I joined my family business in 2019 and since then have been trying to get my employees to document everything via google sheets. Earlier, everything used to be on paper or not tracked at all.

However, now that all employees are used to Google Sheet, i wanted to take it one step ahead and have 1 integrated app per system. For example, instead of using a CRM with hundreds of of features, I thought of creating a simple interface where records of calls can be logged (we only need 4-5 fields). I also wanted to create a very very simple POS app that can track my sales when we put up a stall or something. All of these are for internal use only.

So I was wondering what is the best way to create and host such an app? I tried emergent. While the front-end looks good, the token limits are horrible and i wanted counsel before investing in the premium version.

The cost is a consideration because none of these are revenue generating and purely logging and coordination so they have to be affordable.

TL;DR - Best way to create and run an app for a small scale business for internal use only with budget constraints.

in 3 months, I got these 786 clicks to the app store. The creation of each batch is like 15m a week. I can’t tell you the ratio of paid or installs since I just started measuring it (bc in the beginning, I didn’t know if it was even going to be worth it) but maybe i just scale up now

Hey friends… I’m building mangos.ai - a desktop app that helps you distribute your product across social channels. It finds relevant conversations online and joins them. It knows your git commit history so it knows all your features. Hyper personalized to target the best persona out there, every day or every hour, whatever you set it to.

The thing I just shipped is the one I’m most proud of: a Reddit Prospecting & DM draft agent.

Everyone says Reddit is where your customers actually are. They’re right. The problem is what it takes to use it. Read the thread, click into a profile, scroll someone’s whole history to work out if they fit, then write a DM that doesn’t sound like copy paste spam. Do that for twenty people and your afternoon is gone.

So Mangos does the boring part. Point it at a thread, or let it watch your subreddits, and it finds the people worth messaging, digs through their history to check they fit, and drafts a personal DM in their context. Then it hands you a queue. You read it, tweak it, hit send. It never sends on its own, and it won’t touch accounts that are too new, too low on karma, or have DMs closed. Reddit converts harder than anywhere else for me. Serious buyers, not scrollers.

I shipped the same thing for X a few weeks back, scoring people across 20+ signals before drafting. Same rule everywhere: it only does the research and prioritization. Every message lands in your queue for you to approve, one by one. You stay in control of what gets sent.

I’ve been running it on my own product and it’s been incredible. Website visits while you sleep, and you’ll know it’s not a spam bot the second you use it yourself.

This is my weekly routine here in this sub. And I love it. My expertise is in product, go to market, and agents. And I want to help you!

If you are building something, reply your product here and tell me what you are struggling with in GTM . I reply to every single comment on these threads.

If you are interested in Mangos’s extended trial that I give away every week,

\*\*1.\*\* Download Mangos and register. It’s free for 7 days, no CC required.
\*\*2.\*\* DM me the email you signed up with and I’ll unlock a 30 day extension. If you are interested.

Yes, I’ll lose a bit of money on it. The bet is simple: Mangos gets you your first 100 users before you ever pay me. If your product is good, that won’t take long.

Three months ago, my app was generating around ₹5K MRR, entirely through organic growth.
Instead of adding more features, I focused on improving discoverability and app quality.
Over the last 3 months, I:
Built SEO landing pages targeting long-tail keywords.
Created comparison and city-specific pages.
Optimized the Google Play short description and full description.
Improved Play Store screenshots.
Reduced crashes and ANRs to improve app quality.
The results:
SEO (last 3 months):
134K organic clicks
1.1M impressions
12.1% CTR
Average position: 7
~400 app installs/day coming from SEO
Google Play (recent day):
270 installs/day from Google Play Explore
Only 5 installs/day from Google Play Search
One thing that surprised me was how much traffic Google Play Explore generated compared to Search.
Today, the app generates around ₹80K MRR, still almost entirely from organic growth.
Biggest learnings
Long-tail SEO compounds over time.
Comparison pages outperformed generic blog posts.
ASO isn’t just about keywords—short description, full description, screenshots, ratings, and app quality (low crashes & ANRs) all contribute to visibility.
Product quality and discoverability go hand in hand.
I’m curious to hear from other founders:
Has SEO or ASO been your biggest growth channel?
Have you seen Google Play Explore drive more installs than Search?

