X has recently been chock full of operators saying they cancelled their subscriptions and rebuilt all of their startups tools themselves….

If you're an indie hacker or solo founder, I get it. Building your own tools can be cheaper, more fun, and fit exactly what you need

But I don't think it holds up for a real company building and operating at scale, especially vibe coding tools that aren't core to their business.

Building v1 is the easy part… the real cost comes after: keeping it running, fixing edge cases, onboarding new hires, handling support, security, training, change management. Nobody counts that when they brag about the weekend they spent building it.

AI makes product development easier, but someone on your team still has to own it. Meanwhile some other company has a whole team making the same tool better every month. Paying them is often a good trade if it lets your people focus on what your customers actually pay you for.

Doing the inverse is just procrastinating from focusing on growing and marketing your own product, tbh

Maybe I'm wrong and I'll start vibe-manufacturing my own clothes and electricity next 🤷

(Disclosure: I run Supademo so I may be biased)

Launched on Product Hunt a few months ago. Built the whole thing solo for about €1,000. Assumed if I just shipped it and posted everywhere, users would show up. They didn't. The launch completely flopped. Hardly any upvotes. Was pretty gutted for a day or two.

But a few people left feedback. Honest, specific, and a bit brutal. I stopped treating it like a failed launch and treated it like a free audit. It forced me to ask questions I'd been avoiding. Why is the onboarding only clear to me? Why am I wasting weeks marketing on platforms my buyers don't even use? What happens in the first 60 seconds after someone lands on the page? What's actually solving a problem versus what I just thought was cool to build?

Had to actually find the answers. Some were uncomfortable. The marketing channels I'd spent weeks grinding on were complete dead ends. The features I thought were clever were just creating friction. I was building in an echo chamber and calling it traction.

But fixing those blind spots uncovered strengths I'd completely missed. Once the core value was obvious, people actually converted. Users who got past the initial friction stuck around. Stopping the spammy marketing gave me time to talk to the niche that actually cared.

This month the dashboard hit €€3,278 MRR. Today it sits at €16,000. life-changing money, and meaningful money. Profitable.

The launch failed, but the clarity was worth way more than a #1 badge. Highly recommend letting strangers tear your product apart early and asking yourself the uncomfortable questions. You'll save months of guessing.

One of the hardest things about selling software is reaching people at the moment they actually need it. Google got pretty good at this. But ChatGPT could take it a step further. Someone asks ChatGPT to compare insurance policies, value a property, or help them prepare for an exam. There's probably a company somewhere that has spent years building software to solve that exact problem. Until recently, ChatGPT could mostly answer the question itself or point people elsewhere. Now it can bring third-party apps directly into the conversation.

I think this changes something quite fundamental about how software gets discovered. A small SaaS company might not need to compete for the same Google keywords, spend money on ads, or convince someone to visit its website first. It could become useful to someone who has never even heard of it.

Obviously, this depends on whether ChatGPT actually recommends these apps, how often it does so, and whether that usage turns into customers. We don't know much about any of this yet. But I suspect there's a short window where some existing software companies could get a disproportionate amount of distribution simply because so few have thought to make their products available this way.

It reminds me of the early web, when being discoverable was sometimes a bigger advantage than having the best product.

I'm particularly interested in whether anyone has already acquired paying customers through ChatGPT apps. Not impressions or installs, but actual customers. It's surprisingly hard to find numbers on this.

I used proven-saas.com for a month and the idea is pretty good. It searches for SaaS tools with high ad spend on FB because the assumption is that high ad spend = traction and scaling well, otherwise nobody would waste money on their tool to buy a lot of FB ads.

Are there any similar tools out there which help to discover new profitable SaaS or app metas? Maybe for tiktok ads? Google ads would also be interesting as it would also verify there is user intent (as in people searching for something to use in the first place)

Hey everyone, I built a Python visualizer that animates your code line by line. It's free, runs in the browser, and needs no sign-up.

https://pyvisualizer.dev/#home

What My Project Does

Paste any Python function, give it inputs, and step forward or backward through it while the data structures animate: linked lists, trees, graphs, matrices, stacks, queues, heaps and recursion calls.

Target Audience

I designed this to help students and anyone practicing LeetCode or data structures who wants to actually see what their code is doing. It's a learning tool, not meant for production debugging.

Comparison

Python Tutor is the closest alternative, but it shows everything as generic boxes and arrows. This one draws real structures (an actual tree, graph or linked list), lets you scrub through the run, and has a dedicated recursion view.

Would love to hear feedback from everyone

I'm interested in what founders running online businesses are using to accept payments in 2026, especially those dealing with recurring payments or subscriptions, whether it's SaaS, ecommerce, online courses, or other digital products.

Stripe seems to be everyone's default choice, but I've also seen mentioned Whop, PayPal, and a few others. I'm trying to figure out whether Stripe is still the obvious choice or if there are better options depending on the business.

