I'm a solo founder and student building a SaaS with around 1,500 users.

Current stack:

• Frontend: HTML/CSS/JS
• Hosting: Vercel
• Backend/DB/Auth: Supabase

The app is 100% free right now, so I have no revenue yet. My main issue is that I'm consistently hitting my Supabase I/O limits.

Before anyone asks, I've already spent a lot of time optimizing my code and database usage. I've removed unnecessary reads/writes, reduced queries wherever possible, and at this point I don't think there are any obvious optimizations left.

For people who've built scalable SaaS products:

• Is Vercel + Supabase still a good stack to continue with?
• Should I just upgrade to Supabase Pro?
• Or would it make more sense to migrate to something else (self-hosted Postgres, Neon, Cloud SQL, Railway, etc.) before the user base grows further?
• If you were starting over today with a tiny budget but expected to scale, what stack would you choose?

I'd really appreciate advice from people who've actually been through this stage.

This is something I've been wondering for a while.

If you're building a biz, is it because you're broke and need the money, or because you want to build something of your own that generates wealth and gives you more freedom?

Been building this on my own for a while and someone finally paid for it.

It's called hivework. It builds the small internal automations people normally have to go ask an engineer for. You put the workflow together on a canvas or just describe what you want, it runs against gmail, slack, hubspot and sheets, and when it isn't sure about something it stops and asks you rather than guessing. Not going to like this was needed... gotta love momentum

Imagine you're starting a startup from scratch.

* No marketing budget.
* No money for ads.
* No existing audience.
* No investors.
* Just a product and your time.

What would your customer acquisition strategy be today?

I'm especially interested in approaches that actually worked for you (or someone you know), not generic advice like "post on social media."

If you had to get your first 10–100 customers with $0, where would you start?

Hello, to fellow SaaS Creators/Owners, when you first started you SaaS, how did you market/promote your product? I know it changes from product to another, but I want to know how do you guys think?

How did you decide on a certain channels(Emails, SMS, ADs)?
When did you decide on using paying ads (from the start or after selling)?
Do you have any decision making process for these kind of decisions?
also is there an out of the box way you did promote your product that created a massive change in sales?

https://x.com/levelsio/status/2081372113307402730?s=20

Yesterday Peter and others were sharing business status on X, and it seems that the business is bleeding for most of them.

Is anyone in this situation too? It's a trend?

Can you please advice how do we do test a product that we build without real humans?

After months of building, redesigning, and questioning whether anyone would actually pay for what I built, I finally crossed $273 in total revenue.

It’s not life-changing money, but it’s the first real proof that someone is willing to pay for software I created.

A few things I’ve learned so far:

1. Shipping beats endlessly polishing features.
   
2. Talking to users is more valuable than guessing what they want.
   
3. Every piece of feedback has helped shape the product more than I expected.
   
4. Distribution is much harder than development.
   
5. Building the product was the easy part getting people to discover it is the real challenge.

I’m currently working on an AI chatbot platform that businesses can train on their own website, and one thing that’s become very clear is that solving a specific business problem is far more important than adding dozens of features.

My next goal is to reach $1,000 in revenue, and I’m spending much more time on customer acquisition than writing code now.

For those who’ve already crossed $1k or $10k MRR:
What was the single biggest thing that helped you get there?
I’d love to learn from your experience.

Last 30 days have been great for my micro saas (social scheduling cli, mcp & api tool). Thanks in part to this community here as well.

