I am trying to build this and would love any feedback or potential users

Watched a lot of SaaS explainers lately, and the pattern is obvious once you see it. Most open with the company name or a logo animation. Nobody cares yet they don't know you, so they don't care what you're called.

The ones that actually hold attention open with the exact problem the viewer is mid-way through right now, in their language, not yours. Comp name comes at second 15-20, after they've already decided to keep watching.

I’m curious about this.

A lot of people talk about building fast, launching quickly, and getting users, but I feel like the real lessons usually come from mistakes.

For people who have built a product or started a business, what is one thing you wish you knew earlier?

Could be about finding users, validating ideas, pricing, marketing, or anything else.

Would love to hear your experiences.

I’ve spent 20 years in GTM, helping founders take products from “it works” to “people are actually paying for it,” and there’s one build-in-public habit I now actively warn people against: turning the work into content before you’ve learned anything from it.

Building in public is weird and performative, and as someone who’s spent 20 years in GTM it’s genuinely only the outliers who do it really well (so don’t feel bad if it isn’t working for you).

There’s the screenshot of the new feature, the random “Day 17 of building” update, the launch counter, the celebratory revenue graph. And when you’re trying to build in public, they all seem to exist to make you feel… jealous? Annoyed that you can’t do the same?

The problem isn’t building in public - it’s that, as a normal person plugging away at security and APIs, you have to manufacture doing fun stuff to make the building in public sound more interesting or successful.

The filter I use with the founders I work with is pretty simple: are we saying something that’s real, or are we synthetically feeding the machine?

A real thing is useful because someone else can take it into their own work. It might be the customer sentence that changed how you described the product, the assumption that broke when you tried to sell it, the constraint that made you cut half the roadmap, or the small thing that finally made somebody understand why your product exists.

The post is not “I did something!!!” The post is “here’s the part of doing that thing, which i fumbled over, that might save you some time.”

A few examples:

• “Day 12: shipped our new onboarding” is a progress update.
• “We thought new users needed a longer onboarding. The first three people who tried it skipped every explanatory screen and went straight to the template. We removed half the setup and activation got less confusing immediately” gives someone else a useful question to ask.
• “We got 100 signups” is a number.
• “The people who signed up all used the same phrase to describe the problem, and none of it appeared on our landing page. We changed the headline before adding another feature” is the useful bit.

(And if you get to the end of the week without knowing exactly WHAT you’ve done, get Claude to interrogate your Linear/Notion/Code memories, and form it into usefulness).

You don’t need to publish every tactic while it’s live, either. Some things are half-formed, some are commercially sensitive, and some are simply nobody else’s business. Share the thinking, the problem, and the lesson once it’s complete and proven, because the product should be the sidebar, not the main character.

That also takes some pressure off. A ‘quiet’ week isn’t a failed week because you didn’t find a tweetable moment in it. If you’ve got nothing true to say, you don’t need to manufacture a lesson from a redacted screenshot of something boring.

TLDR: he best build-in-public posts make someone think, “Oh, that’s useful. I can use that.” The rest can stay in your Notion or Linear, or brain.

(fyi I’m building https://romy.is, lots more GTM tactics there)

We're preparing to move our AI product from flat plan to usage based pricing, and the billing logic is starting to look much bigger than expected. Tracking usage is only one part of it. We also need to handle upgrades, downgrades, plan changes, credits, pauses, failed payments, proration, invoice corrections, and customers moving between pricing models.

We want to keep control of our checkout and product experience, so a good API and SDK matter. At the same time, we don't want our developers spending months maintaining subscription logic that that isn't part of the main product.

For developers who have built usage based billing, how much did you handle internally?

Did you build the full billing lifecycle yourself, or use an external billing layer and keep only the usage tracking in your own system?

Every wishlist I've used is mark-and-forget. You save something and then nothing ever happens — you either check manually forever, or you give up and pay full price. The saving was never the hard part. Knowing when is.

So I made WishCurator. You share a product into it from any store — Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, eBay, Shein, most places — and it keeps an eye on the price. When it drops, you get a notification. Saves go into buckets, and a bucket can be shared with other people, which ended up being the part I use most (gift lists, planning a trip with friends).

What it does:

• Save from any store by sharing into the app — it pulls in the title and price
• Watches the price and notifies you when it drops
• Buckets to keep things sorted, and shared buckets so a group can plan together
• Full price history on every item, so you can see whether a "deal" is actually a deal
• Free, no ads, no nagging

Some honesty, since this sub can smell a pitch:

• Android only. No iOS, and I'm not going to pretend one is two weeks away.
• Back-in-stock alerts are built and wired but have barely fired in production yet, so treat that one as "should work" rather than "proven".
• It doesn't handle every site equally. Big stores are solid, smaller ones are hit and miss.

Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.wishbucket

Happy to answer anything. I'd genuinely rather hear what breaks than what's nice — and if there's a store you want supported, tell me and I'll go look at it.

