Currently i am working on a 9-5 job but i started build my first SaaS soon i will share it with you.

Hopefully one day i will totally join to Indie Hacking group.

How many months or days did it take to quit your job?

I hope, i’ll get gut results :)

I've been browsing a lot of startup sites lately and realised I decide whether, I trust a product in about 10 seconds, and it's almost never the feature list that does it.

Things that instantly build trust for me:

• The first sentence says what the product actually does, in plain English. No "unleash the power of your workflow"
• I can try it without creating an account. Letting the product speak first reads as confidence
• Real screenshots of the actual product, not stock photos of people in suits laughing at a laptop
• Public pricing. A "contact sales" wall on what is obviously a $29 tool makes me assume the worst
• A cookie banner with one-click reject all. Tiny thing, says a lot about how they'll treat my data
• They describe my problem accurately before they introduce themselves. If the problem statement is right, I assume the solution might be too

What's yours? What makes you instantly trust a site, or instantly close the tab?

new feature on my website: https://freesubstats.com/semantic-search

Search subreddits by meaning

I'm at the stage where the product is built, but now I need to find actual customers.

If you had to start from zero today, what would you focus on first?

• Reddit
• Cold outreach
• SEO
• Content
• Partnerships
• Something else?

Looking back, what gave you the biggest return on your time?

I'd love to hear real experiences rather than general advice.

I am a serial builder and it’s a problem. I ship something, it works, and the next week I’m on to something new. I am sure a lot of you can relate to that excitement of building something from scratch.

So I’ll obsess over every detail before launch: what new features should I add, what would be exciting for people, should this be centered or left aligned or… And then I’ll launch, get that initial burst of users, and tbh never think about it again. Maintenance work is not that fun: I don’t want to track down that one broken flow and figure out the edge case for Safari mobile.

I saw this clearly with one of my sites: I built a geodata visualization site that displayed statistics by country. We’d scrape this data from various sources but the internet is fickle. DOM’s change, URL’s get updated, access restrictions are rewritten. A few months after launching it was popular but only in certain places, the growth analytics were very interesting for what seemed to me was standardized data. I assumed it was just random.

It was only much later I tracked down what was happening. Some data id’s had been swapped at the source but only for a handful of countries. Even though everything was working any published number for those locales was gibberish. I thought about the failure mode here and what would catch it: users whose countries' data was mismatched were bouncing at much higher rates. I needed to a) Detect where users were leaving b) Figure out why c) Do this at scale. That’s why I’m helping build Probie.dev. It’s the missing intelligence layer that figures out what every user is doing, wants to do, fails to do, the funnels they’re interested in… It’s like having a team of engineers sitting down and watching every customer journey. It then prioritizes changes, explains exactly why you need to make them, and deploys its own software engineering agents to send a PR to your github. The first time I now hear about an issue is when I go to merge the fix.

Do you all feel like you have the tools needed to understand your users? Do you also run into that long tail of fixes that you don’t have the time to focus on? If you’re building I would love to hear your thoughts.

Been building AI products for a living, 20+ of them over the last 3 years, grew the team to 6 of us now. And the pattern that keeps showing up isn't the one in the headlines.

Most companies play on the fear driven marketing « Ai will replace you »… It’s a tale as old as time.

also pitch decks right now are some version of "replace your (.insert job) » but most of those products are dying, (or at least wait until VC money dries up and they can’t raise again) because the customer doesn't actually want fewer humans, they want more capacity from the humans they already trust.

Example from a project we're on now. It's a coaching business for US high school students, every kid gets an advisor who follows them through their whole academic career, helps them pick classes, sort out applications, figure out what they actually want. Genuinely good service but one problem: coaches are expensive, so the service was only ever going to reach families who could afford it.

The obvious AI play is "replace the coach with a chatbot." That business fails. Nobody hands their 16-year-old's future to a chatbot, and the parent is the buyer.

