DEV Community: Yerkebulan Rakhimov

I turned my SaaS loading spinner into a game, and wired it to a discount

Yerkebulan Rakhimov — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:08:57 +0000

Yesterday I shipped a game into PostMine. Partly for fun, but there was a real product reason.

PostMine has one unavoidable wait. When you run a search, an AI agent spends 20 to 60 seconds reading your site, then finds potential customers across X, Reddit, Hacker News and Threads, drafts the docs, looks up competitors, and prepares a marketing plan. The whole time the user stares at a spinner. That is dead time I am already paying for with their attention.

So I deleted the spinner and put a small pixel-miner in its place.

Where it runs

The console on the dashboard is now the miner. While the agent works, you play. Two rules I did not want to break:

the game never blocks or slows the actual search
if you already started playing, the finished search does not yank you out of it

Then I liked it enough to wire it into two more places most apps treat as dead ends:

The landing page. Your score becomes a discount. 100 points is 5% off. Beat 250 and share your run as a challenge on X and it is 10% off. On top of our $29 early-user price, that takes a subscription to $26.10/mo.
The 404 and the fatal/offline error screens. There is a game strip at the bottom now. Even a broken link can be worth a couple of seconds instead of a bounce.

Why a loading screen is not neutral

The mental model shift for me: a loading state is not empty time, it is attention you already captured. Most of us spend real effort getting a user to click, then hand them a spinner and hope they wait. Turning that moment into something playable does three things:

gives the user a reason to stay through the wait instead of tabbing away
adds a genuine conversion lever, because the fun ends in a discount they earned themselves
creates a new hook on the landing page that should help signups on its own

The honest part

It shipped yesterday. I have zero numbers on whether it moves conversion or retention yet. I am posting this before the data, not after, because that is the whole point of building in public. I will report back with the real effect.

One detail I am keeping: the $29 price is for the first 10 people who ever subscribe, and it is locked forever.

I scored 200+ on day one. If you try it, tell me if you beat that.

A backlink swap brought me one click in ten days. It was still the best trade I made this month

Yerkebulan Rakhimov — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 06:03:10 +0000

Ten days ago another solo founder messaged me on LinkedIn. He had upvoted my launch on a couple of directories, and he wanted to swap links: he adds me to the customers page of his uptime monitoring tool, I add a status link to my footer. No money, no contract, two messages.

Guess what, we collab) Here is what the link actually did. In ten days it sent one visitor to my site. My analytics said two, but I checked the timestamps and the second one was me, clicking through that morning to see how my own testimonial looked on his page. Zero signups.

Judged on traffic, that trade was a failure.

But I did not really get a link. I got:

A public status page, so anyone can check whether my service is up instead of emailing me to ask.
Two checks running every minute, one on the site and one on a health endpoint.
Alerts on my phone when something goes down. I broke a check on purpose to make sure the alert actually fires. It did.
And the part I did not plan for: he had already tried my product. So a conversation about links turned into the most direct feedback I have gotten from anyone. He told me exactly which feature almost made him pay, and exactly what stopped him.

That last one is worth more than any backlink I could have negotiated. Ads do not tell you why someone did not convert. A founder who actually used your thing does.

Three things I would tell anyone considering a swap:

Judge it on what you have to build to hold up your end, not on referral traffic. My side of the deal forced me to ship monitoring I had been putting off. That was the real return, and I would not have prioritised it on my own.
Trade with someone whose product you would use anyway. I am a real user of his tool now, not a logo on a page. That is what makes the relationship outlive the link.
Do not expect traffic. One click in ten days is probably normal when two small products point at each other. If you need traffic, this is not the channel, and pretending otherwise just sets you up to feel cheated.

Curious whether anyone here has had a link swap that actually moved traffic, or whether the value is always in the side effects.

I stopped trying to build a social media strategy and started building an automated growth team

Yerkebulan Rakhimov — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 20:23:50 +0000

I stopped trying to build a social media strategy and started building an automated growth team

I spent months watching my own project lose momentum because I could not balance shipping code with consistent posting. Every time I sat down to write about what I was building, I stared at a blank page. The context of my product was in my head, but translating that into daily content for X, Reddit, or Dev.to felt like a second full-time job. I was a solo founder, but I was acting like a marketing team of zero.

