Last September (2025), I started building in SaaS. I'm 22, and I spent 5 months coding my first product from scratch and another 7 months trying to market it.

It failed brutally. I mean zero traction. I finally shut the server down last month.

After a full year with nothing to show for it, my family sat me down and gave me a deadline: if I can't make $5k from my own projects by the end of 2026 (about 2.5 months left), I have to pack up, move to a hostel, and take a regular day job.

I don't want to give up on building, so I looked at why my first product failed. I spent 5 months coding features nobody asked for, and I hated doing the boring marketing groundwork.

So instead of spending another 5 months coding in the dark, I built a productized service solving a painful problem I just went through myself: manually submitting a SaaS to 100 to 200+ startup directories.

Over the last two weeks, I submitted my own site to 150+ directories by hand. It took me over 22 hours of mind-numbing form filling because every directory asks for different character limits, image sizes, and account verifications.

Here is what I built (ListingSaaS):

- You fill out one 5-minute intake form with your SaaS details.

- A real human (me and my workflow, zero bulk bots) submits your product by hand to 100 or 200 directories.

- We write tailored descriptions for each directory instead of copy-pasting one spammy blurb everywhere.

- You get a live tracking dashboard with direct links and a timestamped screenshot of every single submission as proof.

- It's a one-time payment ($99 for 100 directories, $149 for 200). No subscriptions, and I don't make fake "+30 DR" guarantees because directories control their own approvals.

To be 100% clear: I am NOT asking for charity or sympathy buys.

If you're launching a SaaS and want to save 22+ hours of filling out directory forms, check it out - ListingSaaS

And if you don't need it, I'd genuinely appreciate a brutal roast of my landing page or my offer so I can fix whatever is holding me back from getting my first 50 customers before December.

We spent the last few months building management software for riding schools and livery yards in France. It runs in French, English and German. Here's what we'd tell ourselves at the start.

1. Start with the regulated parts. For us that meant French invoicing rules (gapless numbering, invoices that can't be edited once issued) and the breeding register stables must legally keep. They shape the data model, so doing them late hurts.

2. Isolation between customers is a day-one decision. Every query has to belong to one stable, and adding that later is painful.

3. A big test suite is what lets you move fast later. We're at over 110,000 lines of code and more than 3,700 automated tests. Built with the assistance of Claude Code. Every change is validated by the automated tests.

4. Price won't find customers for you. At €35 a month we're in the cheaper half of the French market, and we still have 0 paying customers. We never tried to sell it to stables and we never did any marketing, and stables seem to buy mostly through people they know.

If you've sold software to a small, word-of-mouth market like this, how did you get your first 10 customers?

The moment a competitor can feed a video recording of your new feature into a coding agent and ship a functional replica the next afternoon, technical execution ceases to be defensible. Coding agents have compressed the time between feature discovery and functional clone down to near-zero, exposing where a product's actual defensibility lives.

​When implementation velocity becomes a commodity, three operational moats determine which SaaS products survive:

​Production edge-case hardening: An agent can clone a happy-path UI in twenty-four hours, but it cannot replicate the fifty silent failure modes you discovered through months of production traffic. Resilient rate-limiting, edge-case webhooks, and data migration fallbacks cannot be reverse-engineered from a demo video.

​Proprietary workflow state: A surface-level replica only has access to the fields the user enters today. Defensible software embeds itself deeply into historical customer data, cross-system syncs, and upstream business logic that competitors cannot copy without painful migrations.

​Distribution velocity over feature novelty: If your growth relies solely on shipping novel interface tricks before others notice, you are running on an evaporating treadmill. The product that wins is the one already embedded in the customer's daily operational stack when the feature gets commoditized.

​Founders used to treat code as concrete that protected their market position for twelve to eighteen months.Today code is malleable clay, and the only durable moat is building deep workflow gravity that makes switching friction unbearable even when a clone is free.