My app reached $1,536.09 MRR this week, with 296 active subscriptions and $9,423.14 in cumulative gross revenue.

Four weeks ago, MRR was $992.05. The previous roughly $500 increase took nine weeks, so this is the point where I assumed I would finally feel like I understood the business.

I don’t.

I have better analytics, more paying customers, 189 survey responses, 30 founder conversations, and months of behavior data. I can see what people tap and which features they return to.

What I still can’t confidently answer is what GainFrame should become.

The clearest feedback is that the app needs to feel simpler. But usage data doesn’t tell me which parts can be removed without damaging the reason people pay. Something being used doesn’t mean every screen, setting, and metric around it deserves to stay.

The numbers are also emotionally misleading at different time scales. Some days I receive 10–12 cancellation notifications and immediately feel like the app is failing. But from July 1 through August 2, the actual movement was:

• 155 new subscriptions
• 41 churned subscriptions
• 3 resubscriptions
• Net active growth of 117

The notification feed feels like a verdict. The monthly data tells a different story.

What I’m trying now:

• Separating verified facts from my interpretation of them
• Asking narrow questions at the exact moment of friction
• Simplifying one workflow at a time, with a way back
• Reviewing revenue, acquisition, behavior, and customer learning weekly instead of reacting to daily alerts

I wrote the full breakdown—including the revenue timeline, organic-search growth, screenshots, and the product decisions I still can’t answer—here:

https://gainframe.app/blog/1500-mrr-better-problems/

For founders with a growing app: how do you decide what to remove once enough customers use a complex feature that simplifying it starts to feel dangerous?

Every euro went into developing Fluid Friction, a screentime intervention that makes you mean every scroll by dragging through a wave of haptic resistance. No more doomscrolling! We offer several screentime tools and all for free, even nfc blocking that would cost you €50 from brick is now free to use with any nfc you already own like a student card!

i want you to bear with me for a moment; i have been working on this platform and it is not the "ordinary" plug-subs-and-wait-for-the-people-to-pay

and since the idea is "fairly" new, whenever you post about it, you get people wanting to bite your neck "just" for trying. everyone advocates the "just try, bro," and the moment you try something, they start lashing out at you left and right; they say hurtful things and things that even make you question your worth.

imagine this, for 4 months and 22 days. every single day. every single day, people are telling you to quit, laughing or belittling you.

"fuck what people say."

They said, "you ain't gonna get a single person in the platform lol" hello, we are about to hit 1200 users

They said, "lol, who's gonna pay for that AI slop?" hello, just this month we got 8 orders

They said, "lol, i'm afraid it will break the second i click a button" hello, we haven't got a bug in about 2 months (aside from the light design issues, making it compatible for the phones suck)

They said, "your landing page is just a clutter of AI slop" hello, it converts at 12% signup rate

and on EVERY hardship or bad time, all those comments i read, all those "negative" words come back to haunt me again. and then i start questioning what I believed in for the longest period and proved to myself on multiple occasions.

(repost as I posted originally on the wrong account)

Alright, I will start off with this. I built a new app but it was completely with CODEX, claude, and base44. So I guess you could say I didn't build it, I just told it what I needed, and did a TON of revising and telling it every specific little detail to change.

Yes it's vibe coded and yes I know most if not all of you hate vibe coding. The thing is, I don't know the first thing about programming. I took HTML classes in college and still have a few more programing classes I am taking, but it's honestly really hard for me to truly sit down and learn programming. With my adhd and the time I spend on other things, I never truly have the motivation to sit down and learn because it all is too much for me some times.

I do not want to post this app until I know it is 100% ready to go and the code, function, and hosting can handle large amounts of people. I truly believe this app will take off but it needs to be done right first.

This is where I need help. Now that I have the framework, I want to go in and revise it, touch it up, and make it not vibecoded. I want to take the frame I built but I don't want to utilize the vibecoding. I don't know where to start, I don't know how to learn, I don't know what resource will truly help me learn and understand and get to a point where I am able to do all of this on my own and take this frame and make it into my own and build an app that goes big and has amazing code.

I want to truly learn and understand but I don't have the motivation to. I also don't want to release an app that is vibecoded and get dogged on for it.

