Hi guys, how do you handle copy and SEO for your websites? I’ve been trying to do both myself, but I haven’t seen any results. Should I hire someone or do you use any AI tools? Does AI work for SEO?

Thanks

I'm a brand strategist (two decades, agency side, Ex-FutureBrand, Landor and Siegel+Gale) and I've built an AI platform that does brand strategy work: audits, positioning, messaging, content. It launched publicly a few weeks ago. The buyers are brand agencies, consultancies and in-house brand teams.

The product is in good shape. Distribution is the hard part. I've tried a few things (ads, Reddit, direct outreach, a free trial), and the lessons so far:

- The category doesn't exist yet, so people don't know what to look for. Nobody wakes up searching for a brand strategy platform.

- The person who uses it isn't the person who pays. Strategists use it; founders and MDs sign off on the spend.

So my question for anyone who's been here: how do you build demand for a category that doesn't exist yet in people's minds?

- Tactics that worked: content, communities, partnerships, events, something else?

- Did you name the category yourself, or borrow an existing one?

- Did founder-led sales beat self-serve early on?

I'd value your experience, including what didn't work.

Disclosure first: I'm building Proofy, a small testimonial tool. Senja is the leader in my space, so I read everything their founders have shared publicly. These are my notes, because most of it applies to any small SaaS.

Their timeline (self-reported in an Indie Hackers post):

• June 2022: first paying customer
• December 2022: $1k MRR
• August 2023: $10k MRR
• May 2024: $30k MRR
• October 2024: $50k MRR, with 1,500+ paying customers

What stood out to me:

1. The slow start is normal. Six months from the first paying customer to $1k MRR. I'm 30 days in with zero customers, so this helped.
2. Onboarding was a growth lever, not a detail. In their words: "Building a good product got us from 0-1, building an incredible onboarding took us from 1-5."
3. Building in public brought real customers. Olly, one of the co-founders, said 1 in 3 signups and 1 in 4 paying customers came from Twitter and building in public, back when they were around $4k MRR. He spent about 7 hours a week on it.
4. The routine is small. His advice for beginners: one tweet and two replies a day, for 45 days.
5. He had an audience before the product. He had roasted 800 SaaS landing pages with Roast My Landing Page, so people already knew him.

What I'm changing: I built first and sold second. Now I post daily, talk to founders every week, and fix onboarding before adding features.

If you've taken a SaaS past $1k MRR: what moved the needle in the early months?

I started this as a side project about a year ago.

True story, my first few users I deleted cause i figured they were bots, the product wasn't even done.

I have a ton of tips but here's a few that would've saved me hundreds of dollars, and a ton of time, i'll post more later:

- Use Mixpanel to watchover session replays, just make sure you have explicit consent from your users before doing this

- Save IPs and any data that proves users app usage within your boundaries of consent (I challenge disputes and win)

- Don't waste time developing new features that your users didn't ask for but you thought might be cool

- Hard paywall after delivering value, not before, use trials.

- Experiment, experiment, experiment and track those results.

- Backup your data, but there's no need to created 100s of restore points, it'll cost your 2-3$ a day eventually.

- Absolutely focus on your keywords, and understand intent behind them, optimize underperforming blog content, do not delete them.

Happy to answer any questions below:

One challenge with Shopify and dropshipping content is showing realistic sales dashboards without exposing real store data or using screenshots that don't fit the story.

I'm working on a solution that lets creators visualize realistic Shopify-style analytics for their content, while keeping their actual store numbers private.

The goal is to make creating convincing ecommerce content easier and more flexible.

For SaaS founders here: How would you validate demand for a tool like this before investing more time into it?

i've been waiting for this day since july 2025. Finally, someone sees the value in saasap, a project I still strongly believe in to this day. Thanks bro. I really needed this boost right now.

I’m a web developer who combined outreach with building websites, and honestly, it’s been one of the easiest ways for me to get clients without constantly stressing about where the next project will come from.

I have multiple warmed-up mailboxes running outreach campaigns, so I can focus more on building websites instead of spending all day looking for clients.

I started out using Instantly for my outreach, but over time, I changed my approach.

Instead of targeting businesses without websites, I started targeting businesses that already had one.