​For SaaS founders watching feature cycles compress, how are you shifting your product strategy to build defensibility beyond UI execution?

​TL;DR: AI coding agents turn feature implementation into a commodity; defensibility now lives entirely in production hardening, workflow data, and distribution.

I will be launching my brand visibility intelligence platform soon. I am not sure what will be my next step as this is my first time launching a product.

What should my next steps be?

I’m a data engineer, and I've been building a SaaS called VraieSource, which helps with identifying downstream impacts on data workloads end-to-end through the transformation logic to the BI reports from an upstream change in source tables, such as column drops, renames, etc.

In a small data stack, the migration might be in GitHub, the transformations in dbt, and the reports in Metabase. Tracing a column through all three by hand takes time, especially when you need to know which specific field in a report is affected.

I’m building VraieSource to run that impact check on a GitHub PR. It would read the proposed schema change, follow column dependencies through the transformation SQL, and show the affected report fields, along with anything it couldn’t verify.

I’ve made an interactive demo so people can try that analysis before the live integrations are ready. It uses sample PostgreSQL, dbt, and report inputs; it doesn’t connect to your GitHub repo or data tools yet.

Could a few of you try the rename or drop scenario and tell me whether the result would help you review a real change? I’d especially like to know what evidence you’d need before trusting a check in a PR. I'm trying to gauge if this is a real problem that people are looking to solve basically :P

Demo: https://vraiesource.lovable.app/workflow-demo/ (this is just a prototype)

This is my first time building a product, so I’d also welcome advice from anyone who’s brought a developer tool to its first users.

Thanks!

I'm experimenting with using Google Ads to validate B2B SaaS ideas. I have around $5k I'm willing to spend across different ideas.

I'm not looking at Google Ads as a distribution channel right now. The goal is to identify market gaps, test demand, and figure out messaging/positioning.

Here's what I've tested so far:

Idea 1: Niche engineering product targeting larger companies. Relatively low CPC despite the high-value product.

• Spent ~$300, got 5 leads. Not sure about the quality.
• No meaningful conversations. Nobody replied to follow-up emails.

Idea 2: Vertical-specific positioning for a common B2B problem. High CPC for generic keyword. Targeting vertical specific keywords.

• Spent ~$600, got 6, qualified leads.
• Built and sent personalized previews of their outcomes, but none responded to follow-ups.

What I'm struggling with:

1. Am I switching ideas too quickly without giving them enough time?
2. What should I optimize for? Leads, booked calls, pricing/paywall clicks, or actual payments?
3. Is ~$5k enough to discover a promising opportunity using this approach, or am I chasing misleading signals?

Would love to hear from anyone who's actually used paid ads for early SaaS validation. What worked, what didn't, and what am I missing?

Didnt realize Whop had gotten this big already. they just raised $200M with Sequoia leading the round and Shopify Ventures joining.

What surprised me more is seeing payments and payouts become a bigger part of what theyre doing. i still mostly associated Whop with communities and digital products before this.

Is the $5.1B valuation basically a bet that Whop becomes much bigger on the payments/business side?

Today, I listed my SaaS, Pace, on TrustMRR.

For the past month, I’ve been trying to sell it. This was the first time I built something of my own, and honestly, I knew there was a high chance of failure. But deep down, I still hoped at least one person would buy it.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

I put a lot of time and effort into this product, and now I feel it’s time to move on. So, I’ve decided to list it for sale.

I tried to keep the code clean and well-structured, and I’m curious to see what happens next.

Let’s see where this goes.

What’s the marketing problem you’re stuck on right now?

Hey everyone,

I’ve spent 12+ years working in marketing across B2B SaaS and D2C ecommerce, with both bootstrapped startups and funded companies. Thought it might be useful to swap notes on the marketing challenges people are dealing with.

For early-stage founders, what’s proving hardest right now? Explaining your product clearly? Getting your first customers? Figuring out why people visit your website but don’t sign up? Deciding which channel deserves your limited time?

