zloy88

I figured it out. It is actually brevo rewriting all my links and adds tracking. Will change to Amazon SES very soon. Thanks again for noticing this.

Oh, okay. Which ad blocker are you using? I am using ublock origin and didn't notice that issue. I will take a look. Thanks

Good point. So far I only have email verification. There is no billing yet, everything is free currently. On long term I plan to offer convenience features and for example to possibility to create custom question sets. Those gonna be premium features and I will offer that way cheaper than the competitors. It's a good idea that this could also be the verification level and maybe I could add a matching criteria that only verified premium users match with each other.

Yea exactly. The onboarding questions are designed like that on purpose, that you can't choose every answer, because they are matching criteria.

But when you land in a 1on1 it's more relaxed. Often multiple choice and even a comment field with free text.

Thanks for that info. I am currently using brevo.com and the dashboard says that over 98% of mails were delivered. I already started to register Amazon SES, currently waiting for the DKIM verification. So seems like a good time to switch soon. I hope that helps, since smtp servers and email domain warmup is not really a topic I know much about honestly.

Update: Will add SSO soon

I've firstly searched for subreddits that are international but none of those allowed me even to just pitch the idea. Then I suddenly found German subreddits for searching friends and they had either no rules, no active mods, or the mods just allowed me to post. I searched a few city subreddits of Germany as well. And yea, I am actually from Germany so it made it even more easy then.

The matching works on 5 dimensions, such as - social energy, directness, worldviews. Each weighted on how important it is for you. The matching also tries to pair people with the same activity on the app, means someone who just turns in once a week won't be preferred in matching with someone who opens the app daily. There are also some hard and soft criteria's users can configure in their matching settings, such as age range, locations, gender, etc.

I hope that answers your questions. I have a deep dive on the matching system on my faq page if you're curious

Yea, I mean that is not really a new thing, isn't it? ChatGPT has this feature for a long time already, that it suggests products with links.

I agree. I've also once read an article (sorry, can't find it anymore) - that most startups which were co-founded, are most likely to fail. Mainly because it's usually one founder takes it more serious than the other.

I am a Developer and I am building projects for 8 years already - they kinda all failed but every failure made me learn very important things. Currently I am again onto a new project and I got ~130 users now after 9 days - basically my biggest success I ever made so far.

What worked for me is the following:

1. Don't build everything before it is not really validated, you're wasting time. Maybe your idea sounds good in your head, but is it really solving any issues? You need to find out if there is actually really a demand for it.

2. I've launched my Idea as a closed beta first and I searched for high intend users, this means I searched online where my target audience actually complains about the problem I think my app solves. So a closed beta was my first approach to test if anyone would even have interest to join and I could test my apps core loop if it works.

3. The closed beta validated that the Idea could work but still the product is not validated, you have no Idea from a few closed beta users if they'd be ready to actually pay for it - so you either ask the few closed beta users in a google form poll or something equal if they would pay for any specific features and in general you ask for feedback there. I did it a bit different though, but it brought me to step 4

4. If you got that far, you should open your beta to get more users. For me a lot of my target audience is actually on reddit. I found many extremely relevant subreddits. It was still very difficult there, replies to pain signals converted extremely bad. I found some subreddits that allowed me to post about my project and just explain the idea - it wasn't really written like a pitch, I just asked people if they would use something I've built and I basically just explained the Idea - some posts alone brought me like 40+ users in 2 days - it is not much for some people who are extremely successful, but for me this was insanely much. I never managed this before with any project from the past.

5. You have to be dead honest with yourself and sometimes just shut down your own projects early, try not to be sad about it, you have to learn about every project you've tried what you did wrong and what you could do better next time. I am still unsure about my project as well, if it really pops off.

I wish you good luck though!

If you're curious, this is my current project https://valuepair.app

My claude says: "Fable 5 is now a standard part of your Team plan" "You can use up to 50% of your weekly usage limit on Fable 5. If you hit your limit, you can continue on Fable 5 with usage credits. Fable 5 draws down usage faster than Opus 4.8. Run /model and select Fable to use it. Learn more: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15424964-claude-fable..."

And this is from EU - competition (OpenAI) is a great thing I guess.

Honest question, is blogging even still a thing? I don't read any blogs honestly. I feel like blogging in 2026 is a very niche thing. Maybe I am wrong, it's just my impression. People are so "short-lived" that too much information at once seems not to be popular anymore. People want to get spoon fed all information they need, especially since AI - no?

