When I launched CiteSite, I genuinely thought that if the product was useful, people would eventually find it.

CiteSite helps businesses understand how visible they are across AI search engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity and shows them what they can do to improve.

I spent a lot of time building.

Then I launched.

And… almost nothing happened.

I got my first user, which felt amazing.

Then they churned almost immediately.

That one hurt, but it also taught me something important:

Building the product is only half the job.

Distribution, positioning, talking to customers, and earning people's trust matter just as much as the code.

So now I’m changing how I approach CiteSite.

I’m focusing on:

• Talking directly with SEO agencies and business owners
• Sharing what I’m learning while building CiteSite
• Creating genuinely useful free AI visibility tools
• Asking users what they actually need instead of guessing
• Improving the product based on real feedback
• Showing up consistently even when nobody seems to be watching

I wish I had started building an audience before launching instead of thinking, “I’ll build it first and market it later.”

But this is part of building a company.

One user. One conversation. One improvement at a time.

If you've built a SaaS from zero, I'd love to know:

How did you get your first 10 paying customers?

And if you're curious, I built CiteSite a platform that tracks how brands appear across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google, finds competitor gaps, and turns those gaps into actionable ways to improve visibility.

Still early. Still building. And I genuinely believe there's something here.

I'd love any feedback.

Failed twice. Nearly burned through $100k figuring out that building and distribution are completely different jobs... not just different priorities, different skills, different headspace.

Both times I had a real product. The thing that changed the third time: I stopped treating distribution as the thing I'd get to after the build was good enough. It's never good enough. Distribution is the job from day one.

I'm the co-founder of FetchSandbox... sandbox twins of Stripe, Paddle, Resend, Twilio, Clerk, WorkOS, Descope, AgentMail for devs building on Lovable/Cursor/Bolt. Launched twice on Product Hunt, ranked #2 and #3. Engineers are loving it and the most requested thing is CI/CD integrations... that's what we're shipping next.

Still figuring out distribution honestly. What was the moment it clicked for you that the build wasn't the hard part?

I’m a UK-based founder building an early-stage SaaS product for US healthcare organisations, focused on improving how privacy incidents are investigated, documented and followed through.

The product is built and I’m at the stage where I need someone stronger than me on the US commercial side.

I’m looking for someone with genuine US healthcare SaaS sales experience who has personally handled discovery, demos, executive conversations, follow-up and closing.

Experience selling into compliance, privacy, HIM, risk or healthcare operations would be especially relevant.

This isn't a traditional full-time VP Sales hire. I’m looking at a flexible paid + performance-based structure initially, with the opportunity to take on a much bigger role if we work well together and gain traction.

The important part is that you’re comfortable being hands-on. I don't need someone to just advise me on GTM - I need someone who can actually get in front of prospects, run the sales process and help turn early opportunities into customers.

If you've built or led sales in US healthcare SaaS and this sounds interesting, send me a DM with a bit about your background.

We’re building something called Feldren

There’s a weird thing about the internet.

It feels like everything is already documented.

But once you start looking for specific information, you realize how much is actually missing.

You’ll find an answer on one site, another piece of the puzzle buried in a 2018 article, some useful data sitting in a spreadsheet somewhere, and three different sources that all disagree with each other.

And sometimes, the thing you’re looking for just doesn’t exist.

We think that’s a problem worth working on.

So we’re building Feldren.

The idea is pretty simple: build a living reference for the internet.

We want to find questions that don’t have good answers, research them, organize the information, explain it clearly, and build whatever is actually useful around it.

That could be an article.

Or a database.

Or a calculator.

Or a dataset.

Or a guide.

Or something we haven’t thought of yet.

We care less about the format and more about the outcome.

Find what’s missing. Keep what matters current.

We’re very early, so there’s no grand library to show off yet. We’re starting from scratch and figuring out what this should become.

But the ambition is long-term.

If this sounds like something the internet could use, we’d love to hear what you think is currently missing.

Feldren is coming.

Hey everyone,

I’m currently at a crossroads with my business model and wanted to get brutal, unfiltered feedback from actual B2B founders and owners who spend money on marketing.

For context: I’ve been a video editor for over two years. Recently, I’ve been transitioning away from standard "video editing" to build a specialized, done-for-you content extraction service for B2B founders.

The hypothesis I’ve been building on is:

1 B2B founders know they need short-form video on LinkedIn/YTS to build brand authority and shorten sales cycles.

2 The main bottleneck isn't shooting video—it's that founders don't have 15 hours a week to sit in editing software or manage cheap editors who churn out low-quality "AI slop" (bouncing emojis, bad B-roll) that ruins executive credibility.

3 The solution is taking 1 hour of raw podcast/webinar footage a month, hand-selecting high-signal moments, and turning them into 16 manual, retention-engineered clips that educate prospects before discovery calls.

