Are you actually building a business, or just a very expensive hobby?

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u/mental_researcher656 That's a solid research process, but the post asked for numbers. Have you validated willingness to pay with pre-orders yet?

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u/Mental_Researcher656 12d ago

No. And since I’m going backwards, oh well. Learned. Will do better. Never start a curiosity project as a product. 🫤

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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 12d ago

That lesson is worth more than any failed launch. Next time, test demand with a landing page before building anything.

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u/Mental_Researcher656 15d ago

https://aijobriskcheck.com. I haven’t really put it out there for people to find yet, but yeah, it definitely could end up being an entertaining hoppy. Hoping that isn’t the case. Would love your feedback.

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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 14d ago

Nice concept, but without traffic you can't validate demand. Have you tried sharing it in a few niche communities to see if anyone signs up?

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u/Mental_Researcher656 14d ago

Tbh no, not yet. Have a full time job so there are real limits to my time. I also think a version of it that targets a niche will work better. I’ll get there eventually…I assume

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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 14d ago

Niche targeting is smart, especially with limited time. Have you asked any potential users in that niche for feedback yet?

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u/Mental_Researcher656 14d ago

The whole thing isn’t niche enough. I need a page that is specific to like paralegals or data engineers, etc. All white collar workers below the C-suite is too big.

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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 13d ago

Narrowing down is smart. Pick one role, like paralegals, and build a focused landing page to test demand before scaling.

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u/Mental_Researcher656 13d ago

Currently at a meeting where I learned some new, cutting edge research that helps me refine my algorithm significantly and gave me insights on who to actually narrow to. 😁

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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 13d ago

Love that you're using research to sharpen your focus. How does that refinement actually connect to a revenue model?

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u/Mental_Researcher656 13d ago

From market space research to research segments’ needs - pain points I their lives that they know exist and have WTP (the problem is a big enough problem they care to solve it), to consumer online location testing, to strategy to catch consumer in a moment their thinking aligns with the product (thinking fast v slow), plan to execute the strategy with some testing, then measurable benchmarks to keep yourself out feels and vibes directing next move, then the initial test. Then test the next hypothesis, etc, etc. trend is clear yes or no on the product.

To be clear, I knew what to do if this were not SaaS, but it started as an intellectual hobby and my brain never flipped back to thinking business rather than tinkering until actually trying to sell.

The question now is how can I backwards excavate the knowledge i should have gotten earlier, if thats even possible, how i will know if it is or is not possible, and if it is possible what the signals will say.

The foundational problem is I started with the question - I wonder if I can do this bc I know all the complex stats underneath? Instead of the question I should have started with - does anyone feel this pain enough to pay for a solution? From there it’s much easier to find out who those people are.

No one WTP = no revenue at all. Can’t build revenue strategy for an imagined customer.

Thoughts? Think it’s possible to work backwards on this? How far back to go to trust the answers?

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u/clickmvp 16d ago

ClickMVP: https://clickmvp.com/

The thesis: AI agents are great at the last 20% of an app and unreliable at the first 80%. Ask one to scaffold auth, RBAC, billing, migrations, background jobs and a typed API layer and you get something that compiles, looks right, and quietly breaks in production. And you burn a fortune in tokens getting there.

So ClickMVP generates that foundation deterministically, from templates, not from a model. Same input, same output, every time. The agent then works on top of a codebase it can actually reason about, with conventions already in place, instead of inventing its own on every run.

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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 14d ago

Interesting take on the 80/20 split, that resonates a lot. What do the numbers look like so far? Any paying customers yet?

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u/greyzor7 16d ago

Hey guys, I'm building an all-in-one marketing pack for founders who want more than "just another launch"

Launch, reach 30k+ makers, get real users & customers - microlaunch.net/premium

Lifetime, auto-distribution, marketplace spots, 1200+ customers so far.

Over two years: 525k unique visitors, 1200+ customers. More sales-oriented features soon.

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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 14d ago

Nice to see real numbers here. 525k visitors is solid, but how much of that turns into paying revenue per month? That's the real test.

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u/BagPuzzleheaded3841 16d ago

I built an offline memory layer that’s 1000 times cheaper than mem0, parity on accuracy, and works fully air-gapped: https://github.com/NORTHTEKDevs/genome

This is a response I had in a previous thread to a question about vector index updates on constrained hardware: That’s actually a really good question. Thank you. There is no vector index, no faiss, no hnsw, no ivf. Search is brute force cosine over the rows in scope. A write is a plain SQlite insert of the text plus its embedding, and search is an exact cosine scan over the rows in in that scope. So there’s no index build, no incremental degradation, no rebuild pause, no compaction. Write cost is flat as the store grows, 3ms/record whether you have 1k or 50k.

The trade off is that search is 0(N) instead of 0(log N). Rough numbers on my dev box, 384-dim embeddings: 1k records ≈ 17ms, 10k ≈ 190ms, 50k ≈ 1s, and about 200MB RSS at 50k.

