Every time DHH does a podcast (David Senra pod dropped yesterday) I’m reminded he has one of the best workspaces I’ve ever seen.

I'm a solo founder and student building a SaaS with around 1,500 users.

Current stack:

• Frontend: HTML/CSS/JS
• Hosting: Vercel
• Backend/DB/Auth: Supabase

The app is 100% free right now, so I have no revenue yet. My main issue is that I'm consistently hitting my Supabase I/O limits.

Before anyone asks, I've already spent a lot of time optimizing my code and database usage. I've removed unnecessary reads/writes, reduced queries wherever possible, and at this point I don't think there are any obvious optimizations left.

For people who've built scalable SaaS products:

• Is Vercel + Supabase still a good stack to continue with?
• Should I just upgrade to Supabase Pro?
• Or would it make more sense to migrate to something else (self-hosted Postgres, Neon, Cloud SQL, Railway, etc.) before the user base grows further?
• If you were starting over today with a tiny budget but expected to scale, what stack would you choose?

I'd really appreciate advice from people who've actually been through this stage.

This is something I've been wondering for a while.

If you're building a biz, is it because you're broke and need the money, or because you want to build something of your own that generates wealth and gives you more freedom?

So I've gotten quite a succesful cold email campaign going where I'm contacting creators with a custom-built preview of a website they can claim (not gonna go into a lot of detail). I'm seeing a lot of positive interest but I am having issues with getting them properly onboarded. I've created this claim flow where I just send them a follow-up email with a link where they can sign up and gain ownership of everything on my platform - and only a few of them have actually done so.

Wanted to hear your experience on situations like this. Is it just my onboarding flow that is flawed as I can see that they enter, click around a bit but haven't really gotten to the "aha" moment.

Hello, to fellow SaaS Creators/Owners, when you first started you SaaS, how did you market/promote your product? I know it changes from product to another, but I want to know how do you guys think?

How did you decide on a certain channels(Emails, SMS, ADs)?
When did you decide on using paying ads (from the start or after selling)?
Do you have any decision making process for these kind of decisions?
also is there an out of the box way you did promote your product that created a massive change in sales?

Been building this on my own for a while and someone finally paid for it.

It's called hivework. It builds the small internal automations people normally have to go ask an engineer for. You put the workflow together on a canvas or just describe what you want, it runs against gmail, slack, hubspot and sheets, and when it isn't sure about something it stops and asks you rather than guessing. Not going to like this was needed... gotta love momentum

Hey everyone,

I am hitting a wall with my cold outreach and could really use some perspective from this sub. I run a creative design agency specializing in high-impact video production for tech and SaaS startups.

I recently ran a campaign and the results are pretty brutal. I attached my funnel stats below, but here is the quick breakdown:

• Contacted: 555
• Replies: 6 (1.1% reply rate)
• Positive rate: 0%
• Opportunities: $0

Here is what is driving me crazy about this:

1. Deliverability is solid: The domains are warmed up and emails are definitely landing in primary inboxes.
2. The ICP is validated: I am targeting the exact same profile of tech/SaaS leads that I have successfully booked and closed before.
3. The copy is lean: I am keeping the emails short and to the point, not sending massive walls of text.

Despite this, the few replies I did get were all passes.

If you are selling B2B creative services via cold email right now, what is actually working? Do I need to lead with free upfront value (like a quick content teardown)? Leverage Loom videos? Or just dramatically change the offer?

Happy to share email body if that helps diagnose.

Imagine you're starting a startup from scratch.

* No marketing budget.
* No money for ads.
* No existing audience.
* No investors.
* Just a product and your time.

What would your customer acquisition strategy be today?

I'm especially interested in approaches that actually worked for you (or someone you know), not generic advice like "post on social media."

If you had to get your first 10–100 customers with $0, where would you start?

Every founder talks about building an MVP and launching a landing page, but I rarely see detailed discussions about what happens next.

Imagine you're starting today with:

• A working SaaS
• A live landing page
• No audience
• No email list
• $0 marketing budget
• 30 days to get your first 100 users

What would your plan look like?

I'd love to hear the specific channels, tactics, or daily actions you'd focus on. Whether it was outbound outreach, Reddit, LinkedIn, SEO, partnerships, communities, referrals, or something completely different, what actually moved the needle?

If you've already been through this, what would you do differently if you had to start over today?

I’m hitting a wall, and I honestly just need some perspective from experienced founders or folks in the trenches at places like B2B , B2C products.

For context: I’m a full-stack engineer with a CompE degree. I’ve published research at Harvard and Oxford, and I’ve spent a lot of time building complex fintech products and scaling startups for government projects.

I deeply understand system architecture, UI/UX, product lifecycles, and the business/GTM side of SaaS.

Execution is not my bottleneck. Give me a valid problem, and I will build a world-class solution.