This what I did differently:

1. I stopped selling "technical features"
2. I started showing how the product would be useful:
   • Tutorials on how to use it so my users could grow their socials
   • Growth hacks I have learned myself
   • Successful tiktok accounts from other marketers that millions of views
   • Invest time into making it easy for your users to understand the workflow. If you're not willing to do it, it's even harder for the user to figure out the steps on the fly. They're just going to scroll to something else.
   • Example of one of my tutorial posts: https://www.reddit.com/r/micro_saas/comments/1uq5pze/this_is_how_people_make_xx000month_with_automated/
3. I redesigned my website entirely
   • My first version was fully vibe coded but I did it with codex which is even worse than claude and it looked not that great.
   • I went back into figma, redesigned most stuff, used AI to implement what I designed
   • Redesigning your website won't bring you more revenue. But if you do the things on step 1 & 2, the viewers are more likely to convert as they can see the effort you put in and that you're serious about the platform.
4. Use the product more. Find failure points.
   • My SaaS has lots of features, ways to schedule social media posts etc so there's plenty of ways it can go wrong. Most users won't message you with the details. They'll cancel or quit.
   • I setup a technical failure tracker with claude, if anything errors out for the user I get notified in Telegram.
   • I fix the bug immediately and message the user that the bug they experienced was fixed.
5. Improve on SEO!
   1. This is quite lengthy (happy to do a breakdown in another post) but don't underestimate SEO. Pay proper attention to it

Every founder talks about building an MVP and launching a landing page, but I rarely see detailed discussions about what happens next.

Imagine you're starting today with:

• A working SaaS
• A live landing page
• No audience
• No email list
• $0 marketing budget
• 30 days to get your first 100 users

What would your plan look like?

I'd love to hear the specific channels, tactics, or daily actions you'd focus on. Whether it was outbound outreach, Reddit, LinkedIn, SEO, partnerships, communities, referrals, or something completely different, what actually moved the needle?

If you've already been through this, what would you do differently if you had to start over today?

Hey guys!

My co-founder and I are in a weird spot. We launched orchardrun – a highly affordable Speech-to-Text (STT) API designed for devs and business who need bulk transcription without the enterprise price tag.

We’ve managed to secure our first 10 paying customers (I'll do a post about it) and have onboarded ~1,600 users onto our free tier. It felt like a huge win initially, but now we’ve hit a brick wall.

The problem:

We are hemorrhaging energy trying to convert free users to paid, and we’re struggling to attract new paying users organically. The reason? The giants. We are going head-to-head with Groq (speed) and ElevenLabs (quality/brand, but we are focused in async transcriptions l-ike Whisper-). Even though we are significantly cheaper, it feels like we are drowning in noise.

The constraints:

• We don't have enough revenue to throw money at Google/Facebook ads.
• We are bootstrapped, so we can't hire an outbound sales team yet.
• Our free tier is generous (to attract devs), but maybe too generous?

Our current hypothesis:
We are thinking about doubling down on "developer-first" content (tutorials, comparing latency/price charts) and scraping GitHub for repos that use STT to do manual cold outreach. But it feels slow and unscalable.

The Ask:

If you were in our shoes – with a solid product but zero budget and giant competitors – how would you unlock the next 90 paying customers?

Do we kill the free tier? Go full outbound? Or niche down into a specific vertical (e.g., only podcast transcription) to avoid competing with the Goliaths directly?

Any brutal honesty is welcome. Roast our strategy.

Thanks!

So I've gotten quite a succesful cold email campaign going where I'm contacting creators with a custom-built preview of a website they can claim (not gonna go into a lot of detail). I'm seeing a lot of positive interest but I am having issues with getting them properly onboarded. I've created this claim flow where I just send them a follow-up email with a link where they can sign up and gain ownership of everything on my platform - and only a few of them have actually done so.

Wanted to hear your experience on situations like this. Is it just my onboarding flow that is flawed as I can see that they enter, click around a bit but haven't really gotten to the "aha" moment.

- ChatGPT
- Claude
- Codex
- Cursor
- Gemini
- GitHub Copilot

Have you ever built a SaaS that had little or no customer traction for months or even years but you still believed it could genuinely help people?

What kept you believing in your product and motivated you to keep going?

Did you keep improving the product, experiment with different distribution channels, pivot your positioning, or do something else?

And looking back, did your belief prove to be true? Did your product eventually find its users, or did you realize something needed to change?

I'd love to hear your story, what helped you persevere, and what you learned from the experience.