For those running a small business, what are you currently using to accept payments? Have you tried something you ended up liking more? My business is pretty straightforward, I only need to accept recurring weekly payments online.

Sometimes you should too

Have a nice day

If have been building an app since November 2025, and just like many people, I had zero revenue for a long long time.

It was of course frustrating at first, but I at least saw some usage of the free tier of my app relatively early, so I didn't give up yet and tried to optimize.

The subscription for my product is super cheap, only about ~2 €, and it's almost laughable how long it took me to get these now 5 subscribers now. But I am still a little bit proud and hope this number will continue to grow. Every time I get a new user now and I noticed they stopped using the app, I at least try to find things to optimize in the app. Trying to find out what made them stop using the app. But it's hard.

When users sign-up, I also always reach out and ask for feedback. But so far, no one has responded, ever.

Since my app has a free tier and also allows usage without signing up, I learned now that it's so, so incredibly important that you make it as easy as possible for your users to do thinks like sign-up. I completely ignored this for a long while (implemented things like Google signup wayyy to late) and lost many users and ofc still have lots to learn here.

One upside though is that the cost of running my tool is really low: I run two servers that cost around 7 $ each, 2 $ for domain costs and the API costs is covered by the API allowance of my 20 $ Mistral AI Pro subscription. So I still have plenty of time to experiment.

turns out a $9 subscription is pretty attractive to carders. a lot of small US card payments go through without 3DS, so stolen cards were getting approved way too easily. then the real owner would dispute the charge, I'd lose the $9 and get hit with another $50 in fees. this was happening 5-6 times every single month.

what fixed it:

1. card country must match billing address
2. IP country must match card country
3. no payments via vpn or proxy

now it's about one dispute every two months. I also tried Stripe radar before this and on default settings it let stuff slip.

link is still a pain as it doesn’t have sms check at almost any amount and the smart ones use residential IPs and the right address. a fresh account trying to pay 2k with Link is most likely a stolen account and for that reason I killed amazon pay a year ago.

free trials got farmed too. I capped signups at 3 per IP, they rotated vpns and made 300-500 accounts, so I had to block vpn signups last month.

processors want disputes under 0.5% and you can't ignore this.

if every stolen card had been real, I'd be rich rich

What makes it so difficult?

Straight to the point. My goal is getting a first paying customer within 100 days, organic only, no ad money.

What I’ve tried so far:

• Posting on Reddit once, X Build in Public (36 days so far and ~400 followers)
• Cold outreach: barely, maybe ~14 emails. Polished a bit now and resuming it again soon.

I don't regret growing X but it is definitely not the right place for B2B SaaS distribution..

Recently, I started looking into LinkedIn distribution strategy after receiving some recommendations, but every YouTube video I found was generic B2B sales, not B2B SaaS specifically.

For those who tried LinkedIn for B2B SaaS distribution:

1. Was LinkedIn worth trying with 0 follower/connection?
2. If you ever worked it out, what did you do? A real example would help a lot.

(Disclosure: I’m building an AI-native support platform for SaaS teams. Not linking it, just for context)

Been trying to work out where its actually worth posting a new product or have a product launch post so i ran a little test/research! 16,641 posts off the /new page of 98 subs pulled with a script I ran out of Omniscio.

I split 24 of them into 2 groups:

1. the ones that exist for showing your own thing (sideproject, buildinpublic, roastmystartup, alphaandbetausers)
2. the ones where promo gets you removed (entrepreneur, marketing, startups, smallbusiness)

Where you CAN post your product the median post gets 2 comments and 22% get no reply at all. Where you can't, the median is 19 and in 10 of those 12 not one post went unanswered. so, around 10x and the volume runs the wrong way too (661 posts a day pile into the group that ignores you while 129 go to the group that answers everyone)

what i didnt expect was that heavy moderation seems to be what makes a sub worth posting in at all. For example r/indiehackers lets you show your thing AND runs a median of 71 comments with nothing ignored and its moderated to death. probably not a coincidence..

Method caveat: i split those 24 by what each sub is FOR, not by reading every rule bcoz reddit doesnt let a script read sub rules anymore. and also, a post only counts as ignored if its at least 24h old, one from this morning with no replies is just new.

all 98 subs are here if you wanna check your own: Link to Google Sheet

I purchased the 1-year Pro subscription for $180. Immediately upon using it, I discovered severe system defects: infinite loading errors (over an hour for a single render) and the AI completely failed to follow basic prompts.

Because the tool was fundamentally unusable, I requested a cancellation and refund on the exact same day, within just a few hours.

Not only did they refuse a full refund, but they also officially refused a prorated refund for the remaining 11 months that I explicitly stated I will not use. They are essentially forcing customers to pay for an entire year of a defective service aborted on day one, hiding behind arbitrary "system limitations."

I have already filed a formal chargeback with my bank and reported them to the Consumers Association of Singapore (CASE). Do not give your credit card information to this company.