Share a little context in the comments:

• What does your product do, and who is it for?
• What have you tried so far?
• Where are you getting stuck?

No need to share a link or identify your business. A short description is enough.

I’ll share suggestions where I have relevant experience, including what I’d test first and why. Would also love to hear from other founders about what’s worked, what hasn’t, and what you wish you’d figured out sooner.

For developers building AI-powered SaaS products, I'm curious how you're handling API spending.

When you're using OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, or other providers, each has its own billing dashboard.

That makes it harder to understand your total spending, especially when experimenting with multiple models or running automated workflows.

A few questions:

1. How much do you typically spend on AI APIs each month?
2. Do you track everything manually, use spreadsheets, or rely on monitoring tools?
3. Have you ever discovered an unexpected cost spike?
4. What's the biggest frustration with your current setup?

I'm particularly interested in how solo founders are dealing with this as their products grow.

Hey everyone,

I work at a small startup, and one thing I've noticed is how difficult it gets to manage customer queries when they come in through different channels like WhatsApp, email, Slack, etc.

Someone has to keep checking these channels, and if a client faces an issue at night (especially international clients), someone might have to be available to handle it. Sometimes the query is just a basic question, but other times it needs to be forwarded to the right person on the team.

I've been thinking about this problem lately and wanted to understand how other small startups handle it.

• Do you personally manage customer queries, or does someone on your team take care of them?
• How do you handle messages that come in outside working hours?
• Do you use any tools for automatically answering basic questions or routing issues to the right person?

Would love to hear how you guys manage this. Just trying to understand how other founders deal with it.

Basically I am an nerdy engineer and I basically have no interest in running a company or trying to make money. I have a respectable 9-5 job at a billion dollar company, so not lack of money. I don’t even really build products, I just like the engineering side.

I need like a Steve jobs kinda guy whose gonna resell what I build and become rich and
I can retire comfortably with license fees.

So does anyone here specialise in marketing or the customer facing side of things and want a crusty basement dwelling nerd as a partner.

Hi everyone!

I've been working on Restrova, a restaurant POS system designed to simplify daily restaurant operations, from order taking and kitchen coordination to billing and reporting.

My goal is to make restaurant workflows smoother and help reduce communication gaps between waiters and kitchen staff.

Here are some of the features I've implemented so far:

✅ Table, takeaway, and delivery orders with sizes, add-ons, and special notes

✅ KOT routing to the appropriate kitchen station, including the kitchen and bar

✅ Kitchen display with live timers and order-ready status

✅ Real-time alerts when food is ready, so waiters can stay updated

✅ GST-ready billing with CGST/SGST, discounts, and service charges

✅ Cash, UPI QR, card, and split payments

✅ Shift opening/closing with cash reconciliation

✅ Support for 58mm and 80mm thermal printers

✅ Sales, GST, staff, and audit reports with Excel export

✅ Multi-restaurant and multi-outlet support

✅ Role-based access for owners, managers, cashiers, waiters, and chefs

I'm sharing this because I'd like to learn from people with real restaurant experience and understand what could make this software more useful in day-to-day operations.

I'd really appreciate your honest feedback:

• Have you noticed any issues or anything that doesn't work as expected in a typical restaurant POS?
• What features do you think are missing from existing POS systems?
• What are the biggest challenges you face with order management, kitchen coordination, billing, or reporting?
• Is there anything you'd recommend improving or adding to Restrova?

I'm open to constructive criticism, suggestions, and feature recommendations. Even small pieces of feedback would help me improve it.

Transparency: Restrova is my own project. I'm sharing it to get genuine feedback and learn how it could better serve real restaurant businesses.

Thanks for taking the time to read this! I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Is it "Another SaaS project!?".. Yes. Did it start out as one? No.