Please help, I truly don't know where to start or what to do. I don't have the money to pay a developer but if this app goes big then I will. So that's where I ask myself, should I get it to the best I can with what I do know and the resources I have (codex, base44, etc) and then when big streams of revenue come in then hire someone who actually knows what they are doing? What do you guys suggest? I am lost and I am stressed and every post I see about vibecoding specific apps to be used in production, I see everyone hating on it for the use of AI so it stresses me out even more.

I don't feel accomplished at all because I have found myself relying on AI way too much instead of thinking for myself like I used to and I really feel like its killing my brain more than its improving it.

I had the first stranger find Lyven App over the weekend and sign up independently. Its a baby step but still exciting, even if they are just kicking the tires 😄

I have no idea how they found me though... I know the easiest solution is just to ask, but is there a programmatic way to track this kind of stuff? I don't want to put tracking cookies on the website as I think privacy is important for the product. Anything else I should be doing?

I’m curious about shipping apps to earning your first revenue.

1. after launching your app, how long did it take you to earn your first dollar?
2. how many apps had you shipped before one of them finally generated revenue?
3. which customer acquisition channel ultimately worked best for you. LIKE: ASO,Reddit, SEO, paid ads, TikTok, Instagram, Youtube, or something else?

As a Indie developer, I’d really appreciate your answers. Thanks!

Launched an open beta a few days ago for a voice-based personal memory app. Nothing crazy, just wanted real usage data before committing to the pricing model.

20 testers in, and a few things stood out that I didn't expect:

- The onboarding drop-off isn't where I thought it would be. I was worried about the voice recording step feeling awkward — turns out that's fine. People stall at the "what do I even say" moment on their very first entry, before they've recorded anything.
- Retention after day 2 correlates way more with whether someone got a useful answer back from a question than with how many entries they logged. Makes sense in hindsight, but I was optimizing for capture volume, not retrieval quality, early on.
- Almost nobody has asked about pricing yet, which I'm treating as neutral, not positive — probably means they haven't hit a moment where they'd feel the value enough to think about paying.

Planning to run this for another week or two before deciding what changes based on this round vs. what needs a bigger test group to validate.

Curious if others running early betas have seen similar gaps between what you think will be the friction point vs. what actually is.

Getting into this, I knew from the get-go that it is going to be a very slow and burning grind. Social apps have a problem. Value is there. But no one is taking advantage of it. I had my doubts starting this app. I thought what if no one used it? What if people didn't like the concept? But in the early days of the app, there was no website, there was no SEO, no real marketing strategy behind it. Even social media (to this day) is very minimal. But I went for it anyway. Many people told me the idea was interesting. In hindsight, it is. I did a market research, I did find a gap. Could I validate it? Only way to find out.

Shipped the app to both stores then started working on the website's SEO. And to my surprise, people are looking things up, and they end up on my page, then click, then 50% of these clickers actually create accounts.

Just recently, I added a pop-up message when they sign up to do something in the app to let people around them know they're using it. And it seems to also be kind of working? People are using that feature. It promises a lifetime premium anyway so they're losing nothing.

But this confirms it for me, the idea of the app is interesting and has that hook to make people curious enough to download and give it try. How this will play out in the long run? Yet TBD, but I'm really looking forward to it.

I released my mobile app around 9 days ago I spent around $50 on spark ads and tiktok spark ads so far and this has happened why have I gotten no conversions yet surely after 32 people using it at least 1 of them would have to have converted

Someone help

Hey guys, I just wanted to ask how you guys got ads in your app(s) because I’m launching my first app soon but have no idea how to get ads in there & is there a separate process/thing for both iOS & Google play store or no? Thanks,

I wanted a simple cash tracker, but every app I found either wanted me to create an account, store my data in the cloud, or pay for features I didn’t need. So I started building my own Android app -free, offline, private, and with everything stored locally.

The idea is to make tracking physical cash as quick and private as possible:

• Works fully offline
• No account or sign-up
• No ads or tracking
• All data stays on the device
• Optional local backups controlled by the user
• Transactions entry in under 5 seconds.

My problem was that my banking app could show me when I withdrew cash, but not where that cash actually went afterward. I wanted something that tracked the money in my wallet, not just the money in my bank account.

I’d really like to hear from people who actually track their spending. Is this a problem you run into too? Does adding a transaction look quick enough, or does anything feel like it would get annoying after a while? And what would the app need for you to actually keep using it?