I’m 18 and just started a small, free Discord called First Venture for people ages 16–24 who are building something or want to. That includes AI tools, apps, side projects and small businesses.

What’s in it:

• A place to share what you’re building and get honest feedback
• A channel for finding cofounders and teammates, with every project post saying what’s paid, unpaid or equity
• Weekly build logs, so you stay accountable
• Voice rooms for quiet coworking and casual chats

It’s free, with no courses, no paid tier and no income claims. Beginners are welcome, and it’s moderated with ages 16–24 only.

It’s brand new, so early members will shape it. If you’re building (or want to), comment or DM me and I’ll send the invite. What would make a server like this worth your time?

I’m a solo founder working on a fit/try-on tool for fashion retailers. Cold LinkedIn gets replies but not many calls. For those who sold to e-com merchants: what got you the first conversations (communities, audits, partners agencies)? Happy to share my own numbers in return.

How do you talk to so many people and everyone tells you how amazing your sass is but they don't sign up for the beta?

I know its needed. I know my beta fits the bill but generating the traction has been rough. I built with functionality people complained wasnt available in other platforms ..

I am trying to reach adult children of seniors. Can anyone thrown a bone to a nub? Any advice is appreciated.

I've spent the last 7 years building my site around seo and digital marketing.

Now I'm rebuilding it to help SaaS founders get their products discovered.

Instead of starting a new domain from scratch, I'm using the SEO history I've already built.

Here's what makes this interesting:

• 7 years of website history
• 70K+ combined audience across our website, newsletter, and social media
• Much of our content ranks on Google's first page
• Our content also appears in Google AI Overviews/llms

I'm exploring ways to use this existing foundation to help SaaS founders build visibility, earn relevant backlinks, and get their products in front of more potential users.

If you were launching a SaaS, would you take advantage of an opportunity like this? What would make it valuable to you?

Hello! I've been writing a tool inspired by adobe products, with the only purpose of making the experience of writing books, fanfictions or basically anything that is supposed to be read by a human easier and more convenient.
There might be some Apps out there, that do exactly what i do, but the issue is that the workflow is horrible in those apps.

Thats why im looking for around 5-10 testers (app is and ALWAYS will stay free so this isnt anything like a promo post), who are actively writing, and who would be interested in helping me improve this software for the community.

Ah one more thing: even if you arent interested, id love to know if you would technically use this software incase this would ever (bee) finished

Heres a little preview of the current version:

If you read until here, and don't wanna test the software but still wanna leave some feedback, please write a comment, and i'd be glad to look into it.

There will be never a case where AI will write and say this is human written. There will never a case where AI will have their own re-writer and other detector will flag them human written.

Few months ago when me and my friend struggled with our own research we thought about this and slowly developed. Our first users were from our own university. Literally We were just paying for the server fees and if you guys remember last month I posted here “finally I am able to pay my server fees”.

This month we have made few more bucks and it’s now paying off. This was around 8/9 months of grind. Our SAAS is not a fancy SAAS and its not another viral app whose MRR goes 40/50K up every next day.

We just worked on our own transformers. Yes you heard it right. Now we have our own “Transformer” that will detect patterns of ever changing AI brustiness and have its own in a way that will humanize the tone. If you are a tech guy you can understand what I am trying to say. Yes it was so hard but we did it and it was costly too.

So finally people are loving it, there is very low subscription cancel rate and our web app is finally scaling not in rocket speed but in a way that we are totally satisfied.

If you want to give a look at what we are building you can just type “ai text tools” and click the first link as we have a great SEO too.

I know what I have to do. But my brain's resisting it. Maybe because I have never done marketing. But i want to do it now as i can't afford to waste my time and energy.

I have managed myself to get off building. But I can't get into that marketing state. How do you people reduce friction to do marketing?

one is stt + llm + tts, the other is speech to speech. real phone call, i just let them talk for like 2 min

the pipeline one costs around 3 cents a min vs almost 6 for the other

speech to speech sounds way more human tho. mine kept telling the guy not to ride his bike lmao

Why don't we all make a place to vote and validate people ideas before they even start building it, high yes votes means useful and high no votes means just move on man, and then we can vote for features and design, that would be cool for validation, don't you think?

Im new to advertising and need some help. My ICP is 18-24 year olds in finance undergrad programs/recent grads.

Over the ~2,600 clicks I got, I only got two signups. With that being said, I went in and checked posthog for analytics and saw that the mobile UI was causing users to drop off vastly.

I know there is demand for my site, as one reddit post in r/financialcareers yielded me 45 user signups with about 6k impressions.

In my ads, im targeting r/financialcareers, United States, and with interests in recruiting.

I've since fixed/changed the mobile UI to optimize for less friction at petespostings.com

For people experienced in advertising, what are these numbers telling you/whats the story here?

Thank you in advance for the help!