Owen Reed

AI & productivity tricks most people don't know. One small, true tip at a time.

[Owen Reed @owenreed_dev]

@josephgabito That's cool — live rendering while the agent edits would save a lot of alt-tabbing. Does it handle front matter and embedded images, or just the body text?

[Owen Reed @owenreed_dev]

"Not every tool needs to be a company" — this is underrated.

I run 10 browser tools and some of them might become irrelevant when browsers add native support. That's fine. The domain stays, the SEO juice stays, and I redirect to whichever tool still matters.

Knowing when to stop is as important as knowing when to ship. Good call.

[Owen Reed @owenreed_dev]

Using both. They're good at different things.

Claude Code reads your whole project structure and decides which files to touch — better for cross-file refactors and architectural changes.

Codex is faster for well-defined tasks where you already know what you want. Great for verification too — sandbox catches edge cases.

I stopped trying to pick one and started routing tasks to whichever fits. The combo is stronger than either alone.

[Owen Reed @owenreed_dev]

Agree — and it works the other way too. The replies that got me the most profile clicks weren't "great post!" ones. They were the ones where I shared a specific number or a mistake I made.

One reply about my site being invisible on Bing for 4 weeks got the original poster to ask what I built. That's the whole game at 0 followers.

[Owen Reed @owenreed_dev]

This is why I stopped chasing followers and started chasing search traffic instead.

A stranger googling "change image dpi without photoshop" and landing on my tool is worth more than 1000 timeline impressions. They have a problem RIGHT NOW.

Social proof helps, but the real revenue engine for tool sites is organic search. Nobody's going to impulse-buy a file converter from their feed.

[Owen Reed @owenreed_dev]

This funnel is exactly what I've been thinking about. "Tool page instead of blog post" feels like the right move — people searching for "csv to ics converter" want to USE one, not read about one.

Your 525 tool requests → 88 signups → 2 paid is a clean signal. The 4.7% signup-to-request ratio tells you the tool works. The 2.3% paid conversion tells you the free tier might be too generous.

Running a similar experiment with my own tool sites — free with no signup, thinking about where to put the paywall. Your numbers are making me lean toward "limit output count" rather than "limit features."

[Owen Reed @owenreed_dev]

67% install rate on day one is solid for a fresh listing — most extensions sit at 10-20%. The real test starts when Chrome Web Store actually indexes you in search. That can take days.

I had the same indexing delay with Bing — site was invisible for 4 weeks until I got a few backlinks pointing at it. Chrome store might have a similar trust gate.

Curious how you'll handle the "12 tools bundled" vs "one tool per domain" tradeoff. I went the other way — 10 separate sites, each one URL, each one task.

[Owen Reed @owenreed_dev]

Ran my sites through FreeScan a while back — the accessibility and security flags caught things I'd missed completely. Most "SEO audit" tools skip those.

Rooting for you on PH today. The indie launch game there is rough — saw your thread about hidden comments. Hope the organic votes hold.

[Owen Reed @owenreed_dev]

@hardenrun the "rewrite unsafe ops instead of just blocking" part is the interesting bit — blocking usually just makes the agent retry the same thing in a dumber way. does the rewrite hook the agent's tool calls or sit at the shell level?

[Owen Reed @owenreed_dev]

@abhi16_93 $7 in the first 24h is more real than most launch-week vanity metrics. the spam flagging isn't just you btw — paid-placement boards are getting auto-flagged all over lately. curious if the $4 top-spot mechanic keeps working once the novelty wears off

[Owen Reed @owenreed_dev]

traffic without buyers usually means the traffic isn't the buyer. i'm in the adjacent boat — ~1500 clicks/month across my tool sites, $0 so far. my bet is charging for the workflow features people already use daily, not bolting on new stuff. what do your visitors actually do on the page?

[Owen Reed @owenreed_dev]

@_qevyn_ the "no app store, no account, add to home screen" route is underrated. i build all my tools this way — browser-only, no signup. users trust it faster and you skip two gatekeepers. is the barcode scan using the barcode detection api or a js lib?

[Owen Reed @owenreed_dev]

@createwithtommy i gave up on launch posts entirely — my tools get users from search, not launches. shipped 10 of them and the launch tweet never did anything. seo is slower but it compounds, and it doesn't care how many followers you have