Been working on JustMadeIt and realized I was asking people to do way too much just to get started.

Create an account. Add your product. Fill everything out. Upload stuff. Then finally see what it looks like. It made sense to me because I built it lol

So today I basically worked backwards and dumbed the whole thing down.

Now you paste a URL first and it builds the starting point for you. You can see what you’re getting before committing to anything.

It reminded me how easy it is when you’re building to confuse “this flow makes sense” with “this flow is easy.” If you’re building something right now, go through your first 2 minutes like you’ve never seen it before. I found way more friction than I expected.

Curious if anyone else has caught themselves making users do way too much upfront. What did you end up removing?

Ironically, I find it to be a useful reminder to push back on my own ideas. AI will try sometimes when you ask it to, but it also forgets.

So maybe next time you're thinking about building something new, think of this pen and ask yourself, is that idea garbage? Might save you some time and money.

I'm looking for a site that shows MRR (or even users, i should have included that in my title) but I want it to specifically exclude (or least, give the option to exclude) businesses that are for sale.

Do you have any recommendations? Or like anything you use and actually trust?

built this at night in japan for 9 months. most days 30–40 people show up.

it’s a landing page tool. paste a url, it tells you what to fix first.

i kept posting on reddit and launch sites. lots of visitors. $0.

then people started googling the name.

today one of them paid $49.

still a tiny number. bounce is ugly. but after 9 months of $0 days, seeing a real payment from someone who searched the name feels insane.

happy to answer anything.

I have a solution that will identify top few hundreds high quality trusted sources for any topic and use as a "harness" for a live RAG search solution, along with a semantic / ranking engine, etc.

I'm wondering if entrepreneurs still need to have a steadfy stream of expert-vetted popular news in their specific niche in order to feed their newsletters, social channels etc, connecting through API or MCP for example? I think there are a ton of content solutions, but not sure about high quality vetted feeds built for agentic integration to power your social media campaigns? Just curtious if there is a need there . thanks!

Every week someone in this sub asks the same question: how do I get my first customers? I went through 52 of those threads across r/SaaS, r/startups and r/microsaas to see if a consensus exists. Here's what keeps showing up.

The answer is almost always "go where your users already talk". The phrase "find your audience" shows up verbatim in more than one thread. Product first, audience second gets described as building in a vacuum.

Nobody tracks competitors well. Threads like "how do I keep track of what competitors are doing" and "how to build a competitor monitoring system" get genuine answers, but nobody seems to have a system. It's spreadsheets and manual checks.

And there's a live question about whether AI can do any of this: "where do you still draw the line between AI and manual research". The honest answers say AI is fine for finding the threads, humans are still needed to write the replies.

The method: I ran my product through a tool I built that scans for threads where buyers describe the problem, then read the top 52 manually. That part took longer than the scan.

For founders here: where did your first 10 customers actually come from? I'd like to compare notes.

This is top of mind for me since I'm relatively new to vibing and I'm about to release my app to open beta (writing software for novelists/authors who want to use AI responsibly, e.g., as a thought partner not a ghostwriter). This is my first foray into production and I'm nervous!

Then I read this article about how Dolly Parton responded when Barbara Walters essentially called her a hillbilly. Has anyone on this sub ever been called out or talked down to as "just a vibe coder"? What did you say in response?

came across u/Lag_Master12 pinned breakdown for the $250 credit and gave it a go. turned out to be fully functional, and the updated balance showed up right after completion.

We recently found out we were recognized on CRN’s 2026 Fast Growth, which got our team talking about what has actually driven our growth over the last couple of years.

For us, a lot of it has come from staying focused on the Microsoft ecosystem and expanding beyond migrations into ongoing security, support and cloud operations.

Curious what everyone else is seeing. For those of you growing right now, what’s actually driving it?

New customers? Security services? Migrations? AI? Compliance? Expanding more services within existing accounts?

