u/Capital-Pen1219

For the longest time I kept delaying building an author website.

Not because I didn’t want one — but because tools like Wix or Squarespace felt overwhelming for what I actually needed. I just wanted a simple website for my books, a place readers could find updates, join my newsletter, and see upcoming events.

Recently I tried Zenpage (zenpage.io) after another indie author mentioned it, and the experience was surprisingly straightforward.

The process was basically:
pick a template → import my books by ISBN → publish.

Within about 15 minutes, I had a working author website with individual book pages, a blog, an events calendar, and a newsletter signup connected to Mailchimp. I also liked that there were no ads, and I could connect my own custom domain without extra setup.

For someone who’s self-published and not very technical, that simplicity made a big difference. It felt more focused on authors compared to general website builders.

I’m still exploring it, but so far it feels like a practical option if you want an author website for free without spending days configuring things.

Curious to hear from others here:

If you’re an indie author or creator, what was the hardest part about setting up your website — design, tech setup, or just getting started?

Hey builders 👋

Guys you already know that lifestyle photoshoots are a massive money pit. Renting a studio, setting up lighting, and staging a room just to get a few decent shots of a chair or table can easily burn through thousands of dollars.

I was looking for a way to cut down these costs without making the catalog look cheap, and I finally found a workflow that actually works. I recently started testing a dedicated AI furniture product photography tool (it's called furnea.ai).

It is basically a cheat code for e-commerce visuals. You just upload a basic, raw image of your furniture, and the AI automatically strips the background and places it into photorealistic room scenes. It even lets you swap out materials (like changing wood to leather) and generates short product videos for social media ads.

It completely eliminated the need for physical studio rentals for my workflow. The outputs look incredibly realistic, and it saves days of waiting on photographer edits.

Since we are all sharing our tech stacks and progress today... What are you guys currently building?

I manage a fully remote, distributed team right now with developers and designers spread across LATAM, Eastern Europe, and the US.

For the first few months, our weekly all-hands meetings were incredibly frustrating. The native English speakers would completely dominate the conversation, while my overseas developers—who are brilliant at their jobs—would just sit on mute and nod.

I realized it wasn't a lack of ideas; it was just language anxiety. Trying to process fast-paced, highly technical English and then translate your own thoughts back into English on the fly is exhausting.

Standard Zoom captions were too clunky, so we rolled out a dedicated live video conferencing translation tool for the team (we are using Transync AI).

It runs completely independently over whatever meeting software we use. Now, if one of my developers in Brazil is struggling to explain a complex backend issue in English, they can just speak in Portuguese and the tool provides real-time translation subtitles for the rest of us. Alternatively, they can just read along in their native language while I am speaking English.

It completely leveled the playing field. Meeting participation basically doubled overnight because the anxiety of "saying it wrong" is gone.

For those of you managing global teams, how do you make sure your non-native English speakers feel comfortable speaking up on live calls?

I work with a lot of freelancers, tattoo artists, and designers, and almost all of them use their Instagram grid as their primary portfolio.

It makes sense because it's easy to update, but the web experience has become completely hostile to clients. If someone clicks your IG link on their laptop or mobile browser and they aren't actively logged in, they can scroll maybe twice before a massive "Log in to continue" wall freezes the entire screen. A lot of older clients or corporate contacts just close the tab and move on.

When I need to review a creator's portfolio and I'm not logged in on my desktop, I just use a web-based Instagram viewer like Instaradar.

It bypasses the login wall completely. You just put the username in, and it generates a clean, scrollable grid of their work. It's the fastest way to view Instagram without an account so you can actually see the art without Meta forcing you to download the app.

Do you guys think it's unprofessional for freelancers to only use IG as a portfolio now because of this login wall? Should everyone go back to building standard websites?

I’ve been trying to keep a closer eye on a few competitors in my niche to see what kind of promotional offers they are running on their Instagram stories.

The problem is, I obviously don't want my official brand account (or my personal account) showing up in their "viewed by" list every single day. I tried making a burner account a while ago, but Meta's spam filters are so aggressive now that they immediately flagged and banned it for suspicious activity.

I finally stopped trying to trick the app and just started using an anonymous Instagram viewer (I use one called Instaradar).

You don't need to log in or connect any accounts. You just drop their public handle in, and you can watch all their active stories and view their grid completely undetected. It’s the easiest way to view Instagram without an account and grab screenshots of their ad creatives without tipping them off.

How do you guys monitor your competitors' daily content? Are you just using your personal accounts and hoping they don't notice, or do you have a different workaround?