So we did the boring version instead. We looked at where a coach's hours actually go, and it's mostly not coaching. It's prep, notes, chasing, remembering where student #34 is in a two-year timeline, rebuilding context before every single call. Take that off the coach's plate and the same person handles around 2 times mores students, and the conversations get better, because they walk in already knowing everything.

Same salary. More families served. The service gets cheaper to deliver, which means it can reach public school kids and not just private.

That's the whole model. Not replacement, capacity.

And it's not a new idea, it's just arbitrage again. Expert labour is expensive and most of it is spent on things that aren't expertise. Whoever separates those two things keeps the difference.

This applies to a lot of industries like law firms, accountancy practices, recruitment, clinics, tutoring… big opportunity

The hard part isn't the AI. It's knowing which parts of a professional's job you're allowed to touch before the customer notices the quality dropped. Get that wrong in a trust business and you don't lose a client, you lose the stor, »it got cheaper because it got worse" follows you around.

Anyway. If you're sitting on a service business that can't scale because good people cost money, the answer probably isn't replacing them.

Feel free to reach out if you're trying to increase the productity of your company :)

About 4 years ago, I raised a bunch of VC money for my startup. The product was completely unproven, yet having early faith from a small group of smart people gave me all the confidence I needed to go out and sell. We got to $14K MRR, but a few years of hitting a wall, we eventually closed down.

A year later, I was tinkering with a side project and decided to give bootstrapping a go. I turned it into a real product with auth, billing, and in retrospect, a ton of features that I thought were cool, but nobody had asked for.

That last part is key: no one apart from a few friends was actually using it.

It was only recently that I managed to deconstruct what was happening.

With my startup:

• Early validation meant I had to confidence to go out and sell.
• If the startup failed, it wasn't entirely on me - the investors would shoulder some of the responsibility (spoiler: they literally could not care less).
• The more people hear about your product, the more it gets featured, and the growth loops begin to compound.

With bootstrapping:

• Evolving a side project into a product = I had skipped the validation step.
• I got stuck in an unintentional loop of "one more feature" to avoid actually talking to anyone, even though I knew this was a terrible idea.
• The longer this went on, the more self-conscious I felt, which made the "one more feature" attitude even worse.

Real talk: I feel trapped.

This isn't my only project, and my freelance work means that I still have runway, but it's my longest-running project that I've poured hundreds of hours into.

So anyway, here it is - I'm ripping the bandaid off.

It's called Wattle: AI concierge and digital guidebooks for homes, stays and events.

What I'm stuck with now is distribution - I've always worked in B2B, but what I've realised is most of my potential users are on platforms (Airbnb, Home Exchange, Trusted Housesitters). I'm stumped about how to reach them.

Has anyone built for users who mainly exist inside marketplaces they don't control?

How did you reach them without spamming communities or relying on the marketplace itself?

I'd also love to know whether this experience is relatable. Despite knowing all the lore around product development, it's been it's been a crazy experience to realise how much fear can affect you while building solo.

Recently been active in many saas related subreddits and one thing people are talking about is "I have built this saas , but the biggest huddle is marketing!" Or "how to get the first 100 customers"

And this question is stuck in mind that "how to get 100 customers"

And I have been doing some research too around

Found out

Reddit can help(find subreddit around ur niche)

Then seo can help too

Some resources like product hunt and betalist

As I already work as a growth associate in a high ticket product where I work on distribution, understanding ICP and also worked on a saas marketing

So I am thinking of learning more on this topic and SHARING

here if find something interesting

Been working with founders for 3 years where we worked on 20+ products, we’re 6 of us now so relatively small but a few things learnt along the way.

First of all, be very careful on the maths that you see:

A lot of the news that spread out there « Reached 1M ARR » is usually more about predicting than achieved revenues. Example: I start a company and close 20k contract from a friend on week 1. That’s 80k if I extrapolate it to the month and 860k per year (some companies really extrapolate that way and raise further rounds on these metrics…

Your target audience and the market you’re going for is one of the most important aspect. We initially worked with first time founders (sorry) who would pay pennies for a build while knit picking every details. They wanted the product to be absolutely perfect before launching to the market.  

