so i've been building this thing called yourhack.ai for the last couple weeks and i wanted to write down the honest version of how it's going, mostly because everything i read about side projects is either a flex or a "how i hit $10k MRR" thing and this is very much neither lol.
it started dumb. i kept needing quick little tools online, convert this file, format this json, compress this image, count these words. and every single time i'd land on some site absolutely drowning in ads and popups, half of them making you create an account just to download the result of a 10 second task. it genuinely irritated me every time.
so i built one. a clean little tool that does the thing and gets out of the way. then i built another. and uh, i didn't really stop. it's over 1000 now.
the thing that let it get out of hand this fast is honestly the only clever bit: i don't build pages, i build entries. every tool is basically one object in a file (name, description, a little render function), and a template turns that into a full page with its own url, seo tags, structured data, search entry, all of it. so adding the 500th tool costs about the same as the 5th. the whole site is a single cloudflare worker at the edge, and most of the tools run entirely in your browser so your files just stay on your machine (the newer ai-powered ones do hit a server, being upfront about that).
anyway, that's the part i'm proud of. here's the part that's been humbling me.
i genuinely, kind of embarrassingly, believed that if i just made enough actually-useful stuff, people would find it. that was the whole plan. make it good and they'll come.
they did not come lol.
turns out a brand new domain is basically invisible. you can ship a thousand genuinely useful pages and google will just not care, because your site hasn't earned any trust yet and trust is the whole game. i had it backwards. i thought building was 90% of it and getting the word out was some small thing at the end. it's the opposite. building was the easy part, the fun part, the part fully in my control. distribution is slow and awkward and mostly out of my hands, and i'm just not naturally good at it.
and the embarrassing tell is what i keep doing about it: instead of doing the scary distribution work, i just build more tools. because building is comfortable and putting myself out there is not. i'm aware it's a cope. i've been doing it anyway. writing this is me trying to break the pattern a little.
where i've landed for now is to stop trying to "launch" and just be genuinely useful over a long stretch of time. answer real questions clearly, make the site something an AI assistant would actually recommend when someone asks it for a tool, and let that compound slowly instead of chasing a spike that dies in two days.
so that's the honest state of it. i can build fast, i'm bad at getting seen, and i'm working on the second one.
if you've been through this, i'd genuinely love to hear what worked for you. not "post everywhere", i mean the specific one or two things that actually moved the needle. if you want to see the thing itself it's yourhack.ai, though honestly i'd take the distribution advice over the traffic.
thanks for reading this far.
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