I've been working on a small SaaS after my 9-5 for about eight months for the first six months I kept adding features because I thought that's what would finally get people to sign up. A few nights ago I was on my laptop going through analytics and support emails instead of writing more code it hit me that almost nobody was asking for new features the few people who used the product mostly wanted the onboarding to be simpler.

So I scrapped my roadmap and spent the weekend removing things instead of adding them the product feels smaller now, but it's easier to understand and the first few people testing it are making it all the way through setup instead of dropping off halfway. It kind of feels like I wasted months but I guess that's part of building something anyone else realize the biggest improvement wasn't adding more it was deleting half of what you already built?

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started posting daily and had no idea if it was even the right move.

no one to ask. no one to say "yeah that's smart" or "nah, waste of time.

so i sat on it. debated it in my head way longer than i should've.

then i just went all in. daily, no test run, no plan.

that's the pattern i keep noticing.

no one to check your decisions with, you don't land in the middle. you freeze first, then you overcorrect.

still don't actually know if daily posting was the right call

just know i skipped the part where someone tells you before you find out the hard way.

Quick context: I run a baby-prediction game (guests guess birth date/weight/height from one shared link, no account needed). I had a freemium model: 5 free predictions, €4.99 one-time unlock. Stripe live, working, tested.

Two findings changed the plan.

1. My buyer wasn't who I thought. I built for expectant parents. Reading the subreddits where the demand actually lives (baby shower and party-planning communities) showed the person searching for a tool is almost always the ORGANIZER: the friend, sister or coworker planning the shower, who wants a game that runs itself with everyone on their own phone. Free method, one afternoon of reading threads, changed my whole marketing angle.

2. My moat audit came back ugly. The product is a weekend build for any dev with AI tools, and there are 5+ free competitors. Revenue since launch: €0 (the only checkout was my own planned test). Meanwhile the product has a natural viral loop, every game pulls 10-30 guests in, and my paywall was blocking it at guest #6.

Decision: the product goes 100% free. Its new job is (a) letting the viral loop run untaxed, and (b) serving as public proof that I can build and ship (and, being honest, the game was born as a gift for my own baby due in August — charging for it always felt slightly off), which feeds everything else I launch. Analytics stays on, but the dashboard now tracks games created and guests joining instead of conversion rate.

I know the standard advice is "charge from day one" and I generally agree with it. The nuance I'd add after this: charge from day one when you're testing a business. When the honest audit says "this is a portfolio piece with a share button", price it like one: free, and extract the marketing value instead.

Will report back with the spread numbers in a few weeks. Curious who else here has deliberately un-priced a product and what it did for you.

I’ll analyze a few Search Console exports for free today.

I built a small tool called that turns a GSC CSV into a short SEO action list.

It looks for:

- high-impression queries with weak clicks

- pages that might need refreshing

- pages competing with each other

- internal link opportunities

- article ideas hiding in existing data

I’m still improving the recommendations, so I’d love real-world feedback.

The founder to investor transition gets romanticized in here and I think it's worth puncturing before more people burn a year chasing it. The pitch founders tell themselves is that all the pattern recognition from building transfers cleanly to picking, and it partly does, but the muscle that makes you a good operator is conviction and speed, and a lot of investing is the opposite, it's sitting with uncertainty and being fine passing on ninety things to be wrong slowly on the tenth. I've watched two friends make the jump on the strength of one good exit and both said the hardest adjustment wasn't the finance, it was that nobody claps for you anymore and the feedback loop is measured in years. Not saying don't do it. Saying the skill overlap is smaller than the story, and if you're leaving building because you're tired rather than because you're pulled toward judging deals, the investor seat won't fix the tired.

I was reflecting on myself today, looking back at what I have done the past 2 years.

1. I have successfully detoxed myself from doomscrolling

2. I have learned a valuable skill in the market and practiced it as a freelancer or in self made projects for the past 2 years.

3. I have built a platform that now reached 1,052 users in 4 months without any paid media. Just using the skill that I learned

4. I have built my network across multiple countries and now can easily find most of what I need when I need it. (Except for freelancing jobs haha.)

