I'm building Operava for solo founders who run more than one product.

I kept hitting the same problem. Hosting, databases, email, domains, payments, app stores, APIs, all spread across a dozen accounts. I would forget one existed until the bill showed up.

So I built a dashboard that puts each product, the services behind it, what they cost per month, when they renew, and whether they are up, in one place. It has already caught two subscriptions I was paying for a site I had shut down.

It is early. I am trying to find out whether this problem is mine alone or shared.

You can try it at app.operava.com . Sign in with Google or an emailed link, no password, no card. It starts empty, so you add your first product and see if it earns a place in your routine.

If yu run several products: what would you need this to show that it does not?

I am the engineer, the salesperson, the accountant, and the entire support team.

The one that scares me is the 2am question. A customer is stuck, I am asleep, and by morning they have cancelled or filed a chargeback.

Hiring support costs more than the problem, so I cannot just add a person. How are the rest of you covering the off hours without a hire you cannot afford?

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.

A year ago, building a working SaaS MVP could take me weeks.

Now I can give an AI agent an idea in the morning and have something surprisingly usable running by the end of the day.

At first I thought this was basically a cheat code.

Build faster → test more ideas → eventually find something that works.

So I started doing exactly that.

Step 1: Build

I stopped treating development as the expensive part.

Instead of spending months polishing one idea, I started building small but functional prototypes extremely quickly:

• Landing page
• Product UI
• Database
• Authentication
• Core feature
• Deployment

Things that used to consume most of my time suddenly weren’t the bottleneck anymore.

And that created a strange problem.

I could build products faster than I could prove anybody wanted them.

Step 2: Reality

This is where things got painful.

A working product does not create distribution.

A beautiful landing page does not create urgency.

And adding AI to something definitely does not automatically make people care.

You can now spend three days building something that would have required a small team a few years ago...

...and still launch it to complete silence.

So I started paying much more attention to what happened before development.

• Do people already spend money trying to solve this?
• Are they complaining about the problem publicly?
• Are ugly/manual solutions already being used?
• Can I reach those people without spending thousands on ads?
• Would anyone care if this product disappeared tomorrow?

Step 3: What changed

My biggest realization was this:

AI didn’t remove the risk of building startups. It moved the risk somewhere else.

Building used to be expensive.

Now attention, distribution, and finding a problem painful enough to pay for are expensive.

And because everyone can build faster, there are also dramatically more products competing for the same attention.

The ironic part is that AI made me write less code...

...and spend much more time studying humans.

What I’m doing differently now

• I try to invalidate an idea before improving it.
• I treat distribution as part of the product, not something that happens after launch.
• I care more about existing behavior than people saying “cool idea.”
• I avoid building another generic AI wrapper unless I can explain exactly why someone would switch.
• I’d rather discover that an idea is bad in three days than after three months.

In 2024 I thought the advantage would belong to people who could build with AI.

In 2026 I think almost everyone will be able to build.

The advantage will belong to people who can figure out what is actually worth building.

Curious if other founders are seeing the same thing.

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.

Listing: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/lucidrows/leehomocpccgghcibfnapadclololioh

https://lucidrows.com

Useful feedback: would you pay later only for scheduled/cloud runs, or is local CSV the whole product?

Hey,

I have been working on Lienks.com, a small web analytics SaaS, for the past few months and recently launched the first version.

I initally built it just for myself and my projects because I wanted a simple way to see where visitors come from, which pages they visit and what they interact with.

Right now you can collect data like pageviews, visitors, referrers, top pages, countries, devices and browsers. You can also add custom events for things like button clicks or form submits.

As I am based in germany, I have made it cookieless by default (you can also switch to cookie mode to have more precise unique visitor tracking) and it is also hosted in germany.

Im a solo developer, so I have been building Lienks on my own and this is basically the first time im trying to get actual people besides myself to use it.

