Pradeep CE

Today, I am starting a new series where I share my journey to making my first 111k USD while building in public. Why 111k? Why not 100k, or 10k, or a million? You see, 111k USD is almost exactly one crore INR (1,00,00,000 INR), and it is a life-changing amount of money where I live. It's also an amount that sounds ridiculous when you consider that my business is just me and my laptop. I'm sharing the entire journey: all the wins, and all the losses. So, how am I going to do this? I code for a living, and it's probably the only thing I know how to do, at least moderately well. So that's how. Why am I doing this? I have tried my hand at doing a bunch of things since I started freelancing full-time over 3 years ago: 1. Techoffee: this is the brand under which I do all of my "agency" stuff like building websites and setting up Shopify stores 2. FortnightMVP: a service to build SaaS MVPs in around 15 days; has had maybe 2 clients since launch, and all offline, from people I knew already 3. Freelancing: I'm on Fiverr, and it is currently my primary source of income; I took up a few projects offline, but not many; I wanted to expand into Upwork, Toptal, and others, but haven't had any luck there 4. SaaS: I help build a hotel management software called StayElf, and it's got some early traction, but I want to scale it up; I have built a few other apps like TransDub and SkyKeeper, but none got much traction None of these have been truly successful. I haven't really "made it" yet. I have gotten by ok, but it feels nowhere near what I know I am capable of doing. I have a list of ideas which I have only talked about building, but never did. I suck at marketing, and haven't really done or tried to do much of it, except maybe create a couple of social media posts, and wait for enquiries to land in my Fiverr inbox. So this is my way of taking a proper shot at trying to do better, and building a successful business. This is my way of trying to grow and upskill. Some rules for myself: - Be obsessive about hitting this goal; make every minute count; win or lose, give it everything I've got - Be honourable in pursuit of this goal, and always - Do the hard things It just so happens that I signed on a new freelance project, and have received the first milestone payment: 332 USD (0.299 % of 111k goal). #buildinpublic

Someone messaged me saying they found a vulnerability in my app, and asked if I would be interested in knowing about it. I said, yes ofcourse I would be. They asked if there was "any monetary reward" for the disclosure. I said I'm a broke random dude building on nights and weekends, and that there was no reward. But I'd be oh-so-grateful if they let me know which app it was, or what the issue was. I do care deeply about security, and I do multiple passes of reviews before I push code. So all this while, I was thinking how I could have let this happen. They eventually replied, and turns out, it was an app I hadn't even launched yet. There was only a website and a Tally waitlist form on it. 😭 #buildinpublic

For a split second, I saw a hamburger 🍔 emoji instead of the hamburger menu icon on @github today, and it made me smile :)

Just documenting this gem for those that are fairly young. Source: acme.com/jef/netgems/500mile…

Gave the transdub.ai dashboard a little bit of a makeover today. Still not fully satisfied, but should be good-enough for now. What would you change here? #buildinpublic

Same. To me, this boils down to the probability of irreparable damage. If a page crashes in the frontend, no big deal, I fix it and it works again. Embarrassing, yes, but not the end of the world. But if the backend doesn't enforce user permission scope properly, or if it's writing wrong values to the DB, it kinda is the end of the world. This could also be because I'm a backend dev first, and picked up FE later on.

My version of this is when using banking sites that don't let me use my password manager, or paste passwords. I inspect the password field in dev tools, set its value, and fire a change event on it. Then submit. 😁

📝 Talent without consistency doesn't build anything. — @robj3d3

This is wild! Hermes agent runs on my @Raspberry_Pi 2B from 2016. Like, literally decade-old hardware. In around 48 hours, it has: - created two functional micro saas app mvps - one was django + nextjs with pdf rendering - another was an uptime monitor written as a single process nextjs app - created a "sub-agent" that wrote 100 articles for product 1, all linked internally. It said it targeted long tail keywords. I didn't even know what that meant. All of this was for free via @OpenRouter . The Pi is armv7, 4 cores, around 900mb of usable RAM, 32 GB SD card as storage, and cosumes like 5W of power I think. It's connected via ethernet to my router, and is entirely headless. It also runs a local redis server, nginx, and a couple of cloudflare tunnels for me to preview the apps, as they are being built. Works really well with Telegram, so I just chat with it and tell it what to do. h/t @NousResearch

