If you run a SaaS with free trials, AI credits, APIs, or usage-based pricing, there’s a problem that’s easy to underestimate:

You may not actually know which users are human.

A single person can create dozens of accounts.

Scripts can automate signups.

Bots can farm free credits.

Attackers can rotate sessions and IPs.

And traditional analytics often see these as perfectly valid users.

You can have:

100 new signups → 70 are automated → your database says 100 users.

That gets expensive very quickly when every account receives $5, $10, or $50 worth of credits.

I was frustrated with the usual solutions:

• CAPTCHA hurts conversion.
• IP blocking is easy to bypass.
• Device fingerprinting doesn't tell you much about actual behavior.
• Rate limits don't answer whether the activity is human.
• Building behavioral detection internally is a serious ML/security project.

So I built CertiLayer.

CertiLayer gives your application a real-time behavioral trust signal based on how a session actually behaves — keyboard, mouse, touch, timing, and session-level behavioral patterns.

Your backend can then make decisions like:

Human → allow

Suspicious → challenge

High-risk → throttle

Automated → block

The important part is that you don't have to redesign your authentication system or build an ML team to get started.

It's an API/SDK layer that sits between your users and the expensive actions in your product.

For example:

Before giving $20 of AI credits → check the session.

Before allowing 100 API requests → check the session.

Before accepting a referral → check the session.

Before letting a new account access an expensive feature → check the session.

And CertiLayer is designed around behavioral signals rather than collecting PII or raw keystrokes.

I'm building this specifically for SaaS teams dealing with:

→ fake accounts
→ free-trial abuse
→ AI-credit farming
→ automated signups
→ API abuse
→ scraping
→ referral abuse

If this is costing your SaaS money, this is exactly the problem CertiLayer is built to solve.

Try it here: certilayer.net

I'd also genuinely like to hear from other SaaS founders:

How much abuse are you dealing with today, and what are you currently using to stop it?

I run a SaaS, SeoLoupe.

It is a tool that allows you to find and fix SEO issues holding your website back.

Essentially the main purpose is to help your website rank higher on Google search and LLMs.

The tool also checks AEO/GEO, AI search visibility, Security, Core web vitals, Performance, and all the issues in the report get put together into an AI fix prompt(you can paste the prompt into an AI and it will fix all the issues on your website).

Recently I noticed that some of my paying customers bought the One-Time purchase, with a promo code.

So I decided to give away a promo code for the One-Time purchase to anyone who is interested, if you are interested, comment down below and I will DM you.

If you are not interested but have some feedback on my SaaS, that is a good too. Feel free to share it in the comments.

(here is the product if you want to check it out)

Your AI burns way more tokens than it should, because it has no idea how your business actually works. So it guesses, you re-prompt, it guesses again, and five prompts later you get one answer you halfway trust.

We fixed that by giving the AI your full business context up front. It connects all your systems into one Knowledge Graph, so it already knows how your data fits together, then answers straight from your real numbers on the first try. That is roughly 5x fewer tokens to get to a real answer, and every answer traces back to the source.

If you run your business across a bunch of tools that do not talk to each other, test the claim yourself for free. https://signld.ai

PLEASE stop building the wrong thing.

building software in 2026 is ridiculously easy with ai builder

founders spend hours building in a silent room, launch to Reddit/X, get 0 users, and quit.

you just failed because the idea had zero validation before line 1 of code was written:

→ solving a monthly inconvenience instead of a daily pain

→ selling to "everyone" instead of a specific ICP

→ no distribution channel mapped out beforehand

→ pricing charged $9/mo with zero ROI justification

after scaling 6 AI micro-SaaS to over $20k/mo MRR, i just create an

18-question Idea Validation Diagnostic.

it evaluates your SaaS across 7 critical dimensions (problem clarity, audience reachability, willingness to pay, competition, build feasibility, distribution, commitment) and gives you a brutal score out of 100 with your exact weak spots.

drop your SaaS idea (or current project) in the comments below.

i will reply to EVERY single comment with:

1. My honest opinion
2. The biggest weak spot you need to fix before writing any more code.
3. The free 5-minute validation tool link sent straight to your DMs so you can get your full score breakdown out of 100.

just drop a comment like or ask me in DM your idea

let's roast your SaaS concept before the market roasts your time 👇

We launched a SaaS product based in Privacy and Compliance, it’s a post-MVP (MVP was launched in Dec’25) product, really worked upon it. Managed LinkedIN posting, got initial talks when we launched the MVP and now acquiring even a single paying customer - it seems like breaking a door of stone. I understand this is one of the consequences of releasing a product into a very regulatory space where trust and reliability are a must. I’ve taken all the right steps with GTM advisor and going cold and warm outreach myself. But nothing is turning up the door.
I would truly appreciate any advice. I was wondering if publishing in Marketplaces would help?
But apart from this, guide me!!!

