James Potter (rephonic.com)
@jamespotterdev
Followers
5,058
Following
649
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262
Statuses
1,706
Building (podcast database). Distracted by (get more reviews), (newsletter database), (diet tracker)
Joined October 2020
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I sometimes wonder if coding is going to end up a bit like this.
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Wow
@vercel
this is *terrible* comms. What an interesting way to frame "hi we are increasing your bill by 10x"
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If you use Stripe I recommend turning on Stripe Radar for Fraud Teams ($0.02 per transaction) and then adding this rule.
If someone raises a chargeback it will block that card forever.
I got 2 chargebacks for the same card today grrrr
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Made a little telegram bot for tracking your meals.
You send it a pic of every meal, it analyses with GPT4-V and tries to estimate macros, calories and ingredients (you can correct it if it gets it wrong).
👉 Try it here
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Telegram launched a simple app store for their Mini Apps (basically little JS/HTML apps that run inside Telegram)
If you have a B2C app this could be interesting new channel.
They claim 500 million MAUs across all apps 👀
WeChat playbook
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I'm looking for a (part-time) full-stack developer to join Rephonic. Fully remote, async, flexible hours, no calls/meetings/standups.
Please forward to anyone you know who may be suitable :)
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Live on Product Hunt! — take a 📸 photo of your food (or drink) and it figures out the calories and macros with GPT4-V
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Thank you
@Upwork
for ruining my Saturday morning by mistakenly deciding that I was trying to pay someone off-platform.
They ended all of my contracts without warning.
I've spent tens of thousands of dollars through Upwork over the years.
Furious!!
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✅ Great launch for
Users: 3971
Customers: 19 (some delay as you get 15 pics for free)
MRR: $93
Days since I started coding: 12
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Found this old pic of my rock solid "standing desk" construction. Chiang Mai, Feb 2013. Patent pending.
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Curious if anyone else does this.
I have 3-4 hours of brain-intensive work in me each morning. For years my routine has been to spend that time basically planning out my tasks in pseudocode.
Then I use the rest of the day implementing it with less thinking required. I can go
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✅ Launched the iOS app. Today I'll be reaching out to newsletters, blogs, journalists, podcasts, subreddits, etc to build some buzz.
MRR: $340
Users: 7077
Customers: 71
Days since I started: 38
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I made a thing! I've wanted something like this to exist for a while.
Pick a month to see the spots with the best conditions to go surfing, snowboarding and kitesurfing anywhere in the world. Useful for planning your next trip.
🔗
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@arvidkahl
You're going to hate it because the documentation is horrible, it's written in Java and generally it feels very enterprisey.
But the only valid answer is Elasticsearch :)
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✅ Passed $250 MRR for and added shareable streaks if you hit your daily goals
Users: 5564
Customers: 55
MRR: $264
Days since I started: 17
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@rauchg
@vercel
I dislike Twitter mobs and I actually considered deleting my post when I saw it was going viral, but your response comes across as quite tone deaf I have to say. Your colleague’s too.
This is why Vercel keeps getting dragged through the mud lately. I actually love the product
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I'm still banned.
My favourite thing about all of this is that I recently paid Upwork a $3500 conversion fee to take a freelancer off-platform without breaking their terms.
Wonderful company.
Thank you
@Upwork
for ruining my Saturday morning by mistakenly deciding that I was trying to pay someone off-platform.
They ended all of my contracts without warning.
I've spent tens of thousands of dollars through Upwork over the years.
Furious!!
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This is going to sound trite but the clearest pattern I’ve seen across makers who never go anywhere is lack of shipping.
At the beginning you should be constantly shipping stuff.
If you’ve been coding in your cave for more than three weeks without releasing anything then
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Remember this whenever you feel like a two-bit indie hacker. The sitewide header for a $190B company.
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I just rolled out GPT-4o for and it’s definitely quite a lot faster for vision and text
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Something something Henry Ford faster horses
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I think everyone should have their own Telegram bot.
Mine is called Baldrick. He tells me:
- MRR/ARR and other stats across all of my apps (max once per day, I try to never check them otherwise)
- If error rates for a worker task went above 50%
- Refunds issued by my customer
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If someone actually builds this monstrosity let me know and I’ll share.
Please call it AI THING.