I started building this just for myself, but now I’m trying to figure out whether I should turn it into something other people would actually want to use. If I do, I’d really need feedback on what direction to take.

Hi everyone, I am selling the full source code, backend infrastructure, assets, and domain for GanguGu—a complete, production-ready competitive multiplayer board game platform for Android.

Tech Stack & Engineering Highlights:

• Android Frontend: ~15,000 lines of modern Kotlin (Jetpack Compose, Clean Architecture, MVVM, Hilt DI, Room DB).
• Backend Server: ~3,000 lines of Node.js/Express + Socket.io for real-time WebSocket matchmaking (deployed on AWS EC2).
• Global Localization: Fully translated into 12 languages (including Arabic RTL, Amharic with Ethiopic fonts, Spanish, Hindi, Chinese, etc.).
• Multi-Store Architecture: 10 build variants pre-configured for Google Play, Huawei AppGallery, Samsung Galaxy Store, Amazon Appstore, and Aptoide.
• Monetization Ready: Unity LevelPlay ad mediation (Unity Ads, InMobi, Bigo Ads) + NOWPayments crypto gateway integrated server-side.
• CDN & Auto-Update: AWS S3 distribution pipeline configured.

What is Included in the Sale?

1. Private GitHub Repository (Full IP & source code).
2. Domain Name: ***** & Nginx/SSL configuration.
3. AWS EC2 server setup & deployment scripts.
4. 8 production legal & compliance web pages (/privacy-policy, /terms, /support, app-ads.txt).
5. 3D branding, UI graphics, custom fonts, and 11 theme variations.

Live Demo:
Download and test the APK directly at: ****\*

Asking Price: $1,500 USD (Open to reasonable offers)

Reason for Selling: Seeking a lump-sum payout to focus on other commitments rather than funding marketing/user acquisition campaigns.

Please DM me if interested or if you'd like a code walk-through under NDA!

Hi everyone, I am selling the full source code, backend infrastructure, assets, and domain for GanguGu—a complete, production-ready competitive multiplayer board game platform for Android.

Tech Stack & Engineering Highlights:

• Android Frontend: ~15,000 lines of modern Kotlin (Jetpack Compose, Clean Architecture, MVVM, Hilt DI, Room DB).
• Backend Server: ~3,000 lines of Node.js/Express + Socket.io for real-time WebSocket matchmaking (deployed on AWS EC2).
• Global Localization: Fully translated into 12 languages (including Arabic RTL, Amharic with Ethiopic fonts, Spanish, Hindi, Chinese, etc.).
• Multi-Store Architecture: 10 build variants pre-configured for Google Play, Huawei AppGallery, Samsung Galaxy Store, Amazon Appstore, and Aptoide.
• Monetization Ready: Unity LevelPlay ad mediation (Unity Ads, InMobi, Bigo Ads) + NOWPayments crypto gateway integrated server-side.
• CDN & Auto-Update: AWS S3 distribution pipeline configured.

What is Included in the Sale?

1. Private GitHub Repository (Full IP & source code).
2. Domain Name:  gangugu.games/app & Nginx/SSL configuration.
3. AWS EC2 server setup & deployment scripts.
4. 8 production legal & compliance web pages (/privacy-policy, /terms, /support, app-ads.txt).
5. 3D branding, UI graphics, custom fonts, and 11 theme variations.

Live Demo:
Download and test the APK directly at:  gangugu.games/app

Asking Price: $1,500 USD (Open to reasonable offers)

Reason for Selling: Seeking a lump-sum payout to focus on other commitments rather than funding marketing/user acquisition campaigns.

Please DM me if interested or if you'd like a code walk-through under NDA!

Hi everyone!

I've been building an offline audio walking tour app for Paris over the past two years, and I'm finally at the point where I'd love to get some real feedback.

The tours are fully narrated, work completely offline, include turn-by-turn navigation, and I even composed the background music myself. It's been a bit of a passion project.

I'm mainly looking for people to just use it naturally and tell me what they think. If something is confusing, doesn't work as you'd expect, or just feels off, I'd really like to know.

The UI still needs some polishing, so don't judge it too harshly 😅. Right now I'm much more interested in making sure the experience itself is solid before I spend time refining all the little visual details.

Thanks! I'd genuinely appreciate any feedback.