maestrochess
The chess trainer that studies you back.
Maestro reviews your chess games and finds the mistake you keep making, not the one you made once. Every engine tells you "blunder on move 24". None of them tell you that you've collapsed in five won endgames this month.
Some things I'm proud of:
Analysis runs entirely in the browser. Stockfish 18 NNUE, no analysis server, no queue. A thousand people can scan simultaneously and my hosting bill doesn't move. It also means the free scan can stay genuinely free forever rather than until it gets expensive.
The docs verify themselves. My guides contain chess claims — "this knight is hanging", "this position is a draw" — and the build fails if any of them is false. It caught me writing a diagram with the wrong side to move.
Payments live through Paddle, 2FA with encrypted TOTP seeds, server-authoritative clocks for online play, 277 passing tests.
And the free scan works: paste any Lichess username, get your recurring mistake in 30 seconds, no account.
The honest part: last week the logs showed 31 unique IPs, several of which were Googlebot. I spent my time on the half with right answers — encryption, tests, clock sync — because distribution doesn't have any, so I kept not doing it.
What's actually produced conversations: answering "why am I stuck at 1100?" with real data from someone's own games instead of posting a link.
maestrochess.com — scan's on the front page.
For those past this stage: what moved the needle first? One thing that worked beats ten that should have.
1 Comment
The honest gap between product quality and distribution is compelling here. You have strong evidence that the product works, but almost no evidence yet that the market is finding it.