mhrnik

Around 2018–19, a founder from California reached out to me with just an idea.

No product. No traction. Just a vision.

I shared one of my past projects, which was enough to get the work started.

Soon after, I started working with him to bring that idea to life with my teammate/friend.

We built the app from scratch. That MVP eventually scaled to process over $5M+ (something I’m still proud of).

The company raised funding. On paper, my 1% stake started to mean something. Things felt like they were working.

Then things changed.

A new CTO came in, a great guy who taught me CLI & Linux (grateful for that). But I moved from working directly with the founder to working under a new structure.

Less ownership. Less direct communication. More layers.

At the same time, the company started missing its marketing targets. Growth slowed. Burn continued.

In January 2026, I was asked to stop working. By March, even my teammate who was still supporting the mobile app with the CTO, was also asked to stop.

Eventually, the company ran out of money.

We’re still helping a bit on the marketing side now as we want this to work.

That experience taught me a few things:

- Building is only half the game, distribution decides survival

- Proximity to decision-makers matters more than you think

Still grateful I went through it.

----------- Mainly, I only post here about my product or ask something. This time I just share my x post here to share one of the learnings.

Example: I have a personal finance app and I want user to store their data on their database server. No local because it needs multiple device support.

What are the options for me?

As the solo maker, I'm building this on nights and weekends. lit.money is a simple & privacy-first personal finance web app, but no active users.

My next focus is just to talk to existing people. No more features or other things.

What do you think?

I am working on a finance web app and want to offer complete offline support to users who prefer that. Any pointers on how to do it?

So I started making a web app that helps me see all my finances in one place because in India it's hard to get data from banks via API.

- I made an Excel import so I can easily get all my finances in one shot!

- Shared with online people and offline, got 100+ users. only onboard Indian users for now because my app is only supporting Indian banks. But those users only used PDF so I started working on it and created separate parsers for 8 banks.

But today's issue is, what should I do next? 1. Add more Indian bank's PDFs? The downside is that it will take more of my time and I will keep building.

2. Support US/Canada banks using API like Plaid.

3. Give manual entry support so any user from the globe can use it.

I am making a finance app that helps the user to see all their money in one place so they can make better decisions.

I know that I am genuinely trying to help people like me with simple tools but how can I build that trust?

It's hard to save data in local storage because I ask users to import bank statements.

I have 72 Beta users and right now I am finishing my MVP and want them to try it.

My requirement is to have a closed space when I can share progress with them and get early feedback. Can you suggest me should I just email them or use any tool like discord?

For Mobile or Web app

Tell me your hack to do it.