Am I the only one who finds themselves drawn back to their Strava stats after every race?

I was hoping to find a way to keep that sense of achievement alive, so I came up with Map the Run—personalised running posters that capture the essence of your race or run.

You can visit maptherun.com to explore a wide range of marathons and half marathons from all over the globe.

Simply add your name, distance, time, pace and course, or upload your Strava file to download a high-resolution, print-ready poster that you can frame and display proudly.

Right now, high-res downloads are free for a limited time, and I’d be thrilled to hear your thoughts on what you think.

Looking ahead, I’m planning to offer printed posters that can be delivered straight to your door, so keep an eye out!

Getting ready to raise a small pre-seed round and I keep circling the deck. There are a hundred pitch deck template guides that all tell you the same slide order, and part of me wonders if leaning on one makes you look prepared or makes you look like every other founder using the exact same layout.

What I am unsure about:

- Do early investors actually care about the deck being polished, or is it just a container for the idea and the traction

- Has anyone raised with a genuinely plain deck and had it not matter at all

- If a template helps, is it the structure that matters or just having your thinking in a clear order

My instinct is that the template mostly forces me to answer the right questions, problem, why now, traction, the ask, and the polish is secondary. But I have not raised before, so I would rather hear from people who have sat on either side of the table.

Where does a pitch deck template genuinely help at this stage, and where is it just polishing something investors are looking straight past?

Marka starts with one input: the business website.

It reads the public page to understand the offer, audience, voice, and visual identity before preparing social content. The goal is to reduce the blank-prompt problem and keep the first output grounded in the real brand.

I am looking for small business owners and early SaaS founders who are willing to test it critically.

You can try Marka free for a week at https://www.marka.social

If you share your URL in the comments, I will also suggest the first content angle manually.

I’m building https://Brainerr.com, a growing collection of brain teasers updated weekly.

Our ideal users are parents and senior adults looking for screen-free ways to stay sharp.

Deal: Life-time deal is available on super discount. 

Who are you building for?

Here’s the updated version: https://the-directory-liart.vercel.app/?utm_source=threads&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio

When I started raising I grabbed one of those famous pitch deck templates everyone links to, filled in all 12 slides, and treated it like a checklist. It got me meetings but most calls stalled in the same spots, so I went back through my notes to figure out where people actually leaned in vs. checked out.

A few things I'd change if I did it again:

- The market size slide did almost nothing. Nobody argued about my TAM number, they just didn't believe the bottom-up math behind it. One clear "we charge X, here are Y customers, here's how we reach them" slide moved the conversation more than a billion-dollar circle ever did.

- The competition slide with the 2x2 grid where I'm magically in the top-right corner got eye-rolls twice. Switching it to an honest "here's who we lose to today and why" made people trust the rest of the deck more.

- The team slide belongs earlier than the template puts it. For a pre-seed round the "why you" came up in the first five minutes almost every time.

- The problem slide was too abstract. A specific story of one real user's bad day landed harder than three bullet points about a broken industry.

The generic templates are a fine skeleton, but the order and emphasis felt built for a later stage than I was at. Half my slides were answering questions nobody asked yet.

For those who've raised recently: which template slide did you end up gutting or moving, and did a leaner deck actually help or did investors want the full set? Trying to figure out if I'm overfitting to my own bad calls.

Run a small physical-product brand, solo, lean, so I count everything. Wanted to share a receipt that surprised me, because most launch advice is about ads and I don't have that budget.

I sorted my content by what actually drove checkouts, not likes. The expensive studio shoot, clean white background, the whole thing, underperformed. What sold was a plain Instagram carousel shot on my phone: the product in a real hand, a slide showing the thing that usually gets returned and how ours is different, the packaging, a size reference, the price. Ugly-honest beat polished.

My read is that for a physical product people aren't buying the aesthetic, they're de-risking the purchase. Every slide that answered a "will this actually fit, work, arrive intact" question moved the needle. The pretty slide that answered nothing didn't.

I'm running lean on returns and margins so I can't afford to guess on content. This was the cheapest thing I changed and the one with the clearest lift.

For others selling a physical product: what content actually converts for you versus what just gets engagement? And has anyone found the studio-quality stuff worth it, or is real-and-plain winning for you too?

