20 yrs building software for clients. Now Building @OpenbetaCO @DesignMunk @WPTravelKit Honest takes on startups, AI & getting paid. #shipdebt
Nepal
Joined April 2007
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- Following407
- Followers3K
- Likes1.5K
October Stats for @DesignMunk. The site is growing. Next target 20K Visitors for November.
Sponsorship slots are open. DM me if you want to reach an audience of designers, builders and creators.
I also just started curating APP Store Screenshots. DM me if you would like your APP to be added into our App Store Gallery
designmunk.com/apps/
what's one tool launched this year that actually fixed a real problem for you?
not a hype tool. one you still use.
drop it below 👇
Paying for anything online is nerve wracking for me.
It's not like I don't have money.
But, being from Nepal, I have had to go through so much of trials and tribulation and figure out hacks to pay for anything online, I don't know if my payment will go through or I will have to beg and plead with someone overseas to pay for me.
It's like childhood trauma, that I have to go through every time to pay online.
Kids today have no idea, how we paid and get paid online, while being in Nepal, back in the days.
😞
Mohammad Tajim retweeted
Announcing the death of WordPress every morning is like trashing your ex from 10 years ago. You moved to Astro? Great. Framer? Congrats. Claude builds your sites now? Amazing. Now move on.
I’ve been on WordPress since 2006 and building a business on it since 2009. I’m still here. It’s not perfect, it never was, and some themes and plugins will disappear. That’s software.
But your personal stack change isn’t a prediction about the web. WordPress still runs ~40% of it, and every day ordinary people launch businesses on it who don’t know what Next.js is and never will. They want a site that works, that they own, that they can grow.
Here’s the part the “WP is dead” crowd misses: AI is the best thing that’s happened to WordPress in years. People who couldn’t write a line of CSS now customize their own sites. People scared of code now read the error, paste it into Claude, and fix it themselves. AI didn’t make WordPress obsolete. It made the most accessible platform on the web even more accessible.
If WordPress isn’t for you anymore, fine. Just move on.
Below, Syed will post a tweet about WPVibe: 👇
Mohammad Tajim retweeted
As the Great Fort Minor once said:
It's ten percent luck
Twenty percent skill
Fifteen percent concentrated power of will
Five percent pleasure
Fifty percent pain
and 100% writing good content.
I run @DesignMunk a Design Inspiration Site.
I have received over 150+ submissions in last 1 week to get listed in my Inspiration Gallery.
145 of them are straightforward AI slop designed using Claude or Codex without putting in any effort.
Please use a design.md guidelines or just simply guide your AI agent to make a little better design.
It's not that hard. Takes about 5 mins to setup a design system, which would give your vastly better design.
@DesignMunk already comes with design.md and ready to use prompt for over 800+ sites.
Use it, Please 🙏
I have been a freelancer for over 2 decades now, and this is the first time I don't have any project or work to do.
This is as real as it gets.
For past 20 years I did not had promote my services, make a portfolio or even had a CV.
Clients would just come to me, through referrals and I had a steady pipeline of projects to work on.
Since April of this year, the projects just stopped.
Clients who had been with me since 2011, just stopped sending work. Some retired and moved on. Some are using AI to build things for them.
It hurts a little but I guess 2 decades of building for others, was a good run and now, I am focusing on building my own products.
But fuck me, if I knew how to distrbute my products.
But, we will find a way. We have always found a way.
We can either complain that AI took all the jobs or put our head down and use AI to try and build something meaningful.
This is our last chance to build some generational wealth, before it all ends.
Mohammad Tajim retweeted
If you sell to indie hackers, you are selling to the most price-sensitive, disloyal, copycat demographic on earth
The moment you tweet a revenue chart or build a tool they like, they won’t buy an annual plan, they will spend the weekend reverse-engineering your API, building a clone in Opus, and tweeting a thread about how they built your SaaS in 4 hours for $0
They view paying you as a defeat
I spent last 16 years building websites for local services businesses in US, like plumbers, HVAC, contractors etc.
I have damn good idea on what works on these sites, what doesn't and what customers want.
I have a solid SAAS idea that could solve a major pain point for these businesses but I am not sure if I should build it or let it go.
You cannot reach these businesses though Social Media, UGC ads or generic LinkedIN posts. They need to talk to someone before they buy anything.
And, I cannot do a lot of calls, also I don't live in US so I am just here debating with myself whether, I should build it or just let it go.
There is already 1 SAAS already kind of doing it and has solid revenue so I know the idea has PMF and local business are buying it but their tool is just half assed.
I could build it over 1 weekend, launch it but then will get stuck in distribution.
Story of my life.
A client emailed me: I can’t pay you to build the site, but I’ll buy you $20 Claude plan so you can make it.
So, now I will be paying my rent in prompt tokens.
Short form content is rotting your brain with extensive dopamine boost and AI is taking away whatever thought process you had left. Getting it all back is going to be very hard in coming years.
ChatGPT can sometimes really read your inner self that you have been avoiding for so long.
14 years ago, on a random night, frustrated with client work, I wrote this blogpost on the left.
14 years later, ChatGPT tell me exactly what it is that I lack when I asked it:
"Tell me the pattern you see in how I think and make decisions, and what's the one thing I might be in denial about?"
Traffic on @designmunk is slowly and steadily rising. Anyone would like to Sponsor a post.
Link Below 👇
Promote your product directly inside the DesignMunk feed to reach a broader audience
Only $39 and you get a DR 32 Do follow linkback.
designmunk.com/advertise/
Mohammad Tajim retweeted
Lots of founders are crashing out
A year ago AI felt like an incredible opportunity.
Most of us were able to ship faster, remove admin, and get time back.
Lots of engineering founders were even able to explore marketing for the first time: SEO, organic social, outbound.
Building complex systems that felt extremely productive.
But since then, a lot has happened.
Here’s some of the themes I’m seeing:
AI marketing isn’t working. At first it feels impressive and it looks good but for most it’s not driving results. This is made worse by the fact everyone has access to the same tools. Inboxes are flooded, buyers are fatigued, the economy is flat.
Engineers are fried. Yes you can ship more but for many the flow state has gone. It’s a new way of working and it’s not for everyone. The speed leaves many of us exhausted before 11am.
There’s a feeling of what’s the point? Is my product’s next feature going to be redundant in a year, or a month? Can’t AI do what my business does, better?
SaaS valuations have collapsed. From 3-4x revenue to 1x. There’s a sinking realisation that a large number of SaaS companies will go to 0 in the next few years. Building to exit seems almost crazy right now.
There’s far fewer buyers and far more sellers. These include vibe coders cloning products without the care or craft, contributing to the distribution challenges from people doing it the right way.
Lots of people are trying to make money by selling shovels. This just adds to the frenzied energy.
Build in public stopped being fun. A few makers realised that the new game is attention, and now everything feels insincere and stunt-driven. They are influencers not founders. Changes to the X timeline compounded the issues.
There are exceptions and there are still moats remaining, but the challenges feel existential