Posted by david927 2 days ago
Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)
OSS, MIT licensed. Feedback welcomed!
Mission: get startups access to senior & principal big-tech engineers at a 90% discount and without hemorrhaging equity.
The hack is that I'm tapping into a hidden supply of people hiding in plain sight: top engineers that are already full-time employed in big-tech with benefits who enjoy helping smaller startups, and, recently retired people who want something to do.
The name I'm using is Low Touch Advisor because we are selling what I call "low touch" help in the form of async Slack based guidance. By having access to senior people perfectly matched to your team's needs, you can use your actual engineers to do the hands on and majorly reduce the likelihood that a major rewrite is needed after 6 months of effort on new projects.
Basic model: - Our customer (an early stage company) pays $1,500 / month with no long term commitments to get async Slack help from a vetted senior/principal engineer perfectly matched to their needs - Of that, we ACH $1k / month to the engineer who provided the Slack-based help
Within the first 3 months of operating, I have $27k of monthly revenue booked in my sales pipeline.
So far I've done everything by hand but once I'm a bit further ahead, I'm going to look to begin automating this.
If you want to connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanblockengineer/
This is the type of project that I never would have started in the first place if not for LLMs.
Stack is 15+ Go microservices on k3s. Cross-lingual semantic search is fun. Spanish query returns English calls with no translation code.
We've found most early-stage startups ignore social media until after a launch. Things like “$0 spent on ads” sound cool, but they don’t help if no one knows your product exists.
I'm building Appents to provide a done-for-you social media solution for startups.
Would love feedback: https://appents.com/
I just released support for dashboards. I've kept a devlog for the past 6 months.
And the biggest update is coming soon, DB Pro Cloud, which will let you connect to and manage any database through your browser as well as collaborate with your team.
Imagine Postman but for databases.
Several readers have asked for an easy way to get recommendations without working through long-form review articles.
Here's the first iteration of a simple recommender: https://bcmullins.github.io/reading/