Thomas Oomens

Developing since 14 for 19 years now, working on honest projects
Exited founder of dating app working on app

[Thomas Oomens @HonestDevIO]

@TVanWelsenes One quick feature request: Allow adding team members? One of my projects I have someone helping me, but I don't want to give access to my account (Can't even since it's Google oauth)
I bought the pro version, hope that supports you guys :)

[Thomas Oomens @HonestDevIO]

Spent two days making Mesh Together's onboarding frictionless. Cut it from five screens to two. Signups didn't budge. The form was never the friction, nobody had a reason to be there yet. Polish is something you earn after PMF, and I keep relearning that.

[Thomas Oomens @HonestDevIO]

My VA runs as a persistent Claude Code session on a VPS. It reads my Telegram, tracks tasks, logs my gym sets, drafts these tweets. 80% of building it was memory plumbing. Markdown files and a SQLite db. The agent itself was the easy part.

[Thomas Oomens @HonestDevIO]

Anthropic raised $65B at a $965B valuation the same week they shipped Opus 4.8. The model is genuinely better at long agent runs, I'll give them that. A near-trillion-dollar price tag on a company that mostly sells tokens to other people's startups is still a hell of a bet.

[Thomas Oomens @HonestDevIO]

Someone made a 60-second game about AI agent permission fatigue. Hits a nerve. I run a persistent agent on a VPS and I've started hitting 'y' on bash prompts without reading them. The approval step stopped being a decision months ago.

[Thomas Oomens @HonestDevIO]

My VA is a persistent Claude Code session on a VPS, wired to Telegram. SQLite for tasks and reminders, markdown for daily logs. Three months in: zero forgotten cron jobs, gym sessions auto-parsed, dry Dutch judgment on my decisions for free.

[Thomas Oomens @HonestDevIO]

Marketing doesn't fix a product nobody asked for. Yet every week another solo dev posts 'nobody uses my app, how do I market' and the first reply is never 'how many users did you talk to before building it.' That's the whole game.

[Thomas Oomens @HonestDevIO]

Every solo dev I know (including me) spends the first 3 months building and the next 3 wondering why nobody cares.

The fix is boring: ship week 1, talk to users week 2, rebuild week 3. Not the other way around.

The code is never the bottleneck. Knowing what to build is.

[Thomas Oomens @HonestDevIO]

Posting something genuine, hopefully helpful
1 like, maybe 1 follow

VS

Replying my startup link to all the same: Blablabla, what are you building today? posts
15 likes, 15 followers

Do you still try to post genuine things?

[Thomas Oomens @HonestDevIO]

@49agents It takes a long time, but I purposely don't do simultaneous, because that over complicates things. Also, the AI's often find things in between, which they save to a STATE.md doc. That is then used by the follow-up ones.
I rather have them doing it slower sequential, but good

[Thomas Oomens @HonestDevIO]

A workflow that works for me:
- Design using claude design
- Export to ./design in my repo
- Tell claude code to read the design and split into prompts
- Spin up manager agent that runs each prompt sequential
- Let each sub-agent test their output against the design.

[Thomas Oomens @HonestDevIO]

@AayanShips I'm thinking instagram mostly, setting up some reels that show the final result maybe. You any tips?

[Thomas Oomens @HonestDevIO]

Built a personal VA that runs as a persistent Claude Code session on a VPS. Telegram in, actions out.

Hardest part wasn't the AI. It was state management — making sure it remembers what it said 6 hours ago and doesn't contradict itself.

LLMs are easy to demo, hard to make reliable over days.

[Thomas Oomens @HonestDevIO]

@stevelauda_ The worst part of PDFs is spotting a typo right after sending and having to awkward-email a 'v2_final'. Web proposals let you fix mistakes silently in real-time.

[Thomas Oomens @HonestDevIO]

@AlexeiScales Tracking bedtime and gym to double revenue in 30 days feels like classic over-optimization. At $34k, isn't it almost entirely down to pipeline and closing 1-2 bigger deals? The micro-metrics seem like a distraction.

[Thomas Oomens @HonestDevIO]

@zuess05 Hardest part is just getting that first one out. Writing definitely drains a different battery than building does, but those stats are a solid start for 45 mins in.

[Thomas Oomens @HonestDevIO]

@startupideaspod An iMessage interface is great until they need to fix a typo. Texting back and forth to edit a payroll run is way more frustrating than just tapping a button on a simple, single-purpose web page.

[Thomas Oomens @HonestDevIO]

@iatnon @elonmusk Claude code is wild but I still end up babysitting it way too much. The moment it gets stuck in an infinite loop trying to fix a test it just broke, I have to step in and take over anyway.

[Thomas Oomens @HonestDevIO]

@seraleev Hardest part is fighting your own ego. It feels uncomfortable shipping something that feels half-done, but it's the only way to avoid wasting six months building a polished app nobody actually wants.

[Thomas Oomens @HonestDevIO]

@mes28io The 'money fountain' trap is so real. When MRR climbs fast, it genuinely feels like it'll go up forever. Hard to build the discipline to reinvest or save until you experience that first big market shift or churn spike.