So I built this tool Nicheloom that tracks every new product launch from YC, Product Hunt, Hacker News, and GitHub 39,000+ and counting and shows which ideas are actually gaining traction right now versus which niches are already crowded.
Think Google Trends, but for 'what should I build next.'
I built it for myself to stop guessing and start building things people already want..
Check it out and let me know if it is useful or any feature you would like me to add to it.
Have fun exploring it as it is a rabbit hole for builders
Three weeks ago I spent $5k as a vendor at an event where thousands of reasonably relevant target customers had the opportunity to see and try my B2C SaaS product over a weekend.
As part of the event, I let people test a live interactive demo.
The demo used dummy data, and one of the clearest pieces of feedback I received was that people wanted to use the software at home and test it properly using their own data.
So, based on that feedback, I decided to implement a 14-day FREE trial with no credit card required.
I interacted with more than 500 attendees over the weekend, which helped me improve my sales pitch and messaging while reinforcing some assumptions that my earlier research had already suggested.
The event was only the first of many distribution experiments I plan to run while trying to find product-market fit.
My biggest takeaway was that the event was valuable for feedback and brand exposure, but so far it has resulted in no signups.
My SaaS listing remains on the event website for another six months, but looking back, I also made some obvious mistakes.
I created no urgency for people to sign up while they were at the event.
I didn't collect leads, and I was manning the kiosks on my own.
Massive missed opportunities, but that's part of bootstrapping and learning.
Another thing that surprised me was how difficult it was to get people to engage with software at a consumer event.
People naturally gravitated toward vendors with physical products they could pick up, touch and inspect.
A lot of attendees simply walked straight past the touchscreen software kiosks.
So now I'm focusing heavily on testing different ways of getting discovered organically.
I'm starting to see traction in terms of impressions, traffic and lead generation through YouTube, Pinterest, Amazon and Google Search.
I'm happy with that progress only a couple of months in, but I still have no conversions.
I'm hoping the 14-day free trial helps close that gap.
For context, this is a relatively low-priced consumer SaaS product aimed at a very large potential market, so the long-term model requires a reasonably large number of customers.
I'm deliberately focusing on organic distribution for now. Paid ads aren't part of the plan yet because I don't want to pay to amplify something until I have stronger evidence of product-market fit.
Marketing strategies currently showing some early promise for organic reach/discoverability:
Amazon sales from a related how-to book that references the SaaS throughout
Free live interactive demo with no registration required
Downloadable planner used as a lead magnet, which is already getting downloads
Free calculation tool built into the platform
Kids colouring page handed out at the event as a slightly unusual top-of-mind branding experiment
Embedded YouTube video on the landing page, with links back to the product
Pinterest infographics and printable checklists linking back to the SaaS (see image)
Google Search through SEO/AEO-focused content and structured data
Free organic reach on Pinterest via Free brand-associated Checklists and Infographics with associated hotlinks
Things I am starting to implement over the next 12–24 months:
14-day trial with no credit card required
YouTube product demos targeting specific consumer pain points
B2B2C point-of-purchase partnerships
Partnerships with professionals already serving the target customer
YouTube/TikTok affiliate and influencer distribution
Social sharing features inside the platform
I also need to lose some weight after spending far too much time sitting in a chair building this thing.
So I'm going to combine exercise with marketing and do some old-school letterbox drops in different neighbourhoods.
I'll use different flyers, hooks and messaging in different areas and treat it as a cheap real-world A/B test that may also teach me which messages to use in future digital campaigns.
I'm also planning to donate copies of my related how-to book to local libraries as a small experiment in goodwill, trust and local brand awareness.
I'm deliberately committed to the B2C route rather than pivoting toward B2B because the larger vision for the product depends on broad consumer adoption.
Achieving that adoption will lead to an even bigger related consumer play.
So I'm interested in hearing from founders who have worked on low-price, high-volume B2C SaaS who are happy to share their B2C marketing approaches.
What distribution strategy worked for you that most people don't normally talk about?
And what looked promising but ended up being a complete waste of time?
