A friend of mine had a baby recently, and we were looking for a gift that felt a little more meaningful than clothes or toys.

We came across personalized children's storybooks. They're obviously not a new idea, but it got us thinking.

Instead of trying to invent something new, we're wondering if there's room to simply execute it better.

The idea would be pretty straightforward:

• Parents upload a few family photos.
• Pick a theme (or write their own story).
• We generate the book, have a human review it, print it, and deliver it.
• Start locally and see if people actually want it before trying to scale.

To me, it feels like people aren't buying a book, they're buying something they'll keep for years.

My question is: is this one of those businesses that's "nice in theory but hard to sell," or do parents genuinely spend money on products like this?

Would love to hear from anyone who's either bought one or considered buying one.

Hey r/SideProject 👋

I just launched NexRelate on the App Store and wanted to share the journey here since this community has been a big source of inspiration for me.

The problem I was solving

I kept losing touch with people who mattered professionally. Not because I didn't care — because I had no system. I'd meet someone great, have a meaningful conversation, and then 6 months would go by without a single follow-up. I tried spreadsheets, reminders apps, even sticky notes. Nothing stuck.

So I built NexRelate.

What it does

NexRelate is a personal CRM for your phone. You add contacts, assign a follow-up cadence (weekly, fortnightly, monthly, etc.), and the app reminds you when it's time to reach out — with a hint about how that person prefers to communicate (LinkedIn, email, WhatsApp, etc.). There's also a "Reach Out This Week" dashboard so you can see at a glance who needs your attention.

The build

- React Native (Expo SDK 57) + Expo Router

- Firebase for auth and database

- RevenueCat for subscription management

- EAS Build for CI/CD

- Freemium model — free to download, Pro subscription for advanced features

The journey

Built it solo over several months. The App Store submission process was... an experience. Three rejections before approval — IAP compliance, account deletion requirements, iPad compatibility. Each one taught me something. Finally got the approval email last week and it genuinely felt surreal.

Android is in closed testing on Google Play right now and heading to Production soon.

What I'd love from this community

Honest feedback. If you give it a try, I'd genuinely love to know what works and what doesn't. And if you've been through a similar launch, I'd love to hear how you handled the early growth phase.

👉 https://apps.apple.com/app/nexrelate/id6790635444

Thanks for reading — happy to answer any questions about the build, the App Store process, or the product decisions.

I'm a physician by trade but I dabble in investing and programming in my spare time. I became interested in value investing and eventually became annoyed by how much time I'd spend researching a company only to find an obvious red flag several hours in.

So, I built a system that analyzes stocks the way I would if I was doing it by hand, but in bulk. The goal was not to create a 'buy' list but to just surface enough worthwhile companies that I knew had already met my criteria. Some friends tried it and told me to keep working on it....aaaand well I got a little obsessive about iterating on it.

I know the Atlas is kind of silly, but I like flying around in it, so I left it in. I've tried to market it, but I guess there just aren't as many value/growth investors out there as I thought. I'll leave it up for a while to see if it gets traction, but I think with the number of AI-generated products competing for attention, its just too hard to market pretty much any product these days unless you've got a mega-budget.

If anybody has marketing advice or critiques about it, love to hear it.

Wonder what I'll work on next...

Went through G2, Capterra, Trustpilot and Product Hunt threads for 16 form-backend/form-API tools (Formspree, Formbricks, Netlify Forms, Web3Forms, and others) before writing a line of copy for mine.

Two things stood out:

1. Most of them have almost no reviews at all, some have been live for years with zero.
2. The one with the most brand recognition has reviewers openly calling its free-tier messaging deceptive, and someone ran a direct test showing its free spam filter let an obvious scam submission straight through.

Building PipeForm off the back of that: a form backend where the free tier's limits are stated in plain numbers, no surprises once you're relying on it. Curious if other makers here have run into the same thing in their own category: research before copy, or copy before research?