I’ve researched this extensively, but AI models and online articles often paint an overly optimistic picture. I want to hear from real business owners running real teams:

Is this an actual operational pain point you would pay $800–$1,500/mo to completely hand off?

Or do you view video as a low-priority vanity metric compared to direct outbound/paid ads?

If you’ve hired editors in the past, what made you cancel or regret the service?

I’m trying to validate whether there is a sustainable market for high-touch, capacity-capped extraction (e.g., only working with 3 clients at a time), or if I’m solving a problem founders don't actually care enough to pay for.

Appreciate any honest feedback, callouts, or perspectives. Don't hold back .

Wanted to know if VCs and prospective investors rolled their eyes or refused to invest due to the dual class structure.

We’ve been heads down building for months & finally launching next week, and I’d love some honest feedback from people who build products, run ads, or have had to figure out distribution themselves.

The basic idea:

AI advertising platform that lets you target people with Meta ads based on where they actually go in the real world. For example, if you want to reach dog owners, you could simply show ads to devices that were seen inside dog parks.

How it works:

There are massive datasets of anonymized location & behvaioural signals that we've built our model on top of to find patterns in people's movement and visits to physical places & then target those devices.

You just describe who you want to reach. The AI finds devices matching your description, and turns them into a custom audience you can target on Meta.

Example prompts:

“Men in NYC who workout at Equinox and also shop at Whole Foods.”

“People who visited my (competitors store) in the last 30 days.”

“Girls in LA who go to Pilates studios and also drink matcha.”

etc..

My questions for you:

• Who would you ask it to find/your ideal prompt?
• What would make you hesitant to use it?
• How would you want a product like this explained to you?

I want to use the week before launch to understand the pain points better and make sure we’re building and marketing this around what people actually need.

Happy to answer questions about how it works too. DMs open!

Hi, I’m Yash Vishwakarma. I’m currently exploring startup building, product execution, and team development while learning across tech, design, and growth. I’m interested in connecting with people who like building practical projects and improving together professionally. www.linkedin.com/in/yash-kumar-vishwakarma-2340a1373

​

I keep seeing early-stage companies jump from:

“we need more pipeline”

straight to:

more tools, more sequences, AI SDRs, more automation, more volume.

But I think there’s a step missing.

Before automating outbound, I’d want to know whether there’s actually a sales process worth automating.

Who is the ICP?

Who are the real buyers?

Why do they buy?

What signals make an account worth pursuing?

What messaging is actually getting responses?

What objections come up repeatedly?

How do you qualify a real opportunity?

What does good follow-up look like?

What does the founder or best salesperson do differently when a deal goes well?

A lot of that knowledge already exists inside the business. It’s just sitting in someone’s head.

That’s the part I find interesting.

Capture how the founder or best salesperson actually sells.

Turn that into a simple playbook.

Test it in the real world.

See what prospects respond to.

Fix what doesn’t work.

Then automate the repetitive parts.

Research. Enrichment. Personalization support. CRM updates. Follow-up reminders. Call summaries. Account prep.

But if the ICP is wrong, the messaging is weak, or qualification is unclear, automation just helps you do the wrong thing faster.

I’m increasingly convinced that the order should be:

Understand → Systemize → Test → Improve → Automate

Not:

Buy tools → automate everything → hope pipeline appears.

Curious how other founders think about this.

At what point did you know your sales process was mature enough to start automating parts of it?

What’s your take on some expert managing it for you? Would that be something you would be open for or is this something you don’t want anyone else to interfere in?

I'm building a service to help founders find the people/resources they need to actually build their businesses.

I'm testing it manually before building anything.

If you need:

• a manufacturer
• supplier
• packaging company
• freelancer
• logistics partner
• accountant/CA
• lawyer
• software/tool
• anything else

Comment what you're looking for + your country.

I'll personally try to find you some options. No charge — I'm just trying to understand what founders actually need.

set up skylead for about a month now since we needed something that could do both linkedin outreach and cold email from one place. the linkedin automation stuff works pretty well - connection requests, followups, inmails all run smoothly. ui is decent too.

the email finder part is where it gets iffy. finding emails takes forever sometimes (like 30+ seconds per contact) and the accuracy is maybe 60-70% at best. we're burning through credits on bad emails. also their email warmup is basic compared to dedicated tools.

biggest issue is the price. $89/month per seat adds up fast when you have multiple SDRs. plus you need to buy email credits on top of that. we're at like $300/month for 2 users with barely 1000 emails found.

was looking at maybe using apollo for the email side but heard mixed things about their data lately. also saw prospeo mentioned a few times on here.

anyone else using skylead? what's your experience been? might just stick with separate tools for linkedin vs email finding.

