I started developing the app in early 2017, well before the AI era, when mobile apps were at their peak popularity. My idea was to create an app for emotional and psychological support in the form of helpful articles and various quizzes, such as personality assessments and life satisfaction tests. I named the app "Emotional Intelligence" because this keyword showed good ASO potential for positioning at the top of mobile stores.

This proved to be accurate, and the app quickly gained traction in terms of downloads. A major problem I faced then was monetization. Unfortunately, in my country, it wasn't possible to sell through Google Play then, so I could only display ads. I started with Google AdMob, earning $2000 monthly after just a few months. The app then got about 1500 organic downloads daily and quickly surpassed 500,000.

Three years after launching the app, I decided it was time for branding to build recognition. By combining the words "sentiment" and "intelligence," I came up with "Sintelly." I then pushed the app toward a social network, which differed from the right move. Adding features like discussion forums for problems, likes, and comments would result in even more growth, but the opposite happened. The app started declining, and I began investing in advertising campaigns. I managed to maintain a balance between income and expenses but without any profit. Then COVID-19 hit, and everything went downhill. I had to give up development and find a job as a developer to ensure my livelihood.

Two years passed since I gave up, and that's when ChatGPT started gaining popularity. This immediately showed me how to steer the app towards active support for well-being questions. As I'm not an expert in psychology, I found several external psychotherapists who helped me put together CBT therapy, which I then implemented through a chatbot. This is how the new Sintelly app was born, with its main feature being a chatbot system composed of 17 AI agents that adapt to the user and guide them through a five-phase CBT therapy (I'll write a post about the technology). In addition to the agents, I added various exercises and tests to provide better personalization for the user.

Initially, I made all of this free, which was also a mistake. I followed the principle of first showing what the app can do and gathering enough new users before starting to charge. I started selling subscriptions at the beginning of July, and since then, the app has had stable growth.

If you want a check app, here is the link.

Lessons learned:

• If things are working, don't touch them
• Start selling immediately upon app release; there's no need to wait
• Regularly test prices and types of subscriptions
• Onboarding is the most essential part of the app because most users buy subscriptions during onboarding
• It's essential to listen to user feedback.
• From day one, have a website and work on content to generate organic visits and redirect users from the web to the mobile app

Stats:

• Over 1.4 million downloads
• 4.4 rating
• Only 40,000 active users (I had a massive loss during the period when I gave up)
• 280 active subscribers
• $3000 monthly revenue

Next steps:

• Work on improving the Agent AI approach
• Setting up email campaigns and transactional emails
• Introducing in-app and push notifications
• Introducing gamification
• Potential for B2B

I hope you can extract useful information from my example and avoid repeating my mistakes. I'm interested in your thoughts and if you have any recommendations for the next steps. I'm always looking to learn and improve.

Just crossed a major milestone for my app: Crumb

Did not think this would come that quickly but strangely enough it did!

SEO wise, feels like I just encountered first ceiling at 1500 clicks per month and it’s coming down…

Main issue now is getting more downloads since it looks like people don’t mind paying 😁

Any tips?

Thx

I built https://ghostedd.com/ so that candidates can "do something" about getting ghosted as I, personally, feel powerless whenever I get ghosted and sending follow ups can get annoying.

I'm not sure why a website like this hasn't been built yet but I hope this website will thrive and alert companies that it's not cool to ghost. I also hope that it'll give future candidates peace of mind when it comes to thinking if they've been ghosted or not. I plan on making this project open source too for transparency if there's enough people who are interested in contributing.

It's time to hold recruiters/companies accountable.

hey guys, it's my first time posting here.

i bought roasting.design domain for my '30 days 3 startups' challenge, and have decided to launch a side project on it this week.

the initial idea was to leverage my years of design experience and offer design roast / redesign for websites.

since that already exists, the plan now is to put a twist on it — list all websites in a public directory, after i've roasted and redesigned their design .

that way clients get feedback, while also getting traffic to their new site, and get more sales.

and everyone else has the chance to learn from other's mistakes.

give me honest opinion, what do you think about this idea? ROAST ME!

Last year, when we launched a product on Product Hunt, we got featured and gained customers. It was a fantastic experience that boosted our growth. But this year was a different story. We launched a new product, and with the changes in Product Hunt's system, we didn’t get featured. The result? Not a single visitor came from our launch that day. It felt like a complete letdown.

We then turned to other directories, only to find ourselves facing long waiting lists or high fees things that just don’t work when you have a zero-dollar marketing budget like many indie hackers. It was a frustrating cycle.