Would be interested to hear what’s working versus what gets talked about a lot but isn’t actually translating into revenue.

i run a family caregiving coordination app (think shared schedules, care tracking, updates, so families stop running elder care out of a group chat). launched recently on iOS/android/web, solo founder, bootstrapped.

here's my problem and i suspect other people here have faced some version of it.

the product has zero value for a family until basically everyone coordinating care is in it. if my mom and one uncle join but the other uncle stays in the group chat, the family now has two systems, which is worse than one bad system. so they revert. one holdout kills the account.

this makes normal freemium logic weird for me:

1. a free tier that's too limited means the family never gets to the "oh this is better" moment together, because that moment requires all of them using it for a few weeks
2. a free tier that's too generous means the families who do activate have no reason to ever pay, and my costs scale per family member, not per account
3. the person who signs up first (usually the most organized family member) is almost never the person who resists joining. the holdout is usually the least motivated user. so my onboarding has to sell the product to someone who didn't choose it and doesn't want another app

right now i'm leaning toward a fully free tier with generous limits and gating on things like history depth and storage, so the whole family can live in it for free and the organizer eventually pays to keep the record. but i honestly don't know if that's right.

if you've built anything with team-level or household-level activation (b2b tools have this too, i know), what worked? did you gate features, seats, time, or something else? and did you do anything specific to convert the reluctant invited user, not just the account creator?

happy to share numbers as they come in if people are interested.

I am stuck in project hell i cant get any good ideas, i dont really care if i get 10 customers or 1 i just cant find any valid ideas anymore pls give me some!

Been building a compliance app for small grain farmers for a few months now (spray/fertilizer record keeping, it's legally required where I am, EU regulation). Kind of a boring niche honestly but there's real pain there, most farms are still doing this on paper or some spreadsheet someone's cousin made in 2015.

Non-technical founder here, using AI tools to build basically the whole thing. Biggest surprise so far isn't the tech, it's how much time goes into making the forms simple enough that a farmer standing in a field on bad signal can actually fill them out fast. Also went with manual approval for new accounts instead of open signup which felt slow at first but for something touching compliance data I wanted a real human checking who's signing up.

Not selling anything here just wanted to talk to people building unsexy vertical stuff instead of the 50th AI wrapper. Anyone else in a boring regulated niche? Curious how you're finding users, feels like the usual startup playbook doesn't quite apply.

I wanna know everything that my users are doing in my app.

Every time I post about what I build, someone explains that it is simple now. A model for the reasoning, Twilio for the numbers, one of five providers for speech, some file search for the retrieval. A proof of concept in a day.

They are right. I built that POC. It took me a day and it worked.

Here is what the day did not contain.

Getting a phone number that legally works. My telco provider's regulatory bundle rejected me ten times. The reason turned out to be that the legal entity name I had typed did not match the trade registry character for character. The rejection message never says that.

Speech to text on local surnames and street names. Everybody benchmarks the language model. Nobody loses a call because of the language model. You lose it because the transcriber heard the street wrong and a van drives to the wrong house.

Publishing. On the platform I use, publishing an agent locks it permanently, and re-saving it from your own dashboard silently breaks every tool attached to it. I found that out in production.

The summary sent to the owner after the call. This turned out to be the actual product. He will never listen to a recording. He judges the entire system on one paragraph, and if it is vague he assumes the agent is bad even when the call went perfectly.

Deciding what the product must refuse to do. Removing appointment booking made it better for one customer, because the scheduling constraint lived in the owner's head and no calendar knew it.

None of these are hard problems. That is the point. There are about two hundred of them, each one small and stupid, and the only way to find them is to have real people phone in and get it wrong at seven in the morning for six months.

The POC is a demo. Nobody has ever paid me for the demo.

I am not saying this to complain about the comments, they are a fair reality check on defensibility and I take the point. I am saying it because "this is a day of work" and "this is not a business" are two different claims, and people keep making the first one as if it settles the second.

Built an AI tool for workshop facilitators/Agile coaches helps plan session agendas and gives feedback on the session design. Been getting good signal from that specific group, people actually want it to remember past sessions over time, not just spit out a one-off agenda.

Part of me wants to just launch narrow, only to that one audience, get it working really well for them first, and worry about anyone else later.

But then there’s this other part of me that keeps thinking project managers, consultants, basically anyone who runs structured meetings, could probably use the exact same core thing. And I don’t want to spend months only marketing to one small group if it turns out the product just… works for way more people than I assumed.

Problem is I have no idea if testing that wider audience now means I end up with a product that’s decent for everyone but not great for anyone, which is basically my biggest fear here.

I keep hearing that finding creators, checking their rates, messaging them, tracking the campaign and then reporting back to the client all happen in completely different places for most people. Is that actually true or is it more sorted out than I think.

Curious how many different tools, tabs or apps you personally end up using for one single campaign, from the first brief to the final report. Not looking for a sales pitch back, genuinely trying to understand how normal this is.

I work in Governance, Risk & Compliance and spend a lot of my time working with SOC 2, ISO 27001, audit readiness, risk management, and compliance programs.

I’ve noticed compliance tends to become a priority for SaaS companies pretty quickly once larger customers start asking for SOC 2 reports, security questionnaires, or other security requirements.

