Ask HN: Would you use daily check-ins to build your dev brand?
devcue.io
devcue.io
Problem: I know personal branding helps career growth, but I have 500+ LinkedIn connections and zero posts. Writing "content" feels performative and time-consuming.
Proposed solution: Daily push notifications with quick prompts ("What are you working on?"). Answer in one line. AI transforms weekly check-ins into platform-specific posts (LinkedIn, X, Mastodon, YouTube). You review/edit before posting.
Target: Developers who know they should build a brand but hate "content creation"
Pricing hypothesis: $29/mo for unlimited AI-generated posts
Before I build this: - Would you actually use daily check-ins for brand building? - Is $29/mo reasonable for this? - What would make you NOT use this?
Landing page: https://devcue.io/
Validation survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdwOiLmEKVxmoSuqu0e...
Planning to kill the project if <20 people say they'd pay. Build if 50+ would pay.
Brutally honest feedback needed.*
I think the issue that many would face is that they just don’t have interesting things to say every day. But maybe a tool like this would prove me wrong and improve my self esteem at the same time.
Current plan: AI drafts use YOUR actual words/patterns from chech-ins, and previous posts, not generic templates. You review/edit before posting. Think of it as "auto-formatting" not "AI writing".
Would that address the authenticity concern, or does any AI involvement kill it for you?
I'm not trying to help everyone become a LI influencer, I'm solving for devs (like me) who know sharing work and ideas helps careers, but hate the performative "content creation" game.
The check-ins aren't about building a "brand" in the influencer sense. It's more like "I solved X today", or "I used Y library". Meaning quick note -> formatted as a post as if you want to share.
Does that change your take, or is the whole premise flawed?
What makes progress reports useful and career-helping are valuable notes, not game-like achievements. Those are hard to craft, and often not digestable to a larger audience.
I'll think the next steps for you. If things continue the way they are, it's likely someone will try to skip the influencer stuff and create automated systems that evaluate whether someone is really making progress on something novel or not. That sort of thing could change the way we look at developer presence.
In that world, you want to cultivate a smaller audience that can understand your notes, build upon them, and resonate value within that smaller audience. I'm saying a smaller audience because the larger it is, the higher the chances of it derailing.
You're right that optimizing for reach creates influencer theater. What if the product optimized for credibility within a smaller, technical audience instead?
Instead of "broadcast to everyone," what if it was: - Daily check-ins capture real work - Weekly digest shared to niche communities (Dev.to, HN, technical Slack/Discord) - Audience: 100 devs who understand your domain > 10,000 LinkedIn randos
Re: automated evaluation of real progress—that's fascinating. How would you validate "novel work" vs "performance theater"? Is it context (where shared), substance (depth of notes), or something else?
Your smaller-audience point resonates. Would you use a tool that helped you share technical progress with ONLY people who'd understand it, while filtering out the influencer noise?
I don't know. That's future shit, no one invented this yet. But I think someone will. Otherwise, hiring will become very difficult. As code becomes more and more commoditized, it should become easier to see.
> Would you use a tool that helped you share technical progress with ONLY people who'd understand it, while filtering out the influencer noise?
I wouldn't trust it today.
How about having some guardrails, like requiring code snippets, and "lessons learned" before even seeing proposed AI-enhanced content?
Obviously, people are people, and every tool can be abused (in a good and a bad way).
Any developer brand that gets my attention are the good personal blog posts on non-LI domains the likes of which are often posted on this site. The more technical the better.
I don't agree with the defeatist position that a personal brand is meaningless if everyone's doing it. The point is not to write generic bs or obscure configuration/installation pasta. Developers have different skill areas and different recruiters are looking for different key words. Emulate the likes of simonw for example (the quality level of the posts, not necessarily the soecific domain or content). If you have to put something in Linkedin I would just put excerpts and links from your dev blog.
As far as “personal dev brand” that sounds like some main character syndrome shit to me, but I’m just a Gen Xer who has been getting hired without ever posting on LI since it’s existed so what do i know.
My hypothesis: devs like you (and me - 500 connections, zero posts) avoid LinkedIn because we don't want to sound like those people. But recruiters/employers DO check it.
DevCue isn't trying to make you a "thought leader." It's trying to solve "I need a baseline presence without becoming a LinkedIn bro."
But if the premise is fundamentally flawed (personal branding = narcissism), I should kill this. Honest Q: Do you think ANY tool could make LinkedIn presence non-cringe for devs, or is it unsolvable?
I don’t see myself ever finding LinkedIn’s feed worth anything.