I am one. So you can set your counter to +1

For me the AI boom is honestly rather a relief. I have way less stress than before, because before the AI boom I'd spent days on huge tasks and I am working in an agency with constant time pressures. So AI is such a huge benefit for my stress levels. I love it. I can finally also take more care about quality and automated tests, which often lacked because lack of time. Sure, you have to learn now all the new tools, but that doesn't bother me.

Hahaha :D that is hilarious. I am honestly curious, just like being a motivator, since I am also building.

Yea, kinda agree. I feel like my job just changed into a solution architect and quality assurance inspector.

For me thinking and making decisions are two different things. I rarely let AI decide, unless it's something i do in my private time. But at work, I am the expert and I maximum let AI give me options, but I decide.

Never rely on the trained data. I always ask to do a research which means, it pulls fresh data from the web. Another thing I enforce all the time is simply "don't make assumptions, give evidence" - that basically means it has to prove from where it takes it's statements. I do pretty fine like that.

Lol, wdym. I like to prompt it that I want evidence, so when there is any new topic where I currently don't know how to tackle it myself, I ask that it does a research and give me evidence. So i can check the sources myself. Like I said, I let it spoon feed me.

When I know upfront how to do anything, I just give all the instructions. But the OPs point was If we offload thinking too much, so that's why I was just thinking about this example when I need thinking - that's usually when I need to learn something new.

I do daily. So far I am doing fine, not sure what exactly your point is, sorry.

Maybe it's a way of perspective. I adore to use AI to actually learn, so I don't feel like I offload thinking. I use AI to do all the research which earlier I did manual through google search. I still make my own decisions, I just let Claude spoon feed me all infos I want and need. Feels great man

Really? I was told X is the worst converting platform out there. Maybe I am misinformed. Do you have any articles on that topic? I tried X in the past and the only thing I managed is that replies to pain signals did work, but it was a hardcore grind.

Staying skeptical as a Developer and don't trust the outcome too much. At least I caught myself today, that I was on full lazy mode and let claude just blindy merge something untested. Maybe it was just some monday blues .. but yea, blame me! Was a bad decision

I feel like I am rather a quality assurance guy, who controls what AI is producing.

Just some days ago I started a closed beta for a friendship/dating app.

The idea: Everyone must answer 14 questions, then is getting matched with someone who aligns with you. Once a match is found, both have to answer another set of questions and all answers are revealed immediately. If you don't like any answer, you can quit early and land in the matching pool again. If you like each other, you can both decide to get closer. If one disagrees, you will never be matched again. Also picture reveal is only at the end of the 1on1 session and only if both agree to share it.

I got like ~80 users in about 4-5 days - and it is my personal biggest success any hobby project ever achieved, so I am happy. Especially I get so good feedback.

It's invite only, if anyone would like to join, not sure if there is any DM function here - I am new.

My web app is called https://valuepair.app

Best Google Replacement for me is proton.me - use it for many years already. It also solves the Google Photos problem.

What I disliked about the Claude sandbox is that their IPs are blocked by many platforms, which makes webfetch etc. nearly impossible. I had to write a skill to avoid that. Best example is reddit that blocks all access for LLMs. I mean, it's surely understandable why those paltforms do it. But for your own purpose like research and can be a bit annoying.

Oh well, didn't know that. Yea, there is already a hard barrier now before you're even allowed to post something. I will try to participate. Been missing out on HN for way too long it seems. Def. don't want to post any AI slob :D Thanks for reply though

Um, I am also new here. This makes me kinda scared how I will ever be able to post something under /show - I really don't know much about HN yet. Would it ever be allowed that I can ask for feedback for my beta project here? That's what I actually hoped for.

Nope, not worth it for me. It didn't do any wonders .. it's obviously better, but not how many people act it is. I noticed it especially in big repositories, it does same mistakes as all models - it doesn't check the entire project because it's probably already to expensive to load so much context into a session. So they all struggle the same way when projects getting real big. Anthropic has to work on efficiency from now on, people won't pay so much when every competitor is way cheaper. The first thing you found on the internet once Fable was released, was how to run this model cheaper ... so I doubt the majority of people will pay for it. The only benefit I see in it is paying Fable but use it only for research and let cheaper models implement it.

I just stay with Opus-4.8 - because it's not like that Opus is not capable of solving all my daily tasks. It just works fine. Fable is of course better, especially on paper, but it didn't do wonders for me. I feel like Anthropic can't continue just making better models all the time, they will have to care efficiency more and more because that is what they lack the most. Just compare it to any other LLM, they are all way more efficient which means they are way faster and cost less money per token. So for me it's just wait and relax - use Opus-4.8 until Anthropics models hopefully become cheaper and faster.