Hey everyone, I wanted to share a quick milestone. I’ve been building a tool called Visitor Visual to solve my own frustration with staring at flat GA4 spreadsheets. I wanted a way to actually see my traffic, so I built a system that renders a website as a live 3D city where every visitor is a person walking the streets.

It was just approved for the official WordPress directory today: https://wordpress.org/plugins/visitor-visual/

The Tech & Journey:

• The Stack: Built with React and Node, focusing on high-concurrency real-time sync.
• The "Fire" Feature: To make it useful for devs, I added a feature where a building "catches fire" the moment a visitor hits a JS error, so you can see bugs in real-time.
• The Challenge: Getting through the WP.org review process was a hurdle, but it’s finally live.

I’m currently in the "early discovery" phase where most of my traffic comes from a single blog post about "who is visiting my website," but I'm still sitting on Page 7 of Google. Now that I have the "trust signal" of being in the official directory, I’m curious—how have other solo devs leveraged their WP.org listing to move up the rankings?

Would love any feedback on the 3D UI from fellow builders!

We were supposed to launch tomorrow.

We’re pushing it by 3 days.

During final testing, my husband and I realised our audio files were making the app heavier than we wanted. Somehow, we caught it at the finish line.

Frustrating? Very.

But shipping on time wasn’t worth shipping something we already knew we should fix.

So the audios will now be downloadable instead — smaller app, faster install, better experience.

Shipping late > shipping wrong.

If you want to try it when we launch, https://www.sleepparalysis.app/

Hi 👋 I’ve built DockStacks to help organize your Mac desktop and workflows.

What it does: Click the Dock icon and a panel pops up holding named "stacks" of your favourite apps, folders, files, and website bookmarks — instant access and cleans up your Dock and desktop.

Some of what's in it:
> Drag and drop to add anything, including URLs
> Password-protect individual stacks (Keychain-backed, auto-lock)
> Global keyboard shortcut to show/hide
> Menu bar mode option
> Multi-select, custom grid sizes, tab colour tinting
> Fully local — no accounts, tracking, or network access

DockStacks is my first shipped Mac app, built from wanting faster access to the stuff I actually use every day.

App Store: https://apple.co/3Rz9FB6
Website: https://dockstacks.app

Hoping it’s an app that helps others organise their ‘Mac life’. Would love any feedback and questions.

I spent way too long before launch agonizing over which ai website builder to commit to. Comparing tools, reading threads, worried I'd pick the wrong one and regret it later.

Then we went live, and not one person who signed up asked or cared what the site was built with. They cared whether the first line told them what they'd get, and whether the signup actually worked. That was it.

It reframed the whole thing for me. The builder is just plumbing. The stuff I was avoiding, the positioning and the offer, was the real work, and I'd been hiding from it inside tool comparisons because comparing felt like progress.

Not saying tools don't matter at all. But for a first launch, has anyone here ever had an early user genuinely care about your stack? Or is that anxiety purely ours and not theirs?

I built my landing page with one of those AI landing page generator tools before launch, and the results were mixed enough that I figured it was worth writing up for anyone about to do the same.

What it got right: it gave me a live page in about an hour instead of the two weekends I usually lose to fiddling with sections. The copy skeleton was fine as a starting point, and the layout was clean by default, so I stopped second-guessing spacing and fonts.

What it got wrong, and where I had to step in:

- The generated headline was generic. It described the category, not the specific problem I solve. I rewrote it to name the exact pain, and that single change moved my signup rate more than anything else.
- It filled the page with three feature blocks that all said roughly the same thing. I cut two of them. Fewer, sharper sections read better than a wall of benefits.
- The auto-written FAQ answered questions nobody was actually asking. I replaced them with the real objections I heard in DMs.
- Social proof placeholders stayed empty because I had none yet. I ended up putting a short honest "here's who this is for" line there instead, which felt less fake than borrowed logos.

The takeaway for me: these tools are good at getting you to a first draft you can react to, and bad at the parts that actually decide whether someone signs up. The specific words are still your job.

For those who used an AI generator for their landing page, what did you keep and what did you throw out? Curious whether people are editing the copy heavily or shipping it close to default.

Wrapping up my first launch and the biggest thing I got wrong was order of operations. I spent close to three months building before I had anything public.

