From sketch to launch as a solo builder: 8 notes on journey maps, PWA packaging, free SEO tools and AI product revenue

There's a stage in every solo project where writing code stops being the slow part. The slow part becomes drawing how people will actually use the thing, deciding where to ship it, and figuring out how anyone will find it. These are eight notes I keep for that stretch, ordered roughly the way the work goes: design, packaging, getting found, and reading the market.

None of this is official material from the services mentioned. Each section is my own summary of a public page, and the numbers are whatever the page said when I saved it. The market figures in the last section are estimates, and the source says so itself. Each section ends with a link to the longer note on redreamality.com.

1. User journey maps: draw today and tomorrow separately

Before adding features, it helps to put on one page how a user moves through the product right now and where they get stuck. A guide from the Chinese product-management site Woshipm defines a journey map as a left-to-right timeline told from the user's side, a story of how they reach a goal. It has three parts: a user model, the experience itself (key activities, concrete actions, touchpoints, an emotion curve and pain points), and the opportunities you pull out of it. The idea I use most is splitting the map in two. The As-Is map describes the current journey and lives in the problem space. The To-Be map describes the fixed version and can drop the emotion curve and pain points, keeping only activities, actions and touchpoints. When several roles are involved, the guide uses swimlanes and arrows to show who depends on whom.

Read more: how As-Is and To-Be journey maps differ in practice

2. Overflow: turn screens into a flow you can present

If a journey map is mostly words, Overflow is for the screens themselves. You import designs from your design tool with layers and prototype links intact, then wire them together on a canvas as a user flow. There are three ways to look at the result: a bird's-eye canvas of the whole flow, a prototype view that steps through one screen at a time, and a story view for interactive, self-guided walkthroughs. For async review it has shared folders, editor invites, full version history and comments you can pin anywhere. You can also push a project to Overflow Cloud, get a public link and embed it in a blog or internal tool, then keep iterating and update the link when you're ready. The site says more than 500,000 designers and PMs use it. Even if you work alone, a published flow is a good reference for future you.

Read more: notes on Overflow's three views and sharing options

3. Maoken: free-for-commercial-use Chinese fonts

Build anything for Chinese-speaking users and font licensing is the first wall you hit. Maoken collects Chinese fonts that are free for commercial use; it listed 848 when I saved the note. You can filter by language (Chinese, Latin, Japanese, Korean), by style (sans, serif, rounded, calligraphy, handwriting) and by license: author statement, OFL, IPA, MIT, GPL, CC-BY, CC0 and others. Entries explain derived fonts too, such as one built on Source Han Serif. There's a copyright check and a list of fonts whose status is questionable, which is the part I'd actually lean on. One catch: the site also sells its own fonts (9.9 to 79 yuan) on the same pages, so read the label before you download.

Read more: how to search Maoken by license, and what to watch for

4. PWABuilder: get a web app into the app stores

If you don't have time to write a native app, wrapping a PWA for the stores is the short path. PWABuilder's docs split the toolkit into three pieces. PWA Starter is the team's own production template, with a manifest and a Workbox-based service worker already in place. PWABuilder Studio is a VS Code extension that creates a new PWA or converts an existing web app, manages the manifest, service worker and icons, and validates the app against the store checks. PWABuilder.com itself generates packages you can upload to the Microsoft Store, Google Play and the iOS App Store, plus side-loadable packages for testing first. My note came from the Google Play packaging page, but knowing those three pieces is enough to find your way around.

Read more: the three PWABuilder tools and what each one outputs

5. Thirty free SEO tools for a zero budget

Once it's live, search has to find it. SEO consultant Lauren Galvez's list of 30 free tools covers technical, on-page, off-page and local SEO. Alongside the Google staples (Search Console, Analytics, Keyword Planner, PageSpeed Insights, Rich Results Test) it includes Screaming Frog, free for sites up to 500 URLs, Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, Semrush's free tier, Merkle's SERP simulator for checking whether titles get cut off, and generators for robots.txt, XML sitemaps and hreflang tags. It's upfront about free-tier limits, like 500 URLs for the sitemap generator and 50 URLs at a time for hreflang. For a small site it reads like a sensible first checklist.

Read more: my regrouped list of 30 free SEO tools by task

6. Wanwei Ads: contextual ads for a developer audience

If you pay for reach with a developer product, ads that match the article usually fit better than big banners. Wanwei Ads is a Chinese ad network aimed at developers, product and ops people, and gamers, serving across sites such as the CSDN blog, W3Cschool, Vue.js and ThinkPHP. The page says it avoids large banners and screen-hogging formats, matches only on site type and page topic, and doesn't tag individual users. Impressions are free and you pay per click, which is easy for a small team to try. The stats on the page were 5.51 billion total impressions, 1.877 million total clicks and a 37% advertiser renewal rate. There's also a publisher signup, so if you run a tech blog it's worth reading from the other side.

Read more: where Wanwei serves ads and how it charges

7. A course outline for shipping to overseas markets

This one isn't a tool. I kept it as a map of what people in the Chinese indie scene learn when they set out to build for overseas users. It's the sales page for an AI-assisted coding course built around Cursor, and the curriculum runs in this order: prep, tools, Cursor development, full-stack, real projects, SEO, then promotion and operations. The stack it teaches is Next.js, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui, Better Auth, Stripe, Resend, Vercel, Cloudflare and Zeabur, which is a fair snapshot of what solo builders reach for today. There's a free tier and two paid tiers (1,299 and 1,999 yuan), so I treat it as a hint about learning order, not an endorsement.

Read more: the course's curriculum and stack, summarized

8. Gefei's estimates of which overseas AI products make money

Last, the market. Gefei, who builds SEO-driven AI tools for overseas users, put together a deck that sorts AI products by input and output (text, image, audio, video and so on) and estimates traffic and revenue for each category. The estimates combine traffic heuristics, visits to payment domains, ad spend and known revenue of similar products, and the deck says plainly that they're rough. With that caveat, July figures in it include about 61.27 million monthly visits for Suno, about 10.67 million for Midjourney and $570K MRR for Jenni AI. What I find useful isn't the exact numbers but the relative size of each category and the way the estimate is built.

Read more: how to read Gefei's revenue estimates for AI products

Put together, design (1 and 2), look and distribution (3 and 4), getting found (5 and 6), and learning and market sense (7 and 8) cover most of the places a solo project stalls. Pick one and open it before your next release.

A Japanese version of this list is on Qiita.