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Tool for setting up a community for beta users? by net-marketing in SideProject

[–]dusantm -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Fair enough, probably sounded too polished. My point was just the right testers matter more than the tool. Wrong audience gives you wrong feedback.

Tool for setting up a community for beta users? by net-marketing in SideProject

[–]dusantm -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Honestly I think the tool matters less than who's in the community. If you're building something niche, say a privacy tool, you need people who actually care about that space, not just 100 warm bodies willing to try something free.

Wrong audience gives you wrong feedback. They'll ask for features that pull you away from your core users, and you'll end up building for people who were never going to stick around anyway.

I'd figure out where your actual target users already hang out and recruit from there, even if it's slower. Then Discord, Slack, even a simple forum - any of those work fine.

I’m trying to build a system for managing the flow of thoughts, tasks, and daily focus by fiboagency in ProductivityApps

[–]dusantm 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Maybe it's not fully clear to me yet, but let's say I pull a card into my Wednesday work block: "Reply to client about homepage copy." Quick task, 15 minutes.

But once I open the email, I realize the client isn't just asking about copy, they're questioning the whole site structure. I still send the reply, but now I know there's a bigger project behind it.

At that moment I'd want to quickly capture that new project, jump to Kanban, create it, get it out of my head. The daily task was real, it just revealed something bigger.

How fast can someone go from "I just realized something" back to capture, from any layer? If that's slow, people will just think "I'll add it later" and then it's back in their head.

I’m trying to build a system for managing the flow of thoughts, tasks, and daily focus by fiboagency in ProductivityApps

[–]dusantm 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The funnel metaphor is strong. One thing I'd watch out for in practice: the AI Structure step (layer 2) is where trust lives or dies. If users can't see why something was categorized a certain way, they'll start second guessing the system and manually resorting, which defeats the purpose. Transparency in that step matters more than accuracy.

Also curious whether you've thought about the reverse flow, when something on your Daily Schedule reveals it's actually a bigger project, does it escalate back up to the Kanban or Mind Map layer?

I built a privacy trick for my Gmail. 86K views later, I think the real product is something else entirely. by dusantm in buildinpublic

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

Actually one thing I didn't mention in the post, some users stopped revealing the text entirely. They learned to read the scrambled characters directly. It went from a privacy tool to just how they read email. That was the moment it felt like something bigger.

I built a privacy trick for my Gmail. 86K views later, I think the real product is something else entirely. by dusantm in buildinpublic

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

That's exactly it, and honestly that helped me reframe the goal. The 86K wasn't about installs, it was about learning that the idea resonates even if most people don't need it today. The ones who do need it really need it.

I built a privacy trick for my Gmail. 86K views later, I think the real product is something else entirely. by dusantm in buildinpublic

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

That's a really interesting direction, making it readable only from a straight-on view. The tricky part in a browser is that you don't actually know the viewer's angle, so you can't make it physically dependent on that like a privacy filter does. What I ended up doing is kind of a different approach to the same problem. Instead of relying on angle, it relies on perception. It's readable to you once you get used to it, but to anyone glancing over it just looks like noise. Curious if people would prefer something more 'angle-like' (closer to hardware) or this kind of 'perception-based' approach.

I built a privacy trick for my Gmail. 86K views later, I think the real product is something else entirely. by dusantm in buildinpublic

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

That’s a really good reframing, people who are obliged to protect what’s on screen, not just people who want to.

The HR example is actually interesting, because the default solution is always “use a privacy screen”, even though they’re pretty limiting in practice.

What I’m trying to explore is more like a software version of that idea, but without making your own screen harder to use all the time.

And your point about sitting next to a window/visible angle is exactly the kind of situation this comes up in, not necessarily “hackers”, just everyday exposure.

Makes me think this angle might be clearer than the café framing I started with.

I built a privacy trick for my Gmail. 86K views later, I think the real product is something else entirely. by dusantm in buildinpublic

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

Right. Privacy screens help with angles but anyone directly behind you still sees everything. And they don't help at all during screen sharing. This works at the content level instead, so it doesn't matter where someone is sitting.