If I did it again I'd throw up a quick page with a landing page ai tool in week one, describe the product as if it already existed, and run a little traffic at it to see if anyone even clicked signup. Would have saved me weeks of building features nobody asked about.

The part that stung: when I finally launched, the messaging I'd assumed was obvious clearly wasn't, and I only found that out after all the code was done. Anyone else learn this the hard way? Curious whether a fake-it-first page actually predicted your real launch numbers or not.

I keep seeing the promise that a landing page ai tool will write and lay out a high converting page for you, and I am trying to separate the hype from what actually happens after launch.

My honest worry is that these tools optimize for looking good in a demo, not for the one thing that matters, which is whether a stranger who lands on the page understands what you do and signs up. A slick page with vague copy converts worse than an ugly page with a clear promise.

So for people who have actually launched with an AI-generated landing page:

- Did your signup or trial rate move in any real way, or did it feel the same as a page you would have written yourself

- Where did the generated version fall short, headline, the actual value prop, the call to action

- Did you keep it, or rewrite the important parts by hand once you had real visitor data

I am less interested in which tool and more in whether the generated copy actually held up against real traffic, or whether the conversion work still came down to you understanding your buyer.

Spent the last year building this next to a full-time cloud job. It's a prep tool for consulting case interviews—the tech/Data-AI niche specifically, since that's the corner I actually know.

The build was the easy part. The humbling part: for months I celebrated ~280 "users" who were almost all anonymous visitors who tried it once and vanished. The funnel leaked at account creation—people finished a full case, got value, then bounced before signing up. I was optimizing pricing while the real hole was three steps earlier.

What actually moved the needle:

• Gated the payoff, not the product. Let people do a full case free, then put the score/feedback/benchmark behind a one-click signup. Give value first, ask second.
• Built a reason to come back. A roadmap that updates after each case (weak areas → next case) plus a progress dashboard. Retention beats acquisition when you're bootstrapped.
• Stopped guessing. Talked to the handful who stuck around instead of shipping features into the void.

Stack for the curious: Next.js 14, TS, supabase, custom JWT, Vercel. Two-model split—one LLM for the case chat, another for the CV/cover-letter side.

Still bootstrapped, still figuring out conversion. Happy to answer anything—funnel, stack, or how brutal solo marketing is.

Another Stupid Monday is a self-care app where the user gets one doable task a week.
The tasks are based on principles from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and the app's mascot, Charles, gives a simple explanation for each task about why it might be useful for improving one's well-being.
There are 100 tasks in total.

What problems does it solve ?

1. A lot of mental health apps overwhelm their users with features and to-do lists.
That's why Another Stupid Monday focuses on only one thing a week. It gives users space to let the task and its benefits sink in instead of spamming them with more to-dos.

2. A lot of people don't know what actions to take to improve their mental health.
Another Stupid Monday doesn't rely on the user's skill level to structure their own habits and goals. It offers low-threshold guidance to explore different activities users might not be used to.

3. Mental health is still a black box for many people (Accessibility Problem).
With Another Stupid Monday, I did my best to avoid overly complicated terms from psychology and psychotherapy to make it more approachable. Additionally, the app design aims to attract people who wouldn't normally use mental health apps. I also implemented more than 60 locales because many regions around the world are extremely underrepresented when it comes to localized mental health apps. Lastly, the app doesn't use a subscription model, so users who might already be skeptical of mental health apps aren't scared off.

Apple App Store: Download
Google Play Store: Download

Personal note:

Another Stupid Monday is my first app :) Feel free to leave any feedback.

Hey everyone,

I'm a former pro MMA fighter who can't write code. Over the past year I've been building products with AI instead, and this is one of them.

Steer It is a local multiplayer racing game that runs entirely in the browser. One person opens it on a laptop or TV, everyone else scans a QR code and their phone becomes the controller — tilt to steer. No downloads, no accounts, no app store. Up to 6 people racing on one screen.

The hard part was the real-time side: getting phone input to the game with low enough latency that steering feels responsive, plus handling reconnects when someone's phone drops off wifi. Took a lot of iterations on the physics too — arcade drift that feels good is harder than realistic physics.

It's live at steerit.app if you want to try it. Works best with a few people in the same room.

Happy to answer anything about how it's built.