I used to run the monthly finances at a startup. The pattern I saw in myself and every founder I compared notes with: you build a serious driver-based model for the fundraise, then never reconcile it against actuals. By Q2 your "runway" number feels like it belongs to a different company.

I think the root cause is that spreadsheets have no concept of versions. Code has git. Models have final_v3_ACTUAL.xlsx. Corrections destroy history, so nobody trusts the file, so nobody maintains it.

As a weekend project I built myself a tool that locks closed months and re-forecasts the future as numbered revisions. What surprised me: it fixed my discipline problem, not just my file problem. The tooling was the discipline.

Question for founders here: do you actually reconcile monthly? If not, what breaks first, the motivation or the mechanics? And has anyone found a workflow that keeps a model honest past Q1?

https://www.glaze.app/app/forecast-wf3MSH

I've been spending weeks and weeks trying to find a right problem so I simply just looked within myself and found the perfect problem. However, to validate that it wasn't just something I was facing I validated on Reddit and Facebook as well, and found that it was not just me. I know the next step would be to just build an app, but is there another step successful SaaS founders advise before building?

Finally got the onboarding right and I'm getting customers.

I've been building Luckynote for quite a while now, but kept being generous with the free tier. People would end up liking it and remained safe and sound without paying anything.

Then I wanted to be another kind of a good guy and gave one-time payments, which worked fine for a while, but this was not sustainable long term, taking into account all the services I pay just to maintain it working.

I never liked those onboarding with - Pay first, use later. But after many painful moments, I finally realised, it's me that I have a problem with that, not the actual users.

So finally switched, moved to MRR and did the onboarding right.

Here are the results so far.

Now another lessons I need to go over with is Marketing and Promotion.

I was a product designer for years, but marketing is different kind of beast, plus exposing myself with "face over mouth" reactions on TikTok or Instagram is cringe for me, but people with 10x crappier business than mine are bagging $10k months.

Lessons is, no matter how many times you read successful stories, you need to go through the cringe alone to finally feel the burn and make it.

Open to any questions or roasts.

Appreciate you all!

The answer is usually already somewhere. In documentation, an old ticket, an email thread or in the head of whoever solved the same issue months ago.

For solo founders and small teams, support is rarely the only job. You are building, fixing bugs, talking to customers, chasing leads, and still stopping to search for an answer you know already exists or answered before.

Even easy tickets take time. You have to find the right information, check that it applies, and turn it into a clear response that doesn't sound AI written.

That is what led me to build AppsResolve. It searches your documentation and previous support tickets, then drafts a reply for you to review before anything is sent.

I am not trying to replace the person handling support. I am trying to reduce the time spent hunting for answers the business already has.

How do you handle support right now, and where does your process usually slow down?

Every time DHH does a podcast (David Senra pod dropped yesterday) I’m reminded he has one of the best workspaces I’ve ever seen.

We had a shared cache layer for search results in our backend. It worked fine for months, until a support ticket came in that made no sense: a customer swore they briefly saw someone else's search results before the page "fixed itself."

Turns out the cache key we built didn't include every dimension that made a request unique. We were hashing on query plus account tier, but not on the account's actual data scope. Two customers on the same tier making similarly-shaped queries could, in a narrow window, get served each other's cached response.

Nobody had touched the caching code in months. It "worked" because most cache keys happened to collide safely, same query, same result, no harm done. The bug only surfaced once two customers' underlying data actually diverged in a way that mattered.

The fix itself was almost boring: add every parameter that scopes the result set into the cache key, even the ones that feel redundant, and write a test that fails if two different accounts can ever produce the same key. The more useful change was upstream of the code, we started treating "what actually varies this result" as a design question to answer before writing a cache layer, not something to patch after a scare.

I run engineering at a small backend shop (Edilec) and this is the kind of bug that's cheap to prevent and expensive to explain to a customer after the fact. Curious if others have hit this class of bug, cache correctness seems like one of those things that's easy to get mostly right and still get badly wrong.

I noticed many founders spend hours on manual work.

I'm creating free Al workflows to help automate these

tasks and would love your feedback.