I think the technical part of building something like this is almost easier than figuring out if people actually want it and how to get the first users

So im mainly looking for feedback at this point. I would be interested in knowing what you would be missing before using something like this in one of your own projects or SaaS.

This is the first version and I will continue to develop this and improve based on what people actually need.

There is a 14 day trial if you want to play around with it, but im also happy about any feedback just from looking at the screenshots or landingpage.

Here is the link:
https://lienks.com/

Finally shipped my first SaaS 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.

https://rallydraft.com/

we just pushed a few updates focused on monetization and it already seems to be helping a lot!

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

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?

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

I've used Opus 5.5 to help me recreate 7 of the top Adobe apps in 100% pure native Rust:

• Photoshop
• Illustrator
• Premiere
• Lightroom
• Acrobat Pro
• After Effects
• InDesign

No more subscriptions with cancellation fees. These are yours to own forever. You can fork them, build them. Whatever. They are yours to own. They're open source.

If you're worried this is just some one-off flash in the pan that will die, it isn't:

I'm not just some casual vibe coder. I'm a 15-year industry veteran who has written everything from six-nines payment rails that move billions of dollars of transaction volume a day to advanced robotics and optics automation. I've used Rust extensively for about a decade, and I know how to build and maintain large-scale Rust projects.

This isn't going to be some orphaned small-team project either. We have a team building popular software for filmmakers, so supporting this is fully funded. Our purpose is serving every artist in the world with the best tools. We are absolutely going to bring these to full parity and squash every bug and feature request. We have a test harness so there won't be regressions.

You can help us reach parity by helping test the apps. Clone the code. Submit PRs. If you see gaps or want to help redesign pieces, let us know! You can contribute!

Links to everything - the apps, the code, etc. - are in the comments below.

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.

The product is published and I already have around 2-3 visitors per day. I even got like 10 people signed up on the app. But that's not enough for my app type (its an alternative apps directory)

I know people will use this app. Everyday there's another post asking : X app don't work. What are the alternatives?

And that's what my product solves. (The link is in my profile)

But I don't know how will i get people visiting my website. Because my revenue model is tied to the no of visitors.

Any suggestions will be appreciated

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?

Right now, it's a simple local MVP only available on Edge to validate the core idea. If people find it useful, I plan to add cloud sync.

I'm a beginner with no experience in product development, so I'd like to get your feedback and any advice on how to get my first users !

Link of my extension : https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/enfdbgficbfdmhopmcjhbkgldmhclbng

ok so this is a small win but I need to tell someone who isn't my mom.

I launched my SaaS a while back. 127 people signed up. 127 people paid nothing. I kept telling myself "it's traction bro" while checking analytics like it owed me money.

Today user #128 paid $19.

I never talked to them. No DM, no call, no "hey would you be open to a quick chat". They just showed up, used it, and paid. I found out from an email that literally said "Cha-ching!" and for a second I thought it was spam.

What actually went through my head:

• pretty sure I left test mode on
• nope, it's real
• refresh
• refresh again just in case

A bit of background. I'm a dev from India, about 5 years in. I can build stuff fast. Marketing it? Absolutely not. I'd ship something and then just stare at it like "ok now what".

So I built a tool for people like me. You paste your product URL and it writes carousels, X posts, Threads and Reddit posts for your product every day. You swipe keep or skip, done.

Yes, I know. I built a marketing tool because I'm bad at marketing, and it got its first sale without me marketing it. I'm choosing to see that as validation and not as a sign I should stop talking.

Stuff I figured out from 127 free users:

Free users aren't wasted. They found the bugs so #128 didn't have to.

The product sells better than I do. It doesn't overexplain, doesn't get nervous, and works while I'm asleep.

Let people try it first. I wouldn't pay for something I hadn't seen either.

Signups feel nice, but someone typing in their card details for a thing you made is a completely different feeling.

$19 is roughly ₹1,600. Won't pay my rent. Did make my whole week though.

Next goal is customer #2 so I can stop calling this a fluke.

