For those meeting me for the first time, nice to meet you! 👋 Here's a little background on how I ended up here: I decided to become an indie hacker 6 years ago So I packed my life into 2 suitcases, quit my SF tech job, and off I went to Taiwan! 🥳 Why? A few reasons: 1. Autonomy. I wanted freedom over my time & future 2. Creative freedom. I wanted to build my own projects after years working in B2B 3. Future-proofing. I have profound and progressive hearing loss. I didn't dare gamble my future on employers So no matter how I sliced it, indie hacking was the path that made the most sense to me. And I had some craving for Taiwanese lu rou fan too As for the next 6 years......ummm, yeahhh, I wish I can say I have a bunch of success stories and hacks to share. But it's just me making every classic dev mistake. Several times over. 🙃 Allow me to share some of my greatest hits: 1. I love going all-in → Spent a year building each project. Without validation 2. I love learning new things → Spent half the time learning the next shiny new tech 3. I love building perfect products → Never shared my work until they're nearly "perfect" I know, I know, I want to go back in time and smack myself too. Anyway, here's my track record so far: 4 failures 1 small win (took 4 years to reach $500 MRR) 1 in progress (Conteflow) Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. One thing I did different this year was make an X account. For context, I am a super introvert who avoided social media for over a decade. But I was really tired. Of building stuff no one wants Of projects not getting any visibility Of not having any feedback So yeah, screw my comfort zone. I'm not the most prolific poster But I LOVE chatting with people who comes by my little corner and becomes a friendly face. So feel free to drop a hi sometime! 👋

So true, it’s really quite different psychologically to be on the other end, being asked a question really triggers this urge to respond 🤔 Closest I can think of would be like b2b AI chatbots to collect data from users or b2c AI companion apps but these are still pretty different haha Haven’t really found that middle ground, a b2c AI interviewer-like app for productivity/creativity/work

I feel like there’s definitely a niche for this kind of app! Especially in education or something

I emailed them a few days ago and found out a couple are using it for creative storytelling or academic exploration and brainstorming

Apparently some people like having an AI that does nothing but ask you questions 😆 It’s not a typical AI chat that you can prompt, cuz it’s an AI designed to prompt YOU for answers

Whooo, congrats! 🎉

Retention has been my biggest challenge for a while so it’s nice that there’s one thing they like 😭

Since a month ago, I noticed a tiny but extremely engaged group of users using my app differently They've basically ignored all the social media & content creation features (you know, the whole point of the app 😅) Instead, they're ONLY using the AI chat feature. Like, multiple times a day, every single day So here goes nothing… I’m going to extract that feature into its own standalone AI chat app and see what happens 👀

Dang, make sure you get the rest you need!

Definitely planning to target LinkedIn and the other channels too! Just starting with TikTok cuz it’d be the fastest to experiment on

Tbh, I haven’t done any marketing for the past couple months due to working on major app updates but I’m planning to start with TikTok soon. Currently, most of my traffic is coming from play store search and the rest seems to be organic word of mouth on various social platforms

Ouch, that sounds pretty bad man 💀 How long will it take to heal completely?

I hated tailwind for the first 2 weeks before loving it afterward 😆

😆

Hope I’m not too late to try! 😊

Oh no, what happened? Glad you have an arm back at least!

And also 10x more stressful with live users around haha 😂

😭

Thanks Wilbert, it's all good now! inngest also later reached out with generous credits + looking into root cause too so that's really nice of them!

Well that escalated quickly (in the best way!) @itstonyhb (inngest founder) reached out personally with 6 months of credits and looking into root cause. I already liked inngest a lot as a product but your founder customer support is amazing too! 💙

Just saw this, thank you so much for reaching out! Just replied to your email