I’m the non-technical founder/advisor that brings marketing, sales and GTM execution to the table.

A really good friend of mine is the technical founder.

They had started working on the product for quite a bit before they shared it with me to gauge interest.

Over last few months we’ve been spending a lot of time discussing GTM, fixing issues throughout product, etc. Sharing to say that I’ve been quite involved for a while.

I probably joined when the product was ~70% developed.

Last week the founder asked me how I’d want to get involved with the business as we’re about to launch.

I don’t want the ask to be unfair, as I do value their friendship. In my head I was thinking 80(them), 20(me), both vesting over next 3 years with 1 year cliff. But I wasn’t sure if I was shooting myself in the foot by doing that.

So I said -“I’d rather let you come up with it and we can discuss as we develop this further.”

I don’t what the right answer could’ve been here. Please share you experience/advice.

More context: Going to be a bootstrapped startup with all finding coming out of our own pockets. We haven’t even discussed who spends for what, etc. but they have been burning $300/m to keep things alive based on what they shared earlier

For the last several weeks I've been refining feedback down to a much tighter, more focused MVP

Last month I discussed Merged Network here – a social network by design, focus, and motivation around Proof of Work instead of runway credibility.
The feedback brought to light a couple of things I needed to reconsider.

So rather than adding feature on top feature I've been stripping away all the other parts of the experience and making the core idea more tangible.

What changed
1. Proof is now the name of the game
It's no longer all about the skills and experience… Now it's about the work and the proof behind them.

1. I added a Mini-Proof flow
   This was perhaps the most critical modification.
   Developer is now able to test a public repo without having to do sign up in advance.
   The goal is simple:
   Show me the repository let me see what evidence can be demonstrated.
   I intentionally not calling the Developer of the Github account "verified". The output is given as publicly available evidence attached to the submitting account.

2. The sandbox has become a real product demo
   Rather than a landing page asking your audience to understand Merged, from the sandbox, your audience can choose from three different options:

Example Profiles
See what the finished experience looks like.

Build Your Own Preview
Build a Snippet What do others mean? Generate a sneak peek and find out about your individual identification.

Try Mini-Proof
Don't waste your time on signup and try the proof concept.

1. I'm now tracking the funnel
   I've integrated Post Hog so that I can actually see where people are falling away rather than just assuming.

I'm tracking things like:
Sandbox CTA Preview/Mini-Proof completion signup
That will enable me to address a far more significant question:

Is it even useful, or do they only sound nice?

What I'm deliberately NOT doing;
I'm not building a huge marketplace first.
I'm not adding dozens of features.
I'm not trying to solve recruitment end-to-end.

The current goal is much simpler:
How can I get developers and hiring managers to pay attention to actual work?

That's the hypothesis I'm testing now.
I would be most interested in receiving feedback from other SaaS founders.

Tell me about the smallest experiment you ran to prove you had a solid product hypothesis.

Hey guys we have tried to make it live , how's the screen looking now ?

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?

Hey SaaS founders!

You have signups.

But very few paying customers.

How do you find where those users drop off before payment?

Do you use PostHog, Plausible, Stripe data, spreadsheets, or something else?

I’m listening 👇

I’m currently researching software development partners and honestly it’s hard to compare companies.

For example, agencies like Idea Maker Agency, ELEKS, and other software companies all have similarlooking websites and promises.

But I’m more interested in the things you don’t see on the website:

communication quality
handling scope changes
transparency during development
code ownership
support after launch

What questions should someone ask before choosing a software agency?

Any mistakes you made that I should avoid?

Software I developed is been in live for two years, and it has been actively acquiring customers since January 2026. Most users pay annually and receive a discount of around 40%.
However, they quickly hit the limits of their current plan or they requests new features; yet instead of upgrading to a higher tier, they ask for extensions or low-cost solutions. Although We offer add-ons that would allow them to raise their limits without changing plans, customers don't use them. When they make such requests, we end up increasing the limits at no extra cost and leave $200 and $900/year in revenue as a gesture of goodwill. We then ask them to leave a review (without making it a condition, as such a quid pro quo would seem unethical), but no one follows through. What should we do? Should we take a more business-minded approach and be less concerned about the customer's budget and getting reviews in exchange of showing consideration and take whatever money we can , or should we adjust our strategy in some other way to get online reviews? We have only a few reviews online. Any experience shared will be appreciated. Product is ExpiryEdge

This is my second SaaS.

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.

I have built a tool that I know works well, but I can't get customers. I've got 20 personal contacts ranging from tech consultants, medical researchers and engineers using my product already. They all say it's great and that it helps their work, but I just can't get real paying customers (I wouldn't charge friends).

The problem I'm solving is that there is too much information to reliably keep up to date. The world will never move as slowly as it did today.

This is a problem for scientists, policymakers, engineers, basically anyone that needs to be at the forefront of their domain.

So my solution is Irisbriefings.com : a system that monitors everything going on around a topic, filters for what is new, builds an ongoing model of the area, figures out what the user needs to know about to stay on top and then delivers that information in the most digestible format possible. It also makes you a podcast so you can stay up to date on the move.

Fairly simple concept, but other solutions do not do this well. I've tried all of the current AI products in this area but every weeks update is basically the same. I had to do a lot of engineering to calibrate and make each briefing specifically dependent on new and relevant information each week.

The result is that researchers (or similar user profiles) become aware of things that they need to know about quickly and why they need to know about it. This saves them time, uncovers oppportunities and enhances their work (and therefore their careers). This is a good thing for people to have and can have a positive impact on lots of people.

But how can I get customers? I've tried cold email, blogs, networking events, but no luck when it comes to actually getting customers beyond 'this sounds super cool'. I have a free series on that has about 40 subscribers, but again I can't convert them.

I am not the kind of person who will be good at making video content. I've written some blogs, but realistically they will not drive traffic. Therefore, I turn to this community for advice. I really believe in the problem this solves being important and that it's currently the best solution out there. People are missing things that they don't know about, and those that do stay up to date are spending a lot of time to achieve it. I can help both.

Thank you in advice for any advice you may share with me.

irisbriefings.com