Caleb Hunter Guahip

CipherLock is going on hold for a while, and I wanted to say it here instead of just going quiet.

This week I started a software development internship, on top of my university courses and my undergraduate thesis. Right now I can't give the project the time it deserves, and I'd rather pause it honestly than keep it half alive. My thesis is on lightweight cryptography, so I'm not leaving the subject, just this project for a bit.

I launched NotchMind, a Mac app that turns the MacBook notch into a small hub, as a solo developer with under 500 followers on X. It finished #16 for the day with 76 points, and I'm at about 20 sales so far.

The traffic surprised me:

• X, where I post the most: the tracked link brought 1 vote.

• YouTube: my demo video has about 4.6K views, and around 73% of them came from YouTube recommending it for free. I only spent about $11 on a promotion.

• Reddit, Hacker News and Indie Hackers all stopped me because my accounts were new. One flagged me as spam, one flagged my post, and one wouldn't let me post.

I'm trying to work out where to put my time next, so two specific questions for makers with a small audience:

I open my email a few times a day and somehow it still feels like it s winning. I ve tried a couple of the cleaner inbox tools and AI helpers that pop up here, but I keep ending up back in the same messy inbox with a bunch of unread stuff I meant to deal with later.
Curious what works for other people in practice.

Do you have a simple system, a specific tool, or just a habit that keeps it from piling up?

Or have you mostly given up and accepted the chaos?