The timeline is now a breath of fresh air! 😁

My @WhatsApp has suddenly started getting messages from brands and businesses again. A year or so ago, WhatsApp started showing a popup every time I opened the app, asking me to accept the latest terms. Knowing Meta, I knew what this meant: more ways to let marketing messages through. And so I declined it every time, until a few months later, it stopped showing it to me. From then on, I've never received a single message on WhatsApp from a business. I couldn't even test the WhatsApp integrations and chatbots I built on this number, and it was wonderful. Then suddenly, on the very same day, I've now received messages from five different businesses: Amazon, CRED, RBI etc. @CRED was the main culprit here, bundling transactional notifications into the same number as their marketing notifications, with no way to stop only the marketing ones. @kunalb11 Please, please give us a way to opt out globally from all business communication or marketing. I don't want offers or marketing on WhatsApp. I just want to be able to get notified of transactions without being flooded with "offers". Or not get notified at all, that's fine too.

I found most AI customer support agents to be broken, especially voice agents. Except probably @cursor_ai, which was cool. I am mostly willing to talk to the bot. But I only ever contact support after combing through the docs and not finding the answer there. And since the bot is mostly trained on the docs, it's useless to me most of the time. And with companies removing the "contact a human" feature from their bots, I find myself giving up more often than not. For example, with Cursor, I sent an email to support. Their AI support agent answered, clearly identifying itself as the AI support agent. The response was useful, but I had a follow-up question which I replied with. It replied saying it doesn't have that info, and looped in a human agent seamlessly. The human agent again was fantastic, and answered my question precisely. The whole experience was beautiful. Contrast this with Airtel or Swiggy's bot giving me only 4 options to choose from, as BUTTONS. And no option to say I want to talk to a human, or that I had a question not covered by those four buttons. Horrible experience.

This just makes my day! 🤩 #buildinpublic

If you think your app is too shit to launch, remember that when Dropbox launched, some of the comments said: - Anyone on Linux could "...already build such a system yourself quite trivially" - It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating - I've seen this before Just launch it. Iterate. Take the criticism and use it as fuel to make yourself and your app better. You got this! 💪

ChatGPT has apparently been sending a lot of people to TransDub, and I have no idea how I got on there! 🤷‍♂️

Don't do what I did. I was on the legacy Free plan on Netlify. For years. I didn't even have to think about it. If I needed a quick site up, I put it on @Netlify. I don't get all that much traffic, so it was one piece of my infra that remained unchanged. Then for #HotARSummer, it said to use agents, I had to switch to the new Free plan. I didn't give it much thought, and I did. It said I would receive a one-time free packet of 400 credits to start with agent runners. That didn't happen, and vanished after I switched. But I thought ok, I still have 300 credits from the free plan. I sent maybe two or three prompts, and exhausted all those credits. All of it to show a page with a dot on it, that you chase around with a net. I still thought, ok, fun while it lasted. But it turns out, on the new Free plan, you need credits for _everything_. Like deploying and bandwidth too. And one deployment is like 15 credits. I was heartbroken when I received that email saying I couldn't do production deployments anymore because my credits were gone. I miss my old Free plan. It was simple, forgettable, and a relic from simpler times. So yeah, don't do what I did. Hold on to your legacy plans. P.S: I've got nothing against Netlify. I still love them. I've been free loading off them for close to a decade now, I think. They deserve every dollar anyone ever gives them :)

Saw KP's tweet and joined Netlify's #HotARSummer Spent 10 minutes, and all my free credits on hot-ar-summer.netlify.app/ap… RT to tell @Netlify to send me some free credits 😁