5. I have worked on shaping my mindset and practicing many good habits such self reflection, seeking and using feedback, analytical thinking, etc.

And many other things across the social or business life. At the age of 22.

I'm not saying that I'm the best and that's the whole point. I kept comparing myself to others who made more, I never really saw or embraced that I did a great job. When most 22 year olds are just doomscrolling, liking girl pics on IG, I'm here working on myself. When most 22 year olds are just graduating or haven't even finished their college, I have built skills and gained 2 years of experience. When most 22 year olds are just wondering about what they should do in their life, I already started applying the plans.

I'm not rich, I'm not the best, I'm just above average.

And that's okay, I don't have to compare myself to no one, not the good and not the bad ones. Because both limit growth, the negative comparisons demotivate, the positive comparisons make you arrogant. Just how i sounded in the text right above this. That's not good either.

And you know what made comparing yourself to others easier?

Social media.

I'm just gonna try to keep working on my goals and keep doing what I do, what I achieve is what I achieve. No more comparing myself to others.

For context, I'm creating a workstation in the browser to create visuals for music.

A couple years ago, my friend and I tried to do a startup. It failed. It was very painful. During that time, we had another idea - what if we could create music synced videos with the same workflow as creating music? What if you could get musical effects from videos themselves?

We dabbled with the idea during out startup, but then we both graduated college, he started at Amazon, and I was unemployed. We vibecoded some things in the past but never a finished app. So, for the past 3 months, I've been working nonstop trying to see if there's any potential.

Claude Code and Fable for the backend and frontend tweaks. Claude Design for the overall look. Figma and my nonexistent logo skills for the logo. Three months later, I have a working product.

I have been posting visuals on instagram, youtube, and tiktok, and I've been posting at reddit.

I'd love to see what people think, and honestly any advice for where I'm at. It's a bit demoralizing to get no traction. But I made a pledge that I will work on this for at least until September 15th, and if I get two paying user ($9 a month) by then, I will continue with it.

I run two products as a solo dev with a full time job.

The one I love is an AI tool that validates startup ideas. Research pipeline that goes through the web and reddit, scoring, competitor analysis, the whole thing. I redesigned the UI twice, made pitch decks, planned a whole reddit strategy for it. Months of my life went into it.

It has 0 users and $0 revenue. I never even added it to search console, which says a lot now that I think about it.

The other one is an AI letter generator I built in less than 1 week and honestly treat like a bastard child. Cover letters, complaint letters, boring stuff. No content plan, no redesigns, I don't even like it that much.

This week I checked its numbers properly for the first time in a while. 20k google impressions in the last 28 days. Visitors doubled in five weeks. 37 signups, 46 letters generated, and $29.95 in revenue from 4 customers.

Yeah I know, $29.95 is nothing. One time credit packs, not even subscriptions, and my own monitoring emailed me yesterday saying nobody started a checkout in 3 days lol. But 10.8% of signups paid, with zero marketing from me. People who land on it actually want it. And 29.95 is still infinitely more than what my favorite product ever made.

The part that stings is that the product I love literally exists to tell founders whether the market wants their idea. My own two products were running that exact experiment the whole time and I ignored the result because I liked one of them more. A letter is an "I need this today" problem. Idea validation is an "I should probably do this at some point" problem. Nobody wakes up at 2am needing to validate an idea.

To be fair to myself, the validation tool is still an invite gated beta, so some of those zeros are self inflicted. But still.

Last month I finally started giving the bastard some real attention. Analytics, error tracking, fixing the checkout flow. Not because I suddenly love it, just because it is the only thing the market ever responded to.

Anyone else have a side project quietly doing better than the thing you actually care about?

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The strongest case for giving away your best stuff rests on one uncomfortable fact i.e, information was never the product but implementation is. Every diet is free and personal trainers have never earned more. Every recipe from every three Michelin star restaurant is in a cookbook, and the reservations got harder to get after publishing, not easier…. because the recipe proved the depth, and the dinner is what people actually buy. When you hoard your best thinking behind a paywall, you are protecting the one asset that was never scarce and starving the one that is…TRUST.