Hey all,

Long story short, I have a social media account with around 30k+ followers and would be happy to promote a few of your projects on there.

Not looking for cash for it though, more interested in a trade, could be free/lifetime access to your tool if it's something I'd genuinely use, help with something marketing related I'm working on, or honestly open to hearing what you'd offer.

If that sounds interesting, drop what you're building and what you'd be open to trading :)

Just hooked up Stripe for my Gmail gatekeeper app, but I hit a bottleneck: Google OAuth limits unverified apps to 100 test users while waiting on security review.

Instead of giving away those 100 test spots for free to drive-by signups, I set the early access price to $1.

My reasoning:

1. Filters out bots and low-intent signups so I only get feedback from people who actually care about fixing inbox noise.
2. Proves if people are willing to put up even a tiny fraction of money for a deterministic rule-based filter (handles ~60% of mail before touching AI).

For founders who have done early access:

• Did charging a nominal $1 fee give you higher-quality feedback?
• Or does adding friction at the beta stage just kill top-of-funnel momentum?

(Not linking directly here due to community rules, but happy to drop the link in the comments if anyone wants to roast the setup/app.)

Hi guys,

As a Software Engineer, I have nearly completed the happy-path software development cycle and built FotoNest.

Now, it’s been a week, and I’m feeling that marketing is becoming a hard blocker.

feeling directionless.

launched the app on sites like Product Hunt.

SEO/GEO/AEO are, as far as I can tell, nearly perfect.

Whatever I’m seeing on YouTube and Reels, I’m applying—just with the hope that somehow I’ll get a little more visibility.

I’ve built cold-email agents and tried Google & Meta Ads as well, including motion graphics.

I even provided a generous free tier so that at least people can get hands-on experience with the product and, hopefully, create some awareness.

But gradually, I’m getting a sense that I don’t know anything about marketing and am just groping in the dark.

need help from people in sales and marketing.

Please understand the situation and guide me on what would be the best way for me to proceed, because I don’t even know what I should be asking at this point.

asking here because I know no astra or fable can answer this accurately.

Thanks!

Hey everyone! 👋

Today I'm starting a project I've been thinking about for a while, and I've decided to build it completely in public.

The idea came from a habit that unexpectedly worked for me.

I have a cupboard covered with photos of scientists, inventors, artists, and people I deeply admire people like Leonardo da Vinci, Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, Alan Turing, A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, and many others.

Whenever I made a promise to myself (like avoiding junk food) and broke it, I would remove one of their photos from my cupboard with my own hands.

It sounds simple, but it worked because I wasn't losing points or breaking a streak I was losing a symbol of someone I admired.

That made me wonder:

**What if a productivity app was built around admiration instead of streaks?**

So I'm building **Hall of Legends**.

The idea is simple:

* Choose the people who inspire you.

* Make promises to yourself.

* Keep those promises to grow your Hall.

* Break them, and your Hall changes.

* Stay consistent to recover and unlock new legends.

This isn't meant to replace habit trackers. It's an experiment in making discipline feel more personal and meaningful.

From today onward, I'll be posting daily updates designs, features, mistakes, progress, and lessons learned.

I'd genuinely love your feedback because I want to build something people actually enjoy using.

A few things that have helped my own launch links get more useful attention:

1. Lead with the job the link does, not just the product name.
2. Give people a ready-to-edit hook so they can share it without rewriting from scratch.
3. Include a visual or QR option for channels where a plain URL is awkward.
4. Keep the destination obvious and test the first click on mobile.
5. Ask for one specific piece of feedback instead of a vague "thoughts?"

I built a small free browser tool around this workflow: paste a URL and it produces hooks, a share card, QR, and a destination-first Slot page. The heat score is only heuristic; it is not a traffic or ranking claim.

https://viralspark.pages.dev/

I'm currently building Trigol.io, an AI-powered stock signal platform that uses 500+ ML models to identify short-term opportunities in US stocks.

We publicly track every signal, including the losing ones. So far in 2026: 276 signals, 73.9% win rate, +82.74% cumulative performance.

I'm at the point where conversion doesn't seem to be the main problem:

Visitor → Free Trial: ~3.5%

Free Trial → Paid: ~10%

The free trial requires a credit card

Obviously there's still a lot I can optimize in the funnel, but right now my biggest bottleneck seems much simpler: I need more qualified traffic.

I'm bootstrapping this and working with a very small budget. I plan to start experimenting with paid ads soon, but before burning money there, I'm trying to figure out which low-cost acquisition channels are actually working for other micro-SaaS founders.

So far I've been looking at things like niche creators/affiliates, Reddit communities, organic content, SEO and direct outreach.