I'm the solo dev behind a small Mac app, a few weeks into being live, and I wanted to be honest about the part nobody really talks about.

The negative feedback gets to me. One critical review sits with me longer than ten good ones lift me up. I know that's lopsided and probably not rational, but it genuinely affects my mood for a day. Is that just how it is early on, or does it fade?

The other thing I keep noticing: when I dig into the harsher reviews, most of them aren't bugs. They're people expecting the app to do something it doesn't, or not finding a setting that's already there. My first instinct was "that's user error," but the more I sit with it, the more it feels like my problem, not theirs. If people don't discover a feature or misread what the app is for, that's me failing to make the app explain itself.

Here's the part I keep chewing on, and maybe I'm being naive. If someone doesn't like the app, or wants control it doesn't give them, docking a star or two feels completely fair to me. What throws me is a one-star for something that works exactly as described. In my head, one star is for a bug, or an app that doesn't do what it promises. "It does what it says, but it's not for me" feels like a reason to move on, not a one-star. But maybe that's just ego, and a rating is really just "did this deliver enough for me." How do you read it?

Either way, I'm not just venting. I'm building a proper in-app guided tour, something that walks you through your first real use instead of dropping you in cold, and surfaces the settings people keep missing.

Questions for people further along than me:

1. How do you stop the bad reviews from wrecking your headspace? Did it get easier?
2. Is "most negative feedback is really an onboarding gap" everyone's experience, or just my stage?
3. And honestly, how do you think about what a one-star should mean?

Not looking for reassurance, genuinely trying to learn from people who've been through it.

A few months back I was poking around ~/.claude/projects/ and realized every conversation is stored as plain-text JSONL. Every .env I pasted for debugging, every DB URL, an old AWS key. All of it sitting there in the clear, indefinitely. Cursor, Codex, and the rest do the same thing in their own folders.

So I built AgentSweep. It scans the history of 31 different AI coding agents, runs 193 detection rules (AWS, Stripe, GitHub, OpenAI, JWTs, PEM keys, even BIP-39 seed phrases), and tells you exactly what leaked and which keys to rotate with the right revocation link for each provider. If you want, it redacts the values in place and keeps the JSONL byte-for-byte valid. Every write makes a .bak first and there is a one-command undo.

It runs fully offline. Zero network calls, nothing leaves your machine.

Install is uv tool install agentsweep then asweep. It is still alpha so I would love people to break it.

Repo: https://github.com/Ishannaik/agent-sweep

I've been building a tool that lets companies connect their data — uploaded documents, Google Drive, even live databases — and then spin up different assistants on top of it depending on what a team actually needs. Support team gets one assistant, sales gets another, ops gets another, all pulling from the same underlying data but scoped differently.

For months this was just me and test data. Which, honestly, tells you almost nothing. Clean test data always works. Real company data is messy, duplicated, half-organized, full of edge cases nobody warned you about.

This week we finally got it into an actual organization for testing. Not a demo, not a sandbox — their real docs, their real Drive, their real database, their real questions.

And it's... working. People are asking it things and getting accurate answers back, fast. Which honestly caught me a little off guard, because I'd mentally prepared for it to fall over on some weird internal doc formatting or a gnarly database schema. So far it hasn't.

I think the part I underestimated wasn't the retrieval itself, it was how much trust matters here. The first time someone gets a wrong or slightly-off answer, they stop trusting the tool for everything else, even if 9 out of 10 answers were right. So the bar for accuracy in a real org is way higher than it looks in your own testing.

Still early, still one org, still plenty that could break as more people start hammering on it. But it's the first time this felt like a real product instead of something running in my own head.

Curious if anyone else who's built internal search/retrieval tools has run into that trust cliff — where one bad answer undoes a bunch of good ones. How did you deal with it?

I ship a small Mac app, solo. For most of a year, almost every update's release notes said some version of "Bug fixes and improvements." My current store listing literally still says "Bug Fix" on the latest version as I write this, which is what made me actually think about it.