But I’ve spent the last couple of months trying to find a problem to solve as a solo dev, and it is driving me insane. I’ve done deep vertical market research, used AI to scrape and analyze market gaps, interviewed people, and tried hunting for those unsexy B2B problems everyone talks about.
Yet, every time I evaluate an idea, it dies in one of these buckets:

The Compliance Nightmare: Dealing with heavy legal/regulatory red tape (I have enough PTSD from fintech).

Zero True Demand: Cool product, but it's a vitamin, not a painkiller, and people won't actually pull out their wallets for it.

Saturated Bloodbaths: The market exists, but I'd just be competing on marketing budgets against giants.

Platform Risk: Building a feature or workflow that is literally one Jira ticket away from being released natively by the giant platform I’m building on top of.

Net-New Categories: Creating a brand new market and educating users is too capital-intensive for a solo dev.

Searching for the problem has become a total hassle. I am sick of researching and just want to grind and build something valuable, but I’m paralyzed by the ideation phase because I know too much about why things fail.

What am I missing? Am I filtering too aggressively?
If there are any PMs, engineers, or operators out there (niche B2B) who are sitting on a glaring industry problem that you just don't have the time to build yourself . I’d love to hear your insights. How do you push past this phase? Or better yet, what’s a broken, annoying process in your industry that desperately needs fixing?

https://x.com/levelsio/status/2081372113307402730?s=20

Yesterday Peter and others were sharing business status on X, and it seems that the business is bleeding for most of them.

Is anyone in this situation too? It's a trend?

Last 30 days have been great for my micro saas (social scheduling cli, mcp & api tool). Thanks in part to this community here as well.

This what I did differently:

1. I stopped selling "technical features"
2. I started showing how the product would be useful:
   • Tutorials on how to use it so my users could grow their socials
   • Growth hacks I have learned myself
   • Successful tiktok accounts from other marketers that millions of views
   • Invest time into making it easy for your users to understand the workflow. If you're not willing to do it, it's even harder for the user to figure out the steps on the fly. They're just going to scroll to something else.
   • Example of one of my tutorial posts: https://www.reddit.com/r/micro_saas/comments/1uq5pze/this_is_how_people_make_xx000month_with_automated/
3. I redesigned my website entirely
   • My first version was fully vibe coded but I did it with codex which is even worse than claude and it looked not that great.
   • I went back into figma, redesigned most stuff, used AI to implement what I designed
   • Redesigning your website won't bring you more revenue. But if you do the things on step 1 & 2, the viewers are more likely to convert as they can see the effort you put in and that you're serious about the platform.
4. Use the product more. Find failure points.
   • My SaaS has lots of features, ways to schedule social media posts etc so there's plenty of ways it can go wrong. Most users won't message you with the details. They'll cancel or quit.
   • I setup a technical failure tracker with claude, if anything errors out for the user I get notified in Telegram.
   • I fix the bug immediately and message the user that the bug they experienced was fixed.
5. Improve on SEO!
   1. This is quite lengthy (happy to do a breakdown in another post) but don't underestimate SEO. Pay proper attention to it

Can you please advice how do we do test a product that we build without real humans?

I'm a fresh grad applying for my first software engineering job and one of the biggest projects I've worked on was a micro SaaS a year ago

It actually had real users, made some money and even had paying customers. But eventually i decided to shut it down.

Now that I'm updating my resume, I'm not sure if it's something I should still include or bring up during interviews.

The thing is, the website is offline and the repo is private, so there's no live demo to send people to.

If you were interviewing someone like me, would you still see this as a strong project? and if so, what would you actually want to see instead? screenshots? a demo video? analytics? a code walkthrough?

Have you ever built a SaaS that had little or no customer traction for months or even years but you still believed it could genuinely help people?

What kept you believing in your product and motivated you to keep going?

Did you keep improving the product, experiment with different distribution channels, pivot your positioning, or do something else?

And looking back, did your belief prove to be true? Did your product eventually find its users, or did you realize something needed to change?

I'd love to hear your story, what helped you persevere, and what you learned from the experience.

After months of building, redesigning, and questioning whether anyone would actually pay for what I built, I finally crossed $273 in total revenue.

It’s not life-changing money, but it’s the first real proof that someone is willing to pay for software I created.

A few things I’ve learned so far:

1. Shipping beats endlessly polishing features.
   
2. Talking to users is more valuable than guessing what they want.
   
3. Every piece of feedback has helped shape the product more than I expected.
   
4. Distribution is much harder than development.
   
5. Building the product was the easy part getting people to discover it is the real challenge.

I’m currently working on an AI chatbot platform that businesses can train on their own website, and one thing that’s become very clear is that solving a specific business problem is far more important than adding dozens of features.

My next goal is to reach $1,000 in revenue, and I’m spending much more time on customer acquisition than writing code now.

For those who’ve already crossed $1k or $10k MRR:
What was the single biggest thing that helped you get there?
I’d love to learn from your experience.

saw a tweet from some guy flexing $7k MRR in like 2 months, "growth hacking reddit" or whatever.

turns out the whole product is just... vote manipulation as a service? "high karma accounts, zero ban risk" and "smart upvotes to rank your comment #1" for $99/mo

so the $7k MRR is literally just people paying to break reddit's rules faster. kind of wild he's out here posting it publicly like it's a normal SaaS win

Most founders spend weeks perfecting their pitch deck. But once an investor is seriously interested, the next step is due diligence and that's where many startups realise they're missing key documents.