So, my partner and I decided to take matters into our own hands. We built our own directory where launching is free, there are no endless waiting lists, and our AI reviews your product within 15 minutes. You get to choose your launch date. Plus, we added a ‘Today's Underdog’ section each day, a low-upvote product is randomly chosen and featured on the homepage for free, giving it a chance to be seen.

Our MVP is now live, and we’re excited to share it with you!!! 🥳🎉

Hey everyone!

I'm building ViralChimps, a tool designed to help you and your friends support each other's social media posts and go viral together. When someone in the group posts, everyone gets notified to engage, like, and comment.

I came up with this idea because I noticed how hard it can be to get initial traction on social media, and I figured this could help create a win-win for everyone involved.

I'd love to get your thoughts on the concept. Would this be something you use with your friends?

If you're interested, you can sign up to be part of the early launch at viralchimps.com. I'd really appreciate any feedback!

Hey everyone,

I've been building a new workspace tool called drabbl, and I'm excited to soon open up the first alpha for a short testing window. drabbl is a personal workspace app that lets you create and customize your own "Workspaces" for any type of project. Whether you're brainstorming ideas for a vacation, writing a novel, or managing tasks for a research project, drabbl lets you tailor your workspace with the exact tools you need, without any clutter.

You can choose from a collection of widgets (like a document editor, AI-powered brainstorm board, task manager, Pomodoro timer, and MANY more) and add them to your workspace in just one click. The idea is to keep everything simple and centralized on one page.

I'm a solo developer, so this alpha test will be really helpful for finding bugs, and, most importantly, hearing your feedback on what you like or don't about the app. Feature suggestions are also very welcome! If you're someone who enjoys testing new tools, or if you're just looking for a more streamlined way to manage your personal projects, I’d love for you to join the test.

You can already check out a short screen recording of drabbl to get an idea of what it's like: drabbl recording

If you want to be part of the alpha and get a first look at drabbl, you can sign up for the waiting list at drabbl.com. You'll hear back soon :)

Good day all!

I'm coming from a no-code background and I've decided that I've had enough of working for VCs, so I said that I'll give it a try and build my first every micro-SaaS.

So I picked a niche which I'm familiar with, content creator (I've been running a european property newsletter and know first hand how hard it is to drive organic subscribers on socials), have created all the assets, landing page etc. and am in the process of launching the tool by the end of this week.

However, I'm really unsure what to do next once it's live. Of course the main priority should be to get at least a few users to give the tool a try and provide their feedback and I've been thinking to start posting about it on twitter, as well as contact newsletter creators directly etc. however there is also the SEO part, ai directories and a million other things.

What do you guys think? Would you agree that first I should focus on getting a few users before worrying about SEO and other things?

Any other advice that you might have for me? Appreciate you all :)

A while ago I was searching on my iPhone for widgets for displaying the revenue of my little Stripe projects.

Turned out that they didn't exist, so I built my owns :)

I made cool widgets for displaying your stats in different ways: revenue amount, charts, GitHub like grid graph, MRR...

I built this app on live stream completely from scratch to the launch on the App Store, sharing the whole process.

Looking forward to your feedback!

Cheers! 😙

I created a Turborepo project with a Next.js Multi-tenancy saas Template, a list of UI components made with Shadcn, a list of email templates with react.email, integrations with Stripe for payments, Resend and more much more.

The project saves at least 30h of development to help you focus on what's really imporant: Build your startup.

Recently launched the docs page with a "Ship in Five" guide that allow you to setup a beautiful landing page for your new project.

Already made 3 sells, and looking forward for new sells next week.

The project is actually counts with a special price with $100 OFF, and this will be available for the first 100 sells.

https://turbostack.io

Hey everyone,

I've been working on my side project for over 4 months.

After just 2 sales in the first 3.5 months, I knew I needed to redesign my website. Since launching the new version (2 days ago), I’ve made 3 sales in the past 16 hours.

Mostly thanks to the awesome build-in-public community on X. I love Reddit, and it also made 1 sale so far.

Just keep pushing—your efforts will be worth it in the end. Hope this inspires someone!

Hey everyone,

I've just launched my very first SaaS! It's a service that helps transform your content across various social media platforms. You can check it out here: postpenguin.com.

Initially, I was planning to wait for Lemon Squeezy's approval to handle payments, but since it's taking longer than expected, I decided to launch without it. To kick things off, I've given everyone extra free credits to use the service.

I want to build this according to user needs, so any feedback and suggestions for further development are welcome!