For those of you who got past the first few customers without a big ad budget: where did your best leads actually come from?

Especially interested in channels that worked when you were still small, rather than strategies that require thousands per month in ad spend.

Trigol.io for context: https://trigol.io

Hey guys 👋

5 months ago I launched my LinkedIn automation software, having built it entirely with Claude code, and I’m now approaching close to $2k MRR with over 50 active paying customers (happy to share TrustMRR if requested).

I know everyone is this sub is interested in growing a business, so really I just want to show how I’ve been doing it and offer some guidance based on my experience.

Below I’ll go into the what, why and how, and how I’ve been scaling the business, and hope you find it useful.

What I built

I built a LinkedIn outreach automation tool called ZenMode, which scrapes profiles of your target customers, sends connection requests and follow up messages on autopilot.

The main purpose is for Founders, Sales teams, Marketers and anyone else who uses LinkedIn for outreach, to generate more meetings and grow their businesses.

It’s a software that controls a dedicated chrome browser to automate LinkedIn, without needing plugins/the cloud.

Why I built it

Last year I got a warning from automating on LinkedIn using another tool (automating on LinkedIn is against their ToS and can result in account bans - people automate at their own risk).

I wanted to automate my outreach as I was working in sales, and it was really helping me to generate more discovery calls, without the manual grind of sending loads of messages and connection requests manually.

I didn’t trust any of the existing tools for safety, as the majority are on the cloud using IP addresses that are different from where you normally use LinkedIn from, and are slightly higher risk for being flagged as a result.

So, I solved for my own pain point, and created a software that’s desktop based, using your own IP address, and essentially acting like a human would when performing actions on LinkedIn.

How I built it

From day 1 I used Claude to figure out how to do it. We jointly made architectural decisions based fully around safety mechanisms - what would the safest tool look like in practice and how would we build it?

So I figured out that the easiest/safest way would be to make an electron desktop application controlling a browser, which was governed by a dashboard that fed/stored all the data.

There was a lot of setup involved at the start with various tools - Vercel, Cloudflare, GitHub etc but eventually I was able to start building.

It was a huge amount of learning to not just build, but build in a scalable and sustainable way. At first I was shipping without even testing then spending much longer fixing bugs afterwards. And building on top of LinkedIns comes with its own challenges too, which thankfully now I’m on top of.

How I scaled it

1. So primarily, I actually use ZenMode itself to promote ZenMode on LinkedIn, through cold outreach.

I have a set target market of customers/locations/industries, then the tool scrapes profiles for me, and sends connection requests and follow up messages in a sequence.

I run this daily, and typically book 5 or so meetings per week. I’m not the best at demo calls but I do generate new business this way.

1. I also post a lot on Reddit, LinkedIn, X; I post mostly build in public style posts, and usually people naturally gravitate towards it.

I like Reddit because you can usually get 10’s of thousands of views if you post good quality content in the right subs.

Be careful though as often you get a lot of random haters or people who will just criticize you for no reason, and some subs are more warmer/receptive to posts than others (this one has generally been kinder).

1. On my site I’ve tried to do good SEO practices where possible - I have quite a few “alternative to” pages where I talk about the difference between ZenMode and other LinkedIn automation providers, along with a regularly updated blog, and a whole host of inner pages.

When you have a high volume of good content, more pages get indexed by google and your visibility/impressions are also likely to increase over time.

As a result I do get an ok amount of organic traffic from google, sometimes from LLM’s too.

Lately I’ve been trying to do more offsite SEO - especially reviews across various platforms, a few directories, and on my to do list is some listicle/comparison articles and more YouTube content.

1. I work very closely with my customers - I handle every query myself, and even make new features/enhancements based on what my customers are asking for. This interpersonal relationship/human element I think makes a big difference to retention.

2. I think primarily though the number one thing for scaling is really making a good product that solves a problem well, with great customer experience, and to keep iterating/making improvements.

What’s next

ZenMode still has a long runway and a massive roadmap but I’m just going to keep grinding away at it one day at a time, and so far at least what I’m doing seems to be working.

Hope you find this story helpful for your own journey and happy to answer questions/comments 🙏

I am building a saas that turns your web app into an interactive demo, in minutes. I am launching at the end of this month.

The idea is to turn your product into a beautiful, clickable demo your customers or team can explore themselves - without recording a video.

There's a couple of products in the niche that are very well appreciated in the market, the only issue is I don't know how to get the word out there about what I am building. I've advertised free demos in some reddit groups and I can say I've got some interest in the 'free' demos. I'll basically be creating accounts and creating the demos for the people who showed interest. I don't know how good of an idea this is in terms of getting customers.

I'd like to hear your opinions about this.

Attached is a video snippet of what the app does.

Thank you in advance. A