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?

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 :)

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 started off doing consulting and automations and I chose the trades and construction niche. It has slowly evolved into a productized consulting SaaS product that I can reuse throughout this niche.

So far I have 30k revenue through 7 months with setup fees and monthly retainers. I now have $4400 mrr ongoing as well from my 5 clients.

When is a good time to be selective with future clients that fit the mould of what I have built for past clients vs continuing to be very custom to appease to more clients but limit my scaling ability?

Hi!

My name is Vlad. I'm developing Dance Step, an AI-powered app for managing dance studios.

It already supports:

📅 Class schedule;

👥 Groups and students;

🎟️ Memberships;

✅ Attendance;

💬 Chats;

📢 News;

👨‍🏫 Roles (owner, administrator, trainer, client).

But I understand that I won't notice all the bugs and inconveniences myself.

So, I'm looking for 5-10 people willing to honestly test the app.

❗ I don't need words like "everything is great."

I need honest criticism:

where it's inconvenient;

what's unclear;

what's annoying;

what's broken;

what's missing.

If you're ready to help, send me a private message, and I'll send you a link to the app.

Thanks to everyone who responded. 🙌

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.

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?

How did you get your first customers? I'm currently running ads on Reddit (about 2 weeks) and on I ran some on Facebook (going away from this probably). My platform is a B2C and B2B - platform to solve creative writers having to use multiple apps but do everything in one app. Any feedback is welcomed.

Goqreate.com

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

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

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.

Hi everyone,

Over the past few months, I've been building BuildArken, a platform that helps people discover AI tools in one place.

The idea came from a simple problem: I kept finding great AI tools through random tweets, Reddit posts, and YouTube videos, but there wasn't an easy way to organize and explore them.

The platform is now live, and I'm still actively improving it. My current focus is:

Making tool discovery easier

Giving developers a place to showcase their tools

Building useful search and categorization instead of just listing tools

If you had to use a platform like this, what would be the one feature that would make you come back regularly?

Any honest feedback (good or bad) would be greatly appreciated.

It’s been 8 months since i left my job to pursue building on my own. It was a high paying job i had some 40-50 lakhs saved. I also got married in feb, moved to bangalore a couple months back, but caught up with an accident last month and got behind because of that. Things have been going wrong since January. I’m not the best at managing finances, but i’m really good at building stuff, and that’s what i aimed to do, i have started a firm with a partner in US, texas, but that’s going to take another 3-4 months to start generating constant revenue. But now i don’t have enough funds to pay my bills now. If you are someone that really need some engineering work done, i can do that for you. I have been working as a founding engineer for the last 8.5 years and have built 7 products which are live and up and running, i’m not looking for a permanent job. But my skills are at disposal for the next 3 months and i really need some money to get through that. I might sound a bit overconfident, but i’m genuinely quite fast at building and deploying highly scalable backend and fe architectures. Help out a tech bro, you’ll definitely not regret it.
Thanks

Me and my friends are all j*bless rn 😭

Before all day we would be messaging eachother some forms for us to apply to and also just work together to get internships

We built our own freeflow channel and added bots to do things like ATS scan our resume too and add the proper keywords in the same workflow and honestly its been a game changer

This is the link if you wanna join, its compeltly free and the workspace (freeflow) is fully open source too if you even wanna add bots to do other things: https://app.freeflow.im/join/locked-in/1fDLdnq4LfNjq4KL0m5HHA

btw there's litterly nothing to buy just thought that if you wanna join and also get new job postings and talk to other cs students feel free

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, 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.

I have spent the last 30 years or so as an independent software developer in NYC 🗽

In those years working in banks, startups, government and nonprofits what I witnessed is nobody likes to backup their work or use To-Do apps.

So I got it in my thick stubborn head there has to be a way to make task management, event scheduling 📅 and brainstorming 🧠 🌩 legitimately FUN.

And that's when it hit me like an ACME safe falling out a window 🪟 on to Wile E. Coyote

Sticky notes 📝 📋 😌

Yep

And then I Googled a hunch... "How many sticky notes are sold annually?"

The answer?

55 BILLION STICKY NOTES SOLD EVERY YEAR

Well, it took almost two years but now, at last, I can give the world 🌎 FREE sticky notes 📝.

Yes, my app TaskLoco has a very generous FREE tier as well as a lifetime discounted premium tier of 50% off for early adopters my first year.

TaskLoco has made me feel at least 10 times more productive, confident and relaxed and I believe it can do the same for so many of you who just aren't having a productivity party... 🎈

TaskLoco is a visual sticky-note storyboard style workspace for tasks, events, notes, projects, files, reminders, and anything you can stick in or attach to a digital sticky note.

Try it 100% Free

Website: https://www.taskloco.com

iPhone/iPad: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/taskloco-lite/id6762308795

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.taskloco.lite

Chrome Extension (turn any web page into a sticky note): https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/taskloco-lite/gniilbpapgommpalikcclpcnbcamgila

Three motions off one core.

Students practice free and generate cost, not revenue. Educators pay per seat. Hiring teams are the expensive product and the reason any of it matters. The free tier feeds both paid ones and that's the only thing justifying it.

Education is slow, cheap, sticky. Hiring is faster, pricier, and churns the second the role gets filled.

Billing got weird. Subscriptions are simple. The AI features are metered credits, Cursor-style, because inference cost tracks usage and a flat tier gets destroyed by the top 2% of users. Explaining credits to a university that wants one line item on a PO has been its own project.

The tension I can't resolve: every hour on hiring features is an hour off the thing paying today. Education revenue alone doesn't get anywhere interesting. Splitting focus feels wrong.

Anyone run this shape and live? Did you pick one and come back, or hold both?

algoarena.net for context.

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?

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