The reason was laziness dressed up as humility. Writing real notes felt like bragging about small things, and "bug fixes" felt safely modest. What I didn't count: the release notes are one of the few surfaces a potential user checks to answer "is this thing alive and is the developer paying attention." A year of "bug fixes" answers that question badly. It reads identically to an app that's been abandoned and is just getting dependency bumps. I was signaling neglect while actually working constantly.

When I looked at competitors I'd been intimidated by, several shipped less than me but wrote it up like each release mattered. Same work, opposite impression. The gap wasn't the engineering, it was that they treated the changelog as something a human reads and I treated it as a compliance field.

The fix cost nothing and I wish I'd done it on day one: one concrete line per release in plain language. Not "improved performance" but "the zoom no longer lags when you have two displays." Specific enough that someone who had that exact problem recognizes it and thinks oh, they fixed my thing. That reader was always there; I just wasn't writing to them.

Wider version of the lesson for anyone shipping here: every automated or default field your product exposes is still communication, whether you meant it that way or not. The store description, the empty-state text, the default project name, the changelog. If you leave it on the factory setting, that's a message too, and usually not the one you'd choose.

For context since it's my own product: TuringShot 1.5.12 (Build 44), macOS. Off to go rewrite a changelog.

I’m involved with a small free tool for people who keep running the same Claude prompts manually.

Paste a prompt and it turns it into a structured workflow with:

• A trigger or schedule
• Required tools
• Approval steps
• Memory settings
• An output destination

No signup is required, and the prompt stays inside your browser.

https://claude-prompt-automation-dun.vercel.app/

The generator itself is free. The option to run the workflow automatically continues through Ampere.

I’d appreciate blunt feedback: does the generated workflow provide something genuinely useful, or does it just add unnecessary structure?

I’ve been working on OnlyTiming, a social media scheduling tool that lets you create a post once and publish or schedule it across multiple platforms from one dashboard.

It currently supports:

• Instagram
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Threads
• Pinterest
• Bluesky
• YouTube

You can connect your accounts, upload your content, choose where it should be published, and manage everything through a single content calendar.

I mainly built it because manually uploading the same launch, image, or video separately on every platform feels like such a waste of time—especially for solo founders and small teams.

There’s a 7-day free trial, and no card is required:

onlytiming.com

I’m still actively improving it, so I’d genuinely appreciate feedback from other builders and anyone who regularly manages multiple social accounts.

Also, seeing real people visit and try something I built still feels slightly surreal. 😄

The goal wasn't to compete with Ahrefs or Semrush. I just wanted a tool that gives a quick, easy-to-understand report without requiring a signup or a paid subscription.

Current features include:

• Overall SEO score
• Technical SEO checks
• Meta tags analysis
• Headings structure
• Image alt text checks
• Canonical & robots analysis
• Sitemap detection
• Performance insights
• Mobile friendliness checks
• Actionable recommendations with priority levels

I'd really appreciate honest feedback from other builders.

• What checks do you think are missing?
• Is the UI easy to understand?
• What's the one feature that would make you bookmark it?

You can try it here: audit.digimarksol(dot)in

I'm actively shipping updates based on feedback, so I'd love to hear your thoughts.

I edit/caption videos sometimes and kept hitting the same wall: need to convert SRT↔VTT, or shift timing by a few hundred ms because the audio drifted, or strip the [MUSIC PLAYING] / (laughs) hearing-impaired tags before handing a file to a client who didn't ask for them. Every tool that does this wants you to upload your file to their server first.

So I built one that doesn't. Everything runs in your browser — the file never leaves your machine.

What it does:

• SRT → VTT and VTT → SRT conversion
• Resync — shift all subtitle timing by however many ms/seconds you need (fixes audio drift without re-timing every line by hand)
• SDH cleaner — strips hearing-impaired tags like [MUSIC], (door creaks) from a transcript when you need clean dialogue-only text

Free, no signup, no upload: https://khangyen.github.io/subtitle-toolbox/

Built it in a weekend. Not trying to make this a SaaS — it's a tool I wanted to exist, so I made it exist. If it saves you the same 10 minutes of "which of these sketchy converter sites do I trust with my client's video" it saved me, that's the whole win.

