Building https://teapawt.net/t.co/xKgUqj22eY and talking about tech
Joined September 2020
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Quick follow-up on the directory submissions.
When from DR 7 => 26, so it is working.
DR went up, and that alone helps a bit with trust. When someone lands on AffiliationList, a stronger domain rating makes the site feel less like a random new tool.
More DR does not automatically mean more traffic. That part is slower.
What I do see is a snowball effect. The more places list the product, the easier it is for other sites to discover and mention it. A few people also find the product this way and seem genuinely interested.
Next step: SEO plus niche backlinks (sites in the affiliate and SaaS space), so the links help trust and traffic, not just the domain score.
If you already did the directory grind, what niche sites actually moved the needle for you?
A few weeks ago I shared my directory / backlink experiment for AffiliationList.
Quick update.
DR update: 3 → 7
Not huge, but it finally moved.
What changed in Ahrefs since that post:
Referring domains: 294 → ~379
Backlink pages in the latest export: 414
Domains with at least one dofollow: 11 → ~21
Spam-flagged domains: still about 95%
The spam network is still the noisy part. Most new referring domains are not places I submitted to.
What I actually did since then:
I submitted AffiliationList to about 25+ more directories / launch platforms in a short window (mostly late July).
Mix of free + badge, a few small paid ones.
Interesting results:
Clean wins that showed up in Ahrefs:
Findly.tools (DR 80): paid $19 → 2 dofollow pages. One of the best new results.
Neeed.directory (DR 72): free/badge path → dofollow, crawled fast.
NickLaunches (DR 68): free listing → dofollow confirmed.
BuiltByMe (DR 56): paid $9 → dofollow confirmed.
DanielleLaunches (DR 48): badge listing → 3 dofollow pages.
Still useful from before: PromoteProject, OpenHunts, IndieTools, SideProjectors.
Less clean, but worth noting:
Some listings did create links, but Ahrefs flags the domain as spam (Wired.business, ProductWatch, Uno.directory, ListMySaaS, and Open-Launch from before).
Also: 10words, which was one of my best early paid wins, is now spam-flagged in Ahrefs. The links are still there. The quality signal got worse.
Takeaway this round:
Submitting more directories can move DR a bit, and it can create real dofollow links if you track them.
But:
- volume of referring domains is still mostly spam noise
- a few paid listings under $20 can clearly work
- free + badge can also work
- spam flags can appear later even on “wins”
- DR can stay flat for a while, then jump when a few cleaner links land
I’m still not optimizing for “max directories submitted”.
I’m optimizing for:
- submit
- wait for crawl
- check dofollow
- check spam flag
- check traffic
- double down only on what looks clean and useful
Next priorities:
- Work on the content to make in sort to be a reference for the other website, and AI
- Continue to submit to other directories
- Start to reach website in my niche to get linked.
If you did directory submissions too: what actually moved your DR or traffic, and what just looked good on paper?
Today, I got a mail bombing on my newsletter subscription.
So a bot is subscribing to my newsletter with emails found on the web.
Why? I have no idea.
I guess that's to make in sort to kill the domain reputation.
I'm always wondering why people do stuff like that.
Working on side project in this AI area is so good.
You can make update, and correction during a 30min slot.
I'm sur a lot of people like me will never have deploy so much features, and bug fix with so little time
About to discover that there are open source for almost all existing projects
😅 @marclou inspired me by churning from Beehiiv to vibe-code his own newsletter tool
so when DataFast hit me with an upgrade popup yesterday, I pulled a Marc on Marc 😭
moved all 23 sites to my own Hetzner server in one morning:
🧰 backfilled 3.6M visitors + 7,600 Stripe/Polar payments across 23 sites
🚀 12x–225x faster queries (benchmarked from 1,152ms → 92ms)
📊 ripped out Recharts for native SVG (bundle 536kB → 96kB)
🔌 custom Stripe, Polar, GSC & ClickHouse connectors
🤖 direct MCP access for my coding agents
🇪🇺 100% first-party on EU Hetzner (no 3rd-party sub-processors, no GDPR headaches, no adblockers)
💸 $0/mo, unlimited events
honestly it's just more responsible to self-host your analytics anyway, you own the raw visitor + payment data instead of leaking it to a 3rd party and can ensure you fix all the latest security dependency issues and your Stripe keys don't leak and you can make improvements for your specific stack
he was right: once you have a server and an agent, you don't click "upgrade plan" anymore
SaaS-pocalypse
Out side his 99$/month.
If you are serious with posting on different social media, not sure if it worth the case with post API.
X API will already cost the half of a normal post scheduler(30$/month) and on top of that you will need to deal with hosting and everything around it
Here is the break down
Posting (3/day, about 90/month)
- Plain text or media post: $0.015 each, so about $1.35/month.
- If every post contains a link: $0.20 each, so about $18/month.
Reading ("normal navigation")
- Third-party posts cost $0.005 per post returned.
- This depends on how much the user scrolls, so I'm assuming ~100 posts/day (3,000/month), which comes to about $15/month.
- Light use (50/day) is about $7.50, and heavy use (200/day) is about $30.
Estimated total
- Typical: ~$16.35/month.
- Light: ~$9/month.
- Heavy: ~$31/month.
- Reads are billed per post returned, not per request, so pagination and refreshes add cost.
- Reading the user's own posts is cheaper, at $0.001 each.