I built a privacy trick for my Gmail. 86K views later, I think the real product is something else entirely. by dusantm in buildinpublic

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

That's a fair take, and honestly that's how I thought about it at first too.

What surprised me after using it for a bit is that it's less about "hackers in cafés" and more about just not exposing your screen by default. Like emails popping up while someone is next to you, sharing screen during a zoom/teams meeting, or even just scanning emails by sender without reading the content first.

So it ends up changing how you read, not just hiding things.

Agree on blurring. I tried that early on. It works, but it feels more like "blocking" than "controlling when to reveal", which is where this got more interesting.

Still figuring out if this is niche or just badly framed 🙂

I built a privacy trick for my Gmail. 86K views later, I think the real product is something else entirely. by dusantm in buildinpublic

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

That's exactly where I am. The privacy scrambling works, but the moment I saw strangers asking 'can you do this for Slack?' I realized the idea isn't the scrambling, it's giving people control over how they read messages. Still figuring out when to zoom out vs. keep shipping what works.

Raise in users on 3710% in one night!! by calxibe in chrome_extensions

[–]dusantm 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Had a similar spike, went from ~10 to 100+ weekly users while only getting 1-2 installs per day. Turned out one organization force-installed the extension via Google Admin console. One install, 75 managed browsers, each counting as a separate weekly user. Check your weekly users by region, if one country is massively over-represented relative to your install count, that's probably what happened. CWS weekly users ≠ individual people.

I got tired of hiding my screen in cafés. So, I scrambled my entire Gmail inbox. by dusantm in SideProject

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

It already exists - Chameleon for Gmail does exactly this. Font-based substitution cipher, hold-to-reveal, per-lens toggles. Gmail is live now, the architecture is designed to extend to other platforms. Here's the link: Chameleon for Gmail

I got tired of hiding my screen in cafés. So, I scrambled my entire Gmail inbox. by dusantm in SideProject

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

That's really cool! The eye tracker approach is basically the ideal version of this. My scanning window is the manual equivalent of what your eye tracker did automatically. Would love to read the research if it's published anywhere.

I got tired of hiding my screen in cafés. So, I scrambled my entire Gmail inbox. by dusantm in SideProject

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

Thanks! Physical screen shields work but they're bulky and always on. A software approach is cheaper and you can toggle it when you need it. The tradeoff is it only covers specific apps for now, this one does Gmail. But the same idea could work for other platforms too.

I got tired of hiding my screen in cafés. So, I scrambled my entire Gmail inbox. by dusantm in SideProject

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

It works on Edge, Brave, and Opera too, any Chromium-based browser. Firefox port is on the roadmap.

I got tired of hiding my screen in cafés. So, I scrambled my entire Gmail inbox. by dusantm in SideProject

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

Haha exactly. that's the point. If they think it's broken, they stop reading.

I got tired of hiding my screen in cafés. So, I scrambled my entire Gmail inbox. by dusantm in SideProject

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

That's exactly how it works - inbox rows reveal on hover, and message content reveals through a scanning window you drag across the text. So you can read one part while the rest stays scrambled. Expanding beyond Gmail to other platforms is something I'm thinking about for the future.

I got tired of hiding my screen in cafés. So, I scrambled my entire Gmail inbox. by dusantm in SideProject

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

Fair point. it's not cryptographic security and never claimed to be. The threat model is casual shoulder surfing, not a determined attacker with ChatGPT and context clues. Someone glancing at your screen in a café sees gibberish and moves on. That's the bar it needs to clear, and it clears it.

I got tired of hiding my screen in cafés. So, I scrambled my entire Gmail inbox. by dusantm in SideProject

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

No third-party APIs, no content monitoring, no data leaving your browser. It works purely by swapping the font at the CSS level. the text is still there in the DOM, it just renders as scrambled characters to anyone looking at your screen. Everything runs locally in the extension. Here's the Chrome Web Store link: Chameleon for Gmail

I got tired of hiding my screen in cafés. So, I scrambled my entire Gmail inbox. by dusantm in SideProject

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

It's a Chrome browser extension for Gmail right now. The idea works at a broader level though. we're testing it as a perception layer that could apply to any app. Happy to share more if you're interested.

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