Jake Manger

@jakemanger
9 Followers
7 Following
641 Posts
A PhD student turned indie developer building mini startups like a madman.
& ✍️ on
📖 medium
What I'm buildinghttps://howtoconvert.co
My Homepagehttps://merlinsbeard.ai
Mediumhttps://medium.com/@jakemanger

I made an app to convert almost any file to any other file

2,410 people are now using it

And it does 5,384 types of document, video, image, audio and email file conversions

Went full time on my side project in January

Realised my boss (me) only lets me have 0 or 1 days off a week

But also: never been happier

At a cafe getting reaaal close to launching the next app

I'm building an app to convert almost any file locally

This week I added 1,399 new possible file conversions
(from 3,985 to 5,384 document, video, image, audio, comic and email conversions)

It now converts more file types than any other converter

In hindsight: a bad choice of a hero message

If you haven't heard, two versions of LiteLLM got hacked yesterday (1.82.7 and 1.82.8)

Live on PyPI for 3 hours. Downloaded 3.4 million times per day.

Stole SSH keys, AWS credentials, Kubernetes secrets, API keys, Docker registry credentials, and crypto wallet seed phrases.

How it happened:

I made an app to convert almost any file locally
(so you don't send your files to random servers)

And now it support COMIC book files! CBZ, CBR and CBT
(these are also free to convert on the website)

This is my file converter app

Drag and drop to convert almost any file

Does everything locally, unlike converters you find on Google

It just crossed 2,400 users!

It's funny: 99% of my revenue comes from my main app, How to Convert

But what gets me most excited?

The one sale a month I get from my little photomosaic making app, PicTiler

Literally just made a "weeeooooeee" sound out loud

Hit top of r/macapps

Made $1k in a single day

Spent the next week non-stop fixing bugs and adding features people asked for

Built a scrappy new app over Christmas break in about a month

Posted it on r/sideproject

Got my first sale in 15 minutes