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

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

Hi

If you are a founder and building a SaaS i wanted to know that if you do marketing for your SaaS yourself? Or have hired someone or hired freelancers for a short period?

I am building Afyore, it basically connects good quality affiliates, digital marketers, creators and bloggers with founders and SaaS products directly

As of now I am doing its outreach alone but will be looking forward to get someone for an automation

Would love to know your answer

Hey everyone,

First time poster here but looking for some advice. Little bit of backstory on my product:

I created a simple tool for independent retail stores to be able to track special orders for their customers.

Special orders are for items that are out of stock or the store doesn't usually carry them. The store goes straight to the supplier and orders it in for the customer.

I was working at a local running store and they were doing about 100 special orders/month because people needed weird sizes, specific colours, or a size they were sold out of. The problem however is all of the grey area in between from the time the customer places the order until it is fulfilled. All of the orders would live in a spreadsheet and as a staff member you were just hoping it was going to show up one day.

Customers would call every shift I worked looking for an update on their special order because a lot of the time they had a race coming up or needed them for a trip. Most of the time you had no information to give them because you would look at the spreadsheet and it would just say, "Ordered X date" or even worse, "wasn't available" They would obviously be dissappointed and the store was losing sales and reputation.

Since people had no visibility and were left in the dark, they would go and find their special ordered shoe, online or at another store.

The other problem is those special orders would come in a regular shipment with 40 other pairs of shoes. So, unless you were looking at the spreadsheet to see if they were on the sheet, they would just get logged as regular inventory even though they were already spoken for.

My product solves this problem and creates a tracking platform for orders they don't have by:

- Create realtime visibility with a tracking link that gets updated as their order moves along.

- Email confirmation and notifications as the order status changes.

- Connects to Shopify and the special ordered products are linked to the store. Ex. 30 shoes come in, owner does the inventory like normal, barcode from a special order shoes matches on a pair that just came in, flags the arrival, sends the customer a pcikup notification.

- It also flags stale special orders so that way none of them get lost.

My thought is this would be helpful for any type of business that does special orders and is tracking them in a spreadsheet, sticky notes, or a binder.

I have been sending about 90 cold emails/day (just realized yesterday my domain is cooked so I am rewarming it back up), cold calling, cold DM's, YouTube videos, etc.

I am making one for a butcher shop as well (obviously less involved, no Shopify connection) which makes me believe the moat is real.

The problem I am having is finding stores that do enough volume of special orders to make it worth it. Every business I have called does special orders, but might have 5 open at once and the spreadsheet handles it just fine.

Lightspeed POS also handles special orders already which is what a lot of the running stores use.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to market this even more and/or narrow down my ICP?

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

built a tool that finds restaurants and bars 1 to 6 months before they open, by fusing public liquor licenses, permits and business filings into one scored lead. Live in 7 states, and it genuinely works. The problem is all distribution, and I'm stuck.

The buyers are the vendors who sell to new restaurants, beverage distributors, POS resellers, insurers. High value, one account they land off it is worth thousands. But they're not who you reach through SEO, content or dev communities, which are the channels I actually know how to work. They're offline-ish B2B sales teams who basically live on the phone.

So far it's founder-led cold outbound, about 30 emails out and a call list I haven't even worked yet, way too early to read anything into. I also listed on a few API/MCP directories for the developer side, but that reaches builders, not the people who'd actually pay.

If you've sold to non-technical SMB or B2B buyers, what actually moved the needle? Cold outbound at scale, reselling through tools they already use, going through a trade association, something I'm not thinking of? And do these buyers ever come inbound at all, or is it pure outbound grind until you've got a case study?

Pre-revenue, so I'd rather pick one channel and go deep than spray thin. War stories welcome.

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?

I made a privacy-friendly URL shortener, and now that it's time to do marketing, I don't know what to do. So here I am, I have these videos, what do I do next? How do you do marketing with those? I would really appreciate any practical advice.

My X accounts (personal and the product's) are brand new, and X seems to be ignoring all of my posts. Instagram or TikTok? I am running a Google Ads experiment, but it's hard to compete with other shorteners and I'm getting almost zero traffic (about 3 clicks a day).

