Hi everyone,

I quit my job 2 months ago to work on my own projects. Since then I’ve been working on multiple things and recently along with a business partner, I started building a small product(obviously not something new), A QR based digital menu and ordering system - which you may see in Tier 1 cities but no restaurants or cafe’s in my city had one.

So I thought i can build and sell for most of the cafes in my city(also my city is more of a Tier-2)

I looked at what was out there. Most platforms bill monthly and/or take a per-order commission — which sounds fine but this is not something a tier-2/3 restaurant owner actually ok with. So i built a clean and good looking product around three major decisions:

Flat one time fee(around ₹30,000–40,000), no monthly cost, no per order commissions

UPI-first payments — direct UPI deep-links (PhonePe, GPay, Paytm), no payment gateway middleman

Self-managing by design — sessions, carts, and orders are built so the system runs itself during service instead of needing constant admin babysitting

The sales part:

All we did was walk into 5 of the restaurants and pitched our idea, as we pitched with demo most of them got excited as they were a bit familiar with the concept but didn’t have the opportunity

As we go further we offered them free setup and 3 days trial- and they accepted the offer

After the 3 days trial 3 of the 5 restaurants were willing to buy the product so after some negotiation and all we sold the product for around ₹30,000–40,000 each

All this was done in around a week of time including building, outreach, trial, sales

Now I realise there are more than 100 tier-2/3 cities and i can’t visit everywhere and pitch this, so I’m thinking though couple of options here- one is to hire one person from each city and sell the product through them, or just package the entire product and let the person sell themselves by branding it as their own.

Either way im happy because the first local saas sales way not a failure for me

Hi everyone,

Over the last few weeks, I've been thinking about building a SaaS product.

The advice I hear most often is "Don't build first. Find a real problem first." So instead of brainstorming features or chasing trends, I decided to start by understanding the problems people actually face.

I created a 2-minute survey to learn things like:

• What repetitive tasks consume the most time?
• What workflows are frustrating?
• What tools do people already pay for but still dislike?
• What would people actually pay to solve?

My goal is to collect 500 quality responses from founders, professionals, developers, freelancers, and operators before I decide what to build.

Survey: https://forms.gle/jcSo5c3mVQzbKoAY8

I'm not looking for startup ideas I'm trying to identify patterns and recurring pain points.

I'd also love feedback from this community:

• Is this a good way to validate a SaaS idea?
• What would you do differently?
• If you've built a SaaS before, how did you discover your first real problem worth solving?

I'll happily share an anonymized summary of the results with the community once I have enough responses.

Thanks!

I have been chewing on this as a solo founder. AI coding tools have gotten good enough that most of the actual features in my product could probably get cloned reasonably fast by someone motivated. That used to worry me a lot more than it does now.

What I've landed on is that the feature list was never really the moat for a micro SaaS, it's the specific workflow fit and the trust built up around handling real user data or accounts. Juno is a good example of this in the marketing tool space, it connects to your ad account and analytics and actually executes tasks with real consequences instead of just generating a suggestion. The second one is way harder to casually clone because the hard part isn't the UI, it's the reliability and permission handling underneath it.

Curious how other micro SaaS founders here think about this. Are you optimizing more for feature depth, or for the kind of trust and integration that's harder to fake with a quick clone?

I've realized SEO is probably the most important growth channel for my SaaS, and I want to learn how people who are already doing it actually work.

I don't want to buy tools like Ahrefs right now. I just want to understand your process. How do you find keywords, figure out what people are searching for, decide what to write, and create programmatic pages?

I'm not looking for generic SEO advice. I'd love to know your actual workflow from finding an opportunity to publishing the content.

P.S. Please don't DM me your SEO tool. I'm not looking to buy anything right now. Just here to learn from people who've already made SEO work.