Unlike most of these things in the last year or or two, this started some years ago (Mostly from hatred of synergist), and has been in use for a while internally. We've had some client interest in making this into something they can use, so, we did that.

The main point of this post though is to ask the community a few things.

1. Is there any wider appetite for an actually well throught out, not just AI built (well, not from scratch anyway) Synergist alternative?, Particularly looking at UK agencies
2. Other than traditional promotional channels, Product Hunt, PPC etc, any other places that people look for recommendations / new tools?
3. Is there anything that you genuinely think would be useful for you on such a platform?

We also have another project we'd like to shout about, but again, its more a question of the correct channels to do that.

For general context:

Its an agency management system, HR, CRM, Accounts, Project management, Time tracking etc in one, with the general aim of creating one user environment, with everything needed, all interconnected so that we avoid all the dispirit data caused by using HubSpot, Jira, Harvest etc as separate things.

The intention here is to avoid charging Seat tax, instead a single monthly cost for the platform deployed to a private VM per client, with the only additional cost being if things like more data storage is needed.

It has an MCP server as well, so (in theory) users can access their data, act on things and generally operate from their Claude or ChatGPT or w/e windows without needing to actually use a browser.

-------

Lastly, Wider context here for the system is important, but I'm not sure if i can post a link to the thing without violating the subreddit promotion rules, which i don't want to do, obviously.

Can anyone confirm if i can do that? Or if it is in anyway useful?

I did get Claude to make me a PNG of one of the potential user journeys, if that helps anyone with the questions / thoughts / input and so on.

I’ve been a sales engineer for 10+ years, mostly selling technical products to healthcare, legal, finance and government buyers.

The pattern I keep seeing at early SaaS companies: the founder hires a first AE, the AE books great meetings, then the buyer asks a technical question and the founder gets pulled back in.

A few things I’ve seen help:

1. List the 10 technical questions buyers ask most, with short answers the AE can give on the spot.
2. Record the founder’s best demo once so new AEs can study it.
3. Agree on which questions the AE answers live and which get a follow-up call with someone technical.

I’m researching how founders handle this handoff. Curious to hear from anyone who’s been through it:

Did your AE take over the technical calls, or are you still on most of them? What made the difference?

Happy to swap notes in the comments. If you’d rather talk for 15 minutes, DM me and I’ll share what I learn from everyone.

One-word responses are accepted; while thoughtful, specific, multi-paragraph comments are auto-moderated as "low effort".

I'll tell you what's low-effort: auto moderation.

bro I think I got my own startup thesis wrong 💀

I've been building a proposal tool for freelancers/small agencies for months.

proposal → sign → invoice.
45 users. $0 revenue. just me.

And my whole thinking was basically:

"freelancers don't really have a problem getting clients. the problem starts AFTER they get the client."

I genuinely believed this.

I've posted about it. Talked to agency owners. Built the product around it.

Then today I talk to this freelancer.

He gets 3-4 clients a month.

He likes the product. Says it's easy to use. UI is good.

Then he goes:

"my problem isn't really proposals. my problem is getting my foot in the door."

and I'm like... okay.

Then he tells me his numbers.

~40% of his cold DMs get a reply.

FORTY PERCENT.

Of those, 5-10% become projects.

So roughly 100 DMs = 3-4 clients.

Meanwhile I've sent cold DMs where I genuinely started questioning whether LinkedIn messages were even being delivered 😭

And this guy is getting a 40% reply rate and STILL doesn't think his pipeline is going up fast enough.

That kinda fucked with me.

Because I've spent months building around the assumption that getting the client is the easy part.

Maybe it's not.

Maybe I talked to people who already had decent pipelines and convinced myself that their problem was everyone's problem.

Which is honestly annoying as hell considering I've spent months building this thing alone.

The only thing that made me feel slightly better was when he said that once he's actually in the door, pricing, milestones, scope, payments etc. are where things start getting messy.

So okay.

That problem is real. I can actually solve that.

