topoftheforts

You can do that with flux.1, it's the best image model right now as far as I'm aware, especially for dealing with text.

This is the result for "vegetables spelling out the word "HELLO"" I used flux-pro on Replicate https://ibb.co/1RVKmdk

SEEKING WORK | UK or Remote | IT Consultant / Full Stack Engineer

Technologies: PHP, Laravel (9yrs exp), VueJS/NuxtJS, AlpineJS, MySQL, TailwindCSS, AWS, Azure, RESTful APIs, Adwords, GA Ecommerce, Git, Twilio, Stripe, Docker

Email: topoftheforts[at]gmail.com

CV: Please email and I'll send that over + LinkedIn profile

I have 14 years experience in full stack web development, I have managed small dev teams and have been a one-man IT department for small startups and non-profits. I believe in focusing on business results and revenue. I worked a lot with marketing departments in conversion tracking, conversion optimisation, A/B testing. I love building, making web applications and creating value.

I've been indie hacking for the last couple years as well, latest project is gumtrends.com - built with Laravel, took me 6 days from idea to finish and made it to HN front page.

Looking for projects and part-time opportunities.

SEEKING WORK | UK or Remote | IT Consultant / Full Stack Engineer

Technologies: PHP, Laravel (9yrs exp), VueJS/NuxtJS, AlpineJS, MySQL, TailwindCSS, AWS, Azure, RESTful APIs, Adwords, GA Ecommerce, Git, Twilio, Stripe, Docker

Email: topoftheforts[at]gmail.com

CV: Please email and I'll send that over + LinkedIn profile

I have 14 years experience in full stack web development, I have managed small dev teams and have been a one-man IT department for small startups and non-profits. I believe in focusing on business results and revenue. I worked a lot with marketing departments in conversion tracking, conversion optimisation, A/B testing. I love building, making web applications and creating value.

I've been indie hacking for the last couple years as well, latest project is gumtrends.com - built with Laravel, took me 6 days from idea to finish and made it to HN front page.

Looking for projects and part-time opportunities.

I'm a software engineer and I'm trying to get into selling HTML templates. I wanted to do some competitor research to see what's selling a lot on Themeforest and what people are complaining about, to find gaps in the market.

So I made an app with Laravel that scrapes Themeforest and uses OpenAI APIs to summarise all the bad reviews.

The app is not publicly available but the result of my first scrape (circa 10 days ago) is on Gumroad https://albertofort.gumroad.com/l/themeforest-templates-ai-d...

I think the main link of this post should be the homepage and not the generated report, I was very confused at what I was looking at.

I understand the value proposition of this but I can't get past the feeling of "this is just more auto-generated garbage". I am aware that a lot of online outlets do pretty much the same - they summarize a press release and make it their own, adding some images - and this tool is automating that process.

I just can't see myself ever reading an article like this, especially cause it's obvious to me that it's AI generated (paragraphs starting with "Moreover," , "In Summary,"). I'm a sample size of 1 though, and many other people might still read articles like this.

Another doubt I have is in regards to Google - do they like this kind of content? From what I understand they're not against AI but it has to provide valuable information. This seems to regurgitate existing information without extra commentary, so is this even helping SEO?

Apologies if this comes across as negative, I appreciate the work involved, just trying to give some honest feedback.

"Maybe that was all preparation for slicing America in two using an Australia-shaped knife" one of those sentences I feel like no one has ever said before (/r/brandnewsentence material)

96%, really proud of that

thank you so much for sharing this site! I've been having a hard time wrapping my head around some Vue2->Vue3 changes and this is very helpful

I kinda feel it's mostly because of the paywall

On point.

Thank you! I think you're so right and I used that spirit to launch Gumtrends. I was worried about the reaction of people (about bugs, the scraping, missing features) but I'm so happy I launched anyway.

Thank you so much!

sure just email at info@gumtrends.com

Unfortunately Gumroad does not display any text reviews as far as I'm aware

Honestly I hadn't heard of trends.vc until now (and I never scrolled that far into the Gumroad homepage) I have another website that is focused on trends (social media related) and I know it's a big market so that's why I built Gumtrends

Haven't used AWS. Just a VPS, with Laravel and AlpineJS + TailwindCSS with Vite on the frontend. Database is MariaDB, the DB is just on the server.

No problem about the cynicism, I appreciate any questions. Honest answer: I know Laravel, I know how to use a template to make a nice looking landing page, and I know how to plug in Stripe to receive payments. I don't really write books or sell courses, Notion templates or any of the things that are big on Gumroad, so for now it's better for me to provide this information and charge for it rather than trying to learn how to write an ebook.

This looks great! Nice work

Sorry I was a bit unclear on my previous message. By ratings I mean number of reviews. So I'm not using the average star rating at all, just the pure reviews count.

Thank you! I looked at the previous Show HN submissions and tried to get a pulse on what worked better.

Just followed you on twitter, I'll DM you

That's a fair question, and that's why I didn't build out everything I had in mind (trends, AI based suggestions, etc), I just put together the best MVP I could in a week and put it out there.

Thank you so much this is really helpful! I was a bit worried about spending weeks on something that nobody wanted, so I launched a MVP to begin with. If there’s enough interest I’ll work on more features! I would still keep a one off or license based pricing though, I feel a collective subscription fatigue

thank you! Not yet but I have some ideas for sure

Haha honesty is the best policy!

Not yet, if I see enough interest in my product I’ll work hard to improve the estimates.

Sure! I’ll email you :)

Yes just webscraping. Just used Laravel, cause that's what I'm most familiar with. The site is Laravel + AlpineJS (with Vite)

That's amazing! I thought about whether to keep the data to myself and build something or share it and sell access to it. I hope I made the right decision! (Also I just learned what a COI policy is)

I've calculated the ratings-to-sales ratio on products that do have official sales numbers, and used that to estimate it for the ones that don't. I used the median ratio as a guide.

It's hard to tell how accurate the estimates are until some Gumroad seller confirm their numbers to me, but I think with the data I have this is a good guideline.

One surprising thing I found is that the median ratio is the same across all categories, I thought it would vary much more between different niches.