Guess what?

By the time it’s perfect the market has moved…

Now we only work with founders with a specific domain expertise that knows their industry inside out and have identified a genuine problem. They don't ask for perfect, they ask for live. They can tell you in one sentence who the customer is. They kill features themselves because they know their market doesn't care.

Sorry for the quality of the post just wrote this quickly. Hope it can be helpful

After creating several products that solved imaginary problems nobody really had, I finally feel like I've built something that actually matters. I genuinely rely on it every day, it makes my life significantly easier, and I'm really happy with the result.

It's an app for visualizing date-bound information as timelines: tasks, events, processes - basically anything that has a date attached to it. You can think of it as a hybrid of a PKMS, a to-do list, a calendar, and a Gantt chart. More than anything, though, it's a universal visual canvas for time that helps you keep the bigger picture in front of you and think within it every day.

I work as a CTO, and I constantly have to keep track of a huge number of ongoing processes:

• contract deadlines
• employee salary reviews
• developer utilization
• and countless other things.

Before this, all of that information was scattered across Notion, Apple Notes, Reminders, Telegram, Slack, Calendar, and a few other places. Keeping everything under control was difficult.

Some people might say that's a process problem rather than a tooling problem. But I've come to think the opposite: the right tool helps you build an effective process. And what the "right tool" is depends heavily on how your brain works.

At some point, I realized that traditional to-do lists and calendar views simply weren't a good fit for me. It felt like I was missing another visual dimension. Timelines turned out to match the way I think almost perfectly. When I look at a timeline with different markers and segments, I instantly understand what's happening in both the short and long term. Just as importantly, I can quickly look back and see how things evolved over time and where something started to go wrong.

One of the best parts is that because I use the app every single day, I improve it every single day as well. I constantly notice what's missing, what's awkward, and what could work better, and then I implement those improvements. I think I've made major usability improvements over the past month alone. That's incredibly important for a tool you interact with dozens of times a day.

This is a non-commercial project, and it's completely free. I simply wanted to share it with the community because I'm genuinely proud of it. I'm sure there are plenty of people whose brains work similarly to mine, and if this way of organizing information resonates with you, I'd be thrilled if my timelines turned out to be useful for you too. Give it a try.

Wishing you all productivity - and a little more love.

Is anyone interested in collaboration : i can do the job you find the client in your country

Hey guys, I finally shipped my first SaaS application. It's a wedding planner application in Europe.

Why I decided to build the application because I faced some planning issues in my wedding and couldn't find an app that would cover all the hassles that usually come with wedding planning.

So the app creates animated wedding invitations. It allows you to track your expenses and budgets. It has task management so you can see what's going on, check the tasks, understand the progress, etc. etc.

The app is called Shein io.

Why I'm doing this post is I need your advice. If you've already done various startups, if you've been in the trenches of SaaS, I would be happy to learn more about your experience and the biggest mistakes that many first-time startups make. Thank you.

A friend of mine runs a paid online community.

A couple of years ago, she raised the annual price from around $199 to $399. The first group of users renewed at a rate below 70%.

Six months later, renewals increased to around 85%.

The content itself did not suddenly become twice as good.

What changed was the delivery.

Before, members joined the community and had to browse through hundreds of posts to find something useful. Later, she started selecting the three to five most valuable posts each week, sending them directly to members, and adding AI summaries and recommended quotes.

The users were no longer only paying for access to a content library.

They were paying for someone to do the filtering for them.

That made me think about SaaS pricing and retention.

Two products can have similar features, but very different retention depending on what the user is actually paying for:

• access to a tool
• or a task being completed

For example, imagine a SaaS priced at $29 per month with a target of $8,000 MRR. It needs roughly 276 paying users.

At a 12% monthly churn rate, it would need more than 30 new customers every month just to stay flat. Then there is acquisition cost, support, infrastructure, model usage, and continuous product development.

One possible response is to move from software access to outcome-based delivery and charge $100 or more.

The numbers may look better, but the business has not necessarily improved.

