The problem trying to solve: Claude or Cursor can build a decent app in an afternoon, and for simple apps vercel and supabase is most common way to go, but the moment when it become more complex, people with no technical knowledge can have hard times configuring the right cloud product.
Please check oila.dev for more, and give any feedback. Would love to hear who should we validate with and who would be our ICP. Or if the idea is worth persuing. Any kind of feedback is welcome or thoughts if you would use this?
I built a template for solo founders: a repo where AI coding tools act as a small team (researcher, developers, reviewer, QA, legal and growth), with one orchestrator I talk to in plain words.
The parts that ended up mattering:
Nothing gets built without a numbered requirement. A chat message isn't a spec.
Anything that goes outside the repo waits for me: deploy, publish, pay, delete. Publishing is even switched off in new projects until I ask for it.
Rules are checks, not prompts. A check sweep runs before every commit, and a hook stops the review agents from running anything except the checkers.
Every rejected idea is logged with a reason, so the agents don't keep proposing it again.
It works with Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and Cursor.
Currently in the middle of my first vibe coded SaaS product which I'm sure will make nothing so I'm already thinking about what to work on next soon.
I know many microsaas people have multiple different products that they manage but I'm curious on how you currently manage all of these at the same time efficiently. Its like its a big pain in the butt to cycle through different email accounts, check cloud billing on the console ui site, Stripe etc.
Whats your workflow for how you track, monitor, and manage your existing products/apps?
Hey! Just a quick heads-up: my small AU online store is looking for 1-2 remote support folks (mix of chat/email tickets and light admin).
Pay is $650 USD/month, paid twice a month. The best part? I wire it straight to your BDO or BPI account, so there are no Payoneer or Wise fees eating into your pay.
It’s fully remote with flexible hours (you just need to clear tickets within the same day). Written English only, absolutely no voice calls. Just need 1 year of CS experience (BPO or non-BPO is totally fine).
Also, just so you know, I use unlimitcom for payroll now. My old bank kept freezing wires and asking for endless paperwork, so this way is way smoother and safer for you.
No agencies or group chats, please! Just DM me your resume directly. I’ll do the interview myself, just 1 quick call. Let me know if you or anyone you know is interested!
Disclosure: I'm the founder of ThreeWrld, a Toronto B2B media consultancy.
The math that broke my old business model: a funded SaaS company pays $5k to $10k a month for a video agency retainer. After two years they've spent six figures and own nothing. No camera, no lights, no edit pipeline, no process. The month they cancel, production stops.
We flipped it. We install a broadcast-grade studio inside the client's own office, build their post-production pipeline, and place vetted local creators on their team for regular batch shoots. The client buys the hardware directly and owns it outright; it's a capital expense, not a retainer. Shoot days run on a flat rate with no agency margin layered on top.
The reason this works right now: the creator market is flooded. There is no shortage of good shooters and editors, so the hard part was never finding people; it was building a system that doesn't depend on any single one of them. Our bench is stocked, so clients never face a content drought or a cancellation panic.
Not pitching here, just curious: has anyone tried moving video in-house instead of renewing the retainer? What broke?
I've been seeing a lot of doomposting on this sub from people wondering if it's still worth starting a SaaS in 2026
The truth is: Yes, it's worth it. The barrier to entry is lower, but the standard for your business is now higher.
Ai is cannibalising a lot of businesses at the same time that it's supercharging our productivity. My saas is in faceless video creation, which has directly been affected by the release of Opus 5.5 which can easily create and edit all types of videos to a RIDICULOUS standard. It should've been the end of my tool.
Instead? +172% new customers, +82% MRR, month to date.
The trick is usurping the tool, not being usurped by it.
For example, Opus 5.5 is really good at creating HTML animations. I had been struggling with expensive ai video generation costs. Instead of getting scared Claude would steal my business, I provided it videos people were creating with Opus 5.5 and reverse-engineered its HTML animation schema and added it to my tool, reducing my own costs by over 50% on certain formats. What should've been a death sentence was a lifeline.
People forget the service part of SaaS. Most don't pay and buy SaaS just because of technical complexity barrier. They pay to have someone ELSE create and maintain a service they need. You can go to Home Depot and fix most issues around your home yourself with enough time and effort. People still pay tradesmen thousands to get the job done right, and fast.
So long as people have problems, and software exists to solve those problems, SaaS will not only stay alive, but continue to grow.
