Daniel Smidstrup (@DanielSmidstrup) is a solo developer building small products in public, with the tagline "shipping till something sticks." He says he is an ex-CTO who took a business to $700k ARR, and he is now running a one-person portfolio the honest way: out loud, with the revenue posted. This page is our independent read of how the account behaves, in numbers. He did not write it, and it is not something he can change by claiming a product.
The behavior will look familiar if you have read the other grinder in this directory, because it is the same two plays, run harder. His posting is engagement-bait: short questions and polls ("sleep or ship?", "which founder would you bet on?"), about six in ten of them asking something, roughly eight a day. Then he replies. A lot. In the captured window his replies ran to a few hundred a day, to hundreds of different accounts, and most are one-liners: "haha so true", "nice", "yeah seems so". About twenty-eight times more replies than posts. It is the reply grind, at scale.
Here is why this account is worth studying, and it is the exact thing that was an open question for the smaller grinder here. Reply-grinding builds an audience of whoever you reply to, which for most founders is other founders, which is usually the wrong audience because other founders are not your buyers. For Daniel it is not the wrong audience, because his main product, ClimbX, sells "grow on X" to founders trying to grow on X. The channel and the product are the same thing, so the peers his grind reaches are the actual market, and his own account is a live demo of what the tool is supposed to do. That is the strong version of this play. The honest catch is in his own numbers: by his August figures he currently earns more from X itself, creator payouts and paid posts, than from the SaaS the grind is meant to sell. So the real question, and it is a fair one to sit with, is whether the business is the software or the audience. The plays behind the reach get their own breakdown in the panel, and the three products he is shipping are below.
On X
Based on his recent weeks, with reply volume measured over Sept 15 to 17, 2026
Posting
8/ day
Engagement-bait plus build-in-public: mostly one-line questions and polls (about 6 in 10 posts ask something), mixed with revenue and milestone updates. Around 8 a day.
Commenting
234/ day
Reply-guy grinding at scale: around 234 short replies in a single captured day, to hundreds of accounts, most of them one-liners like 'haha so true' or 'nice', with the occasional customer-support fix mixed in.
- In the captured window his replies ran 48, then 234, then 391 across three days, to about 448 different accounts. That is roughly 28 times more replies than posts.
- By his own build-in-public numbers he made about $3,764 in August 2026, and more of it came from X itself (creator payouts and paid posts) than from his main SaaS.
- Old account, new mission: about 65,100 lifetime posts since 2013, but the solo-dev reboot started in April 2026 from 'zero followers, starting from scratch'.
Our independent read of public activity, as of Sep 17, 2026. Not editable by the builder.
What Daniel Smidstrup is building
ClimbX
AI that helps you write and grow on X, built by someone growing on X to sell it.
DanielLaunches
A launch directory that hands out free backlinks, and quietly builds his own audience and SEO.
JustFixMe
A one-shortcut AI typo fixer, priced two ways so the AI bill does not eat the product.