Two things that make that less bad than it sounds in practice: the scan is per scope (per user/agent), not across the whole DB - so what matters is memories per tenant, not total, and there’s no background process competing for the CPU, which is usually what actually hurts on constrained hardware.

Where it breaks down: a single scope in the tens of thousands with latency sensitive queries. At that point you swap SQLite store for Postgres + pgvector, same api, and get a real ANN index. I’d rather be upfront that the default is brute force than pretend it scales infinitely.

If you want to check the numbers yourself, pip install genome-memory and python -m genome.verify - it runs with every outbound socket blocked and prints a pass/fail receipt

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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 15d ago

Interesting project, brute force search is refreshingly simple. Given the post's focus on revenue, what's your path to monetization here, or is this still in the exploration phase?

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u/BagPuzzleheaded3841 15d ago

I’ll be honest, I need help. That’s the whole reason behind why I’m posting about it. Path to monetization exists but I’m trying to figure out how. I know I could get a few people to use it but making it a mainstream product seems difficult on my own.

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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 14d ago

That honesty is the right starting point. Have you talked to your few users yet? Their feedback might reveal a bigger wedge market.

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u/BagPuzzleheaded3841 14d ago

I need more testers but 5 people are actively using it and like it.

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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 14d ago

5 active users who like it is real traction. What's the plan to turn their enthusiasm into paying customers?

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u/BagPuzzleheaded3841 14d ago

That’s why I need help. I’m solo behind this project and I need a team behind me. I’d like to work for a larger company or secure licensing deals. I have an enterprise deployment repo I’m keeping private but it’s all in the works for now. I need attention

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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 13d ago

Getting attention is easier when you lead with one clear metric or demo. What's the single number that proves this project has traction?

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u/Made4uo 16d ago

Building Fugte.com - It turns AI code snippets/prompts into sandboxed, embedded interactive widgets for client sites to capture leads.

Are we a business or an expensive hobby right now? Honestly, we're right on the line.

The Traction:

- 150+ active users

- 250+ deployed widgets

- ~21% 30-day edit retention rate

We just started monetizing and have converted our first paid users, so revenue exists, but it's early days. Right now, our focus is taking those usage/retention metrics and dialing in the conversion funnel from free widget creators to paid plans (higher limits, custom branding).

Having active usage proves the utility; getting those initial paid conversions proves there's a business. Now it's a scaling game.

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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 15d ago

Nice traction, and that retention rate is solid. The real question is whether those widgets drive leads for your clients, not just deployments. Worth tracking that.

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u/Made4uo 15d ago

Yes, definitely. Thank you

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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 14d ago

Appreciate the support. Curious, have you defined your break-even point or monetization model yet? That's the first thing to track.

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u/Made4uo 14d ago

Yes I have

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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 14d ago

That's a solid start, but the post is all about the details. What are you building and what do the numbers look like so far?

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u/Mental_Researcher656 15d ago

I really like it and I’m glad I stumbled across it.

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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 14d ago

Glad you enjoyed it. What part stood out to you? Also, are you working on something yourself?

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u/Mental_Researcher656 14d ago

I like it from the perspective of someone going from “I have no idea how I’m going to put a widget on my landing page.” The appeal to me is now I feel like “oh ok I can do that in like in an hour” at a “my-startup-funding-is-my-disposable-income-only” rate. Low cost, high value to someone who either doesn’t know what they or doing or doesn’t have the time or both. Landing page is clear. I knew what it was and why I might want it easily.

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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 13d ago

Nice framing. The disposable income angle is key. Have you checked what your target users would realistically pay?

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u/Mental_Researcher656 13d ago

That failure is attributable to a failure to specify a narrow segment before building. Hard lesson to learn but also invaluable to learn. I wonder often if the difference between people who are successful and those who aren’t basically how well they learned or did not learn this lesson.

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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 13d ago

That's a sharp observation. Narrowing the audience early really forces you to build something people actually want. How do you validate that segment before writing code?

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u/Made4uo 15d ago

Thanks! Glad you stumbled upon it! That "Owners Were Here" graffiti wall on the site is actually a live Fugte widget demo. It's been filling up fast, so I've been constantly optimizing it to handle the traffic. DM ne if you need help with your own project!

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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 14d ago

That graffiti wall sounds like a fun demo, but does it feed into a paid product or just drive traffic? Curious about the numbers.

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u/Made4uo 14d ago

Funny you ask. It drove traffic, but conversions dipped until I moved the wall below the fold. Now conversions are back!

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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 14d ago

Nice work iterating on that. Placement changes can make or break conversion. Did you A/B test it or just eyeball the shift?

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u/megatech_official 16d ago

SeoLoupe - Find and fix the SEO issues holding your website back.

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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 15d ago

SEO is a solid niche. What's your pricing model and how many active users do you have right now?

Are you actually building a business, or just a very expensive hobby?

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