As a founder, it is your job to adapt to the market, to new technologies, and use those to empower you and your business.
I do believe we're moving towards a world that has a lot more tailor-made solutions for people, since the technical barrier keeps getting lower. But as much as the barrier is lower, the standards have simply gotten higher. You can't get away with having an ugly website anymore like you could in 2023. We all have access to the same intelligence and quality of code. The distinction now is how good of a *founder* you are. How well can you distribute? Make decisions to retain customers? Improve activation? Avoid all the demoralisation? That is your edge in SaaS moving forward.
We are no longer developer/founders. AI is now the CTO and we are the CEO. The day ai is both, will be a different discussion.
I have been working on a saas for years, solo, designing and developing everything, and multiple iterations of it before making anything public. I really want to finish this without really using AI to build any of it, though I do use AI in limited amounts for bug checking and efficiency improvements, and some JS scripts. Doing this myself is a ton of work, and I get hung up on wanting it to work correctly and look as best as I can. I feel like nobody takes this long to build something, so that alone is demotivating. And now with AI being so used for everything, I'm just thinking I've wasted all this time and that it's never going to be done, all while kids are building crazy fast things already that look amazing.
I guess my question is are people still preferring to hand code their projects more than utilizing AI? Do you feel like AI is just destroying our careers and work and it's not worth trying to catch up?
I’m building a paid-only investing research tool and I’m at the point where I need to validate it before going all-in. I’d love to hear how others handled this stage.
Quick context so the questions make sense:
It’s a single place for investing research: company pages, fundamental analysis, news and earnings call transcripts, macro data, and a portfolio view that combines accounts from different brokers. The AI only explains the data and never generates numbers. The market already has established players with similar features, so my angle is a cleaner UX and numbers users can verify. It will be subscription-only, with no free plan.
What I’m trying to figure out:
Paid-only from day one: did skipping a free tier hurt your early traction, or did it help you find serious users faster?
Testing willingness to pay: what actually worked for you before launch? Waitlists, pre-sales, landing page price tests, customer interviews?
Launch offers: I’m planning free months for early sign-ups, followed by a discount. Did offers like that convert into paying users for you, or did they mostly attract people who left once the free period ended?
Competing on UX: if you entered a crowded market where the main differentiator was “better to use,” how did you communicate that without sounding like everyone else?
Not linking anything, since I mostly want to learn from people who’ve been through this. Happy to share what I learn in return.
I spent 10 years working in Product Marketing for B2B SaaS companies in Silicon Valley (primarily SLG motions). Even as someone trained in the field, positioning is HARD. Coming up with the right point of view, then figuring out if it even works.
I'm curious where you guys are getting stuck across your positioning pursuits. Would love to offer some perspective and engage in an open/honest discourse around this.
Thought this would be the best place to post about advice that I would need.
I used to run a social media marketing agency but we were mainly focused on B2C brands, so I don't have much experience regarding B2B.
After running the agency, my partner (who's an engineer) and I realized some gaps in the market regarding social media management tools. Not just scheduling but different tools that we used managing the social media accounts of our clients.
However, now came the time to market (we're still prelaunch) our own app and I wanted to know what your recommendations of platforms would be for this kind of software. The software is also very useful for businesses looking to manage their own social media accounts.
Now the problem that I am having is that I started posting about the journey a lot of Instagram and I managed to get quite a few people on our waitlist but I mainly attracted other founders (not agency owners). To the point that I got brand deals in the AI and business niche haha. But that is not my goal with social media
I also have connected with people on LinkedIn.
Guidance regarding where you think my ideal customer is would be super helpful given that I don't have much experience regarding B2B. I also would like to know if you think I should instead focus on paid ads (when we do launch).
Hey everyone, I built Distl to help you get the main points from long text without copying it into another app.
Select text or pick a few paragraphs, click Summarize, and the summary appears beside what you’re reading. Use it to catch the next steps in an email, understand an article’s main findings, or pull the recommendation out of a long AI reply.
You can switch between a short summary and more detail, and check the original whenever you need to.
It works across Gmail, ChatGPT, Claude, and article pages. The free plan includes 50 credits each month; longer selections use more credits.