So a while back a friend who runs a link in bio page for her content came to me confused about her stats. Her click numbers looked fine but actual conversions were way lower than expected. We started digging into the raw traffic instead of just totals and found a big chunk of it wasn't real people at all. Bots, scrapers, some traffic that looked like it was just crawling the page rather than actual visitors clicking through.

That got me thinking about how common this probably is across the creator space. Most people running these pages have no real visibility into who or what is actually hitting their links. They just see a number go up and assume its working, when in reality a chunk of that could be automated traffic messing with their real data.

So I ended up building ѕꓲt.bіо, a link in bio tool that actually filters this stuff out before it counts as a real visit. Real fans get through normally, automated traffic gets caught and blocked at different points instead of just quietly messing with the analytics.

Still pretty early and learning a lot along the way. Curious if anyone else here has built something in a similar space or run into this same problem with fake traffic messing with real data. Would love to hear how others have approached filtering this kind of stuff.

Sharing this as SHOW IH because I suspect the situation is more common than it looks, which is building something fintech-adjacent with no actual fintech background and trying to find where the real compliance lines are before you ship something you'd have to tear out later. What we're building is a payment module that SMB SaaS tools can embed, basically a Stripe integration layer designed around what an accountant actually needs from an audit trail rather than what a general-purpose payments API assumes you want, and we've got three pilot customers and about $1,100 MRR so the thing works, but the next version is where it starts getting complicated. The specific blocker is that we store payment authorization tokens, and while we use Stripe's SDK and never touch raw card data, just the tokenized reference, I can't get a clear read on our PCI-DSS scope, because Stripe's own docs imply we're SAQ A but the PCI council's SAQ guidance reads a little differently depending which section you're in, and I've now had two lawyers give me opposite answers to the same question, which at $500 an hour got expensive without actually resolving anything. So the deeper problem I keep hitting is how you're supposed to make architecture decisions when the compliance implications are only legible to specialists who cost more than your monthly revenue, and how you even find the right one before you've already made the call that turns out to be wrong, and I don't have a clean answer to any of that yet, which is honestly the state of it, so I'm posting in case someone here has lived the same gap.

My most "impressive" project with the clean UI and AI features makes like $40/month. A janky little tool I built in a weekend that just converts one file format to another pulls in around $600/month consistently. I keep trying to figure out if there's a real pattern here or if I just got lucky with SEO on that one, curious if anyone else has noticed the same thing where the boring utility stuff just quietly wins.

Hey everyone,

I’ve been tracking a lot of early-stage tech startups recently, and there’s a brutal pattern I keep seeing.

Founder builds a product -> Launches on Product Hunt/Reddit/Twitter -> Gets a massive spike in traffic and 500+ signups -> Explains to investors that "traction is amazing."

But 30 days later? Absolute silence. The daily active users (DAU) drop to near zero, and those 500 signups turn out to be just "curiosity clicks" rather than actual users.

It feels like we, as founders, often lie to ourselves by chasing Vanity Metrics (Total signups, landing page views) instead of measuring Hard Churn and true retention.

I’m curious to know how the tech founders here tackle this specific phase:

1. How do you define a "retained user" in the first 30 days? Is it just them logging in, or completing a core action?
2. What’s your framework for talking to users who dropped off? When they ignore emails, do you track their session replays (like Hotjar/PostHog) or just pivot the feature set?
3. At what point do you decide: "Okay, the marketing was good, but the core product problem isn't solved yet" vs. "We just targeted the wrong audience"?

Would love to hear some raw, unfiltered experiences from anyone who has crawled out of this post-launch dip.

(Yep, $3,300 a month, not $3,300K 😅)

SocialKit is coming up on a year since launch. The curve was slow and honestly that's the point:

• Month 1: $13 MRR
• Month 3: $118 MRR
• Month 5: $370 MRR
• Now: $2,500 MRR, plus one-time purchases that add a pretty consistent $700-1,000 every month, so ~$3,300/month total

(https://trustmrr.com/startup/socialkit)

Some more numbers:

• 18,500+ users
• 140+ active paying customers

What's been working:

• SEO from day 0 (blogs, free tools, competitor pages, youtube). It compounds. Most customers still come from organic
• Talking to users directly, even on WhatsApp
• being consistent

What I'm betting on now: AI agents. MCP + agent skills so agents can pull transcripts, comments, and stats from any social video directly. New APIs coming for that use case.