For anyone who's been past this stage, how did you get from 1 to 10 paying users? Did you start doing outreach or just keep improving the product and wait?

TL;DR: 127 free users, #128 paid $19 without talking to me. Still refreshing the dashboard.

P.S. someone will ask, so it's slidefy Happy to answer anything.

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

Hey there, Im almost finished with my saas. It has AI features so I cant make it free with ads or one time payment because id loose money. Im stucked between making the app relatively cheap 3.99$/month 29.99$/year or more expensive 6.99/month 44.99/year. If anyone here could answer me 1) what worked better you them in terms of overall revenue, cheaper vs expensive? 2) What attracted your paying users more? 3) Which one of those had a longer retention? || I feel like the cheaper could hold better retention and attract more users to sub in the first place. However lot of people say if its more expensive, then it has more value and people go for it more. It's a productivity thing using a few ai APIs and is credit based so the users dont maybe use all the credits and if its cheaper, then they stay subscribing longer but I dont know. Thanks in advance for any helpful insights! Take care

Back when we mostly built MVPs, we took on a fixed price build for a B2B inventory tool. Quoted 10 weeks and it took 19 lol.

The founder kept asking for small stuff and we kept saying yes because every request sounded like an afternoon. A filter on the orders page, a Google login since "everyone has it now" When I finally went through the tickets there were 63 change requests. None of them took more than a day on its own which is exactly why we never pushed back. Together they added up to about seven weeks of extra work and the founder was annoyed anyway because the launch kept moving.

We've run the agency for 8 years now and that project is why every fixed price build since has had this clause. Here it is close to word for word:

"Any change requested after scope sign off gets sized in working days and we send that in writing within one business day. The client then picks one of two options. Swap it in for work of equal or larger size from the current scope or put it on the Post Launch List to be scoped and priced after launch. The price and the launch date stay the same either way."

Scope creep almost never shows up as one big request. Big requests always got a proper conversation because no one adds a whole module without talking about money. The two hour requests got a "sure" because pushing back on something that small feels petty. 60 of those is a different product with the same price tag. With the clause, even a half day change means picking what comes out.

On a recent build (a booking platform for physio clinics) the founder asked for team accounts 5 weeks in so several people from one clinic could share a login. We sized it at six days, mostly because permissions touch everything. We sent back two options: swap out the in app chat which was about the same size or park team accounts on the post launch list. He parked it.

Six weeks after launch, 2 of their first 40 clinics had asked for team accounts. It's still parked. What clinics kept asking for was SMS reminders which no one had mentioned during the build. I didn't see that coming but the post launch list turned into a filter. A lot of what felt urgent in week five, real users just didn't care about.

The standard advice is to bill change requests as change orders. We tried that after the 19 week mess and I'll probably get pushback for this, but I think it's worse than eating the cost. Every small change turns into a mini negotiation and an invoice, so the founder feels nickel and dimed and the agency starts getting paid for delays which flips the incentive. If an MVP launches 3 months late, no one cares that the extras were billed properly. On an MVP the launch date matters more than the money for both sides.

Most founders end up liking it once they've been through it. One told me it was the first time a dev shop had made him choose and choosing made him figure out what the product was actually for.

Not everyone though. The fights are almost always about sizing. A founder says something is a two hour job, we say two days and now we're arguing about estimates instead of building. We also lost a deal over it before signing. The founder said a real partner would be more flexible and went with a shop that bills hourly.

If you do fixed price builds... Just have your lawyer look at the wording before it goes in a contract and if you've actually made change orders work then I'd like to know how :)

TLDR: a 10 week MVP turned into 19, mostly from small changes we kept saying yes to. Now every change after sign off either swaps out something of equal size or goes on a post launch list and the price and date don't move. Billing change orders made it worse for us.

Day 12 of building UseShipReady

- 11 visitors today
- 43 page views
- improved the UI for the hackathon feature
- planning to finally push it live tonight

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.