I'm a solo developer and just crossed 1,000+ downloads on an app I built entirely on my own (Qibla Compass & Prayer Streak a free Qibla direction, prayer times, and Quran reader app for Muslims). No ad spend, no team, just building and shipping features based on what I'd want myself.
Now I'm at the "figure out growth" stage, and curious what's genuinely worked for other solo/indie makers here, especially for niche, non-SaaS products:
- Did ASO (App Store Optimization) actually move your numbers, or was it mostly organic community sharing?
I got to the point when I need to hear your inspirational stories. Trying to force myself into coding. Are there existing such cases that you love only front-end/back-end more?
I build faster now with AI than I ever could by hand. Things that used to take me a weekend now just take a prompt, and a lot of that is stuff I genuinely couldn't have written cleanly myself.
So part of me looks at non-technical founders asking whether they should learn to code and thinks the honest answer might be no, or at least not the way I did it. Spending six months grinding through tutorials to write code an AI will write better feels like a waste of time.
Working on a Gmail tracking extension (Chrome + Next.js backend) right now, and just spent way too long chasing a notification that silently never fired turned out the message type was defined but nothing ever triggered it. Classic "the code looks right" trap
What is the balance between spinning up agents and maintaining mentally sane? I feel like the constant context-switching is taking a toll on my productivity and to an extent, my mental health. Does anyone here have any advice?
In yesterday's discussion by @aaronoleary, there were a few thoughts about using robots at home.
In this context, several questions occurred to me.
For example, what will happen to the future of humans if we delegate most of the manual and mental work to machines? How will we handle our free time? How will people be rewarded?
