Levi Mitchell

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:

How do you all come up with a name when you're launching something new?

For me naming is always the hardest part. I've named around 30 products so far and this is roughly my flow:

- One sentence on what the product actually does, not the feature list. Most of my names come out of that sentence

- Then names from anywhere. One of my apps basically stands in for you, so it became Kagemusha, a Japanese word for a double. Short, and no AI or Pro stuck on the end

A new NBER paper tracks 500,000+ GitHub developers against their actual AI telemetry. The task-level gains are enormous and they mostly don't survive the trip to a shipped release. Across four app marketplaces: a sharp rise in new apps, no rise in total usage.

Most of the AI-productivity argument you've read this year is two camps shouting single numbers at each other. There's a paper out that makes both camps right and is more useful than either, and the revised version went up this month, so it's worth twenty minutes before you write your Q4 plan.