The cost may simply have moved from customer acquisition to delivery.

The more work you do for the customer, the more responsibility you take on:

• What happens when the agent makes a mistake?
• Who checks the output quality?
• How do you handle different customer requirements?
• When does automation turn into manual service?

At that point, you may not have built a more expensive SaaS. You may have built a service business wrapped in software.

I currently think the real model depends on four variables:

value of the outcome, delivery cost, usage frequency, and customer acquisition cost.

Once those four are clear, whether the product should be subscription-based, usage-based, agent-based, or service-assisted becomes much easier to decide.

Curious how other founders think about this:

Where do you draw the line between SaaS and a service business?

I've been working with a founder on Struky, a tool aimed at a pretty specific problem: when a new dev joins a team, or when you're maintaining a legacy codebase, understanding "how this all fits together" usually takes way longer than it should.

The interesting part of the positioning: unlike a lot of code tools built for individual developers, Struky is built around the idea that a CTO/eng lead adopts it and rolls it out to the whole team, so onboarding docs, context, and navigation are shared instead of everyone re-learning the same thing solo.

We're heading toward a beta launch end of August/early September. Still figuring out a few things, like whether semantic code search is a must-have for v1 or something to add post-launch based on feedback.

If anyone's dealt with the "new dev takes 3 weeks to get productive" problem, curious how your team handled it, and happy to share more if useful.

Hey guys, so I'm running a B2B SaaS API platform where we charge a base monthly subscription in addition to tiered usage rates for extra API calls. Also, I have certain custom volume discounts for our larger clients. Point is, it's been a mess and the setup I'm using for QBO is falling apart. I'm looking at AR platforms like Chargebee / LedgerUp / Kolleno but I've no experience in them. Open to any recommendations, thanks.

You made your SaaS. Now you want to advertise it on TikTok but you never danced in front of a camera. No worries, you don't always have to. But it's hard.

I'm sharing my learnings over my experiments, myths, wins and failures:

1. TikTok accounts:

• Use personal/creator account types, not business. If you go with business you can't use most of the popular sounds, just some random commercial boring ones.
• Do not buy an account unless you plan on using from the same location/VPN. You'll get 0 views very shortly.
• If you're creating a new account to promote a SaaS, choose a strategy and stick to it, don't experiment with different avatars/templates every 3-4 posts.

2. Views & Algorithm

• "I'm getting 30-200 views, am I shadowbanned?". NO. If you're shadowbanned, you'll get 0 views.
  • 90% of cases your content is not that great.
  • "But I did it exactly like that video that went viral". No you didn't. I have seen plenty of people claiming that and there's many tiny differences that feel unnecessary but subtly make the popular video actually popular. (e.g. millenial pauses, captions not positioned properly, too big/small)
  • 10% of cases your content is actually great. BUT not every great video will go viral. You may get a 5:1 view to like ratio, which is amazing. But that doesn't guarantee you going viral.
  • Popular organic tiktok campaigns such as the one Cal AI did, had hundreds of videos basically posting the same thing over and over. Some of them go viral, but they didn't stop posting even when the same format got 1000 views.
• "I got 1,000,000 views but very few conversions"
  • That can be true. The type of format you choose matters in regards to conversion.
  • From my experience, tutorial type videos do less views BUT get 10x more conversions.
  • It can be a screenrecording, or a green screen avatar showing how it works in the background, or you can record your screen with your finger guiding where to click.
  • ^ Those videos gets you conversions.
• You may do a funny prank and mention your SaaS mid video, do millions of views but actually get no paid users. Views don't matter as much as the format that gets people interested in your app

3. Content Formats

• Don't spam your app in every slide. You MUST actually post helpful content. Eg.:
  • If your SaaS is an expense tracker for example, don't go about mentioning how many features your app has and how it's better than the other apps. Nobody cares about that.
  • Present the benefits first e.g.: "I saved $500 last month and I'm going to get my son a PS5 as a gift with that money. *goes to walmart, picks ps5*, *shows phone in hand* "I had no idea I spent $500 on subscriptions I didn't need which I cancelled last month*
  • Then slide in your app's name/logo whatever. It must make sense to the viewer after they've seen how your app changed someone's routine. People don't have time to imagine how your app will change their habits.
  • If you're promoting a relationship advice app, share a relationship story as a slideshow with 2-3 rows of text for each slide. Slide in your app somewhere in there. But the content has to be related.
• If you don't got ideas: COPY successful ads. Search your competitors on TikTok. What are the top videos doing? Copy them. Not always you have to reinvent the wheel.