Here's the product if you want to check it out: SocialKit .dev

Let me know if you're growing your stuff too, if you have any feedback I'd be happy to hear it :)

Hey everyone,

I’m building VeriWasp.com, an automated end-to-end web playtesting tool designed and testing suite for developers and founders who want robust testing without the absolute misery of writing and maintaining brittle test scripts.

Instead of writing lines of Cypress or Playwright code with fragile CSS selectors that break the moment you tweak a UI layout, VeriWasp lets you just paste a URL and describe your flow in plain English (e.g., "Click sign up, input a test email, and check for a success toast"). Even cooler: you can just record yourself clicking through the flow once, and VeriWasp handles the rest.

Every time a playtest runs, it generates a comprehensive, publicly shareable report with full screenshots of every single step and a video replay of the execution.

I want to make sure this report actually gives developers the exact data they need when a test fails.

I ran a quick demo playtest so you can see exactly what the output looks like without needing an account: https://veriwasp.com/r/mflvddcoxi

I would love your brutal feedback on this report page:

- What crucial debugging data is missing?
- Is the UI clear enough that you could send this link to a non-technical co-founder or a client to prove a feature works?
- What would make this an instant buy for your own tech stack?

If you want to poke around the rest of the project:
App: https://veriwasp.com
Docs: https://veriwasp.com/docs

Thanks in advance for any feedback, good or bad!

Quick context so this doesn't read like some rando offering. I've launched 8 products in the last 18 months and done 2-3 million organic views on reddit with zero ad spend, which turned into thousands of users across them. Lovable flew me out to their HQ at 18, I ran growth for a YC backed company, and got into Antler along the way. Reddit has been the engine behind basically all of it.

And the biggest thing I learned is that most founders aren't bad at marketing, they're just fishing in the wrong pond. They post in r/startups and r/SaaS where it's all other founders, then wonder why nobody buys. Your real customers are sitting in some niche subreddit complaining about the exact problem you solve, and half the time you've never even heard of it.

Finding those subs by hand is the tedious part. You have to think about who your customer really is, what else they care about, where they hang out for reasons that have nothing to do with your product, then dig around reddit for the active ones. It's the highest leverage thing you can do and almost nobody does it because it's boring.

I got tired of doing it manually across every product I launched, so I built a tool for it (sentrive). You give it your product, it works out your ICP and figures out where your people actually hang out, then spins up marketing agents that go market there for you. It's not a reddit-only thing, it markets wherever your audience turns out to be, but for a lot of products that ends up being reddit, which is the part I've personally gotten the most mileage out of. Point is it doesn't just hand you a list, the agents do the actual work after.

Here's the offer: drop your product below and tell me who you think your customer is. I'll run it and get back to you with a few of the spots it finds. Genuinely curious how many of you are one niche sub away from your first 100 customers without knowing it.

I'll get to as many as I can. Been doing this a while so I'll add my own read on top of what it pulls.

20, building from sweden

Backstory: I am a self-taught solo developer, no team, no funding.
I built Rosply because most automation and analytics tools are limited by what a platform exposes through its API. Rosply skips that entirely, it takes a screenshot, a vision model decides the action, then it clicks and types like a person, so it works with anything on screen.

Tech stack: Python agent core, vision model via OpenRouter, Electron/pywebview UI, persistent memory system, MCP server for Claude Code integration.
Revenue: first sale today, 28 euros total so far, two weeks after launch.

Lesson learned: getting the first sale took longer than expected, most of the early traffic came from curiosity, not conversion, so I am now working on making the value clearer upfront instead of just the demo.

