Luke The Dev

This is how real communities are built. 2 days ago we celebrated 400 shippers. Less than 48 hours later, we crossed 500. +100 builders. Not from hype. Not from giveaways. From showing up, sharing real work, and giving real feedback. Welcome to the new 100 members This community is for builders who ship, break things, fix them, and help others do the same. No engagement farming. No guru nonsense. Just builders building. Proud of this group. On to the next 500

After 3 months of building, ShotSnap is finally in TestFlight and submitted to the App Store. Before releasing it publicly, I’m looking for a few DEVs who are willing to help a brother out by testing the app and sharing honest feedback. If you’re down to try it early, I’d love to hook you up with some free perks as a thank you. Enjoy the demo

Tomorrow is my birthday and today I got the best gift ever. I made $33,000.00 in 7 days of work. It was the quickest money I have ever made as a developer and it came from one thing: Solving a real problem for a real business. I am not posting this to brag I am posting this to encourage you Because most developers underestimate how valuable their skills really are. A client in the lumber industry reached out because his WooCommerce store had more than 17,000 products. Tariffs kept changing. Prices kept changing. And updating 17,000 items by hand was impossible. Worse He was losing money every single week because his prices were outdated before he even finished updating the first page. He wanted a system where he could update one lumber size per category and the rest would calculate automatically. Simple idea Massive impact. I built it in one week vibe coding (off course) using: –> Cursor –> NextJS –> Supabase –> Shadcn –> Vercel When I delivered it he told me it would save them hundreds of thousands per year. Here is the point of this post Do not get stuck only building your SaaS and waiting for the perfect launch day. There is real money in solving real business problems. Use that money to fund your SaaS and you will move ten times faster. Someone out there is drowning in a problem that you can solve in a week. Go find them!

People keep saying SEO is dead. So I tried pSEO instead. One week later, ShotSnap is page 1 on Google for “mac screenshot organizer”. I didn’t believe it, so I asked a friend in Japan to check. Still page 1 No ads. No backlink games. Just shipping and pSEO. SEO isn’t dead. Most people just never do it right.

I’m tired of seeing this. A random .supabase.co URL on a Google login screen. Builders, for the love of God, verify your domains. Users don’t think “oh cool, Supabase.” They think “this feels sketchy.” You’re not losing customers because of features. You’re losing them before they even log in. It doesn’t take much to fix, and it quietly kills trust if you don’t. Ship like you actually want people to trust you.

My $1,000.00 marketing experiment is officially over and the results shocked me. I tested X Ads Reddit Ads Google Ads Here is what actually brought users for NotifiKai Google Ads was the most expensive but it gave me real signups (21 users) Reddit meme ads crushed in CTR X Ads were cheap but weak on conversions Google Results → Spent $282.51 → Impressions 15,604 → Clicks 441 → Conversions 33 (21 signed up) → Cost per conversion $8.56 Learned a lot, and now I know exactly where my money goes next Full breakdown in the thread

Build in public lied to me. When I first shared the idea for ShotSnap, devs loved it. 40 people joined the waitlist. I was pumped. Then I shipped. I emailed every single one of them. Zero replies. So now I’m asking the real question: Were they actually interested or just farming engagement? Is build in public validating ideas or just validating tweets?

Be honest Who else tests Stripe in LIVE mode and just prays it works?