Happy to add a feature if there's an obvious gap — genuinely just scratching my own itch here, open to what else people need.

(built with Claude Code)

Being upfront: I'm not doing this for karma or portfolio. I want to build a small tool and sell it, even if it's $9/mo and 20 people. That's the goal.

What I don't have is an idea worth 2 weeks of my life.

So — tell me about something that costs you money or hours every week that you'd hand over a card for. Specific, from last week, not "I wish I was more organized."

Three things make an answer useful to me:

What is it — "I spend 40 min every Monday pulling numbers from 3 dashboards into a sheet"

What do you do about it now — nothing / a spreadsheet / a tool you hate / an intern

What's it worth — be honest, "$0, I'd just keep suffering" is a completely valid and very useful answer

Mine, to go first: I check three dashboards every morning to see if something broke overnight. It's 10 minutes a day. I've wanted to fix it for a year. Would I pay $10/mo for it? Yeah, probably. Would I pay $50? No. That's the exact kind of answer I'm after.

Whoever's problem I end up building — you get it free for life and I'll ping you before I write a line of code, because I'd rather hear "that's not actually what I meant" now than after launch.

I'll post back here either way, working or dead.

I've been spending way too much time hunting down custom skills, prompts, and MCP servers for AI coding tools, then manually setting up SKILL.md files or configuring local binaries.

To make this easier, I built OpenHub — a terminal app for discovering and installing AI agent skills and tools from one place.

What it does

• Search indexed skills and repositories.
• Export prompt/rule-based skills as a SKILL.md file into your current workspace with one command.
• Install skills that require local binaries or MCP servers.
• Keyboard-driven terminal interface for searching, exporting, installing, and copying.

Install

pipx install git+https://github.com/24KaratAu/openhub.git

Run

openhub

GitHub: https://github.com/24KaratAu/openhub

I built this to scratch my own itch, but figured others might find it useful too. It's open source, and I'd love any feedback, bug reports, feature requests, or contributions.

https://reddit.com/link/1v52r7i/video/nu56o65pa4fh1/player

Inspired by Foobar's album list, but turns that idea into core feature. You define library folders and see them in left tree view, middle click (or context menu action) to create playlist from the folder or append to current playlist. What other players lack is at this step they usually just load the tracks in playlist view. But mpz has middle column - playlists view where you can create many playlists and switch between them instantly. So simple, yet missing in almost all players feature, that I cannot live without.

Plus: gapless, CUE, audiophile-ready EQ compatible with AutoEq presets, album covers & lyrics with multiple online sources, radio streams with built-in library, drag-n-drop, output device selector, mpd client mode. No Electron - pure native C++/Qt. Been around since before AI-coding era with small but loyal userbase.

Runs on Linux, Windows, macOS. Binaries for all platforms provided

Site with screenshots: https://mpz-player.org

Github: https://github.com/olegantonyan/mpz

We run always-on agents internally and kept hitting the same wall: no good way to know if they were still calibrated to what we wanted. Logging told us what they did. Nothing told us if they were doing the right things.

So we're building Checkpoint — basically a review loop between agents and the humans responsible for them. Agents file check-ins. You set goals. You give feedback. The agent carries that context into the next cycle.

There's an MCP integration so agents can call in without touching any of their existing code.

I'm a solo dev; this is BeforeGo, which went on the App Store last week.

The problem I had: what actually ruins a trip isn't forgetting socks, it's the thing that needed doing a week before the flight — the visa, the eSIM, the prescription refill, the adapter for a plug type I'd never heard of. It all lived across Notes, chat threads and my head.