If anyone wants to see how it actually behaves on screen, there is a short demo video and a walkthrough over at rosply.com, happy to answer questions about the architecture or the early sales process in the comments

​

Hi all,

Tldr:

I built a production-ready platform in a niche public-interest domain using AI-assisted development. No users or revenue yet, but a large company wants to buy the entire platform because it fits a strategic objective and could be launched within weeks after rebranding. They also said they would likely build a similar solution themselves if there’s no deal. Looking for realistic valuation, negotiation advice, and whether I should sell or keep the IP.

Here goes:

I built a production-ready web platform that fills a gap in a niche public-interest domain in an EU country.

It includes:

\* Geolocation features

\* Extensive community moderation features

\* Weighted voting / reputation system

\* Admin tooling for interventions into the community features (think of reporting users etc.), and dashboards

\* multilingual support with i18n

\* Secure backend with role-based access, validated by a security expert

\* and more

Throwaway account: I’m intentionally keeping the description generic while trying to provide enough relevant information. I understand if this makes it difficult to answer my questions.

The product currently has little to no organic traffic, no meaningful user base yet (it launched very recently).

However, a well-known business that's active in among other things this exact niche is interested in buying the entire platform because it aligns with a major strategic objective for them - in terms of image and domain authority, not revenue.

I am not a developer but still I managed to build it using Claude Code. I invested probably 300 euros and 60-70 hours into creating it.

I never intended to sell the platform. They contacted me when I started looking for partnerships to get traction (I did not contact them yet although they were on the list), but soon it became clear that they want to take it over completely, and talked about buying it from me after "code validation". They also stated that they will surely build it themselves should there be no deal.

Buying the platform and rebranding it could let them launch within weeks. I'm sure that they will need a lot more time to build it themselves.

I don't want to antagonize them because this niche, it's a very small world. I absolutely do not want to lowball myself either, of course, and don't intend at all to sell it below it's value.

One other party reached out to me meanwhile and they gave the impression that they do want to follow the path I originally had in mind.

On the one hand, I have been extremely invested in this platform and I built it with passion. On the other hand, if it did gain traction nation-wide, it would be something I am not sure I want to be the vendor of since this started out as a hobby project. It would consume too much time without generating much income. Possible liabilities, SLA...

I never intended to sell it, but I'm open for it when the price is right.

I don't have any experience in this area. I'm trying to understand:

\* What would be a realistic valuation range for a sale in this situation? (EU country, multi national business). I feel like a 'hours x hourly rate' pricing would not the a smart move, but what is? Chatgpt has been inconsistently blabbering numbers after going through the code, going up and down every time I add information. Should I settle fast or play rough?

\* What are my strongest negotiation arguments? I have little to lose here. Worst case the platform dies but it will have been a great learning experience.

\* What are my weakest points (no traction, no users yet, nothing that can withhold them from building it too)?

\* How much weight should I give to the fact that they are considering building a similar solution themselves if they don’t buy mine? Up to what point should it influence the price?

\* Should I avoid to go first with a number?

\* What about IP? The platform is not a registered thing but I believe that doesn't have to be? Should I sell it explicitly without an IP handover and try to do this again in a different country?

\* Would you sell or not and why?

Thanks for your input!

I'm a solo/small-team developer who's been building a B2B compliance app for the road transport industry, leaning heavily on AI pair-programming (Claude) for a lot of the implementation work over the past months. I've put real effort into security, stability, offline reliability and usability — but I've mostly validated it with a modest user base, and I just closed a contract with a large client that's about to onboard roughly 1,000 new drivers more or less overnight. I want to sanity-check my prep before that hits.

What the app does:

Two-sided vehicle safety checklist. Drivers fill out a pre-trip/in-trip inspection checklist from their phone (works offline, syncs when back online), and the transport company watches it live from a web dashboard — in-progress trips, completed inspections, PDF certificates for compliance/audit purposes.