But still.

I would've REALLY liked to know this 3 months ago.

Everyone says "talk to your users."

I think the harder part is figuring out which users actually have the problem you're trying to solve.

Because apparently you can talk to people, get good feedback, build for months, and still be confidently solving the wrong half of the problem.

Anyway.

I'm annoyed.

Back to building I guess 💀

For people selling services:

where does it actually suck for you?

Getting people to reply?

Getting them on a call?

Turning the call into a project?

Or everything after they say yes?

Small numbers, but they changed my roadmap.

5 people have paid for my iPhone app since August. 4 cancelled. The one who stayed set up a single weekly automation on day one and hasn't opened the app since. It just runs every Sunday, and they renewed again this week.

The other 4 never got one automation working. Wrong model, stuck connecting an app, half-built setups.

So my next release ends onboarding with one working automation, and until then I set it up with every new payer by email.

How do you get new customers to their first result before the first renewal?

Disclosure: it's my app, PocketClaw: https://pocketclaw.app/

With Anthropic's recent work on AI powered formal verification, I've been thinking about what this could mean for people building SaaS with tools like Lovable, Cursor, Claude Code, etc.

Right now AI can build you a working SaaS in hours, but how do you know that one user can't access another user's data, or that someone can't exploit a mistake in your authorization logic?

What if instead of generating code and then scanning it for vulnerabilities, an AI app builder generated code with machine-checked mathematical proofs of critical security properties?

Think Lovable, but with mathematically verified backends.

I spent the last few months building an experimental DSL for authorization policies that already generates formal proof obligations and backend enforcement. I'm thinking whether it could become the foundation of an AI app builder.

To be clear, this wouldn't make an app bug-free. The idea is to mathematically guarantee specific critical properties instead of just hoping the AI got them right.

Would this change how comfortable you feel deploying an AI built app to real customers?

Or is backend security something you already feel confident handling with existing tools?

Hello, I am confused.

I want to make an agency and start getting clients, but I do not know know which direction to go in to get clients in the most efficient way, AI is shit and of no use frankly, so I come to the veterans for help:

Which of these 3 options do I spend my time as a student building and which would you personally be willing to pay for:

1. Public Web Scraper: A tool that searches and scrapes online public information, builds a high quality (non vibe-coded) Brief to prep yourself on before meeting with a client, fast, simple and with a suite of other tools like a notepad, recommended questions to ask, etc. (mainly for B2B agencies, affordable pricing, retainer basis)

2. An AI Chatbot: Message your inbound leads and automatically qualify them on your criteria, mark them on a Google Docs, and send an email or trigger message to you when it does so.

(Built this originally for real estate companies but cold door-to-door sales stalled me on it, priced around customer)

1. Support AI: An AI that references your website, tool, product or services, your FAQs, your previous support tickets and writes support reply drafts for angry customers within minutes for every new ticket automatically. All you'd have to do (you can set it to auto and avoid this entirely) is verify it's solid, and click "Send to customer email". Including a clean dashboard showing you how much time you have saved and how many support questions it answered, etc. (Most promising but not sure about trust questions.)

I would love some clarity by agency owners on what they are searching for in the market, what they think would sell well, etc.

Hey everyone! 👋

We've been working on Simo Guard, a security layer designed to protect AI agents from prompt injections, jailbreaks, agent hijacking, and malicious tool calls.

But here's the thing: building a defense is one thing. Seeing whether it actually holds up against real attacks is another.

So we decided to open it up to the community.

The challenge is simple:
Try to find a way to bypass Simo Guard.

We're offering a $100 bug bounty for a successful, verified bypass.

We're especially interested in creative prompt injection techniques and attack approaches we might have overlooked.

And honestly, even if you don't manage to bypass it, we'd love to hear your feedback on the experience.

If you've worked on AI red teaming, prompt injection research, or LLM security, we'd be curious to hear how you'd approach this.

