Shipaton Timeline

I’ve seen a lot of founders focus on building a big waitlist before launching. After my own launch experience, I’m starting to think I’d rather launch small and grow from there.

On day 1, I had a blocker bug with subscriptions. It was fixed within 24 hours, but about 30 users were impacted.
Now imagine if I had a waitlist of 500+ people and they all showed up at once.

That’s potentially hundreds of people having a bad first experience with something I worked so hard to get them to try. And getting someone to try your product once is hard enough. Getting them to come back after a bad experience is even harder.

You can test everything before launch, but real users will still find things you didn’t.
So personally, I’d rather launch smaller, learn what breaks, fix it, then push for more users.

Curious how other founders approach this. Big waitlist first or launch small and grow from there?

I built a website that indexes product mentioned across all channels by creators. Be it sponsored, genuine recommendations, reviews, etc. everything. I’m trying to figure out how do I get users to explore the site so we can develop and test out use cases.

I run a tool that tracks product mentions across Reddit and I pulled four months of this sub. Since May 1st: 734 apps mentioned, by 735 different people.

Split by category, with the average number of mentions each app in it picks up:

Productivity is the biggest category here and the quietest one. 140 apps, 1.2 mentions each. Data tools are a quarter as many and pick up four times the attention.

My guess is it's not really a quality thing. 140 people describing a similar app in similar words over four months, someone's going to get lost in that.

Two other things I noticed while I was in there.

This sub gets 3 comments for every post carrying a product. r/sideproject gets 1.0 over the same window. People here actually reply to each other, which I didn't expect from a sub this size.

And of 145 posts I re-read here, 9 were removed, all of them by Reddit's own spam filter rather than a mod. If your launch post vanished, that's probably what got it, and it's an account reputation thing more than a writing thing.

The tool is called PulsePeek, you can look up your own app on it: https://pulsepeek.io

I'm building my app for more than a month and it's on public test on play store and I continue to develop it step by step but I'm stuck on marketing.

I don't know what to do, youtube videos don't help, and I'm burning out.

My app is OrdoLife if you have any marketing experience and can give some advice. If you can make the videos for marketing I can give you a good percentage too.

Just help.

Small update on my app that's been slowly gaining traction.

Built it as an alternative to Habitica, but flipped the focus. Most habit trackers gamify the habit, you check a box, get a badge, feel good for five seconds. Levelite flips that: the game comes first. You're actually playing something, leveling up, unlocking skills, running dungeons, and the habit-building happens as a side effect of wanting to keep playing, not as the whole point.

Solo dev, about 1 year into this. For most of that year I was averaging like $30-60/month, so this next part might sound small to some of you but it's massive for me. Hit $500 in a month for the first time about 3 months ago. Couldn't keep that momentum going though, it dropped back down and has been sitting around $250-300/month since.

Not giving up on it. Goal is still $1k/month, just gonna take longer than I thought 🙏

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/levelite-habits-and-tasks-rpg/id6743447435

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.satsukiizumi.leveliteapp

Hi guys! I was thinking about selling my app, it has 125.000 downloads (103k on app store and 22k on google play).

It has 50k/60k MAU in the high months (it is a seasonal app), mostly of the users are from Italy and it had a 100% organic growth, all of that I 8 months.

If I would try to sell based on the users and not on the annual revenue would it be possible? How much these numbers would be worth?

Thank you so much for the help (sorry for the grammar but I am italian)

RevenueCat android app looks like it was vibe coded in one day using sonnet 5 and the person who built this never even opened it to check how it looks like before releasing it

I’m looking for some honest feedback from people who have experience with SaaS, mobile apps or subscription products.

4 month ago I published an app called BandAtlas, an app for musicians and bands to organize things like gigs, setlists, availability, tasks, discussions, finances, documents and other band-related stuff.

At the moment I have around:
170 registered user accounts
5 paying subscribers

So obviously I’m wondering where the bottleneck is.
Right now I’m mainly using Meta Ads and trying organic SEO and Instagram Posts. I have only small budget for paid ads..

My current funnel looks like this:
I run Meta campaigns that send musicians to my website/landing page. (bandatlas.app)
I’m building a retargeting audience from those visitors.
The plan is to then run a second campaign to that audience optimized for app installs.
The problem is that the retargeting audience is still a bit too small, so the second campaign hasn’t really started properly yet.
The traffic campaign itself actually seems fairly cheap, so getting people onto the website isn’t necessarily the biggest issue.
What I’m struggling with is understanding what I should focus on next.

I have a free testing plan for users, 30 days.
If the didn’t subscribe, they get 14 days after a reminder to do so.
Another one 7 days later..

Is 5 paid subscribers from 170 accounts actually terrible for an early-stage app?