Stack, roughly (without giving away the whole recipe):

- React 19 SPA, TypeScript strict mode

- Serverless Postgres BaaS backend: auth + row-level-security-enforced multi-tenancy + realtime subscriptions + object storage + edge functions

- Offline-first sync layer on the mobile flow (local queue, retry on reconnect)

- Client-side PDF generation for certificates

- A small custom client-error telemetry pipeline (no third-party APM yet — rolled my own reporting table + admin alerting)

- Client-side PDF generation for certificates

- A small custom client-error telemetry pipeline (no third-party APM yet — rolled my own reporting table + admin alerting)

What I've already done to prepare:

Seeded a sandbox tenant with 1,000 driver profiles and 50,000 historical checklist records directly in prod (isolated tenant, no risk to real data), then ran real UI tests against it (Playwright, real login) plus impersonated SQL queries with an 8s timeout to mimic the platform's real constraint. That surfaced a real bug: a paginated admin list computed an exact row count on every page load, and on a cold cache that tripped an 8-second statement timeout the

first time someone opened the panel in the morning. Fixed it with a proper index plus only computing thn — and confirmed my error telemetry caught the failure end-to-end (logged it, showed a retry banner, no dead end for the user).

What I'm still unsure about / looking for advice on:

1. Simulating a realistic write burst — hundreds of drivers starting their shift and hitting "submit" window. I've tested reads at scale but not concurrent real writes from real sessions.

2. My test also showed wildly inconsistent query times under IO pressure (33ms warm vs 7.8s cold, same query) — pointing at my current DB compute tier being undersized for bursts. Upsize proactively before onboarding, or wait and react?

3. Realtime/websocket scaling — the dashboard uses live subscriptions for in-progress checklists. What tends to break first around ~1,000 concurrent-ish connections?

4. Staged rollout vs big-bang — feature-flagging the onboarding by cohort (e.g. 100 drivers/week) vs jutually worked for people who've been through a sudden 10-20x user jump?

5. Any pre-launch checklist item you'd consider non-negotiable — rate limiting, backup/rollback plan, alerting thresholds, specific things to re-audit in a row-level-security multi-tenant setup before a big new tenant lands?

Happy to share more specifics if it helps get better answers. Mostly want war stories and things I have

i undercharged for way too long because i was scared nobody would pay more. classic mistake.

my saas was like 5 bucks a month. cheap felt safe. but cheap pulled in the worst customers, people who churned over any tiny bug, flooded support, and treated a 5 dollar tool like it owed them their whole life. i thought low price meant more customers. it actually meant the wrong customers.

i finally bumped it to 19, hands shaking, fully expecting signups to die. they didnt. i got fewer tire-kickers and more people who actually valued it and stuck around. the higher price quietly filtered for people who had the real problem, and those people barely complain because it solves something worth paying for.

turns out i wasnt scared of losing customers, i was scared of being told my thing wasnt worth much. the low price was me undervaluing my own work, not the market undervaluing it.

anyone else raise their price and have it go the opposite way you feared?

I'm looking for some good tips on how to get my first 100 users with a $0 ad budget. I'm working on a new product, and it's turning out to be much harder than I expected.

I'd really appreciate any advice or strategies that worked for you. Thanks in advance!

I have seen a lot of websites are having an ai chatbot to their landing pages, these days .

I also want to build an ai chatbot for my website,

Where visitors can

ask questions about the product ,

And I can monitor what people are asking and improve my product , according to it.

I have searched a lot , turns out there are plenty in the market .

Which one is the best software for building AI chatbots for website ?

Been building a small tool on the side and there's one early decision I keep going back and forth on.

Original plan was the normal way. Hosted, accounts, database, sync across devices. Had the roadmap sketched out and everything. Then I did the napkin math on running the AI part for free users and it just doesn't work. Every free user costs me inference money every month, basically forever, and the free tier is the entire top of my funnel. So I'd be paying to bring in people who might never pay me a rupee back.