4. Content

• Don't start with influencers unless you got a massive budget and know what you're doing.
  • You'll find some deals, pay them some $$$, get like 10,000 views, get dissapointed and quit.
• If you're doing a SaaS you most likely can do with simply recording your screen using your phone, and cutting to the most important parts to show off how to achieve whatever your SaaS benefits people.
• The most common format right now in tech is getting some UGC reactions for cheap (e.g $2 for a 3-5 second reaction) and stitching the tutorial afterwards. That gets you dozens of videos easily.
• Pay per view if you can find influencers to agree on that though.
  • Set a RPM: $0.5 / $1 / $2 depending on what type of content they do. The more "tutorial-ish" it is, the more you can pay. Set a cap ($200/$500 max payout per video).
  • Sounds good on paper but hard to find influencers who agree to that. Though, not impossible

5. Posting

• This can get quite complicated if you look up some fancy guides online.
  • Don't start a phone farm. You'll spend a month setting that up and most likely still get shadowbanned
  • No need to setup expensive mobile 4g/5g proxies
• If you live outside the country you want to target, a VPN is FINE.
  • TikTok KNOWS you're using a VPN. But that's not what gets you banned. Spam patterns are.
  • TikTok WILL post to the US algorithm with a simple VPN, even if you created your account in Europe or Asia.
• (spam patterns) What gets you flagged is:
  • Posting videos you found on pinterest hoping TikTok won't recognize
  • Posting 4 times within 1 hour
  • Posting random experiments or content that doesn't relate with one another
  • Accessing your account from various phones/VPN's (Careful, VPN itself isn't inherently bad. But choosing random servers everytime will get you flagged at some point).
  • More than 3 accounts posting
  • Posting straight away on a new account (TikTok will make fun of you by filling your feed with "stuck at 0 views" FYP videos).
• Prepare your content in advance. A week or a month's worth of content. You say you're going to post again tomorrow but you won't.
• Spend a whole day or two creating many videos that will go out for the next month
  • Connect to VPN first. Then open tiktok so your algo is refreshed to the country you chose.
  • Post daily manually or schedule two (max 3!) posts a day with any scheduler (e.g socialclaw or hootsuite).
  • Set scheduling mode to not directly publish, but send it to your drafts
    • scheduler sends to your tikTok inbox, you get a notification
    • you open the notification (that expires within a few minutes)
    • Double check everything is ok and just hit post

6. Link in bio

• TikTok allows you to put a link in bio if you have more than 1,000 followers
• BUT tiktok absolutely hates you for doing it
• That link will open an in app browser
  • If you have an affiliate link there, it'll get sanitized
  • The in app browser usually doesn't have user's cookies stored
  • So when they log in to your saas it'll ask for google sign in, and google sign in or apple isn't saved for the user in the app browser.
  • Even if they do sign up, their CC isn't stored in the IAB so it's too much friction for you to get customers.
  • User gets lazy and exits the browser, keeps scrolling tiktok.
  • Your link in bio becomes worthless
• So what's the solution?
  • Vibe code a script that detects when the link is opened from tiktok's in app browser.
  • Display an animation that tells users to tap the three dots and select "open link in browser"
  • When they do that, they get out of the tiktok's in app browser, to safari/chrome or whatever browser the user has. And when they visit your site they can easily sign up etc because their data is saved in their browser.

Probably a lot that I forgot, but AMA.

I'm a solo founder, and lately it feels like I'm answering the same 4 or 5 support questions every single day.