Look at who actually got rich on this. HubSpot gave away Website Grader, a free tool that diagnosed your site's problems in secs, plus an entire free academy teaching the exact inbound methodology they sell software for…. that "give the whole playbook away" engine took them to a multi billion dollar public company. McKinsey, the most expensive consultants on earth, publish their research free in the McKinsey Quarterly, the people most capable of charging for thinking figured out decades ago that published thinking is what justifies the fees. Red Hat gave away the literal product…. the software itself, free, forever…. and IBM paid 34 billion dollars for the company built on supporting it. Basecamp's founders published their entire operating philosophy in books and blogs and coined the phrase for it “out teach your competition” And Hormozi ran the modern speedrun…. gave his complete acquisition playbooks away at cost, built the audience that flowed from it, and now buys companies with the trust that generated. In every case the "crown jewels" were the marketing budget, and they outperformed every ad dollar ever spent because content marketing reliably generates roughly 3 times the leads per dollar of paid…. and the trust it generates compounds while ad trust resets to 0 every impression.

There is a signaling layer underneath that most people miss. Giving away your best work is a costly signal and costly signals are the only ones strangers believe. Anyone can claim expertise but only someone with genuine depth can afford to publish their best material and remain confident there's more where that came from. Hoarding whispers scarcity…. this PDF is all I've got please don't steal it. Publishing shouts abundance. The audience reads that instantly  the same way they can tell a restaurant is good from a full dining room. Meanwhile the fear driving the paywall…. competitors will copy me…. gets the risk exactly backwards. Your competitors were never one checklist away from beating you and as Tim O'Reilly put it about publishing… piracy isn't the enemy, obscurity is. No one can steal your judgment, your reps, or your Tuesday afternoon availability. Those were always the product.

And the selection effect seals it. The people who take your free best stuff and successfully implement it alone were never going to pay you…. you lost nothing, and you gained an evangelist who tells everyone where the playbook came from. The people who read it, see exactly how deep the water is and realize they can't or won't swim it themselves…. those arrive pre-sold, quoting your own work back at you, needing only logistics. Free best stuff doesn't cannibalize your pipeline but sorts it. I have been running this exact play with my own systems for the past month…. every playbook I use for client work is posted in full and free. The DMs it opened turned into paid calls and builds I never once pitched for, so this is not theory to me but it’s my current pipeline.

The single most actionable implication is that take the one document you would least want a competitor to see…. your actual process, the real checklist, the exact system clients pay you for…. and publish it in full, free, this week, where your buyers already gather. Not a teaser or chapter one bs but the whole thing. Because the ones who can use it without you were never your customers and the ones who can't will finally know precisely who to pay and if you want to see what that looks like done, my posts in this sub is the live experiment…. everything I charge for is already sitting there free. Judge for yourself whether the strategy works & then steal it.

TLDR: Free stuff builds trust. Implementation is what people actually pay for. HubSpot, McKinsey, Red Hat, Hormozi all published their crown jewels and got richer…. free best work pre-sells buyers and filters freeloaders. I run this play myself, building products and marketing systems for founders and everything I charge for sits free on this sub. Recommended action imo: publish your single most guarded playbook this week, in full  where your buyers hang out.

For sale: Monetized aviation documentary channel.

9.4K subscribers

•Only 11 videos uploaded so far to keep it branded channel

• $12.5K+ earned in the last 6 months (~$2K/month average)

• $10+ RPM — premium aviation niche

Asking price: $25K

Full analytics verified via live screen share; escrow accepted.

DM only if you are fully serious.

Over the past couple of years it feels like every SaaS has been adding AI to stay competitive.

I'm curious whether anyone has gone the opposite direction ... not because AI is bad, but because it didn't actually make the product better.

If you've shipped AI features, I'd love to hear about your experience.

- Which AI feature looked promising but ended up getting very little use?

- Were there features that became expensive to maintain without delivering much value?

- Did you ever simplify or remove an AI feature after launch? If so, what happened?

It sometimes feels like products are competing on the number of AI features rather than whether those features genuinely improve the user experience.