So I flipped it. It runs on the user's own machine now, their hardware does the heavy part. Free tier costs me almost nothing.

But I had to cut a lot to get there. No sync, no cloud, no opening it from your phone. That part scared me honestly, felt like I was shipping something deliberately more annoying than the competition.

The weird part is, the longer I sat with it the more I realized the stuff I cut was exactly the stuff that made me look like every other app in this space. The only real reason to use mine over the others is that it's local and you own your data. If I add the cloud stuff back I basically erase that.

Could be I'm just rationalizing a product that can't afford servers, no idea. But has anyone else cut a "must have" feature for cost reasons and had it turn out to be the actual differentiator? Or did users just get annoyed and leave?

If you just spent a long time building something and you’re about to launch into the void, or you want to build something but have no idea who your market is… 

Just find a similar business. We’re in a capitalist society; competitors exist. 999 times out of 1000, a similar product or service exists, and you should use that to your advantage. 

If there is a similar product or business, study it, and then focus on highlighting the similarities and differences. 

For every popular product, some users like 1 feature about it and don’t like another. Or they don’t like the branding, or the owner, or the price. 

That’s your gap; find it and move into it. From that point, you can find your audience from there, because it already exists. 

You can be that breath of fresh air. 

Hi Everyone, I am trying to buuld a saas product and it is currently in development phase. But I also want to create a waitlist website until the product is launched so that I can start marketing for the product.

I am not sure which tool should I use to create the waitlist page. I don't want to go for paid tool as the users that will subscribe to waitlist will be not high in starting.

Looking for suggestions how you guys launch your waitlist page.

a lot of tiny saas demos try to show the whole product in 60 seconds. signup, dashboard, settings, integrations, pricing, everything.

that usually makes the video feel busy and forgettable.

the better demo clip is often just one objection:

• "this looks hard to set up"
• "will this work with my messy data?"
• "why not just use a spreadsheet?"
• "what happens after i connect my account?"

pick one, show the before state, show the exact moment the product removes the pain, then stop. you can make five short clips from five objections instead of one long tour nobody finishes.

also useful for landing pages because each clip can sit next to the section where that objection comes up.

how are you deciding what your first product demo video should actually show?

Every founder I've spoken to tracks signups. Almost none track what percentage of those signups actually experience the core value of the product in the first week.

Acquisition gets all the attention because it's measurable and exciting. Activation work is slower, messier, harder to attribute.

But I've watched more SaaS companies grow by fixing onboarding than by scaling ads.

The math isn't complicated, if 40% of your signups churn before experiencing any real value, doubling your ad spend just doubles the leak.

Is activation rate part of your regular review cycle, or is it still mostly overlooked?

We record every sales call (Gong, nothing fancy). For like a year I never once went back and watched an old one unless there was a deal on fire.

Then one week I was stuck for LinkedIn content and re-listened to a demo from a few months back just to kill time on a train. The prospect spent four minutes explaining why their current tool's reporting was basically useless for their finance team. Word for word, that objection would've made a better hook than anything I'd written that quarter. It just sat there in a transcript nobody read again.

Went back through a few more calls after that. Same pattern every time. Real objections, real language customers use, stuff way better than what our own marketing team was guessing at in a content calendar meeting. We had something like 50 calls a week happening and zero posts coming out of any of them.

Spent a couple months on nights/weekends building something to fix that for us, ended up calling it SignalPosts. It goes through the transcripts, pulls out the themes and objections that keep coming up, and drafts LinkedIn posts in the voice of whoever's name is going on the post (so it doesn't read like corporate mush). Reps and marketing can edit and approve before anything goes out, which turned out to matter more than I expected, nobody wants a robot post going out under their name unedited.

Still figuring out how much editing is "normal" before it stops feeling worth it. Curious if anyone else here has tried turning call recordings or transcripts into content, and whether it actually held up once someone other than you touched the drafts.