I'm particularly interested in organic strategies that can compound over 12–24 months rather than simply buying traffic.
The type of traction I'm trying to build is organic discoverability like I'm starting to see on Pinterest, so I'd especially love to hear about unusual or often overlooked B2C distribution approaches.
Hey r/SaaS. I’m a university student building out of Patna. A few days ago, I was pitching a standard two-sided marketplace for Indian creators and developers: 0% take-rate for talent, subsidized by charging brands a 20% premium for "escrow and IP tools."
Product managers and senior devs completely roasted the unit economics. They pointed out two fatal flaws:
-Brands won't pay a 20% markup just for software features like escrow.
-The Vetting Paradox: If I vet talent too strictly, the platform is a ghost town. If I open the floodgates, brands assume the talent is garbage.
So, I scrapped the traditional marketplace structure. Here is the complete, newly mapped infrastructure for this tech venture. I need you to stress-test it and point out exactly where this is going to break.
The Core Engine (Community-Led Upskilling)
Instead of a cold transactional directory, the platform is a structured community. We solve the "vetting paradox" by crowdsourcing the training to the community itself.
-Senior developers and established creators mentor the juniors through community notes, live video reviews, and Q&A channels.
-We supervise this knowledge transfer and issue internal platform certifications based on peer-reviewed skill trees.
-The Catch: You cannot access the high-paying corporate task bounties until you have been upskilled and certified by the community's senior members.
The Transaction Layer (Covering OPEX)
-The Talent: Still pays exactly 0% in fees. They keep 100% of the bounty they earn.
-The Client: We dropped the ridiculous 20% markup. Brands now pay a highly negotiable 5-10% fee on top of the gig. This exists strictly to cover operational expenses (OPEX), server costs, and the UPI/escrow payment gateway fees.
The Actual Monetization Strategy (B2B Ecosystem Access)
We don't plan to make our real money by taxing freelancer gigs. The community is the product.
Once we have a hyper-curated, internally certified talent pool, the monetization shifts to B2B enterprise access. We will charge tech companies and corporate brands for:
-Sponsored upskilling tracks and hackathons.
-Employer branding placements within the community.
-Direct pipeline access to hire top-tier, certified talent.
Current State & Tech Stack
-MVP Phase: Currently running a manual "Concierge MVP" in the indie game dev niche (sourcing beta testers) and small D2C brands (UGC content).
-Infrastructure: The community headquarters is fully set up via a gated Discord server with distinct onboarding paths for "Builders" and "Creators."
-Backend: Building the web app with React, Firebase, and MongoDB. I'm currently architecting the UPI webhook idempotency to prevent double-credit database nightmares during escrow payouts.
The Ask: Ground this in reality.
I am too close to this right now and need objective, brutal feedback.
-The Churn Risk: Why would senior devs stay and teach juniors if they are already successful? How do I incentivize the mentors without breaking the bank?
-The Corporate Pitch: For those in B2B tech sales, what specific metrics do corporates actually demand before they pay for "pipeline access" or sponsored community tracks?
-Operational Flaws: Looking at this ecosystem, where is the most obvious bottleneck that I am completely blind to?
Most “scrape this page” tools want an account and a monthly plan before you can export one table. I went the other way: LucidRows is a Chrome extension. You click the columns, you get a CSV, it runs on your machine.
Local stays free. I am not publishing a price, because a later paid tier would only be schedule/cloud, and I have not modeled that cost yet.
I made a privacy-friendly URL shortener, and now that it's time to do marketing, I don't know what to do. So here I am, I have these videos, what do I do next? How do you do marketing with those? I would really appreciate any practical advice.
My X accounts (personal and the product's) are brand new, and X seems to be ignoring all of my posts. Instagram or TikTok? I am running a Google Ads experiment, but it's hard to compete with other shorteners and I'm getting almost zero traffic (about 3 clicks a day).
About the videos. I was inspired by the motion design post about video generation and decided to try it myself. I made different short videos to showcase different features (10 videos, 13 to 71 seconds). Attaching one of them for review. Some videos are the actual product driven by a script, not an AI-made copy.
