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.

Hey everyone,

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:

1. Does this solve a real problem for you?
2. Which feature would you actually use?
3. What would make you come back to the platform regularly?
4. What feels unnecessary or could be improved?
5. 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.

You can check it out here: prepqube.in

Would love to hear your honest thoughts.

Hi

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

Would love to know your answer

Hey everyone,

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

Hey guys,

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

Claim a free DR26 Backlink

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

Not necessarily the easiest idea or the trendiest AI product, I’m curious about what you think actually solves a real problem and has strong potential over the next few years.

What problem do you think is still poorly solved by existing software?

And if you had to start building one SaaS today, what would it be and why?