Paying $99/month was getting a little too expensive...
So I built my own open source alternative that now costs me LESS THAN $1/month to run.
YES, 99x CHEAPER! 🤯
Introducing Open Post, an open source alternative to Post Bridge that lets you post to all your social media accounts from one dashboard.
I'll be open sourcing it on GitHub this coming week once I finish testing each social media integration.
And just to be clear...
This isn't about taking business away from an existing SaaS. I simply wanted to build something cheaper for myself that does the exact same thing.
If you want a ready-to-use solution and don't mind paying $40-$100/month, definitely check out the original SaaS!
But if you prefer self-hosting and saving money, Open Post is coming soon for free. 🚀
Imagine JavaScript having a major issue 👀
I recommend everyone upgrade Ruby immediately. This is a DoS and RCE vector if you accept user input into Regexp.new() ruby-lang.org/en/news/2026/1…
Today, I worked on AffiliationList to make the update.
I was expecting a notification from UpTimeRobot, but nothing, even if their site is up, and the application is up.
Do they run their email on PHP?
That's weird
New on AffiliationList: bookmarks.
Found a program you like but not ready to apply yet?
Save it, and it's waiting in your dashboard.
No more digging through pages to find it again.
What should I build next?
AnthoVDO retweeted
🇵🇱 Warsaw is Poland's biggest city and it is completely safe at 1am at night
No violent junkies, no drug dealers, no street thugs hanging around harassing women (and men), no pickpockets (nor in the day btw)
No shady people hanging around the train and metro stations
Just people living chill together and police enforcing safety
You know like we used to in Western Europe?
There's a lot to learn from Poland
We climbed Krakus Mound in Krakow with @staskulesh!!!
Very cool
I think it's Pagan but nobody really knows why it's here, it's a man made "mound", like a pile of land
It's very old! 🇵🇱
This ads thing when you open your TV is real cancer.
That’s great if you can change it because it isn’t normal to buy a TV, and have advertising just because it’s connected to the internet…
AffiliationList stats today:
264 lives programs
42 rejected
2,000+ outbound clicks
167 users
Slowly, it's starting to move 💪
Got a request about using Google authentication for Affiliation List because people don’t like to create a username password.
So now you can use your Google account to log in.
Let’s see if it increase engagement
Public complaint help improve the product, so it's a good thing.
That's the reason why Marc can potentially succeed compare to other because most of the users doesn't say anything when they hit a bug, and just leave
Every @marclou launch follows the exact same script:
"noooo you can't just sell a Next.js boilerplate for $199, look at this leaked CLI token!!"
→ fixes it in 2 hours
→ prints $1M+ with ShipFast
"noooo you can't teach coding in 2 weeks, you're not even a real senior engineer!!"
→ ships CodeFast anyway
→ $30k/mo peak ($7k/mo today)
"noooo you can't just build web analytics, attribution is hard and your tracking script has bugs!!"
→ patches every bug in public
→ DataFast is at $31k/mo
"noooo you can't just vibe-code a verified Stripe database, people are spoofing webhooks and test keys!!"
→ uses Twitter haters as free QA, patches every exploit, adds acquisitions
→ TrustMRR is now at $53k/mo
Today:
"noooo you can't just vibe-code a beehiiv alternative over the weekend, email deliverability and SES wrappers are way too hard!!"
Half of X is writing essays in his quote tweets doing free QA and giving him 500k impressions while he fixes the edge cases in prod lol 😂
Never bet against Marc
Indie hacker:
- I will vide code my solution to avoid paying for it
Also Indie hacker:
- Here is my solution that only cost 19$
Btw, I saw Beehiiv product pricing, I wasn't aware it was costing that much.
I'm not into email subscription, but I guess that there is a reason to that?
I vibe-coded beehiiv, and it's 83% cheaper.
✨✨ Introducing MailCheap.ai ✨✨
Everything you need to run a newsletter...
✍️ Editor
📅 Scheduling
📈 Stats
🌐 A website for every issue
🛡️ Deliverability guardrails
🔗 Send from your own domain (and keep your reputation)
And it's not a dinosaur tool:
+ It's open source; you can run it for free
+ It's agentic; everything in the UI is available to your AI
Import from beehiiv, Substack, or Mailchimp in 2 minutes.
You pay for the emails you send, not for dormant subscribers. From $19/month.
Oh, and no "Powered By" badge at the bottom of your emails.
Stop chasing grow and other stuff, just post content, what you do, what you think, and inter act with people.
If it grow, fine, otherwise, you don’t care
That’s better for mental health
Yeah, let's go flooding Youtube with more AI slop
by Dec 31st, I'll hit 1M+ views on a new YouTube channel that my AI agent runs for me
calling it my last challenge of 2026 💪
a few days ago, one of my explainer videos did 600K impressions on X, so I started a YouTube channel that runs completely on its own
it’s called "How It Actually Works"
every day, it picks a topic, writes the script, makes the video and posts it
so far, it has covered interesting topics like how Shazam recognizes a song in seconds, what really happens when you delete a file, and how a contactless card works without a battery
and this is my calendar - every green check is a video that went out by itself, and the blue ones are already queued up
the whole setup is Revid making the videos and Squad running the agent that picks topics, writes and schedules them via PostSyncer
this is going to be fun 🤩
teapawt.net/tibo_maker/status/2105…
I guess they don’t want low value apps that will flood the apps store with 1M variant