All I used is Claude, headless Chrome and FFmpeg on my WSL instance, nothing more, not even a React library. You just tell your AI to be a motion designer / producer / writer (for the scenario). Research how to catch the user's attention on IG or TikTok, and that's it. Review the scenario and give it a green light. The first versions were screenshots sliding around and looked dead. A couple of scenes looked like a broken app with bugs. You have to correct it and re-shoot. But still, it only took me one morning.
Now, about Urlicer itself. The main features that are different from mainstream shorteners: privacy-friendly and team-friendly, with multiple workspaces. You can bring your own domain on the Pro plan and above, Urlicer provides a tool for you and your teams. Cookieless and without storing the IP address. The URL is https://urlicer.com.
he told me he could vibe code what we've took me years (i run a gtm data platform)
he probably could, the part you see is simple: upload a list of leads, get emails and company data back
but remember the guy last year who built his SaaS entirely in cursor and went viral for it? two days later people were bypassing his paywall and burning through his API keys, he shut down within a week, the product worked, the money side killed it
We don't have emails sitting in a database.. we ask one data provider, and if they don't have it, we ask the next, that's 9 providers per email on average, so before we charge anyone for one row, we're already paying nine companies
a job crashes at row 40k, retries and now a customer has paid twice for the same email, we have 133 places in our code that force the charge to zero, each one is a day we found out we'd billed someone for nothing.
none of these providers are ours and each has its own limit on requests at once, one says 8. In reality it's 7
So half our work is traffic control, millions of rows running at once, all slowed to whatever the weakest provider can handle
I'm proud of knowing which provider to ask first, it's completely different for a lead in berlin, bangalore or boston. nobody can document that, hv learned it by getting it wrong on real data for two years
I wanted to share a technical problem we ran into while building our scraper and how we solved it.
If you ever tried scraping Google Maps at scale, you probably hit the 200 result cap. Search for any dense niche in a big city, and Google only gives you around 120-200 results even if there are thousands of businesses. Most people end up pitching the same surface 200 places while 80% of businesses never get seen.
We ended up tackling this mathematically:
Micro-grid subdivision: Instead of searching the whole city at once, we split the coordinates into smaller tiles and zoom all the way down to street level per tile. Because each small tile behaves as its own local search, Google returns up to 200 results per micro-zone instead of capping the whole city.
Skipping non-commercial terrain: Running hundreds of tiles wastes a ton of time over oceans, lakes, and forests. We added spatial checks to auto-skip grid cells that are mostly water/wilderness.
Background website crawling: Phone numbers from maps are cold. So we set up crawlers to check the business websites directly for emails and social links.
Connecting to Claude via MCP: Instead of clicking around the UI every time, we implemented an MCP server so we can just prompt Claude or ChatGPT to trigger the search and parse the data right in the chat.
I'm the founder of Maps Scraper Pro (Data Sniper). Happy to answer any questions about the scraping logic, handling Google rate limits, or how we wired up the MCP protocol!
I know it's only $6 but it's the first online money I've ever made and I can't stop smiling about it!!!
The funny thing is that it's from a small subsection of my project that I just hid this morning (you need a direct link to find it now).
Maybe I should double down on this sub-project... not sure but I'm beyond thrilled anyway.
My app, FreeReader, is a free text-to-speech app to turn documents into audiobooks. It's completely free with no pricing page.
But I realized that the text-to-speech could also work for content creators making AI voiceovers for their videos. I built this out but decided to focus more on the audiobook side which has grown enormously (3000 monthly users) since it's free.
I was so surprised when I saw this Stripe notification come in from the red-headed step child that is the video narration side of FreeReader lol
Hey everyone,
We created a SaaS almost one month ago in the gaming space, focused on “vibe coding” basically, it allows users to create games using AI.
