Allen｜Mingyu Li

Finance PhD from University of York🇬🇧🎓 Building with AI 🤖
Investing • Fitness • Entrepreneurship
Documenting my journey from 0 → 1
从零开始，探索更多可能。

[Allen｜Mingyu Li @MingyuLi98]

28 years old. Finance PhD. Starting from zero.

I spent most of my twenties studying, believing that a good education would lead to a good career.

Reality taught me otherwise.

I’ve realised that I don’t just want a good job. I want to build something of my own.

Now I’m exploring AI, SaaS, investing, and entrepreneurship.

No startup experience. No team. No success story.

Just ambition, curiosity, and the courage to begin.

Documenting my journey from 0 → 1.

Let’s see how far I can go.

[Allen｜Mingyu Li @MingyuLi98]

@younweb3 Thanks mate! It’s been a pretty wild week. Started building my first app, broke a few things, fixed a few things, and somehow ended up with something that actually works. Absolutely loving the process though! How’s your week been?

[Allen｜Mingyu Li @MingyuLi98]

Day 4 of building APT. 💪
Today, I finished V0.4 of my fitness app.
What started as a simple workout logger is slowly becoming something more.
Today's updates:
📈 Strength progress & personal records
⚖️ Body weight trends
💤 Sleep insights
🔥 Training consistency tracker
🏆 Achievement system
142/142 tests passed. Changes committed locally.
One thing I realised today:
People don't just want to track numbers. They want to see how far they've come.
That's why I decided to move away from displaying endless training statistics and focus more on progress, consistency, and the small wins along the way.
Tomorrow: V0.4.1 — Chinese & English support, bringing APT one step closer to its first international beta testers.
Still early. Still learning. Plenty left to build.
Just me, Codex, and a MacBook.
Build the app. Test the app. Get stronger.
Calling it a day. Good night, builders. 🫡

[Allen｜Mingyu Li @MingyuLi98]

@smsCristi Actually, I just finished my work today, I will post my V0.4.1 later.

[Allen｜Mingyu Li @MingyuLi98]

Day 3 of building my first startup.
Started with a blank MacBook.
Now APT can track real workouts, save training history and calculate training volume.
16/16 tests passed. ✅
Already fixing bugs before adding more features.
Codex builds the software.
I build the muscle.
Progressive overload applies to both. 💪
#BuildInPublic #indiehacker

[Allen｜Mingyu Li @MingyuLi98]

@Erica_Codes_NJ Really appreciate the suggestion, Erica! 🙌 Means a lot that you're actually taking the time to think about my little project. Feedback like yours is exactly what makes building in public so worthwhile. Thanks for being part of the journey!

[Allen｜Mingyu Li @MingyuLi98]

Day 3 of building my first startup.
Today, I became the first real user of APT, the fitness app I'm building with Codex.
Logged my first actual workout. It works!
But using it revealed a few problems:
Workout summaries need to be clearer.
No strength trends or personal records yet.
Workout duration tracks logging time, not actual training time.
Tomorrow's mission:
Build smarter progress tracking, improve the UX, and fix how workout time is recorded.
Building something is one thing. Actually using it is another.
Build the app. Test the app. Get stronger.
Both the app and my body. 💪
#BuildInPublic

[Allen｜Mingyu Li @MingyuLi98]

That's actually on my roadmap! The app is already mobile-responsive, but I'm still working on making the core experience solid. Eventually I'd love to have a proper mobile companion so I can log sets between exercises instead of trying to remember everything when I get home. One step at a time though, or I'll end up building 10 features and finishing none 💀

[Allen｜Mingyu Li @MingyuLi98]

@AxelMtn5 Exactly 😂 Asking for a credit card before showing any value is like asking someone to marry you before the first date.

