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How Orty gets made — mistakes included.

One indie developer, one Windows installer, zero venture money. This log holds the releases, the milestones, the lessons, and the honest mistakes. Newest first.

  1. releaseAug 27, 2026

    v1.20.2 ships — the blank Profile box is gone

    8-step questionnaire replaced the empty editor. Answers become structured JSON sent to Gemini 3.6 Flash — empty achievements are never invented. Added Review with inline Edit + 0–100% strength bar, 5 tones (Professional/Friendly/Confident/Creative/Premium Agency), Copy/Markdown/Plain per section, and local-only persistence (orty_profile_answers_v1). Builder UI lives in Free and Pro; generation stays Pro-gated (ai_profile_gen 403). Improve Existing Profile now also via Gemini.

  2. releaseAug 25, 2026

    v1.20.1 ships — Pro becomes real

    Pro stopped being a label. License activation (Settings → Orty Pro) now verifies against the license server — only key + anonymous SHA-256 device hash leaves the machine, one device with 7-day offline grace. Added server-side gates for batch/video/email/profile/portfolio (Free capped at 1), per-launch localhost token, and export sanitization. Frontend now fail-closes to Free. Unified version + badge fix.

  3. releaseAug 19, 2026

    v1.20-beta ships — the biggest release so far

    Outreach Diagnostics, the guided first-run walkthrough, the 7-stage CRM pipeline, local Personal Insights, weekly goals, one-click workspace export, Trust Settings with View-My-Data, and a Free tier. Eight headline features in one drop, still $29 one-time for everyone who bought during beta.

  4. lessonAugust 2026

    The rate-card guardrail became the brand

    Early on, Co-Pilot was 'an AI that drafts emails.' Users didn't repeat that sentence. What they repeated was: 'it can't invent prices.' Constraints turned out to be more memorable than capabilities — the marketing now leads with what Orty refuses to do.

  5. milestoneAugust 2026

    Launched on Product Hunt as Orty

    The OutreachRater rename deserved a real launch. Product Hunt brought the first wave of strangers using the app end-to-end — which is exactly the stress test a solo-built installer needs. Every bug report went straight to the founder's inbox and got answered personally.

  6. mistakeSummer 2026

    I shipped features before the onboarding could carry them

    v1.x had real power hidden behind a blank Rate tab — and beta users told me they scored one lead and stopped. v1.20's guided walkthrough exists because of that mistake. Lesson: a feature without an onboarding path is a changelog line, not a product.

  7. noteSummer 2026

    Why local-first isn't a marketing angle here

    Orty handles screenshots of real people and draft emails that quote real rates. The cheapest architecture to build would have been a cloud pipeline — and the fastest way to lose this exact audience. Local-first was the product decision that made every trust claim on this site true by default.

  8. notev1.1-beta

    OutreachRater becomes Orty

    The old name described the mechanism ('rate outreach'). The new name left room for everything the app grew into — diagnostics, CRM, goals. Renaming after early users existed meant migrating their data carefully; the CSV auto-migration shipped in the same breath.

  9. lessonDay one

    Built because my own inbox needed it

    Orty started as a personal script: score which creators were worth emailing before spending an evening writing pitches. It sent 25 real outreach emails in its first week of use — that number on the homepage is the founder's own result, kept honest as a single data point rather than dressed up as an average.

Want the next entry to be something specific — a deep dive on the scoring rubric, real churn numbers, a postmortem? Ask: getorty@gmail.com reaches the founder directly.