Kyle Platt
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kyleplatt.bsky.social
Kyle Platt
@kyleplatt.bsky.social
4.2K followers 3.3K following 130 posts
Serial Entrepreneur and Engineer. Trying to maximize life while building cool things. 🇨🇦 Building: 🚀 https://local-leads.ai 🐉 https://getbluepilot.com 🧲 https://tactycs.io
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Figured now is a good time to share my current startup backstory and what I am working on.

Have built >20 products/tools at this point and found some snippets of success!

Here they are: 🧵
Thanks! Nothing ground breaking here, two key things I focused on were:

1. Topicality -> best way to get things indexed and ranked quickly. Bluesky is great for this
2. Consistency -> hardest thing but pays off the most🤷
SEO has been a big driver for getbluepilot.com and the growth pattern has been nice and steady upwards. Definitely like seeing that! #buildinpublic
As a founder/business owner, it feels like your job description changes every few months...

And I love it #buildinpublic
Entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart.

Constant rollercoaster 🎢 of highs and lows.

Still wouldn’t trade it for anything else.
New onboarding flow for Local Leads!

#buildinpublic
Hey everyone! I am looking for people who are interested in or already are a 'bluesky influencer'.

I am looking to get my bluesky tool in front of more people. This would be paid of course. Feel free to send me a DM if you are interested!
Finally able to dedicate some time to Local Leads again. Product has a lot of potential and have some great ideas for it.

Going to make it much easier to use and have a very powerful sales lead trigger that is the core of the new features! #buildinpublic
All the context switching between projects and customers has been tough of late...

It's a good sign of finding success in different places but can be difficult to manage!
In startups (and in life), it’s never too late to pivot!
Either I never knew or completely forgot, but OpenAI credits expire

I only had like $10 left in there but still a pretty annoying model, I cant see any technical reason to do that, just scammy.

One of my tools started failing for insufficient credits and I was confident I had some

#buildinpublic
Just found out the email marketing tool (Brevo) I use sent out my last campaign with a good portion of them having broken links...

Looks like one of their redirect domains is broken, that's a mistake they really can't make... 😠

#buildinpublic
I got a hole in one in golf yesterday ⛳
The first 10 customers are *always* the hardest.
No one knows you.

No one trusts you.

You’re nobody yet.
Love it, that sounds like the ideal model to me.

I've been doing something similar with refunds but it sounds like a good idea to actually spell it out like you have.
For BluePilot we opted to not have any free trial when launching

We sync millions of rows of data a day so this saved a lot of hosting money as well as avoided all the early tire kickers.

If the product is useful people will pay right away.

Thoughts? #buildinpublic
I definitely like the speed of it, very snappy
Working on adding an affiliate program to bluepilot. Pretty painless so far. Trying out a newer one, Tolt.io, currently

#buildinpublic
Working on one of those things where every step you take uncovers something more challenging... and the end doesn't seem to get closer.

Usually rewarding but exhausting 😴
#buildinpublic
Feel like I found the limit of cursor for me pretty quickly after messing around with it for a day or two.

Feel like its good for prototyping new things, but it was a net negative when adding features to an existing codebase.

It was introducing bugs, ruining formatting, and more... #buildinpublic
Messing around with cursor the past day or two.

Definitely see a place for it, especially with prototyping some quick projects/features.

Whipped together a quick tool that monitors all my servers and projects, saved me a couple hours for sure! #buildinpublic
Currently running on my home server setup. Would be very easy to spin up a VPS for it though.

To separate I created a basic express js server and copied just the logic I needed for syncing the data I wanted. From their was easy to use node-cron and have it run in the background
I decided to split a chunk of my app away from the main repo. BluePilot runs on vercel, which is great, but I do a ton of data syncing. Millions of records a day

The infra. (and pricing) wasn't really meant for that, so the heavy-duty syncing has split away! #buildinpublic

Saving me $100s a month!
Working on lots of cool updates for Bluepilot that I'm excited about.

Nice to work on new features and not just performance or bug fixing
Had lots of little tasks to do today that I was expecting to take quite a while.

Did them all in two hours which has now freed up a lot of time I wasn't expecting to have!
Checked out WXT for building browser extensions, a suggestion from @enaut.bsky.social

So far very happy with it! Saved me a bunch of time and allows me to keep similar workflows that I use for other projects. Would recommend. #buildinpublic