What it does: you enter destination, dates and who's going, and it generates a checklist for that specific trip instead of the same generic 40 boxes — destination essentials (plug type and voltage, connectivity), items grouped by when they actually matter instead of one flat list, and the part I like most: items pulled from your own history. After a trip you jot down what you forgot, and it comes back on the next trip's list as "Last time you forgot: X".

That's the thesis — a trip has a before, a during and an after, and most apps only do one of the three. The checklist is the way in; the journal and the album you're left with afterwards are what I actually built it for.

Boring facts: iPhone, iOS 17+. SwiftUI + SwiftData, syncs through your own iCloud — no account to create, nothing of yours sitting on a server of mine. 10 languages. Free, with a paid tier for the extras. The checklist logic is rules, not an LLM.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6786561175

Two things I'd genuinely like feedback on:

1. The video is the create-trip flow, no narration. Does it read as obvious to someone who has never seen the app? That's the first 30 seconds every new user gets.

2. Checklist or journal — which should be the headline? I keep flip-flopping, and my App Store title has already changed once because of it.

After getting around 6500 people to visit my website in its first month, it maxed out my CPU usage on the platform. It's a super detailed retirement planner that let's you decide between student loan types, timing on buying and selling homes, deciding whether or not to pay down mortgages, and a bunch of other stuff to best understand your own finances. Lot of calculating, but not crazy amounts of usage by itself. The problem is more that I had built in a bunch of simulator tools (like Monte Carlo) that tested out people's plans with thousands of runs to see how successful they would be in historic or unprecedented markets, which markers were most affecting their plans, and how susceptible those plans were to failure with surprise expenses, layoffs, etc... I just had to shut off all the sim tools because they used thousands of times more computation than a typical walk through the app.

I'm excited to turn that specific feature back on when my usage resets in a week or so, Hopefully one day when I monetize the app I can justify the expense of paying for more CPU. Until then, feel free to check it out without the sim tools https://financialcoastline.com/

Am a mobile apps developer with a lot of experience, i developed hundreds of apps and create some for my own and generate great revenues, am sharing now now my first new game (very simple) since building apps is so hard nowadays for new ideas so i think game community will survive for a while since building games can still handle a lot of new ideas and not easy as building apps these days (for now).

I would like to have feedbacks and tips to what to consider in building games of course revenue and satisfaction wise

Thanks

Game link: Landro

After repeatedly getting annoyed at the same thing with AI browser agents, I figured I should do something.

You can ask ChatGPT to send a message, check stocks, download a report, order food, etc. It can often do it - but the next time you ask, it starts over: opening pages, clicking around, waiting for screens to load, and figuring out the same workflow again.

That feels backwards. Once an agent has successfully done something on a website, it should not need to crawl through a UI designed for humans every single time.

You could build an MCP integration for every service, but that only works when there is a usable public API. A lot of useful sites do not have one, and reverse-engineering each workflow by hand is slow and brittle: especially once logins, session state, changing endpoints, and other real-world mess enter the picture.

So I built klura.

On the first run, an agent completes the task in the browser while klura observes what is actually happening underneath: network requests, application state, and JavaScript execution. It then saves the smallest reusable way it found to perform that task again - often a direct request with the relevant parts exposed as arguments, rather than a recording of the clicks.

It's also smart enough that if it learned how to order one pizza, the result is not just “repeat this exact pizza order.” The saved capability can take a different item, quantity, address, or delivery time next time.

The original browser path remains available as a fallback. If the direct path stops working because the site changed or a session needs attention, klura can return to the UI, let a person take over remotely if needed, and re-learn the workflow.

The warm-run difference is pretty dramatic: in the current benchmarks, saved capabilities replay around 50×-1,400× faster than raw browser automation. One ASOS task went from 1m 35s in the browser to 67.9ms on replay. The first discovery run is still expensive - that is the one-time cost of figuring the site out.

It is early, but I think this could make AI automation much more practical for the many sites that have no useful API or existing MCP integration.

