AI Security Engineer, now indie developer shipping apps in public. Lessons, mistakes & wins from real builds. Follow if you’re building too. \
mebourne
Joined April 2023
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I’m going full indie.
Building & shipping small useful apps in public.
Sharing real lessons — wins, mistakes, no hype.
Follow along if you’re building too.
Have weirdly resisted claude code and anthropic as a whole up til now. Yesterday i signed up, download close code plugin for vs code, installs clause co work : i’m never going back
Dave Gilmore · Indie Dev retweeted
The easy way to make $10k/month
Find a boring app in any niche.
Then rebuild it as:
“Duolingo for [that app]”
Gamify it.
Add streaks.
Add levels.
Add ranking.
Make it addictive.
Then don’t run ads first.
Just print content on TikTok & IG.
After got money -> run ads for scale
Distribution > product. 💪
Super stocked to be invited to speak at the forthcoming OpenClaw event in Melbourne on Thursday April 2nd, 5:30-9PM at Chalk & Stone.
I will be talking about OpenClaw from a security perspective. Hopefully the crew at MLAI will allow me some time to demonstrate some live red teaming so we everyone can see how crucial it is to get your head around OpenClaws security.
If you want to see the most powerful AI agent capabilities, and chat with the experts, come and join us on the 2nd April at Stone & Chalk, Melbourne.
luma.com/learnOPENCLAW
4 rejections later, im back in the game. Totally lost my motivation over the past 2 weeks, today I have fixed the issue stopping the app from being published to the app store/
I'VE LOST MY WAY
Over the past 2-3 weeks I have lost my way completely and stopped developing any of my app ideas.
My first ios app is on the app store, but its not earned a penny (which I kind of guessed as it was my first and its a crap idea really). My second and third ios apps have been caught up in a never ending circle of submission and refusal - i lost the motivation to finish them.
I also have a handful of other ideas and a web app that is 70% done that I have lost the motivation to finish.
How do I get back on the horse?
"The Secret Life of Claude Code: Skill Is Not What You Think It Is" by Aaron Rose #DEVCommunity dev.to/aaron_rose_0787cc8b47…
Dave Gilmore · Indie Dev retweeted
how to build a bootstrapped startup without funding:
1. pick a problem you personally have. if you don't use your own product daily, quit now
2. skip the pitch deck. open your code editor. ship something ugly in a weekend
3. charge money from day 1. free users give you nothing but support tickets
4. use boring tech. PHP, SQLite, vanilla JS. frameworks are a trap that mass waste your time
5. host on cheap VPS ($5-20/mo). not AWS. you don't need kubernetes for 1,000 users
6. do customer support yourself. it's the fastest product feedback loop that exists
7. automate everything you do more than twice. cron jobs > employees.
8. grow on Twitter/X by building in public. your journey IS the marketing
9. keep your burn rate near zero so you never need to raise. ramen profitable > series A
10. say no to investors, cofounders, and "advisors" who want equity for intros
i've been doing this for 10+ years now. no employees, no funding, no board meetings
the entire VC game is designed to make you think you need permission to start
you don't
Dave Gilmore · Indie Dev retweeted
saas is dead
openclaw replaced all my subscriptions
went from $480/month on tools
to $1,245/month on API costs & 15 hours a week fixing yaml files
adapt or be left behind
I have been invited to exhibit at a forthcoming AI Art exhibition in Melbourne in May.
So i’m vibe coding an app as part of my installation. Visitors download the app, select an option to offload their feelings or confess to something and the app transforms your words in to beautiful awesome abstract video animations that will display on large projectors in the exhibition hall.
The app was quickly put together as an MVP today -
the awesome animations aren’t in place yet - lots of work this weekend, but not bad for 2 hours work hey?
Is it just me or is it ridiculous that people who build an app (like me) refer to themselves as a ‘founder’ - like surely to gotta wait until you reach $2k mmr before you can refer to yourself as a founder, up until then you just coded an app - that’s it
Well today's work will be focussing on testing my secure code analysis tool (SCA) which is used to find vulnerabilities in a complex code base.
The SCA works in a different way to the other SCA tools. The challenge with any SCA tool is context window limitations, chunking and context.
My tool is Ai only, no hard coded rules. Right now Im working my way through exploitDB testing known vulns in projects and verifying that my tool detects the known vuln.
So far i have hit 97 out of 100 vulns detected.
More and more Apple ap store connect push backs :(
They reported a bug, which I cannot replicate, plus a few other things.
Love you Apple
Im building a bunch of apps simultaneously in public. My target is 12 apps in 12 months. So far I have 2 shipped, 3 more almost ready to publish.,
If you're building apps in public, say hi and follow me for a follow back :)
Getting fed up with the existing apps I used to vibe code ios apps, so I decided to build my own with @OpenAICodexCli - Codex on MAC is sooooo good, I think this is the claude code killer.
Anyway Im going to soon be using my own vibe coded app to vibe code ios apps!
Successfully Identified and Helped Patch SSRF Vulnerability in Daniel Miessler’s Personal_AI_Infrastructure.
I’m excited to share a recent security win! I discovered a Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) vulnerability in the pai-voice-system component of Daniel Miessler’s widely-used Personal_AI_Infrastructure project.
The Discovery: The vulnerability allowed remote attackers to force the server to interact with internal network resources (like 127.0.0.1) by bypassing URL validation.
The Result: I coordinated with the project team to implement robust IP-range filtering (PR #659). The maintainer has since confirmed the fix, noting it as "important security hardening" for the v3.0 release.
Huge thanks to the maintainers for the professional coordination and for the opportunity to contribute to the security of this open-source ecosystem!
Full details and the fix logic can be seen here: github.com/danielmiessler/Pe…
Im helping to beat the bias built in to AI systems. Built with my co-founder Ngozi Cadmus, trutones.ai generates bias-free images, consistent characters, and authentic videos designed for the GLOBAL MAJORITY:
Black, Brown, Asian, Indigenous, and all communities erased or distorted by mainstream AI.
#trutones #aiimage #aibias
Call me crazy but Im building several apps simultaneously!@
My first app, Boyfriend Decoded was published last week to the app store:
apps.apple.com/us/app/boyfri…
trutones.ai is a web app I have had deployed for a few months now and earns about $900usd MRR.
I have 2 more in @v_computer that are in review by apple (see screenshot attached).
I also have 3 more ios apps built in Rork that I need to finish off and i have 3 web apps im working on.