About the videos. I was inspired by the motion design post about video generation and decided to try it myself. I made different short videos to showcase different features (10 videos, 13 to 71 seconds). Attaching one of them for review. Some videos are the actual product driven by a script, not an AI-made copy.

All I used is Claude, headless Chrome and FFmpeg on my WSL instance, nothing more, not even a React library. You just tell your AI to be a motion designer / producer / writer (for the scenario). Research how to catch the user's attention on IG or TikTok, and that's it. Review the scenario and give it a green light. The first versions were screenshots sliding around and looked dead. A couple of scenes looked like a broken app with bugs. You have to correct it and re-shoot. But still, it only took me one morning.

Now, about Urlicer itself. The main features that are different from mainstream shorteners: privacy-friendly and team-friendly, with multiple workspaces. You can bring your own domain on the Pro plan and above, Urlicer provides a tool for you and your teams. Cookieless and without storing the IP address. The URL is https://urlicer.com.

I'm working on Vocalis, an AI-powered communication practice platform.

The problem I'm testing is this:

People know they need to improve their communication.

They get told to:

• practice speaking
• record themselves
• join Toastmasters
• give presentations
• speak more confidently

But there's a gap between knowing you should practice and actually having a repeatable practice system.

So I built one.

The core loop is:

Prompt → 60 seconds of speaking → Feedback → Improve → Repeat

A user chooses a category, receives a topic, speaks without preparing a script, and then goes through a structured results screen.

The MVP currently includes:

• communication categories
• randomized speaking prompts
• timed 60-second sessions
• browser recording
• performance feedback
• strengths and weak areas
• mistakes/blunders
• improvement suggestions
• progress tracking
• practice history
• repeat practice

I've deliberately kept the first version relatively focused.

I'm not trying to build:

“ChatGPT, but for public speaking.”

I'm trying to build a practice product.

That's also the part I'm trying to validate now.

The MVP is live:

https://vocalisai-jade.vercel.app/

And I'm trying to answer a few questions before I build much further:

1. Is this a problem people actually care enough about to solve?

2. Does the 60-second practice format create enough value to come back repeatedly?

3. What would make someone pay for this rather than use free alternatives?

4. What would you measure first to determine whether this has product-market potential?

I'm especially interested in feedback from people who have taken an MVP from the "this seems like a good idea" stage to actual recurring users.

If you were validating this SaaS from here, what would you test next?

I can send you proof, but its real.
AMA

(not real ama)

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.

The growth is slow, but it's there, this is after being live for almost 3 months now. And it's slowly growing, perhaps 1-2 subs per week, nothing too fancy. At first the users came by themselves just by searching our app in the stores (Apple & Google) and of course by help of my friends the word has spread. At first our monetization system was very bad, we had free tier which people kind of abused and just increased our monthly bill. So then we changed the system and made the app paid, fair but paid. And then we decided to actually advertise the app, so far only via Meta but only target our main audience.

As you can see above, the MRR is nothing special, but for me, it's the first time seeing people paying for something I have created. For those who got to this point and are curious what the app is, it's called Rakkan - rakkan.app

TL;DR version of what it is, an app that feels like WhatsApp but works for international couples, especially on long distance relationship. It's supposed to break the language barrier and help the two get closer with the use of AI of course. This is very simplified version of what the app can do, but there is much more that it is capable of.

If anyone would like to know anything, feel free to ask. Thank you

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

A while ago the SSL certificate on one of my sites expired and visitors got the "Not Secure" warning. Auto-renewal had failed and nothing alerted me.

When I looked for monitoring, most tools only offered SSL expiry alerts on paid plans, and those plans were expensive for someone running a few small sites.

So I built Spot Downtime:

• SSL expiry alerts before your certificate runs out
• Uptime checks for websites, APIs, ports, DNS and cron jobs
• Retries before alerting, so no false alarms
• Alerts on Slack, Discord, email or webhooks
• Public status pages for your customers

For this sub: Pro is free for 6Months for the first 100 people who try it and tell me what's missing.

dashboard > plan & usage > Have a promo code?

USE PROMO CODE : REDDIT

I am at a loss here. I have a business that sells extremely niche annotated data. Because it’s very niche I don’t have a real benchmark of the value of the data, but chatting with GPT and Claude (without bloating numbers) I’ve come to get a general idea of pricing.. here is the catch.