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Shipped full-text transcript search across all podcast episodes.
You can add all kinds of filters so you can answer questions like "which podcasts with >25k listeners have mentioned indie hacking?"
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This has been seen by 250,000 people.
Lets imagine that 1000 founders/companies saw it and decided to quit using Upwork or avoid using it in the future.
According to Upwork's latest 10-Q filing they make around $854 in revenue per client per year ($4745 GSV, 18% take rate)
So
Thank you
@Upwork
for ruining my Saturday morning by mistakenly deciding that I was trying to pay someone off-platform.
They ended all of my contracts without warning.
I've spent tens of thousands of dollars through Upwork over the years.
Furious!!
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I’m worried about next week
When you're overambitious with your meeting room booking...
Any indie hacker types in London want to join us on Thursdays for a regular cowork day? Drop me a DM ✉️
Trying to replicate Bali's Hackagu magic on drizzle island. This was week
#2
.
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Sharing the whole email in fairness to Vercel.
Some people are pointing out that they’re giving 3 months of overage for free.
I’m sorry but that’s just word games. If they didn’t do that, then I would have less than a month to adjust to the new pricing.
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P.S. This is for - send a pic of your meal and it tracks your calories/macros with GPT4-V.
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I think it's tempting to only share the highs when you're building in public...
So far the iOS app has been a bit of a flop: 532 downloads and 5 subscriptions at $7.99/mo.
Free-to-paid conversion rate is 0.9% on iOS (vs 1.5% on Telegram, which was
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Just found this absolutely shameless rip-off of
They even copied the exact text of the error messages 😀 The only innovation is that it uploads every photo you send it to their website as a "recipe" for the whole world to see, without any consent.
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More sharing of the lows! So far influencer marketing didn't work well at all for
I spent $1070 for a total audience of 178k on TikTok/IG
They barely registered as even a blip on the App Store downloads chart and resulted in ~100 visits to the landing
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But the good news is that it's fully decentralised and uncensorable, freeing El Salvador from the tyranny of the global financial system.
Just kidding! It's all hosted on AWS.
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I'm absolutely in love with
@mercury
for my US LLC.
The app is so well-designed and considered.
For example in 30 seconds I can create a virtual card for a team member with a daily/weekly/monthly spending limit. I just enter their email and Mercury handles the entire flow.
You
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📨 I'm launching today! Product Hunt link below.
- Search more than one million newsletters
- Compare subscriber numbers
- Get contact info and reach out
- See where your name/product is getting mentioned
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Update! The head of Trust & Safety at Upwork reached out and they have reinstated my account.
Although all of my contracts remain canceled and I would need to manually re-create them.
But I lost trust and I doubt I'll be using Upwork again unless it's for small one-off tasks.
This has been seen by 250,000 people.
Lets imagine that 1000 founders/companies saw it and decided to quit using Upwork or avoid using it in the future.
According to Upwork's latest 10-Q filing they make around $854 in revenue per client per year ($4745 GSV, 18% take rate)
So
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I fed 1.5 years of (quite messy, unstructured) sleep diary entries to GPT-4. Seems like lots of small adjustments are gradually helping.
Some context: I was diagnosed with sleep apnea in mid-2022 and I've been struggling with very poor quality sleep for ~4 years. With CPAP and
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I'm slightly obsessed with El Salvador's nutty decision to adopt bitcoin as legal tender. So far it's pure popcorn. The law goes into effect today!
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✅ Just passed $150 MRR (I never shared revenue in public before, lets try — clonebois incoming)
Days since I started: 14
I added some basic reminders after 24h, 48h, 3 days, etc if you didn't add any meals. The plan is to make custom reminders so you can write stuff like
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90% of the chairs in this coworking space. This is a war crime.
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When you're overambitious with your meeting room booking...
Any indie hacker types in London want to join us on Thursdays for a regular cowork day? Drop me a DM ✉️
Trying to replicate Bali's Hackagu magic on drizzle island. This was week
#2
.
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I gave GPT-4 the raw HTML source of a web page and asked it to write a Python script to extract some specific data for me. It worked with no modifications. Wow.
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Nerdy post. Working on something a bit mad but it makes sense in my head. There's certainly AI chatbot fatigue right now but for logging meals in it works well and people seem to love it.
