" let r = ["Acme Corp", "CloudVault", "DataSync Pro", "NexGen AI", "SecureStack", "TrustLayer", "Vanta", "ComplianceIQ", "InfraSec", "ByteShield", "PipelineOps", "CyberNova", "TokenGuard", "ZeroTrust Labs", "Aether Security", "PrismData", "CloudArmor", "RiskLens", "AuditTrail", "ShieldIO"]
, n = ["just checked", "searched for", "ran a scan on", "verified"]
, a = ["San Francisco, CA", "New York, NY", "Austin, TX", "London, UK", "Berlin, DE", "Toronto, CA", "Seattle, WA", "Chicago, IL", "Denver, CO", "Boston, MA", "Singapore", "Sydney, AU"];
"
fake popups, xyz domain, recent zeitgeist, 100% straight vibecoded. good hustle I have to say. a domain that'll now get ranked on google for SOC 2 compliance which likely has a high CPC and good DR to piggyback off.
fair call on the popups, they’re not real-time. I added them quickly to make the page feel less empty while testing engagement, probably not the best call in hindsight and I’ll remove or replace them with something real.
on the "vibecoded" part, yeah I moved fast. this was built in under a day to get something out and see if people even care about this angle. that doesn’t mean the underlying data or direction is fake though.
the domain choice is just speed and availability, not some SEO master plan. if this turns into something real I’ll move it to a proper brand/domain.
and yeah I get why it looks like a growth/SEO play, but the actual goal is to push more transparency around these audits. if I just wanted traffic there are easier angles than going after something this niche and messy.
either way, appreciate you calling it out, some of it is fair and already being fixed.
Cybersecurity compliance, but .xyz site built under a day to get something out fast to drum up engagement and "test the vibes on the idea". Makes one wonder what became of this industry.
I've found that there is just not really any "general" advice for doing FB ads. Most of the advice out there is usually for dropshipping, or some sort of physical product.
So just going through my journey from the beginning with FB ads. Still new to YT so pls bear with my (non-existent) editing but I wanted to go into as much detail as possible because a lot of the content online is very deceiving in terms of how doing ads actually work. It gives you a feeling that all you need is one viral thing with low CPC and somehow magically even if your product's price is low, churn is high etc, everything will be fixed and you'll be a millionaire if ROAS = >2x.
No one really goes into detail about sucking on their first few ads, how to improve, how long you should wait for FB to optimize before pausing an ad, how much you should wait before killing a concept if its not bringing you sales, if you should keep an ad running with negative ROAS(if your product is a SaaS) and so on.
tldr; start with image ads. target immediate pain points nothing generic, calculate your breakeven beforehand. and finally your first 200-400 USD will likely be wasted on learning, both for FB and your own skills.
As a solo indiehacker in Europe, its crazy that I have to be so worried about VAT related things and big tech just goes around the whole thing and doesn't even expect to be charged just fined
You only have to be worried if you're doing something illegal, like the guys in the article. Misfiling something won't land you in jail, just some fines at the most. Intent matters quite a bit.
That’s ok for the big players with deep pockets. For the little guy this is a much bigger problem. As it should. It would just be nice if law breaking would be a bigger problem for the bigger companies too.
I've misfiled several times due to being young and stupid.
Each time I got a piece of mail asking my to call the IRS to clear it up, and every time the agent was nice and very helpful clearing it up, and not fined.
The IRS used to have a much worse reputation. Congress passed the Internal Revenue Service Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998 and improved their customer service.
> No country is out here destroying productive businesses because they made a paperwork mistake.
New Zealand. The Accident Compensation Corporation, a compulsory insurance scheme, is absolutely feral. Will crush you "because rules" without a thought.
If you are found personally responsible for tax evasion >1e6€ then the minimal penalty is prison sentence without parole option. This is true for many EU countries including Italy. Idk. about the max. prison length in Italy for this but e.g. where I live in the EU you are likely looking at ~15 years for 1e9€ tax evasion.
The reason executives commonly avoid such penalties is because they avoid being found personally liable by claiming they didn't known, did misunderstood the situation, where deceived by others etc.
Through it should be noted that this case is a bit unusual and complicated.
The tax dispute itself isn't as simple as Amazone directly having avoided paying their own taxes. And the case of missing taxes has already been settled. This new current investigations are criminal investigation (i.e. the failure of paying taxes is assumed to have been intentional instead of a booking error) and seem to be more targeting executives for having committed crimes (instead of targeting Amazone the company).
Or in other words, Italian prosecutors are feed up US companies not caring for EU law and no one being hold liable.
---
(1): Without option to have it replaced with long time parole.
> The reason executives commonly avoid such penalties is because they avoid being found personally liable by claiming they didn't known, did misunderstood the situation, where deceived by others etc.
In the US, Section 302 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act exists literally to avoid this: the CEO and CFO have to personally sign filings so they cannot "not know" about financial disclosure content and have plausible deniability. While it only applies to public companies, the model seems reasonable to solve this case too.
"not know" was oversimplified from me, technically such things exist in many countries, most likely also Italy.
But this comes back to how thinks always tend to be more complicate then "clean cut direct tax avoidance".