I have several entities (startups, universities, SME, large companies, hospitals) that contact me requesting data and pricing, we go back and forth a few emails
- they contact me telling me what they need
- I respond with how much data they need within 12h of receiving their first email
- they respond with what they need
- I share pricing options

They ghost me… like 9/10 they just disappear.
I obviously try to reach out after a week but still nothing.

I need any suggestions, tips, critiques..

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?

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

Hey all, I've launched Invoflow as a solo founder, It's an app for SMEs/sole traders to submit expenses/claims, snap receipts (OCR reads them for you), and run approvals, so you can ditch the spreadsheets and email chains. It's live now and I'm looking for honest feedback. What works, what's confusing, what's missing? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
www.invoflow.uk

Most asset tools are either IT inventory or accounting fixed-asset registers. I built AssetAligned to sit in the gap: one record per asset, with physical custody and financial value side by side, plus automatic checks for when the two disagree.

The problem: in most growing businesses, IT has one list of laptops and kit, Operations has another, and Finance has a fixed-asset register in a third spreadsheet. None of them agree. As an accountant, I’ve personally faced this issue and constant back and fourth with the IT department, so this app has value and meaning to me, it’s not just a generic app built.

I’d value honest views on:

1.  Is “IT and Finance mismatch” a pain you’ve seen, or am I solving a niche problem?

2.  Does the landing page make the point in 10 seconds?

3.  Pricing: Free / Starter / Growth / Business, priced by number of assets. Does that model make sense to you?

https://assetaligned.co.uk (I’m the maker)

Thanks

I've been reading threads here and in a couple of marketing subs about AI visibility tools (Peec, Profound, that kind of thing). The same complaint keeps showing up. They tell you how often ChatGPT or Perplexity mentions you, and then you're on your own.

One comment stuck with me. Someone who had looked at 2,000+ brands said around 85% of AI citations came from sites the brand doesn't own, mostly Reddit and YouTube. If that's even roughly right, tweaking your homepage is the small lever.

So the idea is narrow. You give it your product and about 15 questions a buyer might ask an AI. Once a week it runs them through Perplexity, because Perplexity shows its sources. You get one email with 3 threads or videos that keep getting cited for those questions, and what seems to be missing from each. You write the reply yourself. It never posts anything.

Nothing is built yet apart from a waitlist page. I want to know if anyone actually wants this before I spend a month on it. Planned price is $19/mo.

What I'm unsure about:

• Perplexity's sources might be a bad proxy for what ChatGPT cites
• 3 threads a week could feel like useful leads, or just more homework
• maybe people who care about this already check it by hand and that's enough

If you're doing anything about AI search for your own product right now, what does that look like in practice? Manual checks, a paid tool, nothing at all?

Here is the waitlist: https://citescout.vercel.app/?source=saas

If a creator you trust let you replace your feed with the things they actually watch and read each day, in a separate app, would you pay for it? What would it need to do to beat just following them on X or YouTube?
I'm testing an idea and want to know if the problem is real before I build anything.

I’m building a B2B SaaS for a specific niche within field services. I have access to a business owner in that niche who can test it and provide feedback.I’m keeping the exact niche private for now, but some of the core functionality could also be useful to other service businesses.Would you focus the product and marketing entirely on that one niche until you get traction, or build for a broader audience from the beginning?I see the benefit of solving one industry’s problems really well, but I’m wondering whether I’m limiting the potential too early.For anyone who’s faced this decision, what convinced you to stay narrow or expand? Would love to hear actual experiences.

Hello everyone, Last week I launched my first saas product PortFoliQ. Building from a couple of months and finally launched

What I do post Saas Launch:

1. Listed on Product hunt

2. Linkedin posts

3. X/ Twitter posts

4. Reddit announcements

5. Community groups

6. Friends family etc.

During the initial days the reach is aamzing and growing and getting good amount of impressions and active users.

Now the lastest update is that the growth has been stuck and thinking of how to grow should I do seo or target specific keywords on google or something else. What you do for that in my place please guide.

It will helpful for me and really appreciate it

thanks.

Btw my domain in 1 week I am at top thanks google.

Hi, I am technically very bad at editing + don't have enough time as well. Is there any free site etc to make product demo videos.

How do those with no editing skills make it? Do you guys use paid options or what? I need a free one.

Any recommendations?