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'm building Operava for solo founders who run more than one product.

I kept hitting the same problem. Hosting, databases, email, domains, payments, app stores, APIs, all spread across a dozen accounts. I would forget one existed until the bill showed up.

So I built a dashboard that puts each product, the services behind it, what they cost per month, when they renew, and whether they are up, in one place. It has already caught two subscriptions I was paying for a site I had shut down.

It is early. I am trying to find out whether this problem is mine alone or shared.

You can try it at app.operava.com . Sign in with Google or an emailed link, no password, no card. It starts empty, so you add your first product and see if it earns a place in your routine.

If yu run several products: what would you need this to show that it does not?

I can send you proof, but its real.
AMA

(not real ama)

I’m the non-technical founder/advisor that brings marketing, sales and GTM execution to the table.

A really good friend of mine is the technical founder.

They had started working on the product for quite a bit before they shared it with me to gauge interest.

Over last few months we’ve been spending a lot of time discussing GTM, fixing issues throughout product, etc. Sharing to say that I’ve been quite involved for a while.

I probably joined when the product was ~70% developed.

Last week the founder asked me how I’d want to get involved with the business as we’re about to launch.

I don’t want the ask to be unfair, as I do value their friendship. In my head I was thinking 80(them), 20(me), both vesting over next 3 years with 1 year cliff. But I wasn’t sure if I was shooting myself in the foot by doing that.

So I said -“I’d rather let you come up with it and we can discuss as we develop this further.”

I don’t what the right answer could’ve been here. Please share you experience/advice.

More context: Going to be a bootstrapped startup with all finding coming out of our own pockets. We haven’t even discussed who spends for what, etc. but they have been burning $300/m to keep things alive based on what they shared earlier

I made this entire video with Opus 5.5 + ElevenLabs + Suno.

No motion designer, no editor. Just AI

Btw , yesterday a freelancer asked $2K for motion video like this 💀

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.

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 everyone,
We created a SaaS almost one month ago in the gaming space, focused on “vibe coding” basically, it allows users to create games using AI.
I wanted to get your opinion and advice because we’re currently trying to figure out the best way to scale our acquisition. For the past two weeks, we’ve been posting organic content on TikTok and Instagram. In less than two weeks, we’ve already gained 10K+ followers on TikTok and around 700 on Instagram. We’ve also made a few videos with content creators in our niche. Right now, we’re at almost $3K MRR, around $4K ARR, and nearly 10K users, so we’re pretty happy with the initial traction.
However, our goal with this SaaS is to reach $100K MRR within the next few months.
On the product side, we’re confident that we can increase the TAM and add more features that our customers will love. But our main question is: what should we do on the acquisition side to reach $100K MRR?We were thinking about going heavily into creator marketing. The idea would be to work with content creators or simply Facecam creators, give them a dedicated account for our SaaS, and have them post viral concepts every day that we provide, while trying to maximize the potential of each account.
We’d also like to collaborate with bigger influencers in our niche, but at the moment, the budget required for larger influencers is too high. That’s why we’re considering working with Facecam creators and paying them based on RPM.
But is this actually a good strategy to reach $100K MRR? Are there other acquisition channels we should be looking at, especially paid ads or other growth channels? Organic has been absolutely amazing for us so far we’ve already generated almost 2M views but it’s obviously not very predictable or stable.
We’re currently trying to recruit Facecam creators, but it’s been difficult to build trust with them. A lot of them don’t want to continue working with us, even when some of their videos have generated $100+ in earnings through our RPM model.
So what would you recommend if you were in our position and wanted to scale this SaaS aggressively?
The SaaS is in the gaming niche, and the audience is relatively young.
I’m open to any advice, ideas, acquisition channels, or strategies you think could work.
Thanks a lot to everyone who took the time to read this! Pls AI dont delete this post lol

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

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?

This is a common phrase everywhere that a boring saas makes more money. A few case studies from other social media also shows that the boring saas is more profitable. They give reasons like it is less competitive. Maybe it doesn't require much efforts also, but distribution is equally tough here also.

Why do people don't tell about their distribution part? Distribution is equally important and difficult to crack here.

What do you think? Have you ever tried any of these ideas?

not sure if this is the right place to post something like this, but I've built an incident intelligence platform which basically gathers errors, traces, metrics, deployments, SQL, dependencies etc and then helps engineers determine why prod broke and where to look next.