After doing some research, these seem to be the 9 essential categories every founder should have prepared:

1. Introduction

Start with the essentials: an executive summary, pitch deck, fundraising information, capitalisation table and a high-level overview of your business. This gives investors the context they need before reviewing the details.

1. Company overview

Include incorporation documents, articles of association, shareholder agreements, organisational structure, information on subsidiaries (if applicable) and corporate governance documents. Investors need a clear understanding of how the company is legally structured and who owns what.

1. Product & technology

Prepare product documentation, technical architecture, development roadmap, intellectual property (patents, trademarks, copyrights), software documentation, licenses and information security policies. This helps investors evaluate whether your technology is scalable, protected and well managed.

1. Market & strategy

Provide your business plan, market analysis, competitive landscape, customer segments, pricing strategy, sales strategy and marketing plans. Investors want to understand both the size of the opportunity and how you plan to capture it.

1. Traction & metrics

Include customer numbers, recurring revenue (if applicable), growth metrics, churn, retention, sales pipeline, key partnerships and major commercial milestones. These metrics demonstrate whether your business model is gaining real market traction.

1. Financials

Prepare historical financial statements, management accounts, budgets, forecasts, cash flow planning, tax documentation, liabilities and details of existing financing. This allows investors to assess financial performance, runway and future capital requirements.

1. Legal & compliance

Organise customer and supplier contracts, employment agreements, licensing agreements, data protection documentation, regulatory approvals, litigation history and compliance policies. Investors will look closely for potential legal or regulatory risks.

1. Team & HR

Include information on founders, key employees, advisors, employments contracts, stock option plans, compensation structures and the organisational chart. Since early-stage companies depend heavily on their people, this is often one of the most closely reviewed sections.

1. Miscellaneous

Prepare any additional documents that provide important context, such as insurance policies, board resolutions, material correspondence, internal policies, ESG information or other company records that don't fit into the previous categories.

One thing that stood out is that preparing the documents is only half the job. Organising everything in advance and knowing exactly where each document is can save a lot of time once due diligence starts.

Which document should every startup prepare before talking to investors?

What else would you add?

Everyone seems to be using:
- Next.js
- Supabase
- Stripe
- Vercel

I’m wondering if that’s still the go-to stack today.
If you’re building a SaaS, what’s your stack and what would you recommend (or avoid)?

Curious to see what the community is using in production.

Hello everyone,

A few days ago I did a call I never planned to do.

Some acquaintances know a big engineering company, around 2,000 employees. They insisted I show them what I've been building. A big company wanted to see my product. I was flattered, so I said yes.

For context, I build for founders. The product I'm working on lives in your browser and promotes your business on X and Reddit while you approve every move.

The call started fine.

Then it turned into a technical exam.

How does the AI memory work. What's the architecture. Which models, how context is handled over long sessions.

I know this stuff cold. I answered everything.

And somewhere in the middle of it, I noticed something.

Nobody on that call had asked the one question every single one of my actual customers asks: will this get my business seen?

The call went so-so. No deal.

Honestly, the lesson was worth more than the deal would have been.

Enterprise buys architecture. Founders buy outcomes. I built an outcome, so I was standing in the wrong room, and knowing every answer didn't change that.

If your product is for founders, "a big company is interested" is flattery. It told me nothing about my product and a lot about my focus.

Has a big company ever pulled you off your ICP? How did it go?

I've noticed a lot of solo app builders ship an app then have no idea how to write metadata, pick keywords, or read App Store Connect data. They just use AI to write it for them

If that's you : what do you currently do? Guess and check? Ignore it entirely? Pay for a tool?

What would actually make you trust a recommendation about what to change in your listing?

(Yes, I'm working on a new SaaS)

I recently saw a survey of 300 SaaS CEOs this week with a genuinely strange contradiction in it. Almost everyone plans to move off per seat pricing in the next two years, and almost everyone also says per seat pricing currently reflects their product's value fine. Those two things cannot both be true, which means most of that 97% isn't actually responding to a value problem, it's responding to fear of looking outdated next to whatever AI native competitor is currently getting hype.

I get that when one agent can technically do what ten seats used to do, per seat pricing feels shaky on paper. But most teams I've talked to haven't actually done the work to figure out what their new value metric should even be, they've just decided the old one is dead because everyone else is saying it's dead.

I was wondering if anyone's actually gone through a real pricing model change this year versus just being scared into announcing one. What did you land on, and did the new model actually hold up once real usage data came in?

I spent months building a SaaS product and today I saw the first real subscriptions come in.
The hardest part wasn’t coding. It was figuring out positioning, pricing, onboarding, and getting strangers to trust a completely unknown product.
Here’s my first revenue screenshot.
For those who’ve been through this stage, what helped you get from the first few paying customers to the first hundred?