Kien Phan

Solo Founder — shipped ~35 products, sharing the real numbers daily
🚢 Ship & Tell: ✨ ☁️

[Kien Phan @KienPhan1991]

Earn 30% Recurring Commission for Life
Join the Bills AI affiliate program and earn passive income by helping others take control of their finances with AI-powered insights.

Join it free: https://t.co/IObaLYnEaI

[Kien Phan @KienPhan1991]

Testing something I've been building 🤖 — type a topic, get a faceless short video in ~45 seconds. What topic should I try first? 👇

[Kien Phan @KienPhan1991]

@ChilliDoor @joshmanders @ImLunaHey @sentry Bugsnag's UI got me too. If you want Sentry-compatible without the Sentry bill, that's why I built https://t.co/oFirc8a5EJ — same SDK/DSN, just point your existing Sentry client at it. Drop-in migration is the whole point.

[Kien Phan @KienPhan1991]

@fauxriyal Brutal, but the right lesson. The fix isn't to nuke all 100k — pull GSC and you'll usually find a few hundred pages still earning real impressions. Keep + improve those, noindex the thin rest. (I built https://t.co/wbCi1p7ril to flag which is which; GSC shows it too.)

[Kien Phan @KienPhan1991]

Loved this — step 7 (add keywords you rank for but don't target) is the highest-ROI move most people skip.

I automated exactly it: connect GSC → it returns the missing keywords + the heading/paragraph/FAQ to add. Dogfooded on 11 of my own products this week. https://t.co/paqGyca9L0

[Kien Phan @KienPhan1991]

So I turned that into one call: connect Google Search Console → get the exact missing keywords + ready-to-paste copy → ship.

Dogfooding also surfaced a real auth bug in my own tool. Shipping beats scoring.

https://t.co/wbCi1p7ril

[Kien Phan @KienPhan1991]

I build an SEO tool (SEOBolt), so this week I dogfooded it on my own 11 products.

Brutal lesson: they scored 84-98/100 on-page… and still got almost no traffic.

High score ≠ traffic. Here's what the score was hiding 🧵

[Kien Phan @KienPhan1991]

The one on-page win that moved things: keywords you already rank for but don't target.

One product ranked #5 for "[brand] login" — with no login page. Built one.
Another sat page-3 for a 568-impression phrase it never named. Added it, truthfully.

GSC shows these; few act.

[Kien Phan @KienPhan1991]

Day 1 of the autopsy. I promised this 7 days ago and then posted nothing. That's lesson zero.

Today I found out AutoShort charged 51 people and never gave them a video.

The bug: we take your credits when you hit generate. The job that renders runs later, and re-checks your balance. It sees 0. The 0 our own charge just created. So it kills the video with "out of credits" and refunds nothing, because that code path assumes no charge happened.

Two of them burned their entire free allowance without ever seeing one video work. Then left.

240 videos had been sitting unrendered since January 9th. Every one got marked FAILED in the same second, at 00:05 today, when the job that was supposed to render them finally ran for the first time.

Refunded 32 people, 2,110 credits, an hour ago. Emailed all of them and told them it was our fault.

MRR: $40.33.

[Kien Phan @KienPhan1991]

I've shipped ~35 products in the past few years.

Total revenue: $0.

Not "low". Zero. Every "paying customer" turned out to be me testing my own checkout.

I just finished a brutal audit of all 35. Starting today: the autopsy, one lesson a day.

[Kien Phan @KienPhan1991]

Fix is boring: single column, standard headers (Experience, Education, Skills). Never put text inside images.

[Kien Phan @KienPhan1991]

Here's what I broke, what I fixed, and the one insight that changed how I think about this space.

[Kien Phan @KienPhan1991]

Most ATS systems parse your resume as raw text, column by column. Two-column layouts look great to humans — to the parser, your job title ends up next to someone else's company.

[Kien Phan @KienPhan1991]

Made with AutoShort — type a topic, get a finished faceless video (script + voice + visuals + captions). Free to try 👇
https://t.co/0n37qUCtXG

[Kien Phan @KienPhan1991]

https://t.co/pQnDTX5FcV

[Kien Phan @KienPhan1991]

Hey @X algorithm,

Only show this to people who are:

→ Building a product
→ Solo founder
→ Indie hacker
→ Tech

Lets engage and grow together! 👋👋

[Kien Phan @KienPhan1991]

@sherifgjini @X Let’s connect founders

[Kien Phan @KienPhan1991]

@rcmisk Love to see feedback, thanks

https://t.co/sd0S3J3bp3

[Kien Phan @KienPhan1991]

@s_chiriac I’m building https://t.co/sd0S3J3JeB, let’s connect