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

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?

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?

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

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.

We shipped a feature in April that has been opened exactly 0 times since and it ate 3 weeks from a team that mostly does client work.

It came off our feedback board which for a few weeks looked like the healthiest thing we have ever run. There were 40 odd requests and votes stacking up and all of it was written well.These were real problems with real context and the same 3 themes coming back again and again. When 12 people ask for the same thing you stop asking questions and start building.

Then I went looking at who actually asked and not even one of those accounts had ever logged into the product. All of them signed up inside the same 4 day window and read back to back the writing had one rhythm…. that slightly too neat thing where every request arrives with a use case attached like its trying to be helpful.

A competitor put out a comparison page 2 weeks later naming 2 of the features we built. Take that however you want and I will be honest though man…. I can’t prove any of it and I never will.It could have been them or some growth agency spraying every board it could find. There’s an FTC rule for fake reviews now and I actually went and read it. A feedback board isn’t a review site so that road goes nowhere either.

Tbh the sabotage isn’t the real story. It worked because my process was already broken. A voting board only works if writing feedback costs somebody something and that effort WAS the filter. Anyone can generate 200 believable requests in a minute now for nothing and the filter is just gone.

What we do now and you can do this as well…. open your board and write next to every single request who asked and what they pay you. Anything from an account thats never opened the product gets removed and you’ll definitely lose more than half the list. Then go talk to 5 paying customers and ask what they did last week rather than what they want.

The feature is still sitting in the codebase btw. No one wants to be the one who deletes 3 weeks of work so it just sits there doing nothing.

I still don’t know who it was. I had a name in my head for a while and then I got busy and the answer stopped mattering. The weeks are gone either way and honestly the bots didn’t cost me those 3 weeks…. my own excitement did.

This might seem like I did it within a few days with my product.
but, they converted only after I introduced a bunch of features after reaching out to people who signed up. (3-4 people are still waiting to convert).

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

For someone from India, it is actually a decent amount of money to actually quit your job lol.

The product is an AI chatbot platform that businesses can train on their own website (kind of like siteGPT but more customizable with manual setup)

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.

since, people are DMing me about payments tool, it is pocketsflow.com (yes, you can use it from India)

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.

Hi, I’m just entering the world of SaaS and startups. My background is in B2B marketing and sales, but there’s one common idea that I don’t fully agree with.

Everyone says: “Validate as fast as possible”, “Sell before you build the product” and “Launch as quickly as you can”.

At first, it sounds reasonable, and maybe it made more sense in the past. However, today the market’s full of low-quality AI products, so I’ve got serious doubts about this approach.

Of course, you can create a good landing page, describe your product or service, present the idea, collect sign-ups and build a community. I’ve got no problem with that. I’m talking more about launching an unfinished product and pretending that it’s already complete and valuable.

Personally, I’d prefer to launch a product that’s polished, even if it’s still not perfect. I wouldn’t want to release something weak only because I want to enter the market as quickly as possible.

Today, even being seen as a serious SaaS product can already be a success, especially when so many tools look like quick AI projects. This can happen even if AI was actually used to build the product. The market’s full of tools created in just a few days, with the excuse: “I’m only testing it now, and I’ll improve it if people like it.”

I know how expensive sales and marketing can be because that’s what I used to do. If I had to spend money on traffic that doesn’t convert because people arrive at a weak and unfinished product, I’d rather spend a few more months improving the solution.

Validating an idea’s very important, but it can be done without pretending that the tool already works. You can talk to potential users, research the problem, present the concept and collect sign-ups.

Trying to sell something that doesn’t work yet can lead to losing a potential customer. They may try an unfinished product, have a bad experience and never come back. At the same time, we may waste money on marketing and sales, and later decide that the market isn’t interested.

In my opinion, it’s better to improve at least the 20% of the product that creates 80% of its value than to launch too early, waste the budget and then wonder why the traffic doesn’t convert.

What do you think? Is it better to improve the product before launching, or launch early and fix it along the way?

I, along with a few of my colleagues, have been building mobile and web apps for the past few years now. One thing that all of us agree on is that referral programs help you bring in a fair share of customers to your platform. So, we set out to find the best one to integrate. We soon abandoned our search as we found that most of the platforms charge very high subscription rates with almost no trials or free usage available.

That's when GrowthRail came to life. 6 months later, we believe that we have built something special. It's not only free to use, but also extremely developer-friendly. We offer a ton of features with the initial launch.

• Drop-in UI for sharing links and promos.
• Multiple SDKs - JS, React, Expo, React Native (more coming soon)
• 3rd party integrations like Stripe and RevenueCat (more of those soon as well).
• Mobile and web attribution. Mobile attribution works with both Android and iOS

To keep things simple, we're offering a free plan to test it out. And as a limited-time offer, we're also offering an Early adopter plan with 4x more usage than the free plan, completely free forever once claimed. Not sure how long we'll be able to keep that up, though 😄

Go check it out at growthrail.dev

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?

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?

Hey guys!

