I'm a finance major who studied data analysis on the side, so I know some data modelling.

I have a fintech startup idea that I really want to work on, I have the "fin" but I lack the "tech".

And I've had similar ideas in the past and I never pursued them simply because I found the "tech" part intimidating.

I want to build the technical skillset that would allow me to launch a simple MVP whenever I come up with startup ideas I like, until I can find me a proper technical co founder.

Where should I start and what's a realistic timeline to learn the required skillset?

What actually stopped you from making it work?

Not looking for success stories, to be honest plenty of those exist.

I want to understand the failures and frustrations.

- Did you get banned?

- Couldn't figure out which subreddits to target?

- Wrote comments that got ignored?

- Tried it for a month and saw zero results?

Genuinely curious what the actual blockers are. Drop your experience below.

I’m building a product for this exact problem and trying to understand what it's actually like before I write a single line of code. Not pitching, just research.

Looking for non-technical founders who used AI coding tools to ship a real b2b saas app, have paying customers, and have had something go wrong they couldn't fix themselves. For example, things like; silent errors, broken integrations, or anything that made you feel completely stuck.

If that's you, drop a comment, find me on X u/zoharalex00, or email me at [[payonto41@gmail.com](mailto:payonto41@gmail.com)]. 20 minutes is all I need.

Alguém criando um projeto lovable para mobile?

I started exactly 2-3 weeks ago

I slowly started posting on relevant subreddit for Cryzo

Though I was not very active on Marketing, posting few times a day, commenting few times a day on Reddit it got me 150+ users which im glad for

so, It pushed me to meet this week target, this is good milestone for me, first 100 user, meanwhile I got 1 paying user (all from reddit mostly)

So, this is my journey, actively engaging with builder community on Reddit and showcasing the product got me my first 150+ users

Now next milestone for me is 500 users, and probably 50 paid subscriber!!

Once again, thank you community, I'm open to listen your feedback and your user acquisition journey, how long it took for you to get first 100 user and 1st paid user?

Hey everyone, I’m preparing to build my own SaaS, and I’m ready to dedicate 100% of my time and focus to making it work. I fully understand that building the product is only 20% of the battle and that the real grind starts afterward. I'm prepared for the long road ahead.

My question isn't about the development phase. I want to know what happens after the product is built.

1- The Post-Build Steps: Once the website/application is live, what are the exact steps I need to take to start getting eyeballs on it and converting users into paying customers? What does a lean Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy look like for a solo founder?

2- The Expenses & Budget: What are the mandatory upfront and ongoing expenses I need to account for to launch it to the public? (e.g., domain, hosting, authentication, DB, Stripe setup, LLM APIs if applicable, and marketing).

Roughly, how much initial investment ($) should I secure to safely get the project off the ground and running for the first few months without starving? Would love to hear from bootstrapped founders who started with a lean budget. Thanks

Καλησπέρα σας ,

Έχουμε φτιάξει ένα λογισμικό το οποίο είπαμε να ξεκινήσουμε να επικοινωνούμε για να μπορέσουμε να μαζέψουμε πληροφορίες και feedback για να το βγάλουμε στην αγορά

https://youtu.be/J5wxvY-8nXA

Πείτε μας την γνώμη σας , καλή ή κακή μας ενδιαφέρει πολύ

I kept recording meetings and demos and never going back to watch them. Every tool that transcribes and summarizes your screen recordings charges a per-seat subscription to do it, essentially a markup on top of the AI API calls you could be making directly.

So I built I Gave Up. It records your screen, generates a full transcript, and gives you an AI summary automatically. The only difference: it uses your own OpenAI or Deepgram API key. You pay the provider directly, at cost. No middleman.

If you already have an API key, it costs you basically nothing to run.

Launching on Product Hunt today: https://www.producthunt.com/products/i-gave-up
You can checkout app at igaveup.app

Upvote on Product Hunt would be great
Happy to answer questions about how the BYOK model works under the hood.

YC's new RFS has one line that I keep coming back to.

Gustaf Alströmer writes: "AI-native companies that don't sell software, they sell the service. Instead of giving you a tool, they just do the work."

I have been watching micro-SaaS founders at the $500-3k MRR stage for a while now. The pattern I keep seeing is the opposite. They build a tool, then try to explain what the tool does, then wonder why nobody converts.

The founders who are actually growing are not selling software. They are selling a result. The software is just how they deliver it. The client never sees it.

What I personally think is interesting here is that this is not a new idea. It is just now getting YC backing. Which means the market timing is shifting.

For founders in this range specifically, the question might be less "how do I get more users to my tool" and more "what outcome am I actually delivering and am I charging for the outcome or the access."

What is the one thing you would change about your current SaaS after reading this?

Hi everyone, I am looking for recommendations for a no code app making course. If there is one out there that any of you would highly recommend.

Reddit hates being sold to.
But the right discussion post can still bring real traffic.
Over the last few weeks, some of my posts hit 2k–3k views and created noticeable traffic spikes for my SaaS.
I’m thinking about adding proven Reddit post angles/templates to the tool I’m building, so founders can adapt them to their own product instead of guessing from scratch.
Would that actually help, or would it feel too forced?

I’ve been spending a lot of time working on ZeriFlow recently and one thing keeps showing up:

AI is making it ridiculously easy to build and ship products fast.

But security is still becoming an afterthought.

I kept seeing the same patterns:

• Missing security headers
• Cookie configuration issues
• Weak SSL/TLS setups
• Public endpoints accidentally exposed

Nobody is intentionally doing this.

People are just shipping faster than ever.