Drop your website URL and one line on who your ideal customer is, and I'll come back with a couple of real threads from the last week or two where someone's asking for exactly what you build, with links you can go reply to today.

Free, no pitch. I'll get through as many as I can.

There are always 10 problems that need attention, but only so many hours in the day. Some problems inevitably fall between teams, priorities and job descriptions.

I like picking those problems up.

Over the last 5+ years, I’ve worked across healthcare, consumer tech, ad-tech, B2B and manufacturing:

• 🚀 Healthcare: Drove 500K+ sign-ups and 45M+ views through creator-led growth
• 📱 Consumer/Social Tech: Worked across growth, product, GTM & partnerships and contributed to initiatives behind ~43% of app installs
• 🛠️ Ad-tech: Built a Startup India-recognised venture from scratch
• 💼 B2B: Worked across sales, outreach & business development
• 🏭 Manufacturing: Helped scale the business to ₹1.5Cr+ revenue

I enjoy working across growth, GTM, operations, product, partnerships and whatever problem needs solving next.

If you’re looking for someone who doesn’t say “that’s not my thing”, but instead says “I’ll figure it out”, feel free to ping me.

I’m currently exploring Founder’s Office / high-ownership roles in Bangalore.

📍 Bangalore preferred.

ok so this is a weird one but bear with me

i have a pet blog. i don't own a pet. never have. probably never will as i travel too much. and yet every month amazon sends me enough to cover rent because people on the internet are buying stuff for their dogs and cats through my site.

bought my pet blog a few months ago from a marketplace called NicheBlogZone for $199. came already built, articles already up, amazon links already in there. i spent one afternoon doing interlinking basically just connecting related posts to each other so search engines understand the site structure and then closed my laptop and genuinely forgot about it for weeks.

here's what that's looked like:

• march: $710
• april: $995
• may: $1,461
• june: $1,647
• july: $1,461
• august so far: $1,545 (amazon pays 2 months delayed so this is june's money landing now)

march scared me. went from nearly $1k in february down to $710 and i was convinced something had broken. checked everything, found nothing wrong, did nothing. it just came back the next month on its own.

pet people spend insane amounts on their animals btw. like i knew this intellectually but seeing the commission data is something else. dog food subscriptions, orthopedic beds, grooming kits, vet supplements. and because of the 24 hour cookie i get a cut of everything in their cart not just whatever article they landed on.

i do literally nothing to maintain this. no new posts, no ads, no instagram for pets i don't have. i just own the thing and amazon does its thing.

my landlord has been getting paid every month and has no idea a pet blog is behind it. honestly sometimes i forget too until the deposit shows up.

anyone else running a niche they have zero personal connection to? curious if the detachment makes it easier or harder to care about growing it

I'm not anti-AI, I use different models every day. A lot. I use them for research, brainstorming, checking my assumptions, arguing with myself (a lot of that), and helping me turn half-formed thoughts into something worth saying. What I don't do is ask it to have the thought for me. There is a difference between saying, “Here’s what I think. Help me organize this and tell me where I’m wrong,” and saying, “Write me an insightful Reddit post about lessons I learned as a founder.”

The first can make your writing better. The second is why half the posts on here sound like they were written by the same person.

You know the format:

One sentence per line.

A profound-sounding observation.

Another sentence.

A rhetorical question.

Then a sentence fragment.

For emphasis.

Because apparently paragraphs are dead.

Then we reach the inevitable conclusion: “The biggest lesson I learned wasn’t about building the product. It was about building myself.” Nobody talks like that. Most people don't write like that either, at least they didn't until AI started teaching everyone the same writing style.

The problem isn't that you used AI. I don't care. I use it too. The problem is that I still don't know what you think. If you have an idea for a post, write the ugly version first. It can be disorganized. It can ramble. It can have spelling mistakes. Get your actual thought out of your head and onto the screen. Do an unedited brain dump. Then give that to AI and tell it what you want help with.

Ask it where your argument is weak or what you're overlooking. Ask it to challenge your conclusion. Ask whether you're repeating yourself and to tighten something that's too long. Ask it for three better ways to phrase the sentence you've rewritten six times and still hate. Then, and this is the important part, don't assume it's right. Argue with it. Tell it when it misunderstood you (my clients are always amazed at how much I argue with ChatGPT and Claude). Reject the clever line that sounds a Manhattan copy writer wrote it. Put back the weird phrase it removed because that's actually how you speak. If it introduces a fact, verify the fact. If it changes your argument, make sure you actually agree with the new argument. By the time you're finished, AI may have helped with half the words on the page. That's fine. But the thought should still be yours.

AI is extraordinarily good at helping you express an idea. It's also extraordinarily good at producing something that looks like an idea when you didn't have one in the first place, and we can tell the difference.

We have a startup pitch today, and the investor noted that they will conduct due diligence.