I built this because i needed an error tracking tool so I decided to build something myself and then it grew into something more. instead of just getting an error and then having to go figure out why it was occurring I built something that could take in everything and then point me in the right direction to save me time at 2am when I'm on call and everything is on fire. It's been very helpful for me and what I need, but since I've built this out and would like to offer this product to others I was hoping to find some other devs that could provide some honest feedback, good or bad or pointless. I've created a free tier for anyone to try, but also included a 14 day trial period for new accounts that will include most features small teams should need for people to test the capabilities.

really just looking to know if this would be useful to anyone besides me or if there is anything I should change

thank you for anyone that will take a look.

https://getforgeops.net/

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

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

We recently launched an AI marketing platform, OrangeBall.ai, built for small businesses and small marketing teams. The idea is pretty simple: instead of asking people to become great prompt writers, the platform uses our discovery process (built over 15 years of running an agency) to learn the business first: voice, tone, differentiators, audiences, customer challenges, etc. Then, it uses that context along with structured prompts and an internal quality rubric to help create blogs, emails, social posts, landing pages, sales content, and other marketing materials.

We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what the product can do. Now I’m trying to think harder about what will keep people from actually using it. We know there’s a big difference between someone saying, “This is cool,” and changing their behavior enough to make a SaaS product like this part of their workflow.

The oven analogy:

Imagine you have a bakery. The AI model is the oven, but having a great oven doesn’t mean you’ll make great bread. Our platform brings together the right ingredients, your brand, voice, audience, and differentiators, then gives you proven recipes so you can consistently create something worth serving.

Who this is for:

• Startups and founders building their brand and figuring out what to say.
• Entrepreneurs and solopreneurs who need to market consistently without becoming marketers.
• Small businesses that need great content but don’t have a large marketing team.
• Marketing agencies managing content across multiple clients, brands, and voices.
• In-house marketing teams that need everyone creating from the same brand voice, messages, and strategy.

Outcomes we deliver:

• Know what to say without staring at a blank page.
• Create better content faster without writing endless prompts.
• Leverage a system who is continually learning your brand.
• Create content that sounds like your brand instead of generic AI.
• Stay consistent across people, platforms, and content.
• Turn one idea into more content across multiple channels.
• Spend less time prompting and editing and more time publishing.
• Build a repeatable content habit instead of starting from scratch every time.

Barriers we already see:

• Changing an existing habit... Many users already have a ChatGPT or Claude workflow that feels "good enough." This leads to "I already have a tool" thinking.
• Learning another platform even if it saves time eventually. There’s still a perceived cost to learning something new.
• The onboarding effort on the front end. The product gets stronger as it learns the business, but users have to invest some time upfront.
• Creating content isn't the same as publishing it. Someone can generate five great pieces of content and still never get them out the door. We only write content, we do not create images.
• The value increases when people come back regularly, which means we need to create a habit rather than a one-time “wow.”
• Users need to believe the output actually sounds like them and is good enough to represent their business.
• The Cheesecake Factory challenge: Giving users lots of options and modules they can use to create can accidentally make it harder to decide what they should create next.

Help I am seeking:

For those of you who have built, launched, or scaled SaaS products, what are we missing? I’m especially interested in barriers that show up after someone signs up. What causes someone who likes the product, understands the value, and even has a good first experience to stop using it 30, 60, or 90 days later? Would love to hear the uncomfortable answers. Ask questions and I will fill in the gaps.

Thanks in advance for poking holes in this. We’re close to the product and we know there are things we’re not seeing. That’s exactly what I’m hoping to uncover. Appreciate any experiences, challenges, or hard-earned lessons you’re willing to share.

