Everyone understands the principle of 'using your own product,' but its true value lies not in the act of using, but in the insights you encounter that testers will never report and that you won't think of when writing requirements. I didn't type a single word for this article; everything was spoken to VoiceDoz.
A few days ago I added a Google AdSense script to my blog, just to see if it would go through. After a few days of review, Google came back with: low value content. It stung at first, but thinking it over, it's actually a kind of confirmation.
The manual tells a very enticing story—AI has reshuffled the cost structure of entrepreneurship. But as someone running three projects simultaneously, what I felt after reading it was not 'I can create more,' but 'I need to restrain myself more.'
In the past two years, the independent developer community has been focused on SaaS, AI, and purely digital products. However, the project I just launched is a Hibachi home dining website—where the chefs come to your living room.
HTML Anything has been released, and Anthropic claims they have fully switched to HTML internally. Technically more accurate does not equate to economically viable. A reflection from an external developer on token billing.
The two products I'm shipping at the same time are completely different species. One has a high ceiling but needs me in the room; the other has a low ceiling but truly runs without me. Why indie devs in the AI era should think in dual tracks.
Don't use AI to write articles. Use AI to turn structured data into multilingual content, and let search engines drive free traffic to you.
AI-generated content, auto-updated data, auto-published pages. I just set up the templates once, and AI does the rest. This is what true passive income looks like.
Spent hours building a screenshot tool in Rust called SnapDoz, only to find out Claude Code already supports pasting screenshots directly.
A multi-platform development progress summary for VoiceDoz — Mac version ready, Windows in testing, website 80% complete.
The biggest trap for indie developers isn't failing to build — it's building the wrong thing. I used Claude Code to create a research system that let me deep-dive into 8 product directions in a single week.
When highly paid CTOs voluntarily step down to become individual contributors, it's not because they've lost their minds — it's because they see something the rest of us haven't yet.
A locally-run voice-to-text tool with AI polishing. One-time purchase, no subscriptions, your data never leaves your device.
From the '$100/month' goal to actually building a product. VoiceDoz is launching this week, and the Build in Public journey begins.
You don't need $1,000/month to call it a success. $100 is enough to prove there's real demand — everything after that is just optimization.
You don't need millions of downloads to make money. A small app that solves a real problem and earns $1,000/month is a very solid starting point.
I shadowed a hibachi chef who showed up 45 minutes late. The customers were furious, and he got zero tips. This experience taught me two things: you can never communicate too much, and you should never set the wrong expectations.
I quit Robinhood, got an offer from Scorability, signed it, resigned — smooth as clockwork. Then 2 days before my start date, the offer was rescinded. Why? The recruiter didn't communicate my immigration status clearly.
I saw a post recruiting hibachi chefs on Xiaohongshu, shadowed one session, then went solo. It was chaotic, but what really caught my attention was the Uber-like business model behind it. Opportunities are never scarce — courage is.
A few days after the interview, I pulled the trigger and paid — picking the 4-installment plan. Onboarding first, then a pile of videos and courses, plus a weekly Wednesday online event. Going to work through it for a week before calling it.
The interview is done. Sharing my firsthand take on Hustle Fund and Angel Squad — a genuinely interesting syndicate investing community that I'll likely be joining.
Applied on March 30th, was told it'd take 3 days. Ended up waiting nearly two weeks. Here's my experience with the TikTok mini-game developer verification process.
After over a decade in software, I decided to step out of my comfort zone and apply to join Hustle Fund's angel investor community. Not because I'm rich, but because I want to keep learning.
As kids, we all crushed it in business and strategy games. But in reality, the same brains produce mediocre results. The gap between games and real life reveals the true obstacles on the path to wealth.
Compound interest isn't just a financial concept. How you spend your days determines whether you're on a linear or exponential growth path. Do more things that compound, fewer things that don't.
Exchange rate advantage, less competition, a bigger market, and AI flattening the language barrier — for ordinary people in China, making money overseas with AI tools might be the highest-ROI move right now.
Saw a guy on Reddit who built a simple time tracker now earning $20-30/day in passive income. No ads, no big idea, just shipped. It made me rethink something: in the AI era, the far end of the long tail has become mineable for the first time.
The game in the video is mine — a mobile version of Dice Wars, from zero to playable in about three days. This is the thing I keep talking about: use AI to produce a lot of stuff in a domain you actually understand, and trade output volume for probability.
