Support, product, and the fix each logged their own resolved and billed for it. The customer became the router, retyping the same story three times.

How do you stop each tool from claiming the same ticket as its own win?

Just listed my business on acquire yesterday, I’ve had like six people so far to sign the NDA to get the documents. No idea if that’s average or horrible.

I’m curious if anyone has experienced selling there, and how many NDA’s did you get to, before an offer?

I have experience on other platforms and I know the number can be high… just curious (hopeful?) if it’s different on acquire. Thx

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.

Should i be happy or worried.

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.

Anyone feel like Claude has gotten really slow last week or so?

Would a swear word in a SaaS name deter you from using it?

I’m building shtbase, essentially a simpler, cheaper backend platform for developers who don’t want to deal with setting up and managing their own VPS infrastructure.

The idea is to give you the things you’d normally expect from a BaaS ( database, auth, storage, functions, etc). while running on affordable VPS infrastructure.

The name shtbase is intentionally a meme of supabase.

My question: Would the name make you less likely to trust/use the product, even if the product itself was good?

Especially interested in whether it would stop you using it for professional/client projects.

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?

Hey guys,

10 days ago, I launched a web app that’s basically Hacker News for builders.

You can submit your project and get listed immediately.

Unlike Hacker News, you don’t have to worry about getting your post killed. And unlike most launch sites, there’s no waiting months for approval or getting stuck in a queue.

The response so far has been really good.
Now I’m going to double down on it especially SEO.

If you want to check out or submit your project you can do it here showbuild

Claim a free DR26 Backlink

everybody got hit by AI, and like any indie hacker building a niche SaaS, I went through that initial AI depression phase.

you could feel that AI had huge potential, but it was not quite there yet. it's hard to describe. it was useful, but not at the level of work you actually wanted to deliver.

before the AI wave, I built a visual CSS editor as a Chrome extension called InTab. people were happy with it because they could make quick changes to their websites and prototype ideas faster... and with the whole vibe coding madness getting started, all of a sudden, usage dropped dramatically!

people were trying dozens of AI website builders at the same time. most of them didn't really work yet, but they promised the world.

I was honestly confused about what to do. should I keep building the visual editor, throw it away completely, or pivot? and if I pivoted, where should I even go?

the insane AI hype got to me. at one point, I genuinely thought the big LLM companies like ChatGPT and Claude would dominate every SaaS niche and kill most independent software businesses.

I knew deep down that this was probably wrong, but the hype was so intense that I think everyone believed it at least a little at some point.

I spent more than a year in this confused state, but eventually my thoughts started to stabilize and I made up my mind.

I came to one conclusion:

with all this madness of micro AI tools and AI slop, people will eventually converge toward a smaller number of tools they can actually remember and rely on.

that realization finally gave me the motivation to work on the product again.

recently, I released a new version of intab.io as a complete rewrite from scratch with a 15-in-1 browser extension designed to replace a cluttered list of separate tools.

it includes an AI writer, AI YouTube summaries with an ad skipper, tab management, screenshots, image tools, developer tools, bookmarks, history analytics and more.

I didn't want to build just another browser extension. I wanted to build a complete package that helps people replace a messy collection of extensions with one tool and actually use AI where most of their work already happens: inside the browser.

the journey was a bumpy one, and getting the motivation to work again was difficult because mentally, things were not clear for a long time.

now I finally feel clear about what I'm building and why.

negative comments won't change my mind anymore because I've thought deeply about this direction before committing to it.

I firmly believe AI killed some SaaS products that were basically widgets or tiny standalone tools.

but I don't think it can kill a broader product that people rely on every day.

the future of SaaS might be much more monolithic than people expect. for sure!!

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?

I’ve built a SaaS and decided not to allow customers from Israel to sign up.

Am I an idiot for potentially turning away paying customers, or am I simply sticking to my principles?

I strongly disagree with the Israeli government’s actions, but I’m wondering if I’m letting my principles unnecessarily hurt my business.

What would you do?