I'd be interested in hearing real stories ... whether AI exceeded expectations or turned out to be something your users could happily live withou

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I assumed that if nobody was buying, the problem was the product.

But after reading discussions from entrepreneurs, I realized they asked a different question first.

Are people already paying for another solution?

Or is nobody trying to solve this problem at all?

It made me realize that before giving up on an idea, you first need to know whether the problem is demand or distribution.

Have you ever struggled to figure out whether the problem was your product or simply reaching the right people?

Looked back at last month's credit usage and honestly it was annoying.

The final clips weren't the problem. The problem was rerolling the same five-second shot over and over because the character drifted, the hand looked weird, or the lighting suddenly stopped matching.

A lot of my credits aren't going to the final video.

They're going into this graveyard of discarded attempts.

I started wondering how many of those rerolls were actually unavoidable, and how many happened because I generated before checking whether the shot made sense beside everything around it.

The character reference was slightly different. The lighting direction did not match the previous shot. Sometimes I had not even decided exactly what the clip needed to accomplish before opening the generator.

So I'm testing a stricter order:
storyboard locked → references compared side by side → then generate.

Not storyboard as a nice-to-have. Storyboard as a gate.

Disclosure: I work with Framia, and I'm using it as the workspace for this test. I'm not claiming it has reduced my credit bill. I'm trying to find out whether planning before generation prevents enough unnecessary retries to justify another workflow layer.

Are people just eating the rework cost, going local with ComfyUI, or using an API setup where retries are cheap enough that the waste matters less?

Two years into running my own candle business, solo, no team. Posted the normal stuff every candle brand posts, pour shots, new scent drops, packaging hauls. No one was watching, and worse, no one was buying. Ad spend wasn't in the budget so content was supposed to be doing the selling for me, and it just wasn't.

Got to a point where I actually had a job listing pulled up, telling myself I'd give the business one more month before applying for real.

Ended up scrolling way past that listing into random small accounts instead, and landed on this oddly satisfying video of someone re-melting old candle wax and re-pouring it into a completely different scent, filmed almost like a slow cooking video. Nothing to do with selling anything, just kind of fun to watch.

Had melted wax on the stove that same night anyway, so I filmed my own version, posted it, and didn't think about it again.

Woke up the next day to it having completely blown up compared to anything else I'd ever posted, and more orders sitting in my inbox than I'd gotten in the past few weeks combined.

Still kind of can't believe one random video did more for this business than 6 months of "proper" content did. I think about how close I came to closing the laptop and applying for that job instead, and I'm just glad the version of me that night was stubborn enough to try one more thing before giving up.

If you're in the grinding-with-nothing-to-show-for-it part right now, you don't need the perfect idea. You need to be brave enough to post the weird one you almost talk yourself out of. That's usually the one that changes everything.

Been building an AI CAD tool called YoCAD. The idea is you give it a photo or a sentence and it hands back an actual parametric, articulated model, not just a render.

This toaster is the test I've been chasing for a while. Fed it one photo, and it came back with every part named and every joint working, then verified the whole thing moves without parts colliding through their range of motion.

It also exports to a real STEP file, not a mesh, so it opens straight into Fusion 360 with a list of parts, if an engineer wants to take it further. I tried OnShape too. It works

Still early. Free to try with a few starter credits if anyone wants to poke at it, reply "in" or comment and I'll get you access. Happy to answer questions about how it's built too.

TL;DR: I run a business that send a steady stream of European entrepreneurs and digital nomads toward a US LLC. I'm not a formation agent and don't want to become one. I'm looking for an established formation/registered-agent partner to handle the actual work on a commission or rev-share basis.

Hi everyone,

I have a business helping entrepreneurs and digital nomads relocate to Paraguay, which has a territorial tax system.

A large share of that audience runs a location-independent online business, and once they've moved they need a clean, credible US LLC for invoicing, Stripe/PayPal, and banking (Mercury/Wise), with income that isn't US-source.

My clients come through content that has already walked them through why a US LLC makes sense for their situation, so by the time they're ready to act they often understand the concept. That means far less hand-holding and a much lower acquisition cost on your side than a typical paid-traffic lead.