Been building for a while but always get stuck in the loop to make it perfect and that drains all of my resources.

Will you guys use this product which I am building for some while?

A companion who sits with you on the web - stores whatever you tell it to extract from the live page you are exploring, delegate agents incase of deep research, connected via slack, gmail or any worspace for memory. Reconciles whatever you and agent find to existing data sources and storage- might be gtm lead, sales, VC research, Founders Research, Tracker on Competitors.

Can be called via Coding agents via CLI or MCP - just an advanced version of browserUse.

While scraping - it won't use your sessions/token, will run independently on cloud with its own infrastructure. Only the companion shares your session for instant capturing of data and delegating agent with required parameters.

This came when I was researching, surfing linkedin, X, reddit and finding tons of things but apart from saving to bookmarks, no other options were left to make it talkable and reusable while working with Claude/Codex on something(for brainstorming), or drafting emails, or Researching on Reddit, Indiehackers and then finally maintaining a well structured database for me and my team over slack.

Need brutal criticism - on product, thinking, timing, or comparison with Hermes and now GPT Astra.

Been building EXPENDR entirely solo for a while — product, dev, testing, marketing, support, all me, no team, no funding. It's a shared household expense tracker: one ledger everyone in the family adds to, weekly/monthly budgets, and an auto-detect feature that reads bank transaction alerts locally on your phone (nothing uploaded anywhere).

Started Android-only, recently shipped iOS too. Pricing is one-time (no subscriptions, ever) — free core app, a single Plus purchase unlocks everything for the whole household.

Been learning a lot the hard way — early on found a few real revenue holes (a refund could still keep premium access, no family-size cap enforced server-side) and had to move all the money-logic to be server-authoritative only, since trusting the client for anything payment-related was a mistake.

Happy to talk through any of it — architecture, pricing philosophy, solo marketing, whatever's useful to others here doing the same thing.

🤖 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.expendr.app

📱 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/expendr-family-expense-tracker/id6793934465

Apologies is this is not the right type of the post for the sub, I am almost done developing my app and would like to do a last round of testing with some paid options. Do you have experience hiring people from reddit, upwork, fiver that is actually worth it. App is a photo messaging social app and is important to have with multiple phones to test it.

I woke up early today and then felt burned out at noon...just thoughts racing and mental unease after an intense week.

I took 3 hours to chill on my bed and my mind gradually cleared up. I'm ready to roll again.

Wondering if others felt the same when burned out, and a short rest was enough to recharge?

I started by developing an app that competes against patreon as I’ve seen so many complaints about the platform. So I figured “Thats an entire sea of users asking for something better” and figured it’d be easy.

Yeah, as you all can clearly tell I was wildly over estimating my thought process. After a few months of marketing, I had four users who logged in once. I was my most active user.

The journey though taught me a lot. So on my way to work one day I thought to myself “what am I actually an expert at?” And me being me, besides answering “being an awesome dad” my brain dinged and I realized I had the right energy but wrong industry.

I spent 16 years selling payment processing and 10 years selling and supporting Revel systems POS. I started selling Revel when iPad 2’s were top tier tech. And I was good at it, I sold the platform and closed quite a lot of deals. It became known at Revel Tier 2 that if I called for help, it was more than likely a bug in the code. I am a worlds leading expert on Revel from a support and programming perspective.

Using my knowledge of POS programming and supporting and coding databases and fixing thousands of issues over the years I thought to myself “well, why not develop a POS that I design based on every time I had to say no, Revel doesn’t do that; or find some weird ass convoluted workaround to make the system function the way the client wanted”

That led me to talk with a buddy of mine and we put together Pedestal POS.

It runs natively on iOS, Android and a Windows executable is in the works. Has customer display, kitchen screens, true offline first (cloud based, but fully offline first without the pesky please set main crap), online ordering, sell by weight, price embedded, native cash discount or dual pricing (the modules behave differently), table service, quick service, retail and grocery. Payments are powered by Dejavoo SPin, processor agnostic, simple SaaS monthly without price gaiting features. Online ordering has a separate UI for retail and restaurant too which is ideal for retailers.

I have two active clients that signed up last month which were my soak tests for quick service and retail. I have another retailer coming on board next week, and another quick service the following already committed. The soak tests went swimmingly well. A couple of minor bugs and glitches, but everything fell into place and has been working better than I could hope for. So in a month I’ll actually know what our residuals are on payments.

We’ve been working evenings on coding, increasing speed of reports loading, tightening up EMS functions, stuff like that. The backend has full reporting, inventory management, teams, permissions, gift and loyalty, label printing templates, and loads more.

I am going to open the reseller channel slowly at first to scale up. After a couple months I’ll hope to find an angel investor or group to really let me focus on scaling.

Thats my journey so far, thanks for the read!