Pierre

I like building physical and digital things, solving problems in any shape or form: Mandarin tone practice

[Pierre @pierreBuildsDev]

Hi, I'm Pierre!

From 🇧🇪, live + 🏄 in 🇹🇼

I love building small tools that kill tedious, repetitive work, the stuff we all hate doing by hand.

Objective: my first $ online from useful products.

Started this for my own accountability, but follow along to see the story unfold 🤙

[Pierre @pierreBuildsDev]

@alexwestco I had exactly the same thing! I made a silly little game without thinking anything of it and it actually already made money! It’s litterally FlappyBird but controlled by voice and aimed at learning Mandarin tones. I find it so cool now though! No idea is too stupid

[Pierre @pierreBuildsDev]

The bible arrived

[Pierre @pierreBuildsDev]

Damn I think getting this kind of feedback from users feels even better than that first ever sale.

Hearing FlappyTone actually being useful to people in their Mandarin Learning Journey is super motivating!

#buildinpublic
#MandarinLearning

[Pierre @pierreBuildsDev]

@sagashiio @nico_jeannen If you're having fun + making money, it's just a fun business!

[Pierre @pierreBuildsDev]

Spends 2 days doing backend architecture stuff. 1000s of lines of code.

On the front end, nothing different though. So I just added some Pro badges next to users that got the early bird access, at least a small update the users can see

#buildinpublic

[Pierre @pierreBuildsDev]

@moveToMoonlight Thanks for the AI analysis. It’s true though and it’s all implemented that way already!

[Pierre @pierreBuildsDev]

Completely over-engineering FlappyTone. Love it.

I want to make it super easy later on to add more clips.

Pipeline:

native speaker clip recording
process clip
clip gets converted into a gate following that clips specific pitch line

-> boom it's in the game
#buildinpublic

[Pierre @pierreBuildsDev]

@alexwestco Hey Alex! Stumbled on your books recently. Read them all. Thanks for putting these kinda resources out there, it really helps for people just starting out to be able to put things in perspective. I just made my first couple sales and defnitely owe part of it to these books!

[Pierre @pierreBuildsDev]

@shch_builds @naval @levelsio @dannypostma @marclou @jackfriks Congrats! I just saw this on my feed and wanted to share the joy since I also got my very first sale ever today while sleeping. And the funny thing is I found out because I was checking something in the DB and suddenly saw there’s a new row in the “entitlements” table 😂

[Pierre @pierreBuildsDev]

@markjgg Thanks! Feel free to DM

[Pierre @pierreBuildsDev]

It happened

My first ever sale.

Everything’s possible

Where your focus goes, energy flows

Now time to go and make FlappyTone provide as much value as possible

#buildinpublic

[Pierre @pierreBuildsDev]

5.30-6.45am : go outside, breakfast, coffee
6.45-8.30am: deep work FlappyTone
8.30-9.00am: HIIT workout
9-12am: regular remote job
12-1pm: lunch
1-5pm: regular remote job
5-9pm: eat, walk, wind down

🔁

[Pierre @pierreBuildsDev]

Got my first actual signup on FlappyTone, someone joined the leaderboard! 🙏

Small wins

They didn't beat my highscore yet though 😈

#buildinpublic #learnmandarin

[Pierre @pierreBuildsDev]

@code_kartik It can be really isolating for sure! Especially if living in a bit of a remote area, you quickly find yourself living in a very “small world”. You have to be very intentional about getting out there and keep socialising. Still think remote work has a lot of big advantages though.

[Pierre @pierreBuildsDev]

@StriftCodes @ErnestoSOFTWARE it's a flappy revolution

[Pierre @pierreBuildsDev]

@moveToMoonlight Didn't see this! Thanks! But the initial issue was that the audio wasn't loud enough when playing because it was playing through the earpiece (play-and-record mode). I then fixed it by cutting the mic while audio is playing, which gives rise to the permission re-granted toast.

[Pierre @pierreBuildsDev]

Chrome Y U DO DIS?

Cues were low volume on mobile due to iOS shenanigans.

I now implemented mic off during cue > turn back on when it’s players turn

Chrome displays a toast EVERYTIME mic access was granted again.

Safari doesn’t have this luckily

Any tips?

#buildinpublic

[Pierre @pierreBuildsDev]

@DannyWolfofTech So did you also just push users to use it as PWA? I guess these are just trade offs when going for web compared to native

[Pierre @pierreBuildsDev]

@DannyWolfofTech PWA is fine luckily, it’s only iOS Chrome

[Pierre @pierreBuildsDev]

@DannyWolfofTech I didn’t realise what rabbit hole I just got into 😂 I’m just gonna have to really push users to use it as a PWA rather than in Chrome.