Henri Toivar

Coding since 2005. Built 30+ apps. Sharing about vibe engineering. Fruit enthusiast

[Henri Toivar @HenriToivar]

1/ How many users did my ChatGPT app get with zero marketing?

A few months ago I finally managed to release my invoicing ChatGPT app.

It started as a tool just for my own business.

[Henri Toivar @HenriToivar]

Biggest mistake for most app builders is targeting low ticket market.

We build low ticket apps because that's what we've seen and interacted with mostly so we emulate that.

There is so much more money to be made and less competition in high ticket.

Post your app I'll tell you how you can potentially tweak it for high ticket.

[Henri Toivar @HenriToivar]

Message to builders: People say all SaaS will die because everyone can vibe code their own software now.

Here's what still has a place:

Highly specialized done-for-you services.

There are still people who need things done for them. They don't have the time to use your SaaS or vibecode their own. Any they are willing to pay for expertise, quality, trust, speed and reliability.

The client never touches an interface.

But you create your own specialized software to automate the delivery.

[Henri Toivar @HenriToivar]

This time I've tried Meta ads, Google Search ads, making content on IG, YT, FB

I was getting some subscriptions, but churn was high and CAC was not sustainable.

What finally worked was the one that everyone avoids.
Highly targeted and personalized cold outbound.

But I had to tweak the product from low ticket to high ticket for this to work.

This was a game changer.

[Henri Toivar @HenriToivar]

People underestimate what it takes to take an app from MVP to a viable business.

Getting to an MVP is the easy part. Launching is easy.
The hard part is distribution - finding your channel, your ICP and tweaking your product until it hits.

I gave up too quick in the past. I would build a product, launch, try one channel and throw in the towel if there were no results.

[Henri Toivar @HenriToivar]

If my goal would be to become a good developer again from scratch in the least amount of time I would:

1. Read books about coding from the GOATs - this is like downloading knowledge directly from the pros - books a really underestimated. Your lecturer is often not a top tier pro

2. Apply everything at each step in side projects while you are learning. Otherwise the knowledge doesn’t stick

3. Get hired or intern in a Team of developers asap. I learned a lot from my colleagues and mentors

[Henri Toivar @HenriToivar]

Are you self-taught in coding or did you learn it academically?

I went through both experiences

I learned a lot about coding on my own. Just reading tutorials online, reading books about coding and applying it in side projects.

I also went to uni for computer science - but I only found a couple of courses genuinely useful. There was a lot of noise.

But I made a lot of connections there that have been very valuable.

[Henri Toivar @HenriToivar]

Can someone tell me why after ingesting all the text in the world AI still doesn’t sound like a relatable human?

There has been a huge leap in coding, but LLMs still write the same slopified copy they did a year ago.

It seems that speaking like a human is actually more difficult than solving really complex coding, math and physics tasks

[Henri Toivar @HenriToivar]

Something crazy happened in open source AI right now.

Xiaomi's latest open source model just beat Google's BEST closed model Gemini 3.8 Flash by a HUGE margin.

It is as smart as Grok 4.7 - the SMARTEST model from SpaceXAI

The craziest part is how cheap MiMo V2.6 Pro is.

It's 30x cheaper to use as Grok and 10 cheaper as Gemini.

We are very quickly approaching a time when frontier level intelligence will be very cheap and available to everyone.

[Henri Toivar @HenriToivar]

Is AI a smarter and a faster programmer than me?

To be honest I could not probably solve a lot of the tasks on the AI benchmark tests. And far from with the same speed.

But I still need to steer it on every corner to get actually usable applications.

It’s almost like meeting an alien, who has never lived among humans before.

You ask him to do a job and he always does something weird and out of place.

But at the same time knows the answer to the space time continuum.

[Henri Toivar @HenriToivar]

So how smart is AI?

Is it a better programmer than me?

I think the answer is yes in some capability.

But I would compare AI to a highly autistic kid.

Someone who can solve very complex constrained tasks, but has a very hard time understanding other people and what is asked of them.

[Henri Toivar @HenriToivar]

I like giving AI obscure tasks to solve and seeing how it goes about solving them.

For example: I gave it an image of a infographic that contains a mix of animal images and their descriptions and I asked it recreate this in HTML using those exact images.

Fairly simple to do manually as a human, time consuming, but doable.

I had no idea how it was going to actually solve this, so i was quite curious

[Henri Toivar @HenriToivar]

For it to actually crop something out precisely it needs precise pixel perfect coordinates.

So it needs to solve this purely programmatically. Process each pixel and compare it to the next one.

It does some pretty complex math to disdinguish borders, edges of the animals, seperate them from the background etc.

This is code that I would never write myself. Code that I barely understand

And it did it perfectly in a couple of minutes.

[Henri Toivar @HenriToivar]

@andrewxroas I’ve made this mistake way too many times. Switching focus alone is already a performance killer

[Henri Toivar @HenriToivar]

Descript is really great for long form text heavy video editing.

It has AI editing so it removes all the failed takes, pauses and umms.

And you can even re-generate your narration in your own voice if you said a wrong word or number.

[Henri Toivar @HenriToivar]

I’ve been posting every single day on X and Threads for the last 30 days.

I posted 110 posts total - identical content on both platforms, here are the results:

Threads:
97 395 views
+53 followers
1 595 interactions

X:
5 422 views
+6 followers
277 engagements

Am I missing some magic sauce on X? Or does it have have just so much more competition?

[Henri Toivar @HenriToivar]

I still have that dream of self-sustainability. But I also want to be connected.

It’s okay for me to buy my fruit from the market. I don’t need to grow everything myself.

I have other gifts I can share until then to exchange value.

And maybe one day I will have my small fruit garden as well.

[Henri Toivar @HenriToivar]

A lot of people have the dream of going off-grid, growing their own food and being self-sustainable.

I had that dream too and I moved away from my country. I looked to buy land and planned on starting a food forest.

After 1 year I decided to move back to a western country.

[Henri Toivar @HenriToivar]

The modern infrastructure can be a beautiful thing.

I’ve had over 50 electricity and water outages in the last year.

I appreciated it at first and thought it was “romantic” to be disconnected with nothing but candles.

But over time it just became annoying, missed work calls, melting fridges and delayed plans.

Closed roads caused unnecessary stress and almost missing flights.