Matthew Pierce

8 Apr 2025

It’s here! My app Time Out has just launched. Manage your screen time with it by locking apps behind exercise goals or setting schedules for apps to be available throughout the day! Download here apps.apple.com/ie/app/time-... #ios #iosdev #indiedev #indieapp #screentime

19 June

A big ol’ list of ideas for TikTok. Time to take Time Out and really try make a push with it #buildinpublic #indiedev #marketing

veninto.comVeninto — Turn Bluesky conversations into customers.Veninto monitors Bluesky in real time for your keywords, filters for genuine intent, and drafts replies for your approval. From mention to draft in 2 seconds.

11 June

Using Veninto to find new Time Out customers today! You can too veninto.com trytimeout.com #buildinpublic

10 June

Veninto is actively helping me get users on Veninto!! Check it out and sign up for early access if you're looking for new users too! www.veninto.com #buildinpublic #saas #bluesky #betatest

8 June

Hey folks 👋 I'm looking for a few people to test out a new service I built to help find customers on Bluesky. If you're interested, feel free to sign up or shoot me a DM here. www.veninto.com

I did a "fail fast" thing that makes me feel like I'm shipping fast.... while I joke by using the terminology baked all over the internet, I actually did do these things and it was pretty cool. A 🧵

The only way forward was to go through Reddit for full commercial access for $$$. Which I didn't have. I mean, they're right, I'm wrong. If I got paying customers, then I'd be violating their ToS. But it still hurts. This thing rocked. And it worked with all real time posts and comments. Was chuffed

shipfa.stLaunch Your Startup in Days, Not Weeks | ShipFastThe NextJS boilerplate with all the stuff you need to get your product in front of customers. From idea to production in 5 minutes.

But from it, I've built something else. Something like my own version of shipfa.st. I forked the repo and removed all the application code. Now I have an AI ready skeleton for my next SaaS venture. Email, billing, landing page, back end, front end, continuous monitoring, error monitoring. Everything

But I got too greedy. The tool was actually working incredibly well, and one day I was approving draft after draft when they stopped going through and I started getting errors. Reddit flagged my activity as suspicious. Bound to happen. I'm happy it did so I could figure out how to fix it for prod.

The fix was simple. Reset my Reddit password and reconnect my account to my tool. Easy. Not so fast. Reddit clearly saw my posts were flowing through my ancient Reddit develop app, and they decided to take that off me. Gone. Poof. No more.

And honestly. It nailed it. Now I'm not starting from zero. I'm not YOLOing prompts like "build me an app plz" at it. I structured the repo right. Had subdirectories for different facets of the app with individual CLAUDE and PLAN files. I had claude hooks for updating plans and decision diaries.

pencil.devPencil – Design on canvas. Land in code.Pencil fundamentally increases your engineering speed by bringing designing directly into your preferred IDE.

And it worked. Better than I was expecting. I connected pencil.dev for all my design needs and it made things really straightforward. Supabase and Vercel, with a Fly.io box for all the reddit monitoring. All made sense. All worked. It sort of scaled, but that was a problem for future me.

So I built a thing. It was to solve this exact problem: 1. Enter keywords you want to monitor Reddit for (posts and comments) 2. Run a small AI model against them for sentiment against your product description 3. Draft an AI reply adhering to subreddit rules 4. One click post the ones you like

Reddit makes this hard. You need a commercial license. Luckily I had an old dev app lying around from before they made these rule changes. Jackpot. This was going to be my first "vibecoded" app. Truly not a single line of code written from me. An experiment.

f5bot.comF5Bot - Free Social Media Monitoring & AlertsGet emailed when your keywords are mentioned on Reddit, Hacker News, or Lobsters. Free keyword monitoring and brand alerts.

I was looking for tools that allowed me to find realtime info on Reddit of people searching for solutions to doom scrolling so I could weigh in and suggest using Time Out. The first thing I found was F5Bot (f5bot.com) which is actually just a really great simple tool.

But it's a bit too simple. I would get an email with mentions and after paying for a step up in tiers, I was soon overwhelmed with mentions. There was no way I could check these, let alone action the ones worth getting involved in.

22 May

I was a critic of Liquid Glass when it came out and it’s still not great. But some apps have done well with it. I think WhatsApp and Reddit do it well #ios #liquidgass

26 Mar

Ugh, the only good thing about the update to AppStore Connect analytics is now it lives in the app tab. The overview having no way to change the time series makes no sense. Why does it default to last 90 days?? Saved views are gone. Active sessions are gone. Hour by hour view is gone. #iosdev

5 Mar

Amazing. No notes. @adafruit.com 👏👏👏

19 Feb

Ever since Opus 4.6 dropped, it seems like my Pro plan 5 hour limit gets hit super fast. I thought switching back to Sonnet (even though it's also 4.6 now) would have helped, but still going faaaaast. Have usage limits changed? #claude #claudecode #anthropic

16 Feb

Monday morning. Designing a landing page for new ASO tool. When I say “designing” I mean letting pencil.dev design the whole thing for me. #indiedev #aso

9 Feb

This is driving me nuts lately. Trial goes to convert and then “billing error”. I’m assuming the user has a disposable card or something like that, but grrrrr #indiedev #sideproject #appstore #revenuecat

9 Feb

Don't miss out on claiming $50 free extra usage for Claude Code! Just spotted it this morning #claude #claudecode

6 Feb

It's great that Xcode can now work with Claude, but is it somehow dumber? There's no plan mode, which is annoying and it seems to be going in circles with Opus - I think I might be switching back to command line Claude Code for iOS, this somehow seems poor.