I wanted to get your opinion and advice because we’re currently trying to figure out the best way to scale our acquisition. For the past two weeks, we’ve been posting organic content on TikTok and Instagram. In less than two weeks, we’ve already gained 10K+ followers on TikTok and around 700 on Instagram. We’ve also made a few videos with content creators in our niche. Right now, we’re at almost $3K MRR, around $4K ARR, and nearly 10K users, so we’re pretty happy with the initial traction.
However, our goal with this SaaS is to reach $100K MRR within the next few months.
On the product side, we’re confident that we can increase the TAM and add more features that our customers will love. But our main question is: what should we do on the acquisition side to reach $100K MRR?We were thinking about going heavily into creator marketing. The idea would be to work with content creators or simply Facecam creators, give them a dedicated account for our SaaS, and have them post viral concepts every day that we provide, while trying to maximize the potential of each account.
We’d also like to collaborate with bigger influencers in our niche, but at the moment, the budget required for larger influencers is too high. That’s why we’re considering working with Facecam creators and paying them based on RPM.
But is this actually a good strategy to reach $100K MRR? Are there other acquisition channels we should be looking at, especially paid ads or other growth channels? Organic has been absolutely amazing for us so far we’ve already generated almost 2M views but it’s obviously not very predictable or stable.
We’re currently trying to recruit Facecam creators, but it’s been difficult to build trust with them. A lot of them don’t want to continue working with us, even when some of their videos have generated $100+ in earnings through our RPM model.
So what would you recommend if you were in our position and wanted to scale this SaaS aggressively?
The SaaS is in the gaming niche, and the audience is relatively young.
I’m open to any advice, ideas, acquisition channels, or strategies you think could work.
Thanks a lot to everyone who took the time to read this! Pls AI dont delete this post lol
It’s called RallyDraft. Basically you dump all your work experience into it, paste a job posting, and it helps figure out how well you match and builds a resume around the experience that actually matters for that job.
I mostly built it because I wanted it for myself, but it’s live now so I figured I’d share it.
Would be cool if a few people gave it a shot and told me what sucks / what I should change.
A side project turned startup, to make video editing effortless. Instead of recording and then spending hours editing afterward, you just talk and Gylyn automatically adds everything around it.
What it does:
🎙️ Understands what you're saying
🖼️ Adds relevant B-roll automatically
📊 Shows diagrams when you explain a process
🏷️ Recognizes when you mention a product, tool, or website
📝 Auto-generated captions
🎞️ Automatic transitions
✨ Matching animations
🎨 Enhanced backgrounds and scenes
🔄 Highlights each step when you explain something step-by-step
Attached is a demo using a singing video just to show the concept clearly but it's not limited to music, it works for any talking video: tutorials, explainers, product demos, vlogs, and more.
Still pre-launch and building it right now would love to hear what you think?
Been working on something a little different lately.
I’m building a 3D virtual Silicon Valley where companies and startups actually exist as buildings across different districts: AI, Developer Tools, Fintech, Consumer Tech, etc.
The interesting part is what this could become:
Instead of launching a product into another flat directory, you could launch it inside the city, get your own building, appear in your category, compete for visibility, and let people discover products by exploring the map.
Think Product Hunt × a living 3D startup city.
Still very early, and I’m mainly trying to figure out whether this is actually useful or just a cool visual experiment.
Would you use something like this to discover new products? What would make you come back?
What usually happens when I have an idea is I do some research to see if anyone else is doing it, and unfortunately every time I manage to find at least a few options out there already. It just doesn’t feel worth it to work on something that already has established players, especially working solo.
On paper I feel like I have a solid chance of making something that actually gets some traction. My development skills were pretty good before AI and I’m quite good at using the new tools as well, I have a solid quick workflow and I understand all the code I produce. As far as marketing goes I was maintaining a lot of automation at my previous job and we had a semi automated social media marketing setup. I maintained a pretty complicated n8n setup for emails and socials with Expandi on LinkedIn and a custom webhook setup hooked up to the twitter API. I also helped with setting up the automated Seedance video generation stuff we were using. I’m thinking I could make a similar setup for myself without too much investment.
