2025-12-16. Nomoyu Daily for Indie Developers (Issue 213)

📰 News

The toothbrush test and the money-printing machine

Silicon Valley has a famous toothbrush test. The rough idea is that the best products should be like a toothbrush: users need to use them twice a day. So everyone rushed to build high-frequency apps, working on social products and search. These products have large traffic and strong stickiness, but often do not make money and have to rely on advertising.

Another kind of business is exactly the opposite, such as mortgages. This thing is practically a money-printing machine. A single transaction has enormous value, but the problem is that nobody applies for a mortgage every day. An ordinary person may only do it once or twice in a lifetime. That is low frequency and high value. A very interesting convergence is now appearing in business logic: companies building high-frequency “toothbrush” products, such as home-search apps, have traffic but lack monetization; companies doing low-frequency “money-printing” businesses, such as mortgage institutions, make money but lack traffic and must spend heavily to find customers everywhere.

So you see these wild mergers and integrations in the market, where giants with mortgage businesses acquire home-search platforms with huge traffic. The logic behind this is very simple: attach a low-frequency, high-margin business to a high-frequency traffic entrance. Without doing that, if you rely only on flyers and free T-shirts to acquire customers, the cost can eat up the profit.

🖥️ Software

hack-me

hack-me is a security scanning tool that helps indie developers find and fix security vulnerabilities. It uses the HexStrike framework and provides free security review services.

svgapp

svgapp is an AI mascot generator that creates and customizes mascots from prompts, generates SVG images in different poses with one click, and provides a free mascot library for users.

Spencer

Spencer is a macOS window manager that saves and restores window positions across all virtual desktops with one click. It supports creating workspaces for different tasks and requires no setup.

Nereo AI

Nereo AI is an all-in-one multi-model AI video workstation that aggregates top video models, charges affordably per generation, and provides frictionless workflows plus 100+ fast templates for digital marketers and content creators.

Seekly

Seekly is an iOS search tool that jumps to search results pages across major platforms from the app or widget with one tap, focusing on improving search efficiency and avoiding information distractions.

Buildy

Buildy is a tool that embeds interactive 3D product viewers into any website. It supports GLB/GLTF model uploads, one-click embed code, mobile-optimized viewers, and an analytics dashboard.

GeckoDub

GeckoDub is software that translates, voice-clones, and lip-syncs video ads so they look and feel natural in different markets.

Babagen

Babagen is a free app that explains the latest frontier science research in an easy-to-understand way, presented in an Instagram-like feed.

AppHat

AppHat is a marketing app that provides SEO, directory submission, and AI marketing features to help app developers successfully promote and launch products.

CodeRoutine

CodeRoutine is an open-source app that helps developers build a habit of reading technical articles, with one curated article per day, AI summaries, and a podcast mode.

✍️ Notes

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