Someone left a message on the MonsterHibachi website to book a hibachi bridal shower with a budget of $15,000 without batting an eye. The only requirement was to hire a specific band, whose contact information was provided directly by them. I played along for three days and figured out the entire structure of the scam: what they wanted was never my service fee, but the $7,900 I would pay upfront for the 'band'. This article lays out two sets of emails and summarizes a few rules that small business owners should remember.

After working on ASO for PlayDoz for a few weeks, I discovered that there are many more nuances in app store optimization than I initially thought. This article discusses keywords: why you shouldn't fill all 100 characters with big words, why new apps can never rank in the top 200 for big keywords, how to find smaller keywords from big ones, how to use Custom Product Pages and Apple Ads to help the store recognize you, and why the text in screenshots also counts as keywords.

Both the iOS and Android versions of PlayDoz are live, the number of games has increased from 6 to 13, and traffic is slowly picking up. During these three weeks, I spent most of my time not coding, but doing ASO, selecting keywords, creating share links, managing leaderboards and gift cards, and buying ads. This post documents the real discoveries of an independent developer in the AI era: creating the product is no longer the challenge; the challenge is how to get people to find you and stick around.

My puzzle game collection PlayDoz finally passed App Store review. Google Play is still sitting on the same submission. Along the way I upgraded to an organization developer account, launched the web version at playdoz.com, and set up an AI-assisted pipeline that ships one or two new games every week. Here's what happened, plus screenshots of the ten games in the works.

Everyone understands the principle of 'using your own product,' but its true value lies not in the act of using, but in the insights you encounter that testers will never report and that you won't think of when writing requirements. I didn't type a single word for this article; everything was spoken to VoiceDoz.

A few days ago I added a Google AdSense script to my blog, just to see if it would go through. After a few days of review, Google came back with: low value content. It stung at first, but thinking it over, it's actually a kind of confirmation.

The manual tells a very enticing story—AI has reshuffled the cost structure of entrepreneurship. But as someone running three projects simultaneously, what I felt after reading it was not 'I can create more,' but 'I need to restrain myself more.'

In the past two years, the independent developer community has been focused on SaaS, AI, and purely digital products. However, the project I just launched is a Hibachi home dining website—where the chefs come to your living room.

HTML Anything has been released, and Anthropic claims they have fully switched to HTML internally. Technically more accurate does not equate to economically viable. A reflection from an external developer on token billing.