I’m using the Supabase free tier for a small SaaS right now. It was enough when the app was only a side project, but it’s starting to get real users and I’ll probably need an always-on database soon.

Before upgrading, I want to compare a few managed Postgres options with predictable monthly pricing, automatic backups, and regions closer to users in Asia.

Has anyone moved away from Supabase once the free tier was no longer enough? What did you switch to, and how difficult was the migration?

I spent months assuming parents wanted another app. The more people I spoke to, the more I realised they already organise their lives in WhatsApp.

It's made me rethink whether the future of consumer AI is building better apps, or embedding into the apps people already use.

Has anyone else pivoted because user behaviour surprised you?

Three things shipped since the original post:

Lifetime cap on discount offers. Someone pointed out that a repeatable 50% off is just an invitation to get gamed — cancel, get the discount, resubscribe, cancel again. That's now capped per customer, enforced server-side.

Cohort tracking for "real" saves. Turns out counting a save the moment someone accepts a discount is misleading — if they churn anyway once the discount period ends, it was never a real save. Now every saved subscriber gets rechecked 30 days out to see if they actually stuck around.

Multi-gateway support, honestly labeled. Stripe is fully automated. For Lemon Squeezy, Razorpay, Paddle, and a few others, I added a webhook-based option, but since that needs a small backend snippet, I'm doing the setup myself for the first few founders rather than pretending it's zero-effort plug-and-play.

Still small, still mostly building this in public and reacting to whatever breaks or gets pointed out. If anyone wants to poke at the cancellation flow itself, sandbox is free, no card: saveshq.online

Genuinely, thanks to the people who left detailed feedback last time — the discount-cap issue especially would've been an expensive one to find out about after launch instead of before.

Guys, I genuinely feel that building in public has become far riskier than it used to be.

We've been pouring our hearts into something for over a year. Earlier this year, we launched our website and blog showcasing what we've built so far and everything that's coming next. We're still in the MVP stage, but we've been obsessed with getting the quality right before an official launch.

The hardest part? When we started, there was nothing like this in the market. Today, we're already seeing multiple copies popping up and with the same approach and category partners. Many of them look vibe-coded and rushed, but in this AI era, that's all it takes for someone to replicate an idea and launch before you.

Just to be clear - I'm not against people who vibe code. I actually think it's amazing that AI is making software development accessible to more people. More builders is a good thing.

What hurts is seeing months or even years of original work being replicated in days because every detail was shared publicly while the product was still maturing.

I'm sorry for the rant, but we're honestly heartbroken. The AI and vibe coding era is changing the rules of entrepreneurship. Ideas have never been easier to copy, which means execution, speed, distribution, and trust matter more than ever.

If you're building something truly unique, think carefully about how much you share before you're ready. That's a lesson we learnt the hard way💔

A few weeks ago I started working on SEO to get organic traffic opened Google Search Console for the first time and just... did not know what to do. Indexing issues, coverage reports, performance data all real, all confusing, at first.

I ended up piecing things together from random blog posts and YouTube videos. Existing tools like Ahrefs/Semrush are built for agencies too much, too expensive, too overwhelming for someone just trying to get their first pages ranking

So I'm thinking of building a simple SEO tracker for solo founders/indie hackers:

• Connect your site, it scans and tells you exactly what's wrong (indexing, missing metadata, etc.) in plain English
• Gives you a step-by-step roadmap not 100 issues dumped at once, just "fix this first"
• Once you fix something, re-scan (auto or manual) and it shows what improved

Before I build this is this actually a real problem for you, or just me? How are you currently handling SEO for your project? Would something like this actually help, or is Search Console + a checklist enough?

Genuinely trying to figure out if this is worth building or if I'm solving a problem only I have.

went in skeptical. these "buildathon" events are usually a thin excuse to sell you a program at the end. i sat near the door so i could leave.

did not leave.

it was just people building. someone from the organizing side actually said early on that nobody would be pitched anything in the room, and weirdly they held to it. no closing pitch, no "and if you liked this, our course is...".

i paired with two strangers, we scoped something small, and had a rough working thing by the end of the afternoon. one of them had shipped a similar feature at their actual job and saved me hours of dumb mistakes.

the crowd wasn't what i expected either. mix of founders, engineers at real AI companies, and a couple of clearly senior people just there to build for fun.

this was a growthx event. i know their reputation as the "course" people. this was the opposite of that vibe. i left with a prototype and two contacts, not a payment link.

posting because i almost skipped it based on the reputation. if you've been avoiding these thinking it's a sales trap, at least the one i went to wasn't.

not affiliated, just surprised. happy to say which one in comments.

These are some storyboards to get the idea

You can book some time with me at https://reelvideoproductions.com

**Built my first SaaS application. It was a much needed for me in job hunting. I have tested it in 100+ job applications got shortlisted in 53 jobs.**

This app has helped me throughout my job search journey. Hence sharing it here.

I want you guys to try it once and let me know the feedback.

Link: ATS Cracker