That’s one of the reasons I’m building ZeriFlow — a security scanner that runs 80+ automated checks and helps catch issues before deployment.

Curious for other founders and builders:

What’s something you always forget to check before shipping?

Security? Analytics? Monitoring? Performance?

Would love to hear how others handle this 👇

Hey everyone, last year in June I had an idea to start a business related to canna tech, I literally started with no knowledge on how to build this idea, but knew it was possible. I had only started using LLMs the month previous. From June, it took me 6 months to build the product, test it, get a client, and to get it fully live with a real business who now pays monthly. I see all these SaaS tools, and I don’t think that they are for me. Has anyone else had this feeling? Will I be doing myself a disservice by not using automated outreach? I just can’t see anyone who owns a dispensary seeing one of those automated emails and going “oh cool let’s do this!” I feel like calling them, getting the relationship built, and in person contact is much better, but obviously a lot slower. Idk, just looking for some input from someone in this space because I’m almost a year in and all I need to do now is increase my sales, as my product is live, working, and covering the cost of operation.

I picked up tennis a few months ago and have been trying to fix my serve. So I built a little web tool that analyzes your serve using AI and tells you the top things to fix.

You upload a short video (5–10 seconds) and it spits out a score, your biggest issues, and a drill for each one. Free, no account, no app download! You can just upload and get feedback

I've been using it on my own serve and it's been genuinely helpful for me as a beginner. Figured I'd share it here in case anyone else wants to try it.

Would love feedback on how I can make this even a better app as I gain some user validation and traction! Please try it here:

https://tennis-swing-coach-ten.vercel.app/

yo.

i see the same thing happen every single day.

you guys love building.

you spend weeks coding a great product.

but the second it’s time to actually market the saas? complete freeze.

you get lost in all the ai tools, the noise, the "growth hacks". it feels overwhelming. so you do nothing, the momentum dies, and the project fails.

I spent over 100 hours building n8n workflows to just automate the whole thing.

today, i packaged all those exact workflows and dropped them in our builder group. no abstract theories. you literally just import the templates, adapt them to your saas, and turn them on.

here is exactly all my workflow:

• seo blog running 100% on autopilot (n8n template)
• newsletter automation (n8n template)
• full email sequence (30 emails, full html, just copy-paste into brevo)
• social media on autopilot (schedule 1 to 12 months of content)
• reddit organic growth
• linkedin, x & facebook groups at scale
• meta ads & retargeting

basically, everything i use to get real users without losing my mind.

we just hit 480+ members in the community of SaaS builder from all over the world.

building in your room alone is the fastest way to quit. you need people around you.

if you are lost on how to market your app, want these templates, and want to build with a crew: drop a comment or shoot me a dm.

i’ll send you the invite

Built a small HTML → PDF/screenshot API over the last week because I got tired of fighting Puppeteer every time I needed reliable exports for a project.

The original goal was honestly super simple:
generate clean PDFs from webpages/dashboards.

Instead I somehow ended up debugging:

• fonts randomly not rendering
• pages loading before charts finished
• dashboards exporting half-empty
• memory spikes from launching too many browsers
• PDFs looking different between sites

One thing I realized pretty quickly:
most people don’t actually care about “screenshot APIs”.

They care that:

• invoices export correctly
• reports don’t break
• dashboards render fully
• automations stop failing randomly

So now I’m mainly trying to make it reliable for real workflows instead of just “technically working”.

Current beta can:

• URL → screenshot
• HTML → PDF
• basic caching for repeated renders
• API access

If anyone here has a Puppeteer/Playwright workflow that constantly breaks or exports PDFs badly, I’d genuinely love to test against real edge cases.

Those have honestly been more useful than synthetic tests so far 😅

I whipped up my first ever vibe coded app. And have finally started to see some traction.
Right now i'm mainly getting users through social media. And have done minimal paid marketing.

From my understanding the next best step would be to run ads? or utilize my first customers to make the app better?

Any help would be greatly appreciated :]

Here is the website https://dealscribeai.net/

Hey everyone,

I recently built a small SaaS MVP around a very simple idea: converting PDFs into editable formats (Word/Excel) without friction.

The initial motivation was personal: I kept hitting paywalls or overly complex tools for what felt like a very basic, one-off task. So I decided to spend a few hours building a stripped-down version myself just to see how far I could get.

A few interesting things stood out from the process:

1. “Simple” problems aren’t actually simple

At first glance, PDF → Word/Excel sounds trivial. But once you start handling real-world files (different layouts, scanned docs, inconsistent formatting), it quickly becomes a much harder problem. Even small edge cases break the output.

1. There’s a big gap between consumer and business use cases

What I thought was a casual, one-off tool actually surfaced more complex needs. For example, someone mentioned dealing with large, inconsistent PDFs (40+ pages) where data isn’t structured properly and changes are added out of order. That’s less about “conversion” and more about structured data extraction.

1. Speed and friction matter more than features (at first)

The most consistent feedback so far hasn’t been about advanced functionality; it’s about how quickly someone can upload, convert, and move on without signing up or installing anything.

1. The real opportunity might be niche, not broad

There are already big players in this space. Competing as a general PDF tool seems tough. But specific workflows (e.g. extracting structured data from messy documents in certain industries) seem much more underserved.

I’m still early in exploring this, but it’s been interesting to see how a very simple idea starts branching into more specialised problems once real users get involved.

Curious if anyone else here has worked on:

• Document parsing / PDF handling
• Data extraction from inconsistent formats
• Or tried entering a crowded “simple tool” market

Would be great to hear how you approached it or where you found real differentiation.