2 Feb

I played with www.pencil.dev to see if it could be my AI designer and it's awesome. It uses your current Claude Code subscription and gets to work. I asked it to design a site I want to build to allow iOS devs to dump keywords in and it organises them into title, subtitle and keywords

Matthew Pierce reposted

Kuba Suder 🇵🇱🇺🇦

@mackuba.eu

31 Jan

Me when another crypto exchange emails me that I urgently need to provide some documents with personal information

30 Jan

Bluesky in the last couple months has really started to feel like the bird site 10 years ago. Awesome people building awesome things and I want to use all of them. Can’t remember the last time I’ve started this many git repos. More of this please, I’m here for it. #buildinpublic #indiedev

26 Jan

Notifications for lock events coming soon to Time Out 👀 #indiedev #iosdev

techcrunch.comThreads edges out X in daily mobile users, new data shows | TechCrunchThreads’ daily mobile usage has quietly surpassed X as Meta leans on cross-promotion, creator tools and fast feature rollouts — even as X faces fresh controversies

19 Jan

Really this title should be "Social media edges out deep fake child porn app" but hey, I guess we're still pretending X isn't some sort of cesspit

TechCrunch@techcrunch.com

Threads’ daily mobile usage has quietly surpassed X as Meta leans on cross-promotion, creator tools and fast feature rollouts — even as X faces fresh controversies

19 Jan

Ahhh another day, another realisation there's a way to use Time Out without fully paying for it 🫠 #indiedev #paywall #idiot

18 Jan

I rarely look at the benchmarks page but these numbers look pretty sweet!!

17 Jan

Indie app devs waiting for trials to convert to hit their milestones #indiedev

People talk about their App Store conversion rate all the time but that’s just one conversion rate of impressions / downloads. Really you want to see the whole funnel which is what you can see here for Time Out. (1/n) #AppStore #iosdev #indiedev

Installs to sales is also great to see and I map each step of my onboarding flow in Mixpanel so I can find out where the drop off is there.

But the overall cvr rate is really taking the total sales (18) and dividing it by impression (5501) so just 0.32%. I have no idea what an industry average is here, but that’s a loooooow number.

I think you should always focus on each stage. I can see here that the number of people from search who go from impression to page view is only about a 7.3% cvr rate. Surely that’s not great!? I guess focusing on my app previews could be key here.

But then after that, again in just the search row, page view to download is pretty good at about 64%! I wonder what level of intent is there as the user clicks the app to view more? As in, is their mind 75% made up that this is the app they want 🤷‍♂️

If I change my currency from euro to dollars then I’m over $100 MRR…. That counts right??? 😂😂 #indiedev #mrr #sideproject

12 Jan

It’s happening #applesearchads

theverge.comTim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowardsOnce you’ve traded your principles for proximity to power, do you even run your own company?

Couldn’t agree more with an article. Sick behaviour from spineless cowards. Great writing @theverge.com / @lopatto.bsky.social www.theverge.com/policy/85990... #x #grok #apple #google #elonmusk

There’s so many tools out there for ASO keywords research, but I want a tool that will build me title, subtitle and keywords in the best possible way given a list of keywords with some data on them, such as where I rank, difficulty and volume. Does this exist?

I’ve started to build up a bit of a cash reserve from the few months of Time Out’s revenue and want to figure out the best way to deploy it. We’re talking a couple hundred €’s not thousands.

First I thought App Store Ads, but after running a campaign for two weeks, I feel I need a much larger budget for impact in this space, unless I start getting really niche.

So instead I’m going to spring for a higher end ASO tool. I love Astro, but I feel I could do with more help from a tool. I’ve started trialling both AppTweak and AppRadar. So far AppRadar seems like it’s hitting the sweet spot. Hopefully give me some gains. #aso #ios #indiedev #buildinpublic

8 Jan

A sad day when you remove your first app from the store. But it was time. Zero monetisation and costing me ~$25 a month to run. Plus fallen into disrepair 😢 #indiedev #sideproject

4 Jan

Genuinely forgot I write these down at the end of last year, but they’re the values I work by when addressing side projects. They’ve helped me stay on track. The first two are the most important to me. #indiedeveloper #sideproject #values

3 Jan

Indie developer goals for 2025: 1) Get Time Out to 1K MRR. Might seem small to others. Big deal for me. 2) Launch 2 more things I’ve been mulling over 3) Combined projects hit 5K MRR #indiedeveloper #newyearsresolution