A friend sent me a 2026 Facebook Content Monetization guide. The author claims to run 44 Pages making $400–800 each per month. I took it apart end to end — what's real, what's marketing copy, what's a trap, and why I'm not going to do it myself.
Yesterday I wrote a post about PR output rate. This morning I @'d Peter Steinberger himself on X. One hour later: zero likes, zero comments, zero retweets. And here's the thing — that's exactly the proof of what I've been saying all along.
Peter Steinberger had 449,693 contributions in the past year, peaking above 13,000 in a single day. I do 30–50 PRs a day. In the AI era, the winner isn't the smartest — it's whoever ships the most. Indie dev was always a math problem.
Today is both Qingming Festival and Easter. I burned joss paper for my parents. As a child, I thought it was superstition. Now I fold each sheet carefully and burn it with intention. Some things in life, you only understand after you've lived through them.
Build in Public, launch on Product Hunt — everyone knows those. But the indie developers actually making money are using tactics you probably haven't thought of.
3,000 product listings with only 10 successes. 70+ projects with only a few hits. 50+ repos before one broke through. Indie dev isn't gambling—it's rolling dice. Roll once, you need luck. Roll a hundred times, you need math.
If the essence of human technology is boiling water and throwing rocks, then the essence of business is having goods and knowing how to shout. From street markets to the internet, the medium changes but the logic stays the same.
In the AI era, building products is easier than ever. But the story of an indie developer who quit his job and earned less than $1,000 in a year reveals the real challenge isn't development—it's distribution.
I'm launching pixeldoz.com — a photo-to-pixel-art tool for perler bead and cross-stitch enthusiasts. But the real experiment is whether AI can handle the marketing and operations. Here's day one.
Every day brings new trends, new tools, new ideas — each one seemingly worth pursuing. But when you're building a one-person business, the best move isn't chasing every opportunity. It's taking one steady step forward each day.
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan's open-source gstack has racked up 44k+ stars and is hailed as an AI coding game-changer. But crack open the source code and the truth is surprisingly simple. This series breaks down every skill so you can see what's really going on.
Zhang Xuefeng, a 41-year-old Chinese education influencer, died of sudden cardiac arrest. In the face of life and death, everything else is trivial.
A domain name and a bit of brainpower — that's all you need. AI writes the code, Cloudflare hosts for free, and even a redesign is just one sentence away.
I checked my Xiaohongshu analytics and found an uncomfortable truth: algorithms systematically reward sensationalism and punish honest reporting.
OpenAI's CEO tweeted his gratitude to programmers. The replies exploded. With developer layoffs becoming a trend, what should we actually do after the complaining?
I posted an article on social media and got comments like 'just another worthless AI-generated article.' But when did we start judging articles by who wrote them instead of how good they are?
Vue creator Evan You had Claude Code modify Vue at the framework level and found the implementation hard to follow. When AI-written code stumps even framework authors, how should developers adapt?
Pure Computer Use for web automation burns through $1-2 per task. By lowering resolution, switching to JPG, and introducing a DOM-first hybrid mode, I cut token costs by 80%.
I launched an AI content automation tool yesterday and pivoted today. Because I realized there are already plenty of blogging tools — but scheduled web automation is the real unmet need.
After using Claude Code to write blog posts for a few days, I built a CLI tool called VibPage that automates the entire workflow from research to content generation to publishing. It's open source. But does anyone actually need this?
I stumbled upon an AI company claiming $1.5M ARR with zero human employees. A closer look reveals it's all smoke and mirrors. In the age of AI, the scarcest quality isn't speed — it's focus.
I just wrote a glowing article about Cloudflare Pages. Then I tried to deploy Google Analytics and got slapped with a 504 Gateway Timeout. Karma is real.
Why I moved my personal site from WordPress on DigitalOcean to Cloudflare Pages — via a pit stop at GitHub Pages. Save money, reduce hassle, and embrace an AI-friendly workflow.
A developer's real experience using AI to build a blog: from project setup to going live with a custom domain, Claude Code did everything. Free hosting on GitHub Pages, with auto-translation built in.
A tiny website I forgot about for over a decade secretly earned me $60 CAD. This story is proof that passive income is the ultimate life goal!