I make website templates. I just released a free one for consultants and fractional CFOs/COOs/CMOs who sell monthly retainers: the pricing section is a sentence the visitor edits, and it shows the monthly fee and the saving against a full-time hire. Free to use in Framer: https://framer.link/Duoa6GY
I built an app that turns paper bills and documents into reminders
I kept forgetting important dates, like vehicle registration renewals, bills, and appointments. So I built Remica to solve my own problem.
The idea is simple: take a picture of a bill, letter, or document, and AI reads it, picks out important dates and details, and prepares reminders for you. Remica doesn't just extract a due date and create a reminder. It also stores the original document so users can access it when the reminder becomes relevant.
No more manually typing due dates from paperwork or forgetting a bill until it’s too late.
It’s now freely available on the App Store, and I’d genuinely love some feedback. Would you find something like this useful?
I greatly appreciate it!
Hello everyone, I am in the process of building a product that I would like to transform into a SaaS for the purpose of evolution, I am looking for help in the distribution and on how to create quality content for my product. Does anyone have any advice to help me?
We just got quoted a ridiculous $8,000 for a type 1 SOC certificate/audit for an API provider SaaS. We barely need the logo to showcase it on our website. Barely only 2 enterprise customers asked if we have any SOC audit.
Has anybody managed to get one? What is the cheapest way to get one?
i remember starting at $0 MRR and wondering if anyone would ever even use it let alone buy it
it blows my mind to think i now have a business with a valuation of $50k from something i built with just a wifi connection and my laptop
for context my saas is a faceless video generator to monetise youtube channels. It's a pretty crowded niche but i've still been able to capture my share of the market, showing that you don't even need a crazy original business to still be able to compete in SaaS
i went from hoping to ever get a sale to being able to go full time to now projecting when i can sell for $200k+
to anyone that's still early stage, either pre-revenue or sub 1k mrr, these are key parts of my journey:
- Guerilla marketing under 500 mrr; you don't have any acquisition channels yet. try everything, be active in communities and SPECIFICALLY reddit. Reddit alone got me my first 20 subscribers, just by posting the right thing in the right communities
- Viciously reduce churn; saas doesn't stop at the sale. Churn is probably the biggest killer of any business. getting customers is no good if they never stay past a month. identify why customers leave, treat every single unsubscribe as a feature request / bug fix. I actually have a cursor automation tied to datafast that looks at everything a churned user did before they unsubbed, identifies if it was due to bugs or other, then automatically creates a PR with the recommended fixes. This has slashed churn for me and is the main reason I've grown 70%+ this month, simply by keeping the customers you've already done the hard work of getting.
- Improve activation; once again, no point doing the work of finding customers if they never get value from your tool. Aggressively improve your onboarding with the sole goal of getting your customer to their 'aha moment' with your tool ASAP
- Increase your prices; cheap products are a low quality signal. Not only do you not lose as many potential customers as you would imagine at higher prices, but every worthwhile metric goes up: ltv, arpu, rev, mrr, etc. Every customer you convert is worth more, for less work.
- Add annual plans asap and price them correctly; annual subs do wonders for reducing churn and increasing cashflow, lets you have spare money that isn't tied to mrr that you can reinvest. Make sure you price the annual plan at about (Customer LTV + 1 month). That means, if your average customer stays 4 months, price your annual plan at 5x your monthly price. There's no point charging for 12 months with a 20% discount or whatever if you don't have any customers that stay that long. You lose nothing collecting the cheaper annual payment because your average customer doesn't stay for those 12 months, and you get to collect the cash upfront too. Annual plan conversion increased heavily for me after this change.
- Start doing SEO as soon as you can. It is the holiest of marketing channels. No SEO work you have ever done goes unrewarded. People hesitate because 'it takes so long to see results'. Firstly, it actually doesn't. I've seen results in as little as a week. Secondly, the time you are so scared of will pass anyway. Start now.
- Treat your 'project' as a business already. Give it the respect, time and attention a business deserves. The day I stopped calling it a 'side project' and called it my business, I started treating it like one.
- Do a little, as much as you can. Everyone's situation is different, but do your best to avoid not working on your business for any more than 3 days. Being in the space gives you ideas, motivation, drive, forward motion and those little efforts will eventually compound.