[Allen｜Mingyu Li @MingyuLi98]

That's a really good point. Right now I'm just trying to make the app useful enough that I'd actually want to open it again 😂 Long term, I'd count a return as logging another real workout, not just opening the app. And yeah, separating organic returns from reminder-driven ones would tell us a lot more about whether people actually find it useful.

[Allen｜Mingyu Li @MingyuLi98]

@thsottiaux Day 3 of building my first app with Codex. Haven't hit this issue yet, but auto-resume sounds like exactly the kind of improvement that makes AI coding feel less like babysitting and more like actual building.

[Allen｜Mingyu Li @MingyuLi98]

Day 3 of building my first app with Codex. Haven't hit this issue yet, but auto-resume sounds like exactly the kind of improvement that makes AI coding feel less like babysitting and more like actual building.

[Tibo @thsottiaux]

Day 11/

We've landed a series of changes and more compute to very significantly decrease the occurrence of the disruptive "Selected model is at capacity. Please try a different model". When it does happen, it should also eventually just continue by itself and not just block on it.

Let us know if you still see it out there in the wild and we'll take a look.

[Allen｜Mingyu Li @MingyuLi98]

@akshayshipsz That's great! Good luck Akshay!

[Allen｜Mingyu Li @MingyuLi98]

@KrisRChase @Elliottzeli That's actually a brilliant lesson for someone building their first product. I've been thinking about monetisation before even getting my first real user. Sometimes the market tells you what your business should be. Appreciate you sharing this!

[Allen｜Mingyu Li @MingyuLi98]

@TheElsobky Makes sense. I'd rather have 10 customers getting real value than 1,000 signups chasing a discount. The tricky part is making sure the value survives when the price goes back up

[Allen｜Mingyu Li @MingyuLi98]

Hahaha I’m building it on my Mac, and I’m not exactly bringing my laptop to the gym 😂 So I noticed the bug when I got home and logged my workout, though I already had a feeling something was off mid-session.
And yeah, I nearly fell into the pretty UI trap too! But I genuinely believe in starting messy and improving as you go. If you wait until everything’s perfect, you’ll never start building anything. 💪

[Allen｜Mingyu Li @MingyuLi98]

As someone who spent years doing academic research and is now building with AI, I find this fascinating. The real breakthrough won't just be AI solving harder problems. It'll be humans asking questions we never thought to ask before.

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

We want to support the mathematics community in turning progress in AI into deeper human understanding and new discoveries. To support that goal, we are contributing $5 million to a new Simons Foundation initiative to help mathematicians examine, understand, and build on results produced by AI, including the results we recently published.

The funding, managed and awarded by the @SimonsFdn will support workshops, conferences, and special programs. We will also provide access to our models and computing resources to Simons Foundation-supported researchers.

[Allen｜Mingyu Li @MingyuLi98]

@OnatAksaray Exactly! 😂 Three days of building taught me more than weeks of planning. Turns out being your own first user is both a blessing and a curse. You find every bug the hard way.

[Allen｜Mingyu Li @MingyuLi98]

@Elliottzeli @KrisRChase Appreciate you bringing Kris in! Really curious about this. The jump from consumer traction to B2B revenue is something I’m trying to understand as I build my own product.

[Allen｜Mingyu Li @MingyuLi98]

@akshayshipsz That’s a clear first wedge. Finding those first three users is the real founder boss fight 😅 Are you reaching them through dev communities or direct outreach?

[Allen｜Mingyu Li @MingyuLi98]

@smsCristi Deal 🤝 You’re officially customer #1. I’ll send you the waitlist link as soon as it’s live — daily build logs are now part of the contract 😂

[Allen｜Mingyu Li @MingyuLi98]

@rafal_darlak Got it! Will you repeat the same prompts to establish a baseline? Knowing when a visibility change is big enough to act on would be really useful.

[Allen｜Mingyu Li @MingyuLi98]

@michaelyinplus Maybe the bridge is one reusable lesson per messy story: what broke, what you tried, what changed. Gives the reader something to take home besides our emotional damage.