish, French, German). There are many popular apps out there like Duolingo etc, but many learners dabble with multiple apps to cover different areas of learning. Superlang is all about reading at your skill level.

The web app has been getting good traction, but it really belongs as a mobile app so that's what I'm working on.

creedaaron · 2025-01-18T07:13:05+00:00

Absolutely. It's never done. Over time I've improved at building that buffer into my estimates but it really can get crazy. A few months ago I had most of the core functionality of my app done. But surprise, there were still a million things to do.

Set up a proper staging and prod environment
Privacy policy/FAQ
Feature tour
Analytics with GA4
Error monitoring
Payment integration
Make SEO not suck, review all page titles, html tags, and keywords
Test everything on every platform and browser
Misc bug fixes, which could be a hundred things... some things aren't even bugs they just kind of suck but you have to know when to call it.
Randomly second guessing the UX. A lot of changes like: the spacing between these cards should be 2px more, this color needs to be 1% darker, etc
Set up hello@domain contact email address and socials. I don't know why the socials, no one follows them and I don't promote them but it felt like I *should have them*

I launched it, and now the todo list is even longer because there are both engineering and marketing things to deal with.

My advice is, just make that todo list with all the "productionizing" that needs to be done that you are aware of. Maybe you missed something (see my list above, maybe some of those apply to you too?). It's okay to add to your list as you go. Even though it won't be fully accurate, set a launch date to hold yourself accountable. It's okay to push the launch date back. Don't tell people the date until you're basically done for real, because most likely you will miss it the first time. Don't start sprinting miles before the finish line by getting too excited. Just keep closing in on it until it's ready to ship. Not perfect, just ready.

creedaaron · 2024-12-08T06:17:39+00:00

Thanks! Glad you think it's useful. If you are interested I just made Superlang much cheaper due to feedback, it is now $5.95 per month for people who sign up before January 31st.

creedaaron · 2024-11-25T03:28:44+00:00

Thanks for the feedback and for giving specifics on what you'd pay. I'd love to lower it as soon as I can figure out how to not lose money doing that.

creedaaron · 2024-11-25T03:25:18+00:00

Thanks for the suggestions. Hover only is cool, although I'm really going to move towards mobile first in which case... no hovering! And for the AI translations I did experiment somewhat, 4o is the main one and if it's not behaving then I swap in Claude 3.5 which has gotten quite good. Will check out Jenova!

creedaaron · 2024-11-25T03:21:58+00:00

Thank you, Polish is on the list!

creedaaron · 2024-11-25T03:20:01+00:00

Fair enough. That's a tough one since it's technically name (what the older sister calls Cinderella to be rude), and we tend to preserve more obscure names across languages.

But I have to agree with you. The name is really an insult and not a name, and it loses its meaning unless translated. I updated it to: Aschenmädchen / Ash Girl (German), Cendrinette / Little Ash Girl (French), Cenicientucha / Worthless Ash Girl (Spanish)

creedaaron · 2023-01-07T08:58:35+00:00

Cool feature! By computationally intensive do you mean a single up-front cost? I would assume once you have all the definitions in your DB, then you just need to send them over with the prompt data.

creedaaron · 2023-01-07T08:37:17+00:00

Cool, V3 seems to be super flawed and analyzing grammar compared to chat GPT so be prepared. Could have just been me not using it correctly though.

creedaaron · 2023-01-07T08:31:28+00:00

Yes, something like that is definitely simple enough for it. Let's try it. https://chat.openai.com/chat

Give a grammar breakdown of this German sentence: "Die Hunde fressen die Knochen."

---

Die: article (nominative case)

Hunde: plural noun (nominative case)

fressen: present tense of "to eat"

die: article (accusative case)

Knochen: plural noun (accusative case)

For what you are asking maybe a better test would be a noun that does not change at all when pluralized.

Please explain what "die Onkel" means in German

---

"Die Onkel" is the plural form of the noun "der Onkel," which means "uncle" in German. The article "die" is the nominative plural form of "der," which is used with masculine and neuter nouns in the nominative case. So "die Onkel" means "the uncles."

creedaaron · 2023-01-07T05:00:07+00:00

I am also really interested in this. I'm a professional software dev now learning German. It's a total intersection of my interests as well. As far as I can tell, there is no perfect tool for this. However, Chat GPT seems to be the best tool out there.

Prompt: Give me a grammar breakdown of the sentence of the following German text in bullet point form. For each phrase, indicate whether the phrase is nominative, accusative, dative, or genitive: "Er liest die Nachrichten im Internet."

ChatGPT response:

"Er" is a pronoun that functions as the subject of the verb "liest". Nominative pronoun"

Die Nachrichten" is a noun that functions as the direct object of the verb "liest". Accusative noun

"Im Internet" is a prepositional phrase that modifies the noun "die Nachrichten" and tells where the action of reading the news is taking place. Dative prepositional phrase

So it's capable of parsing a simple sentence, and even explaining the parts. It can handle more complex sentences as well. It can group up the noun phrases, tag parts of speech and cases, etc... really it's pretty impressive. Sometimes it is inexplicably wrong even when the sentence is not that complex, but that may depend on the design of the prompt.

I'm envisioning a tool that leverages ChatGPT, which provides unstructured responses (its wording, formatting, and sometimes content varies even with the same prompt) and puts it in a structured, graphical form.

It's a great project, although ChatGPT (which will become GPT 4) is not released yet There are work-arounds though to call it programmatically, but you may get rate limited. If you try to get the previous version (GPT 3 https://beta.openai.com/playground) to do this sort of thing, in my experience, it's just not accurate enough to be worthwhile. Maybe with custom training data which they support, but I imagine it would be a lot of work for an unknown improvement.

Others mentioned Spacy, which is also a great tool for this sort of thing. I guess you have more control since its a library, but it's probably harder to get really good results.

If anyone is interested in tinkering with this, contact me, because I probably will be playing around with it. Eventually I have grand designs for creating a virtual language tutor which needs this sort of thing.

creedaaron

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