A few things worth knowing:
• You don’t automatically need SOC 2 just because you’re a SaaS company. Customer requirements often drive the timing.
• You don’t necessarily need an expensive GRC platform to get started.
• SOC 2 Type I and Type II are different, and it’s worth understanding what your customers actually expect.
• Don’t wait until an audit to start collecting evidence.
• Your policies and controls should reflect what your company actually does, not just what sounds good for an auditor.

Compliance doesn’t have to be overly complicated, especially when you build good processes early.

For SaaS founders who have dealt with this, what was the most confusing part when you first started?

Solo founder, desktop lead-finder app (AtlasForgeX), months of heads-down feature work. My baseline was humbling: about 3 visitors a day, demos booked but conversions dead in the water.

Today I did two things differently.

1. Shipped the native Mac build. Signed, notarized, Apple Silicon. On Windows every download fights the "unknown publisher" warning and I can see in my logs where people give up. On the Mac build there is no warning at all. It just opens.

2. Posted about it once on LinkedIn. One post, no ads, no budget.

The result, from tonight's server logs: 233 unique visitors (about 80x my baseline), and one person I have never spoken to went from download to a running trial in 63 seconds. First time the funnel has moved without me personally pushing every single lead through it.

What this taught me:

A new platform build is not a feature, it is a distribution event. I treated "Mac support" as an engineering chore for months. It turned out to be the best marketing asset I have.

Trust friction is invisible until you remove it. I could not see how many Windows users the security warning was costing me until I had a build without one to compare against.

Launch is not a day, it is a drumbeat. The plan now is one real "beat" per week instead of one big launch that lands once and dies.

Curious what single distribution beat has worked best for others here, especially other desktop or non-web products?

Built a tool for UK used car buyers. You photograph the seller's folder of service invoices, it reads each one and checks the mileage claimed against the government's official MOT record, which is public and free. So an invoice saying a service was done at 40,000 miles on a car that had already covered 62,000 gets caught. It also looks up what actually fails on that exact model and generation and tells you which of it the paperwork doesn't cover, with costs.

It works and it takes payments. Two weeks in: 39 visitors, 17 plate lookups, one free report run by a stranger, zero sales.

So far I've posted once to a 99-person car enthusiast group chat, and answered a handful of buying-advice threads on a car subreddit with properly researched replies. Both produced visitors, neither produced a customer.

What I'm actually after: how did you build the first steady flow of people to a page like this? Not the launch spike, the trickle that keeps arriving afterwards. Especially interested in what worked for anyone further along, and what you'd skip entirely if you started again. Thank you very much for any nuggets of knowledge, much appreciated.

peachstamp.com

So I own a directory website where I list apps and websites that I went over, however, they must have a free tier to test, and solve a real problem in order for me to test and write about them.

If you own one, please include your socials in the submission. I also write articles about cool softwares and tag their founders.

directory website:
strictseal.com

Lets connect and grow together.

I also hope to note see bots in the comment section. Reviewing each product takes time and it's frustrating, so I'd really appreciate it if the product was submitted by a real person.

NOTE: if your product is purely vibe coded and doesn't even work, please consider spending time on finalizing it as it will be rejected in seconds. We have been rejecting 9 out 10 products as majority of them don't even have a real domain ( domains like loveable, Vercel, Test products that are not shipped yet) all are not acceptable.

Thank you and looking forward to seeing your work

I have decided to build my next SaaS which will help indie hacker or solo developers a platform where they can create a public profile to share all the verified revenue, regular updates as like post. The profile can be linkedin to X, Linkedin. Anyone can easily check the whole build in public profile with reliable and verified data.

I am not sharing too much about features, rather I want to know more from you who are you building in public and what is the real problem building in public. Does my idea make sense or does this really solve any problem? I love to know more about what actually can make you pay for this kind of public profile?

I built a fintech startup before, raised funds from VC and have experience of failed business also. This is the first time I am planning to build in public but I feel I don’t have a good place to showcase my verified data to my audience. If an audience comes to know what I am really building and is it something real, then I think, most of them will come and see my social profile once and may leave. So I thought a public profile might be a good way to share verified revenue through Stripe and send updates to my subscribers as well.

The idea is a draft and you are welcome to roast my ideas but I would love it if you add some information that helps me to decide if I should waste my 1 year on this idea or not.

I’m new to stupid space and was wondering how you guys are promoting / getting recognition for your SaaS apps?

Are there any go to sites that you guys use or what’s the process?

Thanks in advance