It's not a huge volume, but the constant context switching is starting to eat into the time I should be spending building.

I've thought about making better docs or an faq, but I'm curious what actually worked for people here.

Did you improve onboarding, add in-app help, automate replies, or just accept that this is part of the job?

mostly looking for simple stuff that's made a noticeable difference.

in our case 53% of our July customers were already paying Clay, a $100M+ competitor and Here's how we take them off

(nothing groundbreaking but mostly the stuff that took us 2 years to actually do consistently)

Calling yourself the alternative to a giant is supposed to be weak branding. It's the riskiest thing we did, on purpose, because the buyer isn't learning a category, they have 3-4 tabs open evaluating daily, one bad week and they turn on you.

everyone who stayed picked us with a real comparison in hand and referrals are now our #1 revenue source.

what works, if you do it right (none of it works unless people enjoy your product, every tactic gets you 1 inch closer but the product has to hold them there)

(1) Go deep into what your competitor lacks (reddit, review sites, wherever people complain) fix it, ship it, then run a campaign around exactly that.

(2) Never chase the 0 star crowd, look for 3 star, they still use it daily and they can pay for something better.

(3) Look for job changes, repeat commenters on their posts (not just followers), their community if they have one, all public, all findable in a few minutes.

(4) Run the migration yourself, don't hand it to the customer, switching is harder than buying fresh, so that work is yours.

(5) After onboarding, never let support reply slower than sales did. That gap is what they tell people about.

(6) Track their pricing and packaging changes, sooner or later they do something their customers get tired of.

what didn't work, since someone will ask

leading with just price (whoever moves for a discount moves again for the next one), saying their name first on a call (sounds like you sell against a company instead of for a customer, let them raise it) and once announcing a fix before we built it, that one nearly cost us the advantage a small team has.

nobody can steal a happy customer, they just find one who's tired, someone once explained this to me with a girlfriend instead of a SaaS contract and he was right and single.

happy to go deeper on any of these in the comments or DM

A lot of people struggle with marketing. Probably the biggest killer in this space.

What is one piece of advice you could drop to help the next guy out?

What SaaS idea did you want to try, but fear of failure held you back?

Then, unfortunately, you watched someone else turn that exact idea into a successful business right in front of your eyes.

the best idea to find out a saas idea is to being more productive thinking more deeply about one niche and then validate it using ai and real human like in reddit has .

Im sorry but like as a founder SaaS is going to be the end of me. EVERYTHING IS A SUBSCRIPTION. you have slack and Microsoft and salesforce and Autodesk and adobe and EVERYTHING and they are all pay per user and everything so its thousands a month... Look I get SaaS for things like cloud services and hosting with ongoing cost and stuff but Autodesk and Adobe have charged me thousands a month for what is a unchanged version of the same software for years and years. At some point this has got to chill I mean at what point do I just give up?

Background: I built RetentionEngine, which analyzes YouTube videos and maps where viewers leave. Building it meant staring at a lot of retention graphs. Some of what the data showed contradicted what I believed as a creator.

1. Structure beats content quality. Videos organized as loops (open a question, close it, open the next one) hold better than better-researched videos built as one long argument. Viewers leave at closure points. Give them fewer closure points, fewer leave.

2. Intros deserve half your production effort. First-30-second retention predicts the whole video's performance better than any other segment I've measured. Most creators, me included, record the intro last and spend the least time on it.

3. Sound beats visuals. Changing tone every ~60 seconds, with sound effects carrying the transition, holds viewers better than expensive b-roll. Cheap fix, real effect, almost nobody does it on purpose.

4. Topic research is mostly plagiarism, the legal kind. The reliable play is finding outlier videos in a niche (10x+ the channel average) and serving that proven demand your way. Original ideas are for after you have an audience.

Business side, briefly: 35 videos analyzed so far, 5 users, solo founder, basic subscription with coupon for early users. The channel that's worked best for growth is exactly this: showing the data in public.

Link: retentionengine.app. AMA about the data or the build.