Lucas

18
(acquired)

[Lucas @lucascodes]

shipped fast & got acquired at 17

feels so surreal...
thanks @marclou

[Lucas @lucascodes]

how important is it for conversion if ad campaign is targetting outside of the US/Europe?

unfortunately geolocked in SEA

@athcanft thoughts on tiktok admaxxing outside usa?

[Lucas @lucascodes]

@athcanft what do I gotta do for you to be my mentor

give me a challenge and if i do it then you'll mentor me and help me lazymaxx

[Lucas @lucascodes]

@terencebuilds What do you reckon is the best channel for distribution?

[Lucas @lucascodes]

I launched my project on Product Hunt last week.

4 upvotes. 0 signups.

Felt like the product flopped. Then I looked back on number that mattered: my launch post had 11 impressions.

Nobody skipped signing up. It's just that nobody saw it

Reminder to lock in your distribution!

[Lucas @lucascodes]

@filiksyos Definitely disagree. You can't let the X algorithm be the judge of your app's worth. All that matters at the end of the day is exposure, so if you don't have a lot of followers, your best bet is the exactly those "worst places"

[Lucas @lucascodes]

@bruvimtired I had to do a programming course last sem for uni and it felt so refreshing writing code again haha

[Lucas @lucascodes]

When I was 10 years old, I made a Minecraft clone and put it on the Chrome Web Store so I could play on my Chromebook.

It got over 200,000 downloads.

Until I got an email from Mojang.

My school gave everyone Chromebooks, and like every kid in 2018 I loved Minecraft.

But there was no way to play it on Chromebooks.

It couldn't run Java, no workaround, there was nothing you could do. At the time I was just starting to learn to code, so instead of accepting that, I started searching on Google.

I found out that Chrome OS could run Android apps back then. Google had a tool that let you package an Android APK as a Chrome app. So I took the Android version of Minecraft, packaged it, and put it on the Chrome Web Store myself.

It worked.

Suddenly I was playing Minecraft and every kid with a school Chromebook could play it too.

It spread way past my school. The download count was well over 200,000, and I started getting emails from schools around the world, complaining that their students were getting distracted, messing around, joining each other's servers and talking smack in the chat 😂

Reading emails from school administrators on other continents about a thing I made because I was bored in class. It felt crazy to me.

Then one morning I woke up to an email from the Chrome Webstore. It was a DMCA takedown notice sent by an official employee from Mojang.

November 9th, 2018. The app was gone. RIP🪦

The email was pure legal boilerplate. They had no idea they were writing to a 10 year old.

Honestly, even with the legal jargon, I didn't feel scared at all. Mojang acknowledging me in some way was the coolest thing that had ever happened to me.

(Geometry Dash's CEO also sent me a similar email shortly after, but that's another story.)

The app only lasted a few months, but I still remember the rush of checking the download count every morning before school and watching it jump by thousands overnight. Refreshing a dashboard, and having my heart race over a number.

Nothing I've felt since has matched it.

That was eight years ago. The rest of this year I plan to spend chasing that feeling again.

[Lucas @lucascodes]

Last month I bombed a Java midterm after knowing some theory and syntax but having no practice. 54%. My course had no way to practice and just showed code on the slides.

So I built Kodo: upload your lecture slides, get coding problems on exactly what your course tests, with auto-graded test cases you solve in the browser. Python, Java, C, C++. (kinda like LeetCode)

I've been studying with it for my own exams since.

https://t.co/cfBQIYO4xX

[Lucas @lucascodes]

@athcanft I'm 18 rn and I've been doing web design for many years but I feel like web design and the other skills you mentioned can just be done by AI nowadays and have low costs (eg $199 websites) - how would you get customers and reach $2k mrr?

[Lucas @lucascodes]

@ErnestoSOFTWARE Teach me your ways🙏

[Lucas @lucascodes]

@ErnestoSOFTWARE Reply to dms 🙏🏻

[Lucas @lucascodes]

Day 3: Getting close to submitting my first app 🤞

Honestly crazy how fast I've progressed with this project using Claude Code, this would've taken weeks

[Lucas @lucascodes]

Stop overthinking your app idea.

I launched Claude Code, did some market research and went from zero to App Store ready in 2 days.

No fancy tech stack. No spending weeks on fixing little things. Just picked the idea, opened my laptop, and shipped 1 main feature.

Tomorrow I'm submitting to the App Store.

The best app is the one that actually ships. Your distribution does the rest.

[Lucas @lucascodes]

@jackfriks I think $1,000,000 then buy a business that does $5,000 for around $100k

[Lucas @lucascodes]

@marclou If you were starting again today, what would you do Marc?

[Lucas @lucascodes]

@mattmerrick16 @RoundtableSpace Couldn't have said it any better than this

[Lucas @lucascodes]

Day 1 of building an app to quit vaping

Set up the project, here's how the first screen is looking

[Lucas @lucascodes]

@bzagrodzki Crazy results, what ended up being your strategy for distribution/marketing?

[Lucas @lucascodes]

@simonecanciello Sick idea if you weren’t already building it I would’ve snatched it. Best of luck to you man