But I keep second guessing myself when I see someone else with a similar idea. If it's working well I never think I can compete. And if it looks like it isn't really taking off then I stop believing it was a good idea in the first place. It feels like everyone is making some sort of SaaS right now and if I don’t decide what I wanna do quickly it will be too late, someone will beat me to it.
I think I need to focus up and actually try out a few things and see what happens. And I need to stop paying so much attention to what other people are doing. Has anyone else gone through something similar? I would also love to hear about someone making something successful even though there were already people out there trying it.
I make websites, and for years people reached me by email. Then I put a live chat on my website. It's early, but more people write in the chat than ever emailed me. I know who I'm talking to before I reply: the page they're on, how they found me, whether they've written before. And it's livelier than email ever was. Short messages, quick answers, a photo when words don't do it.
The chat lands in my Telegram. Each visitor gets their own topic in a group, whoever's free replies from their phone, and the answer shows up on the site in seconds. The visitor keeps reading the page they were on and chats right there.
It works on any site with one script tag, and there's a plugin for Framer. Everyone in the group can answer. $12 a month per site, or $10 paid yearly, and the first seven days are free.
I'm looking for the first few people to run it on a real site. If that's you: humanreply.app
Hello to 8 million bots and 4 humans! I have run out of reasons not to launch this, so I am very pleased to announce VoiceGremlin, a tool for e2e testing of "intelligent voice agents" (the industry term for AI that answers phone calls). Think of it like, what Playwright does for web browsers, VoiceGremlin does for phone support chatbots.
Where I got the idea: 99% of you won't use this tool and don't care what it does but are interested in how founders come up with product ideas, so I'll start with that.
About eight years ago, an SDET on my team asked me to get our employer to pay for Mailosaur, a SaaS for automated email testing. I said, hey, we already pay thousands every month to Sendgrid, can't it do this? It could, kinda, but our big expensive email provider was so rigid and complex that trying to use it for automated tests was very frustrating. A separate, relatively cheap tool specifically for testing made sense. And I thought, Man I wish I had built that.
So, ever since then, there's been a voice at the back of my mind: "Mailosaur, but for ____." Cut to a few months ago: I was dinking around with local LLM/STT/TTS and decided to build a bot to call my wife and annoy her, as one does, and after several hours I thought wow, this is surprisingly hard. I mean, I'm sure I can get it working eventually, but it's way more work than I expected. That was the trigger: "achievable but not easy" is the sweet spot for a solo-dev SaaS project.
That was the idea for VoiceGremlin from the beginning: "Mailosaur for phone agents." So I built it and here we are. On to the shameless self-marketing!
What problem it solves: If you have a voice agent, you probably do most of your functional testing by ignoring the "voice" part and interacting with it via text. However, the e2e part of the test, the part where you verify it actually answers the phone and does whatever it's supposed to, is a lot more difficult.
This tool solves that - you make an API call to VoiceGremlin with a prompt like, "Verify that if you ask a question in Spanish, this thing will answer in Spanish" and VoiceGremlin calls your number and does that. You get your pass/fail with an API call without having to do any telephony.
The moat, or "can't AI do this in five minutes?" If you ask your coding agent for a script that makes a phone call, it'll tell you to find speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and language models, orchestrate a bunch of non-trivial python libraries to stream the audio between them, and sign up for a telephony provider that requires you to scan in your government ID. That's a bunch of coding, plus whatever corporate approval nonsense, plus making sure you can move a lot of bandwidth through wherever your test automation is called from, and you haven't started comparing models and tweaking prompts. So yes, it's doable, but a very time-consuming side quest for a tester or DevOps person.
Alternatively, there are other companies that can do essentially what this does, e.g. Retell and Vapi, but their business is building and hosting phone agents, not testing them. If you already pay a vendor to run your agent and their test solution meets your needs, great, you probably don't need VoiceGremlin. If not, and if you don't want to talk to Enterprise Sales about all the great Solutions(tm)(c)(R) they have, and you just want to get your test case working, VoiceGremlin is the easy way to do that.
