Kyle Platt
@kyleplatt.bsky.social
4.2K followers 3K following 120 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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kyleplatt.bsky.social
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: 🧵
kyleplatt.bsky.social
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!
kyleplatt.bsky.social
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
kyleplatt.bsky.social
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!
kyleplatt.bsky.social
In startups (and in life), it’s never too late to pivot!
kyleplatt.bsky.social
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
kyleplatt.bsky.social
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
kyleplatt.bsky.social
I got a hole in one in golf yesterday ⛳
kyleplatt.bsky.social
The first 10 customers are *always* the hardest.
No one knows you.

No one trusts you.

You’re nobody yet.
kyleplatt.bsky.social
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.
kyleplatt.bsky.social
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
kyleplatt.bsky.social
I definitely like the speed of it, very snappy
kyleplatt.bsky.social
Working on adding an affiliate program to bluepilot. Pretty painless so far. Trying out a newer one, Tolt.io, currently

#buildinpublic
kyleplatt.bsky.social
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
kyleplatt.bsky.social
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
kyleplatt.bsky.social
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
kyleplatt.bsky.social
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
kyleplatt.bsky.social
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!
kyleplatt.bsky.social
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
kyleplatt.bsky.social
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!
kyleplatt.bsky.social
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
kyleplatt.bsky.social
Nice this looks useful, was looking for something like it.

Thanks!

Going to spin a test up now
kyleplatt.bsky.social
Been a little while since i've built a chrome extension. Wish me luck! #buildinpublic
kyleplatt.bsky.social
Have some big ideas planned for local leads that will make it even more useful.

Want to do another run through of some of the players in the lead gen/finding market first. Big ones like Apollo and Lusha, but curious if there are some recommendations to check out?
kyleplatt.bsky.social
Back to working on new features for my products! both localleads and bluepilot are going to see some big upgrades in the coming days and weeks 🦙
kyleplatt.bsky.social
I can't imagine having a major portion of my business be custom software and not having anyone technical directly on the team.

It amazes me how many people I've come across that successfully operate this way, kudos to them, it would stress me way over the top.