It's also a dream building on top of Telegram (no thinking about
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How I figure out where to stay in a city I don't know (in this case Córdoba, Argentina)
1. Search for "restaurants", "bars" and "vegan" in Google Maps (I'm not a vegan but it's a good proxy for the kind of area I like)
2. Filter for rating > 4.5
3. See where they all overlap
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Interesting tidbit I just learned. Pocket Casts (biggest podcast app on Android I think) makes ~$100k/mo.
- 50,000 paid subscribers
- $25/year for the paid plan
- 1M+ downloads on Google Play so I assume a few million users
Via
@Podnews
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Honestly it’s been great building on Telegram. You don’t have to think about UI at all. No API to build - it’s all server side. Authentication built in. 1 billion user install base.
One downside is I think the perception of value is lower for a chat bot. People are accustomed to
I just bought yearly access to Meals Chat by
@jamespotterdev
and it's fantastic.
And the cool thing about it is that there's no app, no fancy UI, and nothing to download.
It's a Telegram bot.
You take a photo of your food, drop it into the chat, and it calculates the calories,
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It's in many ways accidental that I ended up here, but Rephonic is the perfect kind of indie business I think:
- B2B, high margin
- Not mission critical (if it goes down for 30 mins, it's not the end of the world)
- Not high traffic so scaling is pretty easy
- Low-touch sales
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I finally got access to the GitHub Copilot tech preview but it seems to be malfunctioning?
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🧠 Brain dump. I'm slightly bullish on Google in the AI wars (I even bought some stock)
Microsoft is getting so much hype but they are culturally incapable of building nice products. I tried to switch to Azure recently and gave up because the experience was so awful, even with
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Does anyone have a connection at Upwork? They're refusing to restore my account and they won't even say why!
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I got tired of manually calculating tax owed per country across all my apps for my quarterly 🇪🇺 EU and 🇬🇧 UK VAT filings so I made this quick tool.
GPT-4 did most of the work and I added quick styling with MVP.css
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This is so cool. I'm starting to see why it's fun to build in public.
ROASTED 💥 I've been using the meals(.)chat by
@jamespotterdev
to track my calories and it's been amazing so far!
I've always wanted a simple no-bullsh*t solution to this without the annoying notifications of all the other apps like this. I was also surprised by its accuracy.
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Websocket API kinda working. Swift/iOS app almost done. Hoping to submit on Friday🤞
Users: 5944
Customers: 62
MRR: $301 (slowed down a bit, need to do more marketing)
Days since I started: 23
Hat tip to
@naveennaidu_m
who built the app so quick
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✅ Just passed $500 MRR for and I haven't marketed it at all for a couple of weeks so it seems to be slowly growing by word-of-mouth
My OpenAI bill is still ~$300/mo though so I need to work on that. It's probably due to my essay-length prompts.
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At least once a week...
Person: Let's jump on a call about nothing specific!
Me: I'd be happy to chat over email
Person: <disappears forever>
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Dear
@Airbnb
- I can't think of worse activities to recommend to me at the top of the home page. What on earth is this.
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People kept nagging me for this so now you can write anything to and it will try to figure it out.
Before you had to write /add bla bla
Now it checks if it's a food/drink with GPT-3.5 (fast, cheap) → if yes then pass to GPT-4 Turbo for better analysis
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@Citrullin
False-negatives are really bad so I can see why they're conservative with the rules.
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I find all of the observability tools like Datadog, New Relic bla bla way too complicated. I just want to know if my server is using up a lot of memory or disk space.
So I made this cron job that messages me on Telegram.
Follow me for more cowboy devops tips.
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I found my app in this newsletter for copycats to find ideas to copy
The author copied the data from another website that lists ideas for copycats to copy
Copycat centipede
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Migrated to this $800/mo beast of dedicated a server for Rephonic's main database, scraper and number cruncher.
Hetzner Cloud performed heroically for 4 years but disk space maxes out at 960GB and they don't offer dedicated servers in the US (where my other servers are located).
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✅ Websocket API is working great. Submitted to TestFlight. Still some UI things to fix but it's getting there.
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I haven't really touched my app Reletter in 9 months and now this is happening. No idea why.
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✅ First influencer marketing reels/tiktoks going out for
Attribution seems tricky with iOS apps. How do people track this? Coupon codes?
