John Cinar

🤖 Building AI tools & automations from scratch 🔧
⚡ Founder of — 268+ free online tools
📍 Cleveland, OH 🇺🇸

[John Cinar @thejohncinar]

Office for the next few days - a hotel room near Toronto. Laptop + tea, that’s all I need ☕️

#buildinpublic #workfromanywhere #toronto

[John Cinar @thejohncinar]

Solo dev privilege: I’m the merge conflict and the person who resolves it.

[Scope 404 @Scope_404]

Please…

[John Cinar @thejohncinar]

ToolHQ's tool page content rewrite is almost done — 241/268 pages now have properly researched, cited descriptions instead of templated filler. Should be fully wrapped in the next day or two.
Also quietly started work on something new — a mobile app. Not sharing details yet, but it's in motion. 📱

#BuildInPublic #IndieHacker #MobileApp

[John Cinar @thejohncinar]

New approach for batch 4: before rewriting each tool page, I'm now researching what competitors are doing well — not to copy, but to actually understand what Google (and users) expect from a good page in that space.
90/268 done so far.

#BuildInPublic #IndieHacker #SaaS

[John Cinar @thejohncinar]

Along the way, I started sharing progress publicly, partly hoping to hear from people who know this space better than I do. I'll keep posting updates as regularly as I can to document the process.
Fully open to advice on indexing, ranking, and SEO — if you know something, drop it in the replies. 🛠️

[John Cinar @thejohncinar]

April 11th, 1:39 AM — the moment I started ToolHQ.
Right before this, I had just shut down Playswitch (a Spotify↔YouTube Music playlist transfer tool). Spotify's Extended Quota requirement demanded 250k+ monthly active users, and before we could get anywhere close, an already-established player in that space had become Spotify's official partner. I had to start from scratch.

[John Cinar @thejohncinar]

That's exactly what I'm working on right now: making the content genuinely useful so Google will index it. Bulk/templated content generation just doesn't fly with Google, so the process is slow — I'm rewriting each page individually, actually adding value instead of cutting corners.
The plan: finish the technical and content work site-wide first, then bring the blog posts up to the same quality bar, and only after all of that translate everything into the other languages. No rushing — quality first, translation last.

[John Cinar @thejohncinar]

@chams_builds Exactly. The code was the easy part. I learned the
hard way to ask "will they let me ship this?" before
"can I build this?"

Lesson logged for the next one.

[John Cinar @thejohncinar]

After months of building, I'm shutting down my music
transfer side project.

Not because the code failed. Because the biggest
platform in the space locked its API behind a wall I
can't climb.

Building in public means sharing this part too. 🧵

[John Cinar @thejohncinar]

Biggest takeaway: never let your product's core value
depend on someone else's permission.

Next time I'm building something where the data is mine
and nobody can revoke the keys.

Already sketching it. 👀

[John Cinar @thejohncinar]

I could've spent more months + money chasing workarounds.

Instead I stopped early.

Killing a project that works is harder than killing one
that doesn't. But sunk cost isn't a strategy.

Onto the next one.