E.g. here the case isn't as simple as Amazone directly avoiding tax. But them instead to quote:
> Amazon's algorithm and operating models enabled the sale in Italy of goods from tens of thousands of non‑EU sellers - mostly Chinese - without disclosing their identity, helping them avoid paying value‑added tax (VAT)
I.e. Amazon is seen responsible for acting with sever levels of negligence with suspicion of intentionally enabling/supporting tax evasion to profit from it. (And honestly given the level of fraudulent-looking things Amazone allows vendors since a very long time, there is likely some truth to the "intentional supporting malicious actions" part.).
And in turn executives don't claim exactly "they didn't know". They claim they did know and started actions to fix the issue but it the actions failed so you tried other actions and if asked why no bigger actions are tried they claim it didn't look like it was "that" big of a problem through they now realize that was wrong.
The end effect is still the same they doge responsibility as-if they could just claim they didn't know, just with extra steps. Instead of "didn't know" I probably should have used "they claimed incompetence" (and external factors outside of their control) or similar.
but also overlaps with other laws, e.g. wrt. failing to act in due diligence
(other laws) like you are legally required to act with due-diligence, as CFO this inherently means knowing about the finances of the company so even if you claim you didn't know it's not exactly changing anything as not keeping up with your due diligence still makes you as likely
> If you are found personally responsible for tax evasion >1e6€ then the minimal penalty is prison sentence without parole option. This is true for many EU countries including Italy. Idk. about the max. prison length in Italy for this but e.g. where I live in the EU you are likely looking at ~15 years for 1e9€ tax evasion.
There's o EU wide tax law, so that statement is misleading at best and there's many places where that's false. You're spreading misinformation.
> The reason executives commonly avoid such penalties is because they avoid being found personally liable by claiming they didn't known, did misunderstood the situation, where deceived by others etc.
Misinformation again. This blanket statement in just false. Again, because there is no EU-wide law. It's up to the countries and they handle it very differently.
New things not making money yet
https://admakeai.com - AI ads generator for facebook ads. Made mostly so I have a easy way to prompt for stuff and keep track of good AI ad prompts. Have been using it to make static image ads for BestPhoto and actually have over 40 conversions at $~45/conv. Pretty good considering my previous attempts with my own handmade ads using canva was like $80-100/conv. but most of the time FB wouldn't even spend anything from my budget before
Fun stuff/for myself:
https://xhdr.org/ - Made like a few months back when twitter was allowing HDR images in your profile pictures, they patched it like a week later, but was fun while it lasted. Still works for facebook, keeping it up for FB video ads, I've noticed people abusing this a lot when scrolling on FB recently searching for good ads, so I'm guessing it works? Good way to get attention of people on iphone quick
https://framecall.com - Saw people making cool AI motion videos using the claude code skill with remotion, so packaged it into an actual web app you can use as a chat instead of through terminal. Harder than expected to get all the tool calling(and auto continue) stuff to work, similar to how claude code works
TranslateVoice(name TBD) - An iphone voice translate app where you tap microphone button and it uses 4o realtime to translate between you and someone else. This was originally one of the biggest thing I was hyped about as a usecase when 4o released but when I tried it on their app, it just didn't do prompt following well at all it would randomly try to communicate with the user instead of strictly translating, just randomly cutting off someone before they finish speaking etc. Currently have 3 modes that work, that if no one else uses I will be using:
1. Interpreter mode: Basically User 1 speaks to phone in their language, phone talks to user 2 in their language, user 2 replies to phone in their language, phone replies to user 1 in their language etc. Just pure translation, with chat history transcribed in each other's language
2. "Friend mode": You tell it a general goal, "I want to get immigration documents, I need to know the requirements" it then basically acts as if its a friend you called to help with translation and gathers everything while talking back and forth with User 2 and then at the end goes back to user 1 with all the info.
3. Stealth mode: Airpods in, it will transcribe and translate everything being spoken and tell you what to say based on initial goal or you can also write extra instructions in the chat. This is currently the only non-working/buggy one I'm trying to figure out before releasing this, since both will be speaking in same language its hard for model to know who is user 1 and who is user 2 automatically.
First time I'm creating an Iphone app fully vibecoded(react native so I understand whats going on frontend wise at least cause of react). Not looking forward to the app store review process. And I know this is likely something someone already made but its probably paid and I have like $25k in Azure credits I can burn anyways.
You can click on the videos to copy the prompt for each one, made all of them(5 variations per) in one go with a script. Only one was made custom, the "The party told you to reject the evidence" one, which still took under 5 prompts to get there after some fixes using prompting.
Usually I'd say I'd say people are just being superstitious or got used to a model's intelligence. But recently I've had Opus just repeating things over and over a few times and just have lower code quality in general.
The latter is harder to "prove" as its mostly vibes but the former I've been noticing a few times.
Got two websites but the second one is basically a clone of the first with better visuals and better tech stack that I actually want to work on
https://aieasypic.com - 3k per month (declining cause not working on it a lot, just maintenance)
https://bestphoto.ai - 2k per month (increasing cause of better SEO)
Now trying my hand at an actual non-consumer product, not that b2b but something to make making ads easy because that’s where I find myself getting stuck on when doing fb ads or TikTok organic stuff : https://admakeai.com
Was curious what it looks like now, and yea, not a fan of the fake hacker "we don't do CSS or styling". But then again maybe I was just used to their old design
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