Paulius

🚀 Building an app to help me learn Japanese
📚 Sharing the journey in public
💻 Software Engineer based in London

[Paulius @PauliusBuilds]

@abhijeet_gautam What's your Figma workflow?

[Paulius @PauliusBuilds]

What do you use to design your apps? 🎨

More of an engineer than a designer myself 😕

[Paulius @PauliusBuilds]

@brunotwin Yup but where do you start with Figma?

[Paulius @PauliusBuilds]

@DarioSitnik Haha yeah tried that. But everything feels too MVP for me. I'd like to design something with quicker iteration speed and more control over the result.

I guess it's great for idea generation!

[Paulius @PauliusBuilds]

@fabiomlferreira I'll try that!

Let's say you want to design one of the UX flows, where do you start? Look at other examples on Figma? What Adobe products do you use?

[Paulius @PauliusBuilds]

What’s the fastest way to learn Vim in 2024? I just set it up for VSCode! 👨‍💻

Also overhauling my dev experience by going mouseless for speed (Raycast, AeroSpace for window tiling). ⚡

I'm super slow right now, not gonna lie 😄
#Vim #VSCode #DevTools #Coding

[Paulius @PauliusBuilds]

Adding missions to my Japanese learning app! 🥷

It will be easier to chat if there is a goal. Need to work on making the gamification fun and engaging. 🎮

#buildinpublic #learnjapanese

[Paulius @PauliusBuilds]

How do you use LLMs in your projects? 💻

Non-coding related.

[Paulius @PauliusBuilds]

Added voice to text to my Japanese practice app! 🎙️

Using OpenAI's Whisper API for accurate transcription.

Needed to do GPT4 post processing to transform Kanji into Kana because I'm noob in Japanese. 🍙

#buildinpublic #japanese #indiehacker

[Paulius @PauliusBuilds]

@msmialko Thanks! Will do, not quite there yet. Want to add some more key features 😊

[Paulius @PauliusBuilds]

Added AI voice, translation, and user icons to my Japanese practice app! 💻

Really exciting to see more visuals and features come together. 😊

#buildinpublic #indiehackers #learnjapanese

[Paulius @PauliusBuilds]

@barancezayirli How many people would cancel?

[Paulius @PauliusBuilds]

Adding free trial to your SaaS?

Or just paid. 🧐

[Paulius @PauliusBuilds]

How are you planning on growing your personal brand while building?

Need ideas.

[Paulius @PauliusBuilds]

Spent the evening adding AI voice to my Japanese practice app! 🤖

Voicevox is awesome for it, just needed to bypass all that advanced Japanese. 😆

Also the latency right now is around 1 second, wondering how to reduce it. 🤔

#buildinpublic #learnjapanese #indiehacker #VOICEVOX

[Paulius @PauliusBuilds]

@SebastianRoehl Awesome, makes sense.
What about in terms of marketing?
How did you manage to get so many users?? :)

[Paulius @PauliusBuilds]

Reworked my infra.
- Cloudflare DNS & proxy
- Hertzner VPS hosting everything
- Nextjs static site served via Nginx
- Flask backend to support AI libraries
- GitHub Actions for CICD

Feels good when everything finally "just works" 😌

What's your infra like?

#buildinpublic

[Paulius @PauliusBuilds]

@ebubechris_k Thank you for sharing your experience, very helpful

[Paulius @PauliusBuilds]

You're building your SaaS and then you find someone else building the exact same idea (way ahead of you).

How do you react?

[Paulius @PauliusBuilds]

@manuhortet Great advice, will do just that. Thank you.