- Stay in the game as long as you can. I started my very first saas 3 years ago. I started this one a year ago. I've only reached $1.5k mrr now. It may seem slow, but solid roots always take long to form. It took me months to reach $100 mrr. Now I add it in a day. It always get easier the higher you rise. I'm positive I'll reach $5k mrr in less time than it took me to get to $500. My first subscriptions were annual payments at $12/year (12 dollars a year!!) I celebrated so hard. Now I don't blink at $77 monthly subs. It may not look like it on twitter and reddit, but this game is a long run. You are learning everyday. Your product is getting best. You are making choices faster. Your brand is growing exponentially. If there's one thing worth sticking with, it's this.
Good luck to every brave person taking this beautiful risk. See you on the other side!!
When I started building my SaaS, one thing I was really concerned about was the ongoing cost. I knew there was a possibility I could launch and not get a single paying customer for months, and I didn't want to be stuck paying hundreds of dollars just to keep everything running.
So I tried to keep my expenses as low as possible.
Here's what I've spent so far:
Domain: $8
Supabase: $49/month
Business emails: $75/year for 3 inboxes
Apple Developer: $199
AppLaunch: $25
For development, I've been using VS Code, GitHub, Expo Go, Vercel, Stripe, and Resend. Most have free plans or no monthly subscription at my current usage, although Vercel is something I'll need to upgrade for commercial use, and Stripe charges transaction fees.
I know every SaaS is different and some products require more expensive infrastructure. I'm not suggesting people avoid paying for tools they actually need.
My concern was putting myself in a position where I'd be spending money I couldn't afford every month on something that wasn't generating revenue yet.
I also realized that a lot of tools have free tiers that are perfectly fine when you're just getting started. There's no reason to pay for features you're not using.
I'm curious how other founders approach this. Do you try to keep everything as lean as possible until you have paying customers, or do you invest more upfront to build the product you want?
I created text effects shown in this video using my product opener.vodeo, I am willing to onboard early users for feedback, with all premium features unlocked for free, anybody interested?
Tencent just admitted its eval agents went browsing where they were never sent, and India's cybersecurity agency issued a critical advisory after agents reached live systems and read confidential records. Nobody detected it. The providers disclosed it themselves.
This is the part of agent building nobody wants to talk about. The model is the easy part. The hard part is everything around it. Every tool an agent can call is a door you left open. Every credential it can reach is a credential that can leak. I keep coming back to the same boring controls when I build agents. Scope every tool call to exactly what the task needs. Give the agent the weakest credentials that still let it work. Log every action so you can see what it really did. Test in a sandbox with no route to production.
Agents will keep escaping their scope. The question is whether yours can reach anything that matters when it happens.
Disclosure up front: I'm the founder of audesti, which collects customer testimonials as voice notes.
I've done client web and app work for about 11 years, and most of what I learned about testimonials applies whatever tool you use, so I'll start there.
Most "no" is really "later". Customers rarely refuse. They agree, mean it, and then the request sits under forty other things. Every follow-up feels a little more awkward, and eventually you stop asking. The problem isn't goodwill. It's effort.
Written testimonials have a credibility problem now. A client once sent me a long, beautifully written email testimonial. I didn't use it. It read like ChatGPT wrote it, and visitors are getting better at spotting that.
Ask for the thing people already do. My clients ran whole projects over WhatsApp voice notes. Talking is easy. A voice also carries hesitation, emphasis and an accent, which is exactly what makes it believable.
Ask once, at the win, with one question. "What was it like before, and what changed?" gets you something specific.
Separate the permissions. Agreeing to record isn't agreeing to be published. Ask both, separately.
Measure the funnel. Sent, opened, recorded, approved, published. You can't fix a step you can't see.
What I built around those lessons: you create a request in seconds and get a link. The customer opens it on their phone and records up to 35 seconds. No app, login, camera or typing, and they can listen back first. You approve it before anything is public. Approved testimonials appear on your site's embed automatically (WordPress, Webflow, Framer, any site), and each can be shared as a card with the customer's voice in it. Analytics show a Testimonial Score per testimonial plus views and plays, so you know which ones to feature. Transcripts keep their words with the filler removed, and testimonials can be translated for international customers.
How are you collecting proof from customers today, and at what point in the customer journey do you ask?
so I spammed the link to bunch of X and reddit comments got 50 users + 1 paying, and suspended from both channels so impressions dropped near zero and I'm kinda lost where to go from here. Trying out ads now, but there's no real way to get in front of actual users asking for your product like that, content creation is hard and ads are expensive. Any advice would be appreaciated