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@arvidkahl
@vercel
Yes exactly 😃
I’m actually happy to pay Vercel more. $20/mo is cheap for what I do with it. But this is mad.
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@ralfelfving
Yep true but they’ve created a bunch of other accounts with the same card so this will hopefully stop that
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I sold my Google stock. Nice +22% return since I bought in March and I think my post stood up reasonably well.
But the initial roll out of AI Overviews in search was botched and they don't seem to be iterating very fast to improve it. I stopped using Gemini completely because it
🧠 Brain dump. I'm slightly bullish on Google in the AI wars (I even bought some stock)
Microsoft is getting so much hype but they are culturally incapable of building nice products. I tried to switch to Azure recently and gave up because the experience was so awful, even with
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The flip side of this is giving up too early if you launch and get even a little bit of traction.
It took me 6 months to get to $1k/mo. I don’t share numbers publicly but let’s just say giving up would have been a spectacularly bad life decision.
$0-$500/mo is the hardest phase
This is going to sound trite but the clearest pattern I’ve seen across makers who never go anywhere is lack of shipping.
At the beginning you should be constantly shipping stuff.
If you’ve been coding in your cave for more than three weeks without releasing anything then
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Spotify just added ratings to their web app so Rephonic now scrapes them across ~3m podcasts.
I calculate a weighted average across all platforms (according to the number of ratings on each platform) so I *think* this is now the most accurate overall rating for a podcast that
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RIP my little server 2020-21 ⚰️
If you enjoy my podcast please leave us a rating and review!
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I believe this is called the B2C AI app churn of death
iOS app almost done and then it's time to do more marketing + fix the churn complaints. I emailed 25 TikTok/IG creators today.
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🚢 I rolled my own very simple A/B testing tool. I found all of the hosted solutions to be too complicated/bloated.
The nice thing is the test bucket gets randomly assigned client-side so it doesn't slow down your app at all.
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Just to clarify: I've been coding for 12 days. I didn't learn to code 12 days ago 😀
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I noticed quite a lot of people don't know this trick. Saved me countless hours over the years.
Chrome Dev Tools > Network Tab > Right-click any request
You can reproduce it as a fetch() call or curl command with the exact headers that your browser sent.
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You can now send a pic to of what you ordered on the menu and it will figure it out.
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A lot of people told me they forget to log their food in so now you can write stuff like "yesterday" or "two days ago"
Users: 10,045
Meals: 38,507
MRR: $430 (haven't given it enough love lately! seeing some churn)
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Who is building the Semrush/Ahrefs of LLMs?
I’ve tried to persuade a few friends to work on something like this but no bites 🥲
I think brands will want to know how they appear in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Llama, etc - these models are proliferating fast.
How I
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Love this.
@TobiasWhetton
was playing around with on his commute and came up with a new icon idea (the current one is a terrible DALL-E 3 thing!)
B2C is challenging for me but it's much more fun than B2B for this kind of stuff
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New iteration on my ultra scientific method for finding the optimal area to stay in a new city.
🇧🇷 São Paulo edition:
1. Search for the types of places you care about in Google Maps with rating >= 4.5 and copy-paste screenshots of the exact same map region
How I figure out where to stay in a city I don't know (in this case Córdoba, Argentina)
1. Search for "restaurants", "bars" and "vegan" in Google Maps (I'm not a vegan but it's a good proxy for the kind of area I like)
2. Filter for rating > 4.5
3. See where they all overlap
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Can't wait to ship this as I've been in the trenches with it for a couple of weeks now.
Right now the audio world of podcasts (i.e. RSS feeds) and the fast-growing video world (mostly YouTube) are pretty disconnected. I'm auto matching them up at scale.
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It's all going fantastically well so far!
Buried in that goldmine of a post is this little nugget. The official website to top-up up your Chivo wallet with your credit card runs over HTTP *unencrypted*:
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Sumatra (7h bumpy drive with broken AC was worth it)
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Starting to play around with feeding podcast episode transcripts to LLMs.
I had a go at transcribing podcasts back in 2020 with CMUSphinx and failed spectacularly (I was trying to extract sponsors and ad reads). I think we'll look back on the release of OpenAI's Whisper as being
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