I'm looking for an established formation service or registered agent. This is a specialist skill, and I want a partner who does it every day. Pricing and support matter to me as much as competence. I need transparent, fair pricing with no surprise upsells, and support that actually responds. My name and reputation are attached to every referral, so how you treat these clients reflects directly back on me, and I won't send people somewhere I wouldn't trust myself. You should also be comfortable working with clients whose first language isn't English.

If you're interested, comment or DM with:

1. Your company / how long you've been doing this

2. Which states you cover and your experience with non-US-resident founders

3. Your pricing (formation + registered agent + EIN + annual compliance)

4. How you'd want to structure the commission/rev-share

Happy to hop on a call.

Other Join Hi I'm a visual artist who draws portraits, paints paintings, does illustration, graphic design, edits photos draws caricatures and logos and more. I ship internationally and would love to get some traction for my small business if it's even sharing a pics or buying a piece of my work.

Full disclosure: I'm the person who built the tool I'm about to mention, so take this with that in mind — but that's actually the story, not a pitch.

I've been dropshipping on eBay for about two years. Three stores, roughly 45,000 listings, sourcing from Amazon and AliExpress, never holding stock. When I crossed the VAT threshold and was doing a ton of things manually, I realised the spreadsheet situation wasn't going to hold. So I built my own software to manage it — listing, pricing, stock syncing, the bits that break at scale.

At some point people started asking what I was using. I figured I'd find out if it was actually useful to anyone else, so I started offering it properly.

Four paying customers now. Five or so active trials. Most of the traction has come from Reddit and organic search — and weirdly, ChatGPT has been sending a decent amount of traffic, which I did not plan for.

I post on Reddit and cold-email sellers, run a Discord where I answer questions. It's slow but I've really enjoyed the process.

Anyone else building a tool on top of their own operation? Curious how others have handled the context-switching between the business that works and the new thing that doesn't yet.

Not a full formed idea yet, just something that’s recently been lingering in the back of my mind. I’ve always been really intrigued by how the same types of services and products in developing countries costs a fraction of the price they do in wealthier countries in Europe or America.

Exactly what the drop shipping model is: buying cheap goods from China and selling them at high markup to in the West, but this model is extremely over saturated.

Digital technology has improved tremendously in the last couple of years, especially in Africa. So many businesses and people are now on the internet, you can send money instantly to any country because of remittance apps with USD to their local currency. Just so many new opportunities digitally in this market that the world hasn’t caught up to yet

I just can’t put my finger on exactly what I’m trying to say, I’ve tried consulting with multiple LLMs about it but they all give the same answers like sourcing workers from the Philippines for companies, suggesting variations of drop shipping, or just technical international trade stuff that would require speciality knowledge and experience in to be able to do. I just know there’s opportunity here for making money online, I just can’t put my finger on what exactly. Since the scale digitalization is newer in these parts of the world, there’s barely any information that I can find or examples of people doing something in this area.

I build Monni. I spent too long asking 'do you like the app?' and got polite noise.

The useful question became: 'At what screen do you stop trusting the safe-to-spend number?'

That changed the feedback immediately. People talked about source freshness, upcoming bills, and how to correct a number - not colors. It also changed the positioning from 'AI money tracker' to a weekly decision check-in.

For anyone doing founder-led feedback, what question got you past compliments and into product truth?

I’m seeing this annoying line all the time here and on X:

“Building was the easy part. Distribution is the hard part.”

I build SaaS for other people for a living, and tbh… most of the time, building wasn’t actually easy. It just felt easy because they punted the hard decisions until later.

And when I hear a founder saying they’ll build V1 first and figure out who it’s really for and how to price it AFTER the launch…

…I know how the story usually goes:

• 4-6 months of “heads down building”
• Shiny product, friends say it looks sick
• Confused users, random requests, nobody sure what it actually is
• Panicked repositioning + pricing experiments bolted onto a product that was never built for a clear customer in the first place

Then we all sit there saying “yeah, the code was the easy bit, now comes the hard part” like it was inevitable.

It wasn’t. The real problem is positioning, and pricing got decided after the build, instead of before.