Could the problem be:
the landing page?
the positioning/value proposition?
the onboarding?
pricing?
targeting the wrong musicians?
simply not having enough users yet?

I’d also really like to hear what other acquisition channels you would test for a niche app like this.
Google Ads? Reddit? YouTube? Influencer partnerships with musicians? Band communities? Direct outreach? Content marketing? App Store Optimization?
I’m not looking for generic “just post more content” advice. I’d genuinely like to understand what experienced marketers would test first if this was their product.
Feel free to tear apart the funnel or the business model. I’m probably too close to the product at this point and could really use some outside perspective.

I am a founder and CEO handling product design, leadership, go to market, and operations for my startup. We are a social app meant to connect people in a unique way that the market is starving for. Looking to expand the team with a dedicated technical developer.

What I’ve already done:

- The product is already fully designed with clear specs and features (MVP + longterm future features), language/copy and mechanics. There has also already been a prototype tested, and a tech stack available, though it’s not locked yet without engineer input.

- An active go to market strategy including a healthy waitlist that is still actively growing (high 7.5% conversion rate on and rising on cold outreach) and a clearly defined market/avatar. Users are ready as soon as MVP ships.

- Daily content production will be used for distribution with plans to do even more. My account has reached ~700,000 views in its first 4 months, and that number is growing.

- Leadership ability through over a decade of work directly with people, both client and colleague. For 3 of those years, I have run my own business, which I have closed to pursue this full time.

- Developed business skills through previous business successes. All business metrics are tracked and help determine how we execute our work and make adjustments when necessary.

What I’m offering:

- I’m open to dev positions, depending on what you’re looking for. (founding engineer, contracting, internships, something else).

- Full ownership over the technical side of the project. You won’t have to handle anything else but the dev side, and you control how it’s done. If there’s another way you’d like to work, we can discuss that too.

- Negotiable terms that I’d be happy to establish before any work starts getting done. Profit share, equity, etc. I want this to be a satisfying win for both of us.

- Full spec sheet and preparedness to communicate clearly and consistently over the course of the partnership.

DM for more information.

Yesterday I posted a screenshot of my app store earnings. Many community members asked me how I am marketing my app and asked me for tips. Well, the answer is simply, I am not a marketing expert, the truth is I am not good in marketing and that's the reason I am here in this community to get idea from other members.

The only reason I started making a good amount of earnings from day 1 after my app was published is that I already have a website that is getting a good amount of traffic since 2016, and I have lots of registered users and their newsletter emails. Another member asked me for some tips to get traffic on a website so that it can help to promote the app. But truth is that, I am getting good amount traffic doesn't means I can also give some tips to someone and easily start getting traffic. For example, I also started a website in 2020, and another website in 2021, but both of those websites failed and didn't get any traffic. I found that all the SEO rules that worked in 2016 don't work in the present. For this reason, after 2016, I have not been able to success in any of my websites. So I am only focusing on the old website where getting traffic since 2016.

hi, i've published a few apps on app store and playstore. Only recently, three of my apps (1 ai generated design and 2 done all by self) got rejected based on Design Spam 4.3 (a)

I did a lot of research and designed both the apps out of literal passion, im so sure of the feature set uniqueness to atleast 80% but not sure why suddenly my apps got rejected on design spam. Has anyone recently experienced something similar?

We’re a small team building a screenshot app, and we’re sharing it here to get feedback, suggestions, and advice on how we can improve it.

Sealshot was developed with the help of Claude. It’s open-source and free, so more people can try it, contribute feedback, and help shape where it goes next. It’s still a work in progress, and we’d especially love to hear from people who use screenshots heavily for development, QA, support, documentation, or security work.

One of the problems we kept running into was that screenshots often became disposable files. We’d take screenshots for bug reports, annotate and share them, then struggle to find them again later. Screenshots can also contain things you probably don’t want to share by accident, such as emails, tokens, API keys, internal URLs, or customer information.

So we built Sealshot for macOS around a simple idea:

Treat screenshots more like documents than temporary images.

Sealshot can:

• capture regions, windows, scrolling content, and recordings
• keep annotations editable after saving
• detect potentially sensitive information before sharing
• OCR screenshots and make the archive searchable
• organize captures in a local library
• encrypt captures stored on disk
• generate metadata locally without sending screenshots to a cloud AI service

Everything is processed locally on the Mac.

What’s the biggest pain point in your current screenshot workflow?

GitHub / download: https://github.com/ldeng83/Sealshot
Docs: https://seal-shot.com/

"I made an app, no idea how to do organic marketing, this is tuff".