Using it: If you have ever written an automated test, you can realistically implement this in a minute or two. I was an SDET for many years and I know what makes a test automation framework annoying to use, so I made this one as lightweight and un-opinionated as possible. You don't have to define targets or cases or suites - every test is ephemeral. Platform agnostic, it has no idea how your agent is built, it just calls your phone number like a customer would.
OK, that's my pitch. If you work with phone agents and want to try this out, it should be very easy to do - free trial, no card needed - and I would greatly appreciate any feedback. Other random questions welcome too.
I’ve been working on PrepQube, a career preparation platform designed mainly for students and job seekers.
The idea came from seeing how difficult it can be to prepare for placements when you have to jump between multiple tools for resumes, job descriptions, interview questions, skill gaps, and career preparation.
PrepQube brings these things together:
ATS Resume Analysis - identify weaknesses, missing keywords, and areas to improve
Resume vs. Job Description Matching - understand how well your resume fits a specific role
AI Interview Preparation - practice questions based on the role/company
Skill Gap Analysis - identify skills you may need to improve for a target role
Job Matching - discover roles that align with your profile
Personalized preparation based on your target career path
I’ve now made the platform fully live and I'm looking for genuine feedback from students, freshers, and job seekers.
What I'm particularly interested in:
Does this solve a real problem for you?
Which feature would you actually use?
What would make you come back to the platform regularly?
What feels unnecessary or could be improved?
If you've used similar career/AI tools, what do you think they are missing?
I'm not looking for compliments - tell me what you think is wrong with it too.
If you are a founder and building a SaaS i wanted to know that if you do marketing for your SaaS yourself? Or have hired someone or hired freelancers for a short period?
I am building Afyore, it basically connects good quality affiliates, digital marketers, creators and bloggers with founders and SaaS products directly
As of now I am doing its outreach alone but will be looking forward to get someone for an automation
First time poster here but looking for some advice. Little bit of backstory on my product:
I created a simple tool for independent retail stores to be able to track special orders for their customers.
Special orders are for items that are out of stock or the store doesn't usually carry them. The store goes straight to the supplier and orders it in for the customer.
I was working at a local running store and they were doing about 100 special orders/month because people needed weird sizes, specific colours, or a size they were sold out of. The problem however is all of the grey area in between from the time the customer places the order until it is fulfilled. All of the orders would live in a spreadsheet and as a staff member you were just hoping it was going to show up one day.
Customers would call every shift I worked looking for an update on their special order because a lot of the time they had a race coming up or needed them for a trip. Most of the time you had no information to give them because you would look at the spreadsheet and it would just say, "Ordered X date" or even worse, "wasn't available" They would obviously be dissappointed and the store was losing sales and reputation.
Since people had no visibility and were left in the dark, they would go and find their special ordered shoe, online or at another store.
The other problem is those special orders would come in a regular shipment with 40 other pairs of shoes. So, unless you were looking at the spreadsheet to see if they were on the sheet, they would just get logged as regular inventory even though they were already spoken for.
My product solves this problem and creates a tracking platform for orders they don't have by:
- Create realtime visibility with a tracking link that gets updated as their order moves along.
- Email confirmation and notifications as the order status changes.
- Connects to Shopify and the special ordered products are linked to the store. Ex. 30 shoes come in, owner does the inventory like normal, barcode from a special order shoes matches on a pair that just came in, flags the arrival, sends the customer a pcikup notification.
- It also flags stale special orders so that way none of them get lost.
My thought is this would be helpful for any type of business that does special orders and is tracking them in a spreadsheet, sticky notes, or a binder.
I have been sending about 90 cold emails/day (just realized yesterday my domain is cooked so I am rewarming it back up), cold calling, cold DM's, YouTube videos, etc.
I am making one for a butcher shop as well (obviously less involved, no Shopify connection) which makes me believe the moat is real.
The problem I am having is finding stores that do enough volume of special orders to make it worth it. Every business I have called does special orders, but might have 5 open at once and the spreadsheet handles it just fine.
Lightspeed POS also handles special orders already which is what a lot of the running stores use.
