A startup asked me for marketing advice. I gave them my biggest pain instead — now I'm their co-founder.
Twelve years in tech as a CMO. Zero ability to write code.
When AI tools got good, I finally started building the little internal tools I'd spent years describing to engineers. Claude would hand me a working app in an afternoon. And then — nothing. The code just sat on my laptop. Servers, SSL, environment variables, backups: not my language, and honestly not one I plan to learn.
Building took 2 hours. Going live? Never happened.
About 9 months ago, a VPS hosting startup booked me for a marketing consult. They were stuck in a price war in one of the most commoditized markets on earth. After a few sessions I told them straight: a growth strategy won't save you — niche down or pivot.
Then they asked what I, as a wannabe builder, actually needed from hosting. My answer: nothing. I don't want hosting at all. I want to drop my code somewhere and get back a working link.
Five months of silence later, they showed up with an MVP — and an offer to join as a co-founder. That's how livemy.app happened: a platform for people like me, who can build with AI but hit a wall at "now put it on the internet."
The part that finally closed my personal loop: livemy ships an MCP server, so deployment lives inside the AI tool itself. You finish the code in Claude or Cursor (or whatever writes your code), say "deploy this" — and a couple of minutes later you're holding a live link: server provisioned, SSL wired, done. Updates work the same way — change the code, say "update it," the same URL refreshes. I never open a terminal. The AI writes, livemy ships.
Where we are now, honestly:
- Open beta, a few dozen apps running on the platform
- Revenue: barely started, free tier is free, paid is $20/mo
- Runs on our own bare-metal servers (long story, wrote it up on our blog)
- First product where I'm also user zero — built around my own pain, after years of marketing other people's products
The irony isn't lost on me: I spent years telling founders their positioning was wrong, and now I get to eat my own cooking. Scariest career move I've made.
Question for those who build with AI tools (Claude, Cursor, Lovable, Bolt): where exactly do you get stuck between "the code works" and "it's live on the internet"? Trying to figure out if my wall is everyone's wall — and if you want to poke holes in what we built, I genuinely want to hear it: https://livemy.app
The wall you’re describing is real, but I’d be careful not to frame this too broadly as “deployment for AI-built apps.”
The strongest buyer is probably not every Claude/Cursor user. It’s the non-technical operator who can now create internal tools, landing pages, portals, dashboards, or client utilities, but still cannot turn them into something usable by other people.
That person does not think they have a hosting problem. They think:
“I built it, but I still can’t share it safely.”
That is a much sharper pain.
So I’d probably position livemy less against VPS/hosting and more against the final-mile anxiety after AI building:
code works locally
no idea how to deploy
afraid to break something
doesn’t want terminals, SSL, servers, env vars, updates
The MCP angle is strong, but I’d use it as proof, not the headline. The headline is probably closer to: “Build with AI, ship without becoming technical.”
Happy to put a tighter version in writing if useful. The main thing I’d map is the first buyer segment, the exact pain language, and the fastest way to test whether this wall is common enough to convert into paid users.
This is a really good breakdown, thank you. Fair point about the buyer.
The post itself is just the origin story, so it leans on my personal wall moment. The actual positioning we run is already close to what you describe: "You build it. We make it live." Most of our copy avoids the word hosting completely, for the same reason you mention. That person doesn't believe they have a hosting problem.
The line I'm stealing from you is "I built it, but I still can't share it safely". The word safely is sharper than anything we tested so far. It carries the fear of breaking something, not just the inconvenience. Going straight into the next round of landing page tests.
One honest nuance though. We are not locking the segment yet. Early signups split into two camps:
I want to see which of the two actually pays before committing the messaging.
Curious about your own version of this wall. When you say share safely, what scares you most personally? Access control, breaking things while updating, or something else?
For me, “safely” is less about one technical issue and more about the moment the app becomes real for other people.
The non-technical buyer is probably thinking: “I built it, but I don’t know what happens when someone else uses it.”
That is very different from the weekend-project developer, who is probably thinking: “I just don’t want to waste time on infra for something small.”
Same product, different emotional trigger.
Drop your email and I’ll send over the tighter version. I think the useful part is mapping the two buyer messages and the quickest test to see which one actually converts.
That framing is useful. Two triggers, one product. The fear one rings very true. For me the scariest moment was never the deploy itself, it was sending the link to a real person afterwards.
Honestly I'd rather keep this in the thread. If you're up for it, post the tighter version right here. More people hit this wall than admit it, and your breakdown is exactly the kind of thing they would want to read. Plus I'm curious what others in the group say about the two messages.
Makes sense. I’ll leave it there for now.
The real test is which segment actually pays after shipping through livemy, not which framing gets the most agreement in-thread.
Agreed, and that is exactly the plan. Both messages go live with separate tracking, and signups are cheap talk until someone pays. Appreciate you pushing on this, it sharpened my thinking.
Every indie hacker hits the wall. The ones who make it work are the ones who adjust, not quit. What's your next move?
Next move is boring on purpose. Keep shipping distribution experiments in different communities, each one tagged separately, and watch which kind of person actually converts to paid. Not the loudest segment, the paying one. Once the answer is obvious, the messaging narrows to that person and everything else gets cut. Adjusting is easier when checkout does the voting.
The most underrated line here is "niche down or pivot." In a commoditized market the only escape is getting narrow enough that one specific person feels like you built it just for them, which is exactly what happened the second you described your own pain. The product didn't come from a growth strategy, it came from one honest buyer conversation. Most founders skip that and try to out-market a price war instead. Did niching down actually change who livemy.app sells to now, or did you keep the door open for the broader "I just want a link" crowd?
Good catch. The funny part is that the pivot itself was the niche. They went from selling generic VPS to serving one person: someone who built something with AI and wants it online without touching a server. Inside that, we deliberately keep two doors open for now. People who are not technical at all, and developers who don't want to babysit infra for something small. Both arrive saying the same sentence: I just want a link. Who actually pays will pick the final niche, and I'm letting checkout make that call instead of my own taste.
This is one of the more honest co-founder origin stories I've read. Most versions of this narrative get cleaned up in the retelling — 'I saw a problem and built a solution.' The reality is usually messier: you stumble into alignment by accident, and the co-founder relationship crystallizes around a shared pain rather than a shared vision. The fact that you gave them your real frustration instead of advice is the interesting part. Advice is about them; a frustration is about you — and that's more credible signal for a founder trying to validate a problem. Hard to fake genuine annoyance. How has the dynamic evolved now that you're inside the company versus being the external person whose pain they were originally solving?
Honestly, the biggest shift is that my pain stopped being the center of the universe. As the outside guy I was sure my wall was the wall. From inside I now watch onboarding sessions and support tickets from people whose walls look slightly different from mine. Same gap, different fears. So my job changed: stay user zero, but stop assuming I'm user average. That tension is half of my week right now.
the biggest lever is usually one concrete pain you can name in a sentence. if the advice is too broad, it is hard to turn into a product wedge.
Agreed. Ours fits in one sentence: I built it, but I can't put it online. That was literally my own sentence nine months ago, word for word, and it is the reason the product exists. The open question is which flavor of that pain pays first, and that one gets answered by checkout, not by agreement in the thread.
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The grind is part of the deal. What nobody tells you is that it gets quieter before it gets louder. How are you holding up?
Appreciate that. Holding up fine, mostly because shipping a real thing feels lighter than years of advising on other people's things. The quiet part is real though. Today's reality is a few dozen views and a handful of comments, and I'm weirdly okay with it. Quiet is fine as long as the people who do show up describe the same wall.