Mark Blue

Indie Dev - launching things until I make it
💰40 MRR - MRR -

[Mark Blue @M4rk_Blue]

STEP 0

I’m Mark.

A divorced but dedicated father of 4, and an IT veteran with 25 years of experience.

About 10-15 years ago I took my first shot at startups and indie hacking. I learned a lot, burned out, and eventually went back to a software engineering career. At the time, the effort-to-reward ratio simply made more sense.

Now things feel different.

AI has dramatically lowered the cost of building, life is more stable, and I finally have the time and energy to give it another serious shot.

My goal isn’t to build a unicorn. If I can reach $20k MRR, I’ll consider that a dream outcome.

I love breaking things down to first principles and understanding how they work. I have a bit of a hacker mindset.

Over the coming months I’ll be building SaaS products, Chrome extensions, mobile apps, whatever solves real problems and creates value. I’ll ship fast, experiment often, and accept that many ideas will fail.

I already know how to build.

Now I want to learn how to distribute, market, and sell at scale.

This account will be an honest log of that journey, the wins, the mistakes, and everything I learn along the way.

If that sounds interesting, follow along.

[Mark Blue @M4rk_Blue]

@grok @publicappscom @yongfook @grok what is Fin?

[Mark Blue @M4rk_Blue]

STEP 5

Lets talk a bit on validating PMF. Builders like to build but then validating product and distributing is something that they avoid. Marketing budgets are often $0 and we don't want to invest money in it, rather invest time and effort.
So first steps are doing SEO or GEO and trying to get some "free" traffic. What is the problem with this approach is that even if succeeding, you need time for this to get to fruition.
What will happen is that you will spend time optimizing and improving the product while waiting for traffic to come, which could lead to sunk cost fallacy.

Best thing to do here is try to validate fast. Ideally this could be done with AdWords, where you focus on high-intent traffic keywords. Spend couple of hundreds of dollars and get a insights do people actually want to buy your product or not.

Lean startup method was to build "Landing Page Smoke Test" but today with AI tools, it makes sense to build an actual small MVP and try to market real product in some cases.

Regards to that I am doing AdWords campaign for https://t.co/gxQ7jTnauJ project to get more validation and current state of market and how much is there actual demand for the project. Initial thoughts were that there is demand as there are competitors out there offering similar solutions, often with subscriptions so my idea was to offer and solve this as one time payment solution. Will see the results once AdWords campaign gets approved and act accordingly.

[Mark Blue @M4rk_Blue]

@hannah24_app Hi, let’s 🔗

[Mark Blue @M4rk_Blue]

@pcshipp congrats on milestone

[Mark Blue @M4rk_Blue]

@kirtandopamine @X Hi, lets connect

[Mark Blue @M4rk_Blue]

https://t.co/UwoEkHKWuz

[Mark Blue @M4rk_Blue]

@vadym_petryshyn hey, lets link

[Mark Blue @M4rk_Blue]

@alwayspriyesh hey 👏

[Mark Blue @M4rk_Blue]

@razvanships keep going bro

[Mark Blue @M4rk_Blue]

@GoldilocksOrbit @SpookedE86704 Good point, so how do you determine that?

[Mark Blue @M4rk_Blue]

@iannuttall I built something similar, social scraper + is the name, took me few days with Cursor, trying to productize it now.

[Mark Blue @M4rk_Blue]

Interesting advice, thank you
Also if you like lets 🔗

[Mark Blue @M4rk_Blue]

@flytradr_guy @StevBuilds That makes sense. Problem is if you are building something niche which people dont "form" community around it but maybe that is also a sign there is not big enough PMF.

[Mark Blue @M4rk_Blue]

Was looking at this upwork statements and what is surprising to me is that the gross profit is not what the company actual earned. Expenses play big part of the story and just looking at profit is also not enough.

Gross profit ≠ what the company actually earned.
Operating income ≠ final profit.
Net income is the “bottom line” — what the company truly earned (or lost) after everything.

Financial metrics explained simply:

Revenue → How much customers paid you

Gross Profit → Revenue minus the direct cost of your product/service

Operating Income (EBIT) → Profit from running your core business

Pre-Tax Income → Profit after interest and other gains/losses, before taxes

Net Income → The actual bottom-line profit or loss after everything

[Mark Blue @M4rk_Blue]

@levelsio OF is connected with Dating apps? have men really directly replaced one with other?

[Mark Blue @M4rk_Blue]

@NicolasLecocqHQ Interesting projects, good luck. Also lets link up

[Mark Blue @M4rk_Blue]

STEP 4

I often needed to scrape some data from reddit or X but problem is that most of the professional tools for this ask for subscription and add some AI on top of it to justify all that.

What I really do need is just a tool to scrape X/Twitter post or reddit post and put it all into my own LLM and analyze.

So I built that where its all LOCAL and without any subscription. There is ONE TIME fee for it, which is now on discount, but there is also trial version you can use and try to see does this fit your needs.

Wondering if the branding is done right. Name is generic but I added "PLUS" to it so its "Social Scrapper+" maybe the plus sign is not the best idea as people need to write plus with words and not + sign as acts as operator in google search, we will see if this was mistake :)

Check the VIDEO how it works or just Download the extension and try it. Soon to follow will be also LinkedIn and Threads. Later TikTok and Instagram.

[Mark Blue @M4rk_Blue]

STEP 3

So the Dante Genomics Report needed a whole overhaul. It is based on scraping PDFs from Dantes website as backup feature for users. What happened is that Dante changed (and finally fixed they UI) and then the whole extension and promos were outdated, so I needed to rebuild it all and make new video and new extension version. Just a learning that its very volatile doing this kind of things as you are dependent on 3rd parties.

New version is here though and working fine
https://t.co/gvXKtHKRBQ