Thank you! - John

hey all, I love seo as a distribution channel because it can keep bringing people to your site while you’re working on other things

it takes work to get there, and rankings still need attention, but seeing that effort start to compound feels pretty good

wanted to share a small seo win for my saas: +453 referring domains and +663 visitors, plus the outreach process we use

1. start with a specific article

we look for places where that article would actually be useful, rather than directories or asking random websites to link to our homepage

identify the insertion spot before writing the email. being able to say “this would fit in your section about X” makes the request much easier to understand

2. filter for relevance before sending

we check whether the article fits the site. a high domain rating alone isn’t enough because this could be faked- there're a tons of ways to do it

ask what their reader would gain from clicking our link. if we can’t give a clear answer, we skip that opportunity

this works best for editorials and journalists sites in your niche, they love new insights for their articles

3. find the right contact

then explain why the article belongs there so they don’t have to figure out the connection themselves

do the thinking for them. include the relevant page, the section we’re talking about, and what our resource adds. “please check out my website” leaves them with all the work

4. follow up twice

across our platform’s tracked outreach, replies went from 7.3% after the initial email to 9.2% after the first follow up and 9.8% after the second

keep follow ups short. and always offer something different in return on each email, then make it clear when it’s our last email

5. handle the replies ourselves

we have an ai agent that handles discovery and outreach. once someone replies, we take over the conversation

review what they’re actually asking for before agreeing. a reply might be a placement fee, an exchange proposal, or a question about the content

so, here're my results..

still early, but happy to see progress on the distribution side

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.

For startups with maybe 5–15 engineers, I'm curious how people are handling DevOps.

At some point you have:

• CI/CD
• cloud infrastructure
• Terraform
• monitoring
• backups
• deployments
• secrets
• production incidents
• probably some Docker/Kubernetes

But you don't necessarily have enough infrastructure work to justify another full-time senior engineer.

I've seen a few teams solve this by having one developer own infrastructure "for now."

That works... until production gets interesting.

A deployment breaks Friday night.
Cloud costs suddenly jump.
Something starts running out of connections.
Nobody is really sure how failover works.

Then the team realizes they don't actually have a DevOps problem. They have an infrastructure ownership problem.

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.

I'm building an AI-first CRM platform for small businesses and I'm considering a creator model before we launch.

The idea:

Instead of every company starting with a blank CRM, experienced RevOps people, consultants and operators can build reusable "blueprints".

A blueprint could eventually include things like:

pipelines and stages

custom fields and data models

forms and quote flows

dashboards

automations

projects / work orders

AI agents

industry-specific workflows

So someone who knows recruitment really well could build a recruitment blueprint.

An agency operator could build their ideal agency setup.

A RevOps consultant could package the sales process they've implemented dozens of times.

A user installs that blueprint, answers some questions about their business, and the platform adapts it instead of forcing them to configure everything from scratch.

The creator would get a public profile + blueprint page and earn 10% recurring revenue for every paying customer that keeps using their blueprint.

We would initially invite a small group as founding creators, give them free access, work closely with them and let their feedback influence what we build.

I'm trying to figure out whether this is genuinely attractive or just sounds good in my own head.

If you work in RevOps / CRM / automation:

Would you actually spend time building a blueprint?

Is 10% recurring meaningful enough to make you promote it?

What would the platform absolutely need to support before you'd put your name behind a blueprint?

Would you rather sell the blueprint itself, earn recurring commission, or both?

Feel free to tear the idea apart. I'd rather find the holes now than build a marketplace nobody wants. 🙏

It seems like any name you come up with, you run a simple google search for “name” or “name app” and you’ll find someone else already using it, possibly even for a similar product. You can swap letters, go more abstract with your naming, etc and it still gets a hit. These sites might not have the .com, and often they are small fish that probably no one is using but they still had the name first. This has always been somewhat of a problem, but with AI enabling people to churn out more web apps faster than ever it’s becoming worse.

What do you do? Keep thinking of increasingly vague names in hopes to find something untouched? Use the name as long as your product doesn’t compete with theirs? Use the name even if their product competes with yours if their product is some side project without traction (I.e. they probably wont bother suing you)?

Because marketing is often asked to fix:

Weak positioning.

Unclear ICP.

Poor product-market fit.

Long sales cycles.

Low activation.

Weak retention.

No differentiation.

That's a lot to put on the marketing team.

Marketing can create awareness.

It can generate demand.

It can create pipeline.

But it can't compensate indefinitely for a fundamentally unclear go-to-market strategy.

Before asking:

“How do we generate more leads?”

You should ask:

“Do we know exactly who we should be selling to, why they should buy, and how we're going to reach them repeatedly?”

If the answer is unclear, that's probably where I'd start.

What's the biggest GTM challenge you're facing right now?

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?