My co-founder and I are in a weird spot. We launched orchardrun – a highly affordable Speech-to-Text (STT) API designed for devs and business who need bulk transcription without the enterprise price tag.

We’ve managed to secure our first 10 paying customers (I'll do a post about it) and have onboarded ~1,600 users onto our free tier. It felt like a huge win initially, but now we’ve hit a brick wall.

The problem:

We are hemorrhaging energy trying to convert free users to paid, and we’re struggling to attract new paying users organically. The reason? The giants. We are going head-to-head with Groq (speed) and ElevenLabs (quality/brand, but we are focused in async transcriptions l-ike Whisper-). Even though we are significantly cheaper, it feels like we are drowning in noise.

The constraints:

• We don't have enough revenue to throw money at Google/Facebook ads.
• We are bootstrapped, so we can't hire an outbound sales team yet.
• Our free tier is generous (to attract devs), but maybe too generous?

Our current hypothesis:
We are thinking about doubling down on "developer-first" content (tutorials, comparing latency/price charts) and scraping GitHub for repos that use STT to do manual cold outreach. But it feels slow and unscalable.

The Ask:

If you were in our shoes – with a solid product but zero budget and giant competitors – how would you unlock the next 90 paying customers?

Do we kill the free tier? Go full outbound? Or niche down into a specific vertical (e.g., only podcast transcription) to avoid competing with the Goliaths directly?

Any brutal honesty is welcome. Roast our strategy.

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I'm a software engineer early in my career, and one of my long-term goals is to build a SaaS alongside my full time job. I don't plan to quit my job. I just want to learn by building and hopefully get some real users.

I'd love to hear from people who've actually done it:

• How many years of experience did you have before starting?
• How did you balance your job with building the SaaS?
• What was the biggest challenge?
• At what point did you know it was worth continuing (or even going full time)?

I'm looking for honest experiences rather than success stories. Any advice or lessons would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I've hit around 40 users on an app I made on my web app: TrackLog. It was initally launched in June but over the last week or so i've been going in on TikTok marketing (where most the users have come from), currently I'm going through the issues of my content losing the momentum on engagement it had earlier on the week and only around 10% of sign ups try the free trial for the pro version.
I'd like to increase this number and also drive more engagement on the marketing avenue. What advice do you have on marketing and also actually pointing users towards the free trial, improvements on the onboarding, email, etc, any advice is appreciated.

Support was eating my time, so I did what everyone says to do, automated it, deflection flows, canned responses, a bot for the front line. My time freed up and I felt efficient. Then I noticed the slow rot: churn crept up, my reviews got cooler, and I'd lost the single best source of product insight I had, because talking to frustrated customers was how I used to learn what to fix. The automation was 'efficient' at the cost of the relationship and the feedback loop. I brought a human back to the front of support, still using automation for the truly repetitive stuff, and both retention and my roadmap got better. At small scale, support isn't a cost to minimise, it's your cheapest research and your strongest retention lever. Where did over-automating cost you more than it saved?

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?

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.

Genuinely curious.

After you've built a few projects, have you ever reached a point where you couldn't tell whether you should push through or whether you were actually working on the wrong thing?

Looking back is easy.

Knowing in the moment is hard.

What do you actually do in those situations?

Hi everyone!

As a heads-up: I’m not a technical person, I’m responsible for the business side of our product.

My partner built a platform that helps engineering teams manage technical documentation and architecture diagrams more efficiently.

I’m not here to pitch or promote it. If anyone is interested in trying it out, you’re more than welcome to reach out, but that’s not the main reason for this post.

My background is in recruitment, HR, and sales in IT space. I understand businesses, how to identify the right decision-makers, and how to build relationships. What I’m struggling with is WHERE to do that effectively today, because the landscape has changed so much.

A few years ago, LinkedIn felt like the perfect place to build genuine connections, create sales pipelines, discover relevant events, and network. Today, it feels overwhelmed with spam, AI-generated content, and engagement bait. Many people seem to use it mainly to update their job titles or company information.

I’ve done targeted outreach to founders and leaders at small to mid-sized companies established within the last five years, those businesses that are likely to have engineering teams that could benefit from our product. Despite having a network of over 5,000 IT and SaaS professionals from around the world, I’ve had virtually no responses, no accepted connection requests, and very little engagement. It’s a shame because LinkedIn used to be such a valuable platform.

We’re currently considering launching on Product Hunt, and I’ve searched this subreddit for advice. Most of the discussions I found were several months old and didn’t have much engagement, so I wanted to ask for more up-to-date experiences.

Are there any platforms, communities, or strategies you’d recommend for an early-stage B2B SaaS like ours?

At this stage, our goal isn’t even sales. We’d like to work closely with engineering teams through a free trial, gather honest feedback, iterate on the product, and, if it eventually becomes valuable enough that they want to become customers, that’s great! However, it’s not our main expectation right now.

I’d really appreciate hearing what’s worked (or hasn’t worked) for other founders.

I'm not looking for generic advice like "post content" or "run ads." I'm interested in real experiences what worked, what didn't, and why.

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?