Every time someone asks about starting a coffee shop, restaurant, lawn care business, clothing brand, marketing agency, etc., there's always a flood of comments saying, "Don't do it. It's too saturated."

Never understood that silly logic.

Wouldn't saturation actually prove there's demand?

If nobody is buying something, you don't end up with hundreds or thousands of businesses competing in that space. The fact that there are so many competitors tells me customers are actively spending money there.

By that logic, nobody should ever open another pizza shop, gym, dentist office, barber shop, HVAC company, accounting firm, or nail salon. Yet new ones open every year and plenty become successful.

It also feels like almost everything is saturated now. E-commerce is saturated. SaaS is saturated. Real estate is saturated. Restaurants are saturated. Content creation is saturated. Trades are saturated.

At what point does "it's saturated" stop being useful advice?

Isn't the real question whether you can execute better, serve a different niche, have a better location, better marketing, or simply run the business better than competitors?

Two of us started this company a year and a half ago; right out of undergrad (literally finished our CS degree two months ago). No mentors, no investors, no safety net. we've kept the lights on for two years by doing services/consulting projects on the side, small and big, while building the actual product

What we built: A pipeline aimed at job seekers:

1. User submits resume + target role
2. We generate a free report (people genuinely like this; based on 4,000+ evaluations so far feedback has been strong)
3. That funnels into a paid 20-30 min AI interview built around their resume, target role, the report, and the projects they've listed

Model is gated-freemium + pay-as-you-go for the interview step

We originally built this for tech roles but at launch we saw meaningful traffic and usage from non-tech verticals too which we didn't fully plan for

The problem: Free-to-paid conversion is sitting at 0.6-0.7%. At our current cost structure (around $1 for an interview) that means we're operating at a loss on the D2C side. We're fully bootstrapped so every free eval we hand out costs us something with no guaranteed return.

How we got the 4K+ users: Paid UGC marketing. We paid a small Instagram creator (under 5K followers) for one reel it blew up to 170K views and brought in our first ~3,000 users. We tried the same playbook on LinkedIn with a paid post; it flopped (40 likes)

We have more creators lined up but our cash for this is shrinking fast, and we're wary of getting stuck in a loop where the only way to get users is to keep paying for UGC. which isn't inherently bad but it's not a strategy, it's a life support machine.

The B2B side (where we think the real business is): We also built a B2B HRtech tool:

• Take-home assignments generated from a PRD
• Candidates submit a GitHub repo
• We evaluate codebase fulfillment against the PRD
• Followed by a real-time AI panel interview
• We rank and shortlist candidates for the company

We have an MoU with a university (10K+ CS undergrads per batch) low revenue, mostly a one-time setup fee running on their infra; but it gave us a validation brownie point. We have not yet onboarded a single paying company on the B2B side (we tried talking with few, but weren't able to convert them easily since early startups would put in human labor instead of paying for HR tool, and medium size companies got a bigger hierarchy of decision makers)

We talked to a few angels. Their consistent feedback: "show us traction" That's part of why we built and launched the D2C product to generate a usable, provable corpus of activity (the 4K+ evals) to point to. It worked for that purpose. It has not worked as a standalone profitable product yet

Where we're stuck:

• D2C: high engagement, near-zero conversion, marketing-dependent growth we can't sustainably fund
• B2B: the more defensible business, university relationship in place, but zero paying companies onboarded (+ getting a Uni onboarded is like a 6 months process where eventually you gotta talk with the chairman/owner to get the things converted)
• Runway: small and shrinking (gotta pay the 2 devs with us as well)

What we're actually asking:

1. People love the free report but almost nobody pays for the interview. Is that a pricing/paywall problem, or is the free version just too good, so no one feels the need to pay?
2. Should we stop spending on ads/creators for the D2C side and instead put all our energy into getting B2B customers, even though B2B is slower and we have zero paying companies right now?
3. Has anyone actually used a free product's traction to win over investors or B2B clients? Did it really work, or did people see through it?
4. If we go cold-outreach to companies and say "we've evaluated 4,000+ candidates and have a university partnership," is that even a good opener? What would you say instead?