The reality of the blank page

The trap for most of us is treating social media as a chore rather than a core part of the product cycle. I realized that my growth stalled not because the product lacked value, but because I was intermittent. I needed a system that understood my specific niche and my voice without me having to feed it prompts every morning. I started https://postmine.tech to solve this for myself. I wanted a growth copilot that actually read my site instead of asking me to invent marketing hooks from scratch.

Moving from manual labor to intent

When I built the initial engine for PostMine, the design goal was to remove the friction of the setup. You provide one URL, and the system performs a deep dive. It generates strategy documents, SEO and GEO audits, and competitor dossiers grounded in your actual project reality. This is not about generating generic fluff. It is about taking the technical reality of your product and turning it into a reply-opportunity inventory across platforms like Hacker News, Threads, and Reddit.

Why I keep the human in the loop

Automation can easily turn into noise if you lose your unique voice. I built the tone profile feature so that every draft sounds like you, not a generic AI bot. You approve each post before it hits the timeline. For those who want more integration, I added MCP server access. Now, I can connect the tool to Cursor or Claude and draft posts directly within my development environment. This keeps the marketing work inside my existing flow rather than requiring me to hop between tabs and tools.

The shift in daily habits

By having six ready posts stocked for every platform, I no longer worry about what to say on Tuesday. I check my reply-opportunity inventory in the morning, see if there is a thread on Reddit or Hacker News where someone is actually asking for the solution I built, and I engage. I am no longer hunting for conversations because the platform mines the winners for me. The result is a steady presence that I could never maintain manually. I still write the code, but I finally stopped feeling like my product was dying quietly in the background.

Building for solo founders means solving the blank page problem

Yerkebulan Rakhimov — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 06:42:09 +0000

Building for solo founders means solving the blank page problem

I spent months watching my own projects stall because I could not balance shipping code with consistent posting. Every time I opened a social media scheduler, I faced a blank page and the familiar fatigue of trying to sound authentic. It was a repetitive cycle of guessing what my niche wanted to hear, and inevitably, my marketing efforts died because I stopped showing up consistently. I realized that as a solo founder, my biggest bottleneck was not the lack of strategy but the manual labor of content creation and community engagement.

Moving away from generic content

I decided that if I wanted to grow my projects, I needed a way to automate the heavy lifting without losing my unique voice. Most tools felt like glorified spreadsheets for scheduling posts, focusing on volume instead of relevance. I wanted something that acted as a growth copilot, one that understood the context of my project before asking me to write a single word. That led me to build PostMine, which you can see at https://postmine.tech to understand the mechanics of this approach.

The reality-based approach to growth

My primary design rule became simple: start from reality, not from thin air. When you paste your project URL into PostMine, the system reads your actual site, niche, and past writing style. This data forms the base for everything from strategy documents and SEO audits to competitor dossiers. By grounding every output in your specific project details, the tool creates ready posts that sound like they came from you. You never have to stare at a blank page again because the drafts are waiting there when you log in.

Managing reply opportunities

Beyond writing posts, the hardest part of being a solo founder is finding where the actual conversations happen. I needed a way to find threads on Reddit, Hacker News, or Threads where people were discussing the problems my product solves. The platform now tracks a live reply-opportunity inventory, showing me the context and public counts of threads so I can decide if a conversation is worth joining. It drafts the reply in my voice, but I retain the final say on what gets posted. This keeps me engaged in real discussions without needing a full-time growth team to monitor every platform.

Staying in charge of the output

Consistency often breaks when you have to jump between five different tabs just to hit publish. I wanted to consolidate that flow. One-click publishing to platforms like X, Dev.to, and LinkedIn made a massive difference in my daily throughput. For tools that require more control, like Threads, it provides a pre-filled composer. I even shipped an MCP server so that if I am working inside Cursor or using Claude, I can trigger content creation directly from my development environment. This turns marketing into a technical workflow rather than a chore I dread every morning.

Automating your growth strategy directly from your codebase URL

Yerkebulan Rakhimov — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 11:15:57 +0000

Automating your growth strategy directly from your codebase URL

Most solo founders struggle to bridge the gap between building features and finding users. You have a product, but explaining why it matters to strangers feels like a secondary job that eats into your coding time. The common advice to just be consistent on social media ignores the reality of the empty document. You sit down to write, but the screen stays blank because you lack a structured plan based on your own actual work.