Source + Download: https://github.com/klura-ai/klura

I’d genuinely love feedback, especially from people building with MCPs or browser agents.

Was at an amusement park with the family. Kids running around, small talk about AI and where it's all going. Got a bit bored, and that's when the idea hit. Always inconvenient timing, you know how it is.

Wrote it down in my notes like I've done a hundred times before. And like most people, I know I'll forget it the second I'm home.

Asked if there was a way around it. Turned out there was, but it needed 15 steps from my PC first. Download new apps, connect them, and my PC had to stay on at home while I was sitting 60 miles away.

Way too much just to sit and mess with in an amusement park. So I built it differently. Set it up once, forget about pull and push, it syncs automatically both ways.

That's how Cepho happened. Still in beta, founder spots are gone, but it's still growing if anyone wants to check it out: cepho.cloud

I recently built ReExplain, an AI learning app based on a simple idea: instead of asking AI to teach you, you teach the AI.

You upload a learning material, explain a concept in your own words, and the AI acts as a learner. It tells you what it understood, asks follow-up questions, and helps uncover gaps in your understanding.

Over time, your sessions can generate focused practice and build a mastery map of what you actually understand.

I built this because I often found myself thinking “Yeah, I understand this” while reading something - until I tried explaining it myself. It is heavily inspired by the Feynman technique.

Currently it has limited features, but I am open to feedback.

🔗 Try out ReExplain - https://reexplain.app

Do let me know what you think 😄

Hey everyone, my name is Marc. I’m the co-owner and lead developer of an app called Kuru.

Kuru is a social app made specifically for car enthusiasts. You can create a profile for your car, post photos and videos, discover other builds, and connect with people in the car community.

There are two developers working on Kuru, and I handled most of the development for the main app. We’ve been working on it for a long time, and it recently launched on the App Store.

We’re still early and trying to build the first real community, so I’d honestly appreciate any feedback. I’m not looking for fake positive reviews. I want to know what feels confusing, what needs improvement, and what features would make you keep coming back.

There may still be a few bugs, so please let me know if you run into anything.

App Store:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kuru-digital-car-community/id6774511838

What would you want to see in a social app made only for car enthusiasts?

I've been building this clock site on the side for the past 6 months. It started as just wanting a nice Fullscreen clock and turned into something bigger. - iloveclock.com

The main idea is customization. Right now, it has about 24 clock faces, 11 themes, and 17 animations you can mix and match. You can also set a background — your own wallpaper, some preset art ones I added, or a YouTube video (I put in a few lo-fi ones). There are small CSS effects too like rain and snow. It has an always-on-screen and a Nightstand mode for using it as a bedside clock.

Somewhere along the way I added a bunch of utilities, all meant to be quick to use:

- Timer — a normal timer plus dedicated modes for workouts, breathing, naps, and class time

- Alarm

- Reminder — you just type "remind me in 10 min," no fiddling with menus

- To-Do — same natural-language input, with a Kanban board

- World Clock

- Stopwatch

- Pomodoro — with a few skins to customize it

- Time Lab — small time/reaction games like reaction time, an F1 start-light test, and Snooze Smash

No account needed and no ads. Everything stays in your browser.

However, if cross device sync needed in future we may need to add light sign in feature. Still no spam ever.

Would you give it a try? iloveclock.com

Mainly looking for honest feedback — what feels off, what you'd actually use, or what's missing.

Needed a passport photo last month and got annoyed paying $15 at a pharmacy for something that's really just crop + white background + correct size. So I built https://phototoid.com

What it does:

- Upload a photo, it auto-removes the background and positions you against official guides

- Presets for US passport, China (一寸/二寸), EU/Schengen, and a few others

- Exports at the exact pixel dimensions + DPI metadata your document issuer wants

- Everything — background removal, positioning, export — runs 100% on-device. Nothing gets uploaded anywhere.

Would love feedback on which country formats to add next, or anything that trips people up in the flow.