The Feed

ShipNaija @builder_os5k3ygl

shipping ShipNaija · 5h ago

🚢 Shipped the first production version of ShipNaija. ShipNaija started as an idea for a home where Nigerian solo developers, indie hackers, and vibe coders can build in public and stay consistent. The first release now includes builder profiles, project showcases, daily build logs, likes and comments, shipping streaks, trending leaderboards, weekly challenges, and a personal builder dashboard. This project became my case study in building a complete product with AI—from planning the database and authentication to debugging production issues, redesigning the homepage, and making the dashboard mobile-friendly. The product is live, but this is only the beginning. I’ll use these logs to document every improvement, mistake, lesson, and milestone from here.

First 50 signups. People are using it for their side hustles. Wrote a quick blog post about what I learned.

Just crossed 50k downloads. The danfo driver I met in Ojota still doesn't know the app is his. Made me smile.

Sold 10k tickets this year. 5% commission = real revenue. Thank you Abuja.

$5/mo × 2,000 users = $10k MRR. I'm not a VC-funded startup. I'm just a guy shipping on weekends.

Shipped the auth flow today. Email + password, with a magic-link option. Took longer than I expected because Supabase RLS policies needed a refresh — but it works now.

Hit a wall on Hausa diacritics. Need help from a Hausa speaker. Posted on Twitter, waiting.

200k students. Built this with 3 friends during a school break. The WHOLE thing was a passion project. Now looking for a teacher to join full-time.

5,000 downloads of the CLI. The most common use is `lazydev init` in a new project directory. Feels good.

Switched to a USDT/USDC off-ramp for diaspora. Expensive but people want it.

Pausing Japa. Realized I should finish my own application before building a tracker for it.

3,000 weekly downloads. Built the yabis-only theme because I missed home.

Shipped the v1 palette + tokens. Tested with 3 design tools. The Adire blue still needs work — too saturated on dark backgrounds.

Benched the Rust settlement engine against the Node.js one. Rust is 4x faster but uses 2x memory. Worth it.

Ledger Naija in beta. 30 small businesses. The hardest part: teaching double-entry to people who've never seen it.

Hetzner cluster + Cilium + K3s = 80% of EKS for 15% of the cost. Writing up a post-mortem next week.

500 businesses on KoloPay. Profitable. 2-person team. Looking for a Rails engineer to join — remote, Lagos hours.

Started the digital esusu engine. The state machine is the hard part — too many edge cases. Refactoring for the third time.

1,400 weekly downloads. The error messages are now in pidgin because a user asked nicely. Probably the most-requested feature ever.

3 partner agents in Lagos. Cash pickup works. Settling to bank accounts daily. SMS link is a nice touch.

First deployment to a Hausa newsroom. They're using it for headline classification. Accuracy: 89%.

Schema-first protoc-gen is not as nice as I thought. Considering switching to Protobuf directly.

80/300 icons done. Need a contributor to speed this up. DM me on Twitter.

New adire-inspired theme in the kit. Color contrast is hard but worth it for accessibility.

The package is 1.2kb gzipped. Couldn't be smaller without losing the type signatures. Shipping tonight.

Pretraining loss is converging. Hit 1.8 perplexity on the dev set. Need more data — looking for Yoruba-text corpora.

Schema-as-code generator works for 80% of cases. The other 20% need custom logic. PRs welcome.

Pilot in 5 schools. The kids love it. The teachers are skeptical but warming up. The hardest part was getting the audio to sound right in Lagos noise.

Danfo model in Three.js is harder than it looks. Spent two days on the steering physics. Still janky.

Reference impl complete. 1,200 lines of Go. Tested with grpcurl. PRs welcome. Honestly wish I'd had this 3 years ago.

Hit 2,000 transactions in the first month. A user in Abeokuta used it to send her mum money for her birthday. 10/10 would build again.

2,000 downloads of the Terraform modules. Used by 3 YC startups. Still can't believe it.