Moving beyond generic marketing templates

At PostMine, we built an engine that reverses this flow. Instead of starting with a generic content calendar, you feed the platform your project URL. The system crawls your site to synthesize Product Information, Customer Research, and your specific Marketing Strategy into a set of living documents. This grounding is the core of our approach. By reading the code and content already present on your site, the AI understands your value proposition in its rawest form. It does not need you to prompt it with vague instructions about your brand because it has already mapped your technical documentation and landing page copy.

Identifying the right conversations

Once the strategy documents are generated, the manual work of finding where to post ends. Our system performs automatic SEO and GEO audits to see where your project currently stands, but the real utility happens in opportunity discovery. You can see relevant discussions on platforms like Reddit, Hacker News, and X where people are explicitly asking for the solution you built. Instead of hunting through search results or using multiple social media management tools to monitor keywords, you see a centralized feed of potential replies. This turns the process into a targeted act of helping rather than a frantic attempt to broadcast.

Implementing content with an MCP server

For those of us who live in editors like Cursor or Claude, we wanted a tighter integration than a web dashboard provides. We added an MCP server to allow you to draft and publish content without context switching. You can stay in your IDE, use your familiar workflows, and let the AI handle the final push to your connected social channels. This eliminates the need for copy-paste operations between your technical environment and your browser. If you want to see how this approach changes your daily routine, you can explore the engine at https://postmine.tech.

The reality of founder-led growth

Building a product and promoting it are often treated as separate silos. This is a mistake. When your marketing strategy is derived from your product URL, your social media presence reflects the technical reality of what you are actually building. You stop guessing what to post and start sharing the problems you have already solved for your users. This creates a feedback loop where your development progress feeds your growth machine, allowing you to bring your project into the light without the exhaustion of traditional social media management.

Marketing for solo founders is a technical problem of context

Yerkebulan Rakhimov — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 18:02:43 +0000

Marketing for solo founders is a technical problem of context

Most founders approach growth marketing as a creative challenge. They stare at a blank page, try to synthesize their product value into a punchy post, and eventually give up because the feedback loop between building and promoting is too wide. This is not a failure of creativity. It is a failure of context integration. When you build in the dark, your marketing efforts often lack the tether to your actual technical decisions, specific SEO requirements, and the competitive nuances of your niche. The result is generic content that fails to resonate with the exact audience who would value your solution.

The cost of disconnected growth workflows

Managing a marketing stack often feels like a second job. You have one tool for scheduling posts on X and LinkedIn, another for tracking competitors, and a spreadsheet for SEO audits that you update once a month if you are lucky. This fragmentation creates a mental tax. Every time you switch contexts between the editor and your analytics dashboard, you lose the flow state necessary for building. Solo founders do not need more dashboards. They need a system that translates the code they have already shipped into a repeatable growth machine.

Effective promotion requires an understanding of where your potential users hang out. Finding active threads on Reddit or Hacker News is difficult enough without manually scouring every comment section. Most founders settle for broad, impersonal updates that get ignored. The real opportunity lies in identification. You should not be guessing which topics to engage with, but rather pulling data from the conversations that already demonstrate intent. This is the difference between shouting into the void and showing up with a relevant solution at the right moment.

Solving the blank page with URL-driven intelligence

To move past the blank page, you must ground your marketing in your own project architecture. By ingesting your URL directly, an automated system can perform a technical audit that covers more than just surface-level text. It can evaluate your SEO and GEO readiness while simultaneously drafting a competitor dossier that highlights where you differ from the incumbents. This data-driven approach removes the need for generic brainstorming. You are not starting from scratch, but iterating based on a foundation of your own existing work.

When you use a platform like https://postmine.tech, you effectively offload the research phase to a system that understands your project context. This setup avoids the common trap of using AI to generate fluff. Because the tool analyzes your actual URL, it can maintain your specific brand voice throughout your social media presence. It creates a bridge between your technical output and your community engagement. You stop managing multiple tools and start letting your product define its own promotional signal.