Here's how to create 2 months worth of content in half a day:

1. Create a TikTok account
2. Pay a UGC girl to give you 30-40 reaction clips (3-5 seconds long)
3. Record a video of your screen showing how the app works, cut it shortly to 1-2s clips.
4. Organize all of these footage files into folders.
5. Ask Claude/Codex to overlay text over the UGC clips and automatically stitch a random reaction + the screen recording of your app.
6. -- Do something like "This website feels ILEGAL". with a surprised reaction of the UGC girl.
7. Generate 100's of random combinations / different caption variations.
8. Ask claude to schedule 2x posts a day automatically for you for each account through socialclaw.

Iteration:

1. Be patient. You won't go viral in a week. Accept most posts will flop. But keep an eye on ones that get ~1,000 views. Improve on them.
2. If you find something that can be done better delete all scheduled ones and regenerate better ones.
3. DO NOT USE AI content. You can generate caption ideas, but use only original footage. TikTok/Youtube can detect it.
4. Yes you can still go viral with AI content, but it seems most are just funny videos and stuff.
5. Use AI only to help your process.

Last year it barely made $600 a month.

I kept working on the app, as AI models like Claude and gpt-5.6 made it more reliable by fixed a lot of bugs, and reduced lag for long live translation sessions.

The live translation market is saturated but it is very large market nonetheless.

Without going into detail, the app is for anyone living abroad and it is still not fluent in the listening part and need in the moment context of the conversation.

Anyway just keep working on your app, keep adding features and polishing it like a katana.

I launched a web app with nextjs. Turns platform specific content from any YouTube video URL. Like LinkedIn post, Twitter thread, Instagram captions, TikTok script, newsletter and blog post with proper hashtags.

So now my plan is that if users retention will be good I'll build a mobile app and divert into a mobile app for a web app. 5 content generates free per week. So if users fulfill this free limit in taharcast then I'll move into a mobile app where I can integrate revenueCat.

Is this approach better for validating the product?? And need here to update any features or add new features?

I only post about this last day on Twitter and LinkedIn. So for this which platform, strategy will be good for marketing and distributing?

I shipped a film discovery site as a non-technical founder — Claude wrote the entire codebase

I’ve been building WatchWise, a film discovery platform designed to answer three questions: What should I watch, where is it streaming, and is it worth watching?

I focused on the product decisions, testing, and refining the experience, while Claude handled the code. After hundreds of iterations, it’s finally ready to share.

What’s available today:

Streaming availability across major platforms

A transparent rating showing the sources used and how each one is weighted

Box-office analytics for actors and directors, including budgets, grosses, and career hit rates

A swipe-able trailer feed

More than 80,000 titles from around the world, with particularly strong coverage of Indian cinema

It’s completely free, with no ads.
I’m sharing it because I’m sure there are bugs, incorrect data, and confusing parts I haven’t spotted. If you try it, I’d genuinely appreciate honest feedback—especially on anything that breaks, feels unclear, or could be made more useful.
Website: watchwise.in

Hi Reddit!

I'm Jill, a PM at a games studio. I've spent more than a decade building games from 0 --> 1 and launching them on the app stores. This time, I wanted to try something that was more personal, and would solve some of my problems. I'm building something to solve a problem my family faces every single day, and I'd love your feedback.

The problem:

Every household has someone carrying the invisible mental load of meals. It's not the cooking that's exhausting — it's the deciding. 21 meals a week. Knowing what's in the fridge. Figuring out quick meals for busy nights.

My partner and I are both pretty into fitness. We train, we track our calories, we actually care about hitting our macros. And still, most nights we'd end up standing in front of a fridge full of groceries with no idea what to make. I'd have 200 recipes saved on my Instagram but going through it all would take me 30 mins and by then it'll be too late and I'll end up ordering take out. And even when we landed on something, we had no way of knowing if it fit our macros until after we'd cooked it and logged it. Too late to change anything by then

What I built:
Cal Pal - A calorie tracking app that let's you scan what's in your fridge and it gives you recipes you can actually make right now, and they fit your calorie and macro targets so it doesn't wreck whatever goal you're on. You can still pull in recipes you've saved on Instagram, it just checks them against what you've got. Sets your daily numbers, logs meals, Apple Health, shopping list for the bits you're missing.

Where I'm at:

Early beta — collecting founding users and feedback. The app is live in most countries but I am only doing a soft launch for now (Live in all countries except: United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Germany, France, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Japan). However, if you'd really like a test flight link, I can send it to you if you DM me or write in comments below

My questions for you:

1. Does this solve a real problem for you or your family?
2. What's missing that would make you actually use this?
3. Any feedback on the landing page?
4. Any feedback on the app?

🔗 Cal Pal Landing Page 🔗 Cal Pal App Store Link (SG) but you can find the app on the app store as Cal Pal: AI Recipe Finder

Thanks for any feedback — I'm building this based on what real families need.

https://reddit.com/link/1w4e8x6/video/q6l2uu5eaxmh1/player