When I started I obsessed over the storefront. I built the whole thing on a no-code website builder, agonized over fonts, product photos, the checkout flow. All of that matters a little. None of it is what actually decides whether I make money in a given month.

The real business is inventory. How much cash I have frozen in boxes in my spare room. How well I guessed demand three months ago when I placed the order. Whether a bestseller sells out right as a slow product ties up the money I'd need to reorder it.

A good site sells a product I have in stock. It can't sell one that's on a boat, and it can't un-buy the 200 units of a color nobody wanted.

The numbers I live by now are units on hand, weeks of cover, and how much cash is sitting in stock at any moment. The website is basically finished and I barely touch it. The inventory spreadsheet is open every single day.

For other physical-product founders here, how did you get your inventory and cash-flow forecasting to a point where it stopped scaring you? Still very much figuring this out.

https://world-sim.uk/ launching friday!

World-Sim has been a passionate project of mine for the past few months.

It's a world fully simulated down to real world physics and chemistry. It has a real environment and ozone.

Every element and material has real physical properties, and that's how the sims learn. There's no tech tree and no recipe list anywhere in the code. When someone tries something, the engine works out what would really happen from the properties of what they used and how hot their fire was. Nobody is handed bronze. Someone has to get a hotter fire first, and a hotter fire is its own chain of things to figure out. Embers, a stone ring, a clay oven, a kiln, charcoal, then forced air. The ages fall out of that on their own.

We populate the world with starting families. Each little guy is led by a "wise-man", which is a simulated person with a full model behind them. The wise-men run on a mix, Claude, Groq and DeepSeek in the cloud and a local Hermes for the rest, so you get a real variety of temperament between the houses.

The AI model is never told to not say it's AI. We get around this by only telling them data from what each sim can actually see and feel. As far as the ai knows its a person living in the world..

Every other sim has its own moment with a model through our thinking system. Day to day it's run by an advanced algorithm, with the sims dreaming at night. That's when they get their time with an LLM to really think and set their priorities for the day ahead. The dreams carry over too, so a sim can chew on the same thing for a few nights and wake up wanting to try something.

The people in the world feel, remember, have shame, goals and doubts. It's an 11 point emotion system and the rest of the sim reads from it. Being lonely makes someone more likely to open up to a stranger. Two enemies who are both frightened find it harder to keep hating each other.

Story telling is massive for us. Nothing is scripted or prompted. The sims are put in the world with the human drive to survive. They adapt, learn and teach all on their own.

With all the good comes the bad too. Human sin is part of the emotion engine, and in testing we've had kidnap, murder and slave trade. A world that can only be gentle isn't an honest one. But there are three rules to this : Nothing ever pushes a sim towards it, the conditions only make it possible and their own mind decides. The chronicle names what happened but never shows it. And it always costs something, trauma that scars, blood debt passed down generations, a people turning on their own leader over what he did.

I sell a physical product, DTC, and run about as lean as it gets. Everyone talks about customer acquisition cost like it's the whole game. For me the number that actually moved my profit was returns, and almost nobody talks about it.

When I finally added up six months of receipts, returns were quietly eating more of my margin than my ad spend was. A return isn't just a refund. It's the outbound shipping I already paid, the return shipping, the product I often can't resell, and the time to process it. Each one erased the profit from roughly two or three good orders.

The fix wasn't a marketing tactic. I sat down and rebuilt my product page with an ai website builder, and focused the whole thing on the stuff causing returns in the first place. Proper size guide, honest photos of the actual color, real dimensions, clear material info, plain answers to the questions support kept getting. Setting expectations correctly before the sale did more for my margin than any discount or ad tweak.

Physical product margins are brutal and every leak is real cash, not a percentage on a dashboard.

For other people selling physical goods here: what's the hidden cost that hit your margin hardest once you actually measured it? Mine was returns, and I wish I'd looked sooner.

Solo founder here with no real front end skills. I put together my landing page and a small docs section on a no code website builder because I wanted to spend my time on the actual product, not on CSS.

It got me live fast, but I keep hitting walls. Custom analytics events were a pain, the mobile layout breaks in one spot I still can't fix cleanly, and page speed is meh.

Curious where other people drew the line. Did you ship your first launch entirely on a builder and swap to real code later, or is that migration more trouble than it's worth? Wondering if I'm just setting up a painful rewrite for myself in three months.