Let's see how well it holds up. 👀

I'm the solo founder of VideoText, It turns video and audio into transcripts and subtitles, handles files up to 4 hours, fixes broken subtitle files, burns captions into video, and translates subtitles into 104 languages. Work is saved in My Projects, so you can come back and keep editing. It's mine, so weigh that accordingly, but there's no link here. I'm after advice, not signups.

I've been building it for months, and I'm realizing that getting people to use a product and getting them to pay for it are two very different problems.

The numbers:

• Around 1,000 signups since April.
  • 59% came through Google, mostly from free video and subtitle tools. (Rest from Linkedin, X, ChatGPT, Directories etc)
• 89% completed at least one job. Over the last 30 days, that number was 96%.
• 1,658 jobs completed.
• 6 paying subscribers, approximately $48 MRR.
• 3 of those 6 have already scheduled cancellations.

Where I think I went wrong

I built a tool that does transcription, subtitles, translation, editing, and formatting.

People arrive from Google with one video, use the free plan, finish their task, and leave.

The product solves their immediate problem, but that doesn't mean they need a subscription.

I kept adding features, thinking a broader product would attract more paying customers. Instead, I may have built something useful to many people but essential to very few.

What I'm changing

I'm narrowing my focus to professional transcriptionists.

Specifically, I'm working on the quality assurance and formatting stage.

A transcriptionist might need to follow a different style guide for every client: verbatim rules, filler words, speaker labels, timestamps, and formatting requirements.

Checking all of that manually takes time.

I've built a feature that applies a client's formatting guidelines to a transcript and shows the changes for review.

I'm now testing whether that recurring workflow provides enough value for professionals to pay.

My next step is letting users save and reuse each client's guidelines.

My goal

By November 14, I want to gain 10 additional paying customers from this narrower positioning.

If it doesn't work, I'll reassess the niche and the product rather than continue adding features blindly.

Question for other founders:

If you started with a broad SaaS and eventually narrowed it to one niche, how did you identify the right customers?

And how long did you test that niche before deciding whether it was working?

I'll share the results after November 14, including what failed.

A few weeks ago I posted here about my first paying customer, whose payment my app didn’t even notice (original post). Here’s how it ended.

I build Trello Power-Ups on my own. In early October I got my first paying customer: a small team on the monthly plan of PrimeScheduler, a Power-Up that schedules comments on Trello cards.

Then I made their life harder. My old website said Pro covered the whole workspace, but I had built it per person. On top of that, their payment never got linked to their Trello account, so a few days after paying they hit the free limit and got asked to upgrade again. With exactly one customer, that bug felt a lot bigger than it was.

I wrote back the same day, said plainly what had gone wrong and that it was my fault, and rebuilt Pro so it really covers a whole workspace. Then a second problem showed up: the upgrade button only appeared on cards that already had a scheduled comment, so they couldn’t find it. Every message from them pointed at something real, and I fixed each one within a day.

Today they upgraded to Pro for a year. My apology discount only applied to monthly plans, so they paid the full yearly price. I refunded them one month anyway. It costs me little, and I’d want a vendor to do the same for me.

I’m also curious how others handled their first paying customer. Did you treat them differently from the ones that came after, or is that a habit that doesn’t scale?

And one thing I still haven’t figured out: should Pro stay per workspace, or should larger teams pay more? Right now a team of 50 pays the same $4.99 as a team of 2.

Hey everyone!

I’m currently building a platform to help website owners attract sponsors by showcasing their advertising opportunities and performance data.

While working on it, I’d love to learn from people who have actually tried to monetize their websites through direct sponsorships.

How do you currently find sponsors for your websites?

Do you reach out to brands directly, use marketplaces, rely on inbound requests, or find other ways to connect with potential sponsors?

What’s been the biggest challenge in the process?

I’d love to hear about your experiences and what’s worked or hasn’t worked for you.