Shifting focus to winner-mining

Moving toward a sustainable growth model requires shifting from broad-spectrum posting to specific opportunity discovery. You should look for signals in the market that show where competitors are falling short or where users are begging for features that your roadmap already contains. This is what I call winner-mining. It means focusing your limited founder energy on the specific discussions where your product has the highest probability of conversion. It is not about reaching everyone on the internet. It is about reaching the right person at the moment they feel the pain your software was built to heal.

Building this way changes the relationship between a founder and their marketing strategy. You are no longer juggling social schedules or forcing content creation during your busiest shipping cycles. Instead, you are curating the output of a system that learns from your project and its position in the market. Automation here is not about removing the human element but about providing the infrastructure for a more authentic, research-backed presence. My own experience building PostMine centers on this exact philosophy: using your project URL as the single source of truth for your entire growth workflow.

Stop treating your marketing strategy like a guessing game

Yerkebulan Rakhimov — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 08:18:10 +0000

Stop treating your marketing strategy like a guessing game

Most solo founders struggle with marketing because they rely on fragmented tools. You use one app for social scheduling, another for SEO audits, and a third to draft content. This approach leaves you staring at a blank page every morning, wondering what to post or where to find your next user.

PostMine replaces this scattered stack with a single growth co-pilot. Here is how the workflow compares to using standard tools like Typefully or Buffer:

Feature	Traditional Tools	PostMine
Strategy	Manual research	Automated audits
Content	Blank page	Your voice only
Discovery	Manual searching	Active opportunity feed
Goal	Scheduling	Winner-mining

Traditional tools focus on the calendar. They provide the interface to post, but they do not help you decide what content will actually convert. You end up building in the dark. PostMine analyzes your project URL to create a specific strategy, identifying SEO gaps and competitor weaknesses before you write a single character.

When you are ready to engage, the platform moves beyond simple scheduling. It scans Reddit and Hacker News to find active threads where people are already looking for solutions. It does not just blast out generic updates. It drafts responses that match your brand voice, ensuring your outreach feels human and relevant.

Stop juggling tabs. Use your project URL to set up your growth engine at https://postmine.tech and get one click to go live with content that actually targets your audience.

How I stopped marketing in the dark by building my own growth team

Yerkebulan Rakhimov — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 11:31:20 +0000

How I stopped marketing in the dark by building my own growth team

Building a SaaS project usually feels like building in the dark. As a solo founder, I spent too much time switching between SEO tools, strategy docs, and social media dashboards. I was constantly facing the blank page and wondering if anyone actually cared about my updates. I did not want to hire an agency, so I built PostMine.

My goal was simple. I wanted a growth co-pilot that understood my project from the inside out. Instead of manually auditing every page or hunting for keywords, I started by feeding my project URL into an automated system. It now performs the SEO and GEO audits for me and generates competitor dossiers to help me see where I actually stand.

Content creation was the next hurdle. I realized that generic posts do not drive growth. I trained the model to write in my specific brand voice, ensuring every post on X, LinkedIn, and sounds like me. Now, the platform identifies active discussions on Reddit and Hacker News where my potential users are already asking for solutions. It turns my day-to-day work into a stream of relevant replies.

I built this to skip the manual work of managing multiple tools. Whether you are a solo founder or an indie hacker, you can try the free version at https://postmine.tech to see how it changes your workflow. You get one fresh post and one daily reply opportunity to start.

I am still iterating on the winner-mining structure to help founders find what works faster. Building this has moved me from guessing to executing. You can follow my progress as I continue to ship updates.

How to stop guessing with content and start building an audience?

Yerkebulan Rakhimov — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 18:11:28 +0000

How to stop guessing with content and start building an audience?

You launched a product. The code works. But marketing is a black box. Writing posts into the void, hoping for virality, spending hours on editing. Sound familiar?

I am a solo founder. I do not have a team of marketers, no time to figure out SEO audits and competitive analysis. But without them, there is no traffic. Previously, I either wrote at random, or did not write at all. Both options are bad.

PostMine solved this problem. You drop a link to your project, and it scans the site, the docs, the niche. It gives you a strategy: who to sell to, which channels to be on, what topics to bring up. No empty page.

Next: content. The model learns your style from existing accounts. Not generation "in a vacuum", but drafts that sound like you. Edit less, publish more often.

One dashboard: X, LinkedIn, Telegram. Scheduled, pressed: posts flew away. Without switching between buffers and tabs.