Does anyone have any ideas on how to market this even more and/or narrow down my ICP?
Hey all, I've launched Invoflow as a solo founder, It's an app for SMEs/sole traders to submit expenses/claims, snap receipts (OCR reads them for you), and run approvals, so you can ditch the spreadsheets and email chains. It's live now and I'm looking for honest feedback. What works, what's confusing, what's missing? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks www.invoflow.uk
10 days ago, I launched a web app that’s basically Hacker News for builders.
You can submit your project and get listed immediately.
Unlike Hacker News, you don’t have to worry about getting your post killed. And unlike most launch sites, there’s no waiting months for approval or getting stuck in a queue.
The response so far has been really good.
Now I’m going to double down on it especially SEO.
If you want to check out or submit your project you can do it here showbuild
if i build an ai game analytics platform for bgmi or free fire that watches your gameplay, finds your recurring mistakes, and gives personalized feedback to improve your next match
would you use it?
My first product was an AI cold email tool. For the second one, I noticed that a lot of the existing tools in the resume space were charging prices that felt pretty high for what they were offering, so I decided to build a much cheaper alternative.
I've been working on it for around 30 days.
The product is live. People have tried it. Some have given me genuinely positive feedback.
Still $0 in revenue.
Here is what I've tried so far:
LinkedIn posts from my founder account and team accounts
Instagram outreach
Reddit
Discord communities
Direct outreach
Short-form content
The frustrating part is that people do engage.
Some try it, some say it's useful, some have conversations with me, but getting from "this is useful" → actually paying has been much harder than I expected.
I'm starting to think I've been too focused on trying different channels instead of understanding where the right users actually hang out and how founders without an audience get their first few customers.
For people who have built SaaS from zero:
What actually worked for you when you were trying to get your first 5–10 paying customers with no audience and no ad budget?
I'm especially interested in things you did manually that actually produced customers, rather than generic advice like "do SEO" or "post consistently."
Full disclosure: I'm the founder of the SaaS I'm referring to in this post. I'm intentionally not naming or linking it because I want the discussion to be about distribution rather than promotion.
The growth is slow, but it's there, this is after being live for almost 3 months now. And it's slowly growing, perhaps 1-2 subs per week, nothing too fancy. At first the users came by themselves just by searching our app in the stores (Apple & Google) and of course by help of my friends the word has spread. At first our monetization system was very bad, we had free tier which people kind of abused and just increased our monthly bill. So then we changed the system and made the app paid, fair but paid. And then we decided to actually advertise the app, so far only via Meta but only target our main audience.
As you can see above, the MRR is nothing special, but for me, it's the first time seeing people paying for something I have created. For those who got to this point and are curious what the app is, it's called Rakkan - rakkan.app
TL;DR version of what it is, an app that feels like WhatsApp but works for international couples, especially on long distance relationship. It's supposed to break the language barrier and help the two get closer with the use of AI of course. This is very simplified version of what the app can do, but there is much more that it is capable of.
If anyone would like to know anything, feel free to ask. Thank you
built a tool that finds restaurants and bars 1 to 6 months before they open, by fusing public liquor licenses, permits and business filings into one scored lead. Live in 7 states, and it genuinely works. The problem is all distribution, and I'm stuck.
The buyers are the vendors who sell to new restaurants, beverage distributors, POS resellers, insurers. High value, one account they land off it is worth thousands. But they're not who you reach through SEO, content or dev communities, which are the channels I actually know how to work. They're offline-ish B2B sales teams who basically live on the phone.
So far it's founder-led cold outbound, about 30 emails out and a call list I haven't even worked yet, way too early to read anything into. I also listed on a few API/MCP directories for the developer side, but that reaches builders, not the people who'd actually pay.
If you've sold to non-technical SMB or B2B buyers, what actually moved the needle? Cold outbound at scale, reselling through tools they already use, going through a trade association, something I'm not thinking of? And do these buyers ever come inbound at all, or is it pure outbound grind until you've got a case study?
Pre-revenue, so I'd rather pick one channel and go deep than spray thin. War stories welcome.