The most non-obvious part: finding opportunities. PostMine analyzes Reddit and Hacker News, finds questions where your target audience is asking for a solution. You answer, rather than spam. Traffic comes on its own.

The free plan gives you ready-made posts for X and , one window for replies per week and a strategy. If you need more: Pro for $49 per month with two posts a day, replies twice a day and access to MCP (you can connect it to Claude or Cursor).

I stopped guessing. Now I have a plan, a voice and channels. Everything from one place: https://postmine.tech.

And how do you solve the problem of the blank page and finding your first readers?

How to filter the noise from business advice threads?

Yerkebulan Rakhimov — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 13:17:13 +0000

Tired of threads about how people made money in 30 days? They are usually full of filler about gym routines and networking. I built a skill in Claude Code to filter that noise and extract actual takeaways from those posts. Here is the distilled version of a recent thread on hitting 1000 dollars a month in 30 days.

Copy what already sells instead of inventing demand.
Target strong human desires like money, status, or the fear of falling behind.
Measure everything and invest time only where the money already exists.
Kill failing projects quickly to avoid wasting years on hopeless ideas.
Look for early signals in actual sales rather than likes.
Take payment upfront and deliver the value afterward.
Remove friction from the initial user steps.
Send notifications only to people who are genuinely interested.
Test your pricing and payment screens, not the color of your buttons.

In short, the recipe is simple: copy what is proven, launch cheaply, identify where the money appears, and commit your resources there. Everything else is just decoration. You can find the skill in the comments. Feel free to contribute or open an MR if you like.

Why shipping fast with AI is a trap

Yerkebulan Rakhimov — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 23:24:17 +0000

Everyone is bragging about the wrong number. Claiming you shipped a feature in 20 minutes with AI is not a flex. It is a confession that you sped up the cheapest part of the job and skipped the expensive work.

Code generation was never the hard part. The real challenge has always been defining the requirements, cutting scope, naming constraints, and deciding how to prove the change is correct. When you skip that, AI just helps you ship the wrong thing faster. You are creating a trap where the gap between looks done and is done blows up. The model provides clean, confident code, but that does not tell you if it fits the system or what it will cost you in six months.

AI does not upgrade your engineering. It amplifies the loop you already had. Good judgment gets faster, but bad judgment gets faster too. Look at the reality of current workflows:

People are wiping production databases because the output sounded confident and nobody read the diff.
Review burden scales with how much code you accepted, not how much you wrote.
Most breakages still trace back to unclear requirements, not bad generation.

These are engineering problems wearing a new mask. The skill that matters now is not prompting, which you can learn in a weekend. It is shaping the work through a clear sequence: requirements, identifying gaps, planning, small changes, review, and verification. Make your first prompt about the test that proves the work is right, not your last.

Every serious tool from Git to CI/CD was useless until teams rebuilt their workflow around it. The tool matters, but the workflow matters more. The engineers who win this phase will not be the ones who use AI the most. They will be the ones who slow the problem down before they speed the code up. Most people are using AI, but almost nobody is engineering with it. How are you adjusting your internal workflows to account for these verification gaps?

What happens when syntax is no longer the bottleneck?

Yerkebulan Rakhimov — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 21:15:02 +0000

A self-taught researcher claims to have deciphered Linear A, a script that has stumped linguists for over a century. He did not do it by being a savant. He used Claude Code to build the research machinery: the crawlers, the comparison scripts, and the hypothesis-testing harness that would have taken a team years to construct. His work is now under review at universities.

This matters because it moves the bottleneck. For years, the gatekeeping factor in computing was syntax: the ability to translate an idea into working code. Claude Code dissolves that gate. The barrier is no longer can you write the loop. The barrier is whether you have a real question worth answering.

This tool is not a magic wand for shipping a SaaS in a weekend. It is a tireless lab assistant that handles the unglamorous scaffolding. However, it also introduces a massive risk. It is just as cheap to generate forty elegant, completely wrong sign readings as it is to find the truth. The machine will happily build a beautiful case for nonsense.

Automation does not lower the cost of being wrong. It raises it, because now you can be wrong faster and at scale. The discipline of checking your results against reality remains your job.

If syntax were no longer the constraint standing in your way, what problem would you point these tools at?