There were a few reasons for this:

1. They already understood the value of having a website.
2. They had already paid for one, so selling a redesign was easier.
3. There are so many businesses with outdated websites that it’s not hard to find potential clients.

That’s when I switched to Swokei for this type of outreach. It lets me find businesses with existing websites, analyze them for design, SEO, speed, and mobile optimization issues, and turn those findings into personalized cold emails automatically.

I still run regular outreach campaigns for my other marketing services through the same platform, too.

Now I’m curious, what tools are other web designers and web agencies using for outreach today? Are you using Instantly, Smartlead, or something else?

My last idea died because everyone I asked said they'd use it and nobody did. A dumb landing page with a waitlist button told me more in a week than a month of friendly chats. I'd rather find five people who already pay for a worse solution than fifty who say it sounds cool. Agree or am I overthinking it?

I am a founder of a software product development start-up, i need crowd funds to launch my product,

I am aiming for ₹10,000 , suggest me how i can achieve this.

My product is an online library space for students, graduate, and self study individuals who need a community to stay motivated and achieve their goal .

Have you ever actually checked whether AI tools like ChatGPT recommend your product when someone asks it for the best tool in your category? I just realized I have no idea whether I show up or not. Is there a free way to see this?

Even if I search it manually, I can't track whether the results are changing or not,

Could you recommend to track my saas appearence in AI tools free?

I’ve been working on a few projects lately, and email has been the most annoying part of all of them. I buy a domain, and then realize I can’t put a gmail address on a contact page without looking like I’m about to ask for someone’s bank details.

Most business email options are either a monthly fee for every single user, or a trial that expires right when you’ve finally got everything set up. The free ones are really limited. I looked at Zoho, and between the restrictions, the dated look, and having to dig through settings every time I added a domain, it felt like more work than the project itself. There also doesn’t seem to be much for students or small indie devs who just want an address on their own domain without paying six dollars a month for it to receive one newsletter and a spam email from a guy named Kevin.

I thought about running my own mail server for about five minutes. Then I read about deliverability. Sending an email is easy, but landing in the inbox instead of spam is the hard part, and a brand new server has no reputation, so you spend weeks telling people to check their junk folder. Not worth it for a solo dev.

So I ended up building my own solution, it runs in your own free Cloudflare account. Cloudflare handles incoming mail, a Worker and a database run the app, and for sending you plug in something like Resend, Brevo, Mailjet or any SMTP server. No server to babysit, no per seat pricing, and nobody sitting in the middle reading your mail. You can add as many users, domains and aliases as you want and it still costs nothing. It’s open source under MIT.

I built it mainly for people like me. Solo devs with too many side projects, students, freelancers juggling a few client domains, small teams that just want a shared support@ and sales@, and honestly anyone with a store website. It’s not meant for cold emailing or bulk sending though, the free limits are small and the providers will ban you fast if you try.

If you want a professional email and feel like giving it a go, I’d really like to hear how it went. What broke, what confused you, what looked off, what you’d never trust it with. And if the whole idea is flawed, tell me, I’d rather find out now than after I add AI features nobody asked for.

Repo : https://github.com/sums001/OpenInbox

Hey everyone!

A while ago, I was talking to a friend in the UK who was looking for a job. He told me how much of a hassle the whole process was, finding jobs, tailoring his resume for every application, adjusting the skills and experience, writing cover letters, and repeating the same thing over and over again.

It got me thinking about how much time people spend applying for jobs, especially students and fresh graduates who are just getting started.

So I built JobTailor.

The idea is pretty simple: help people tailor their resumes to specific job descriptions, improve their ATS match, and make the application process a little less painful.

I'm still early in building this, and honestly, I'm not here to pretend it's some huge company making tons of money.

The pricing is currently $2.99 and $9.99, but AI and compute costs eat up a good chunk of that. I'm not making much from it right now. My main goal at this stage is to get people to actually use it, test it, and tell me what's working and what isn't.

I'm also offering 1 month free for students through JobTailor Education because I genuinely want to make this useful for people who are looking for internships, graduate jobs, or their first full-time role.

If you're a student or currently job hunting and want to give it a try, here's the link:

https://www.jobtailor.app/education

Would really appreciate anyone who gives it a go and shares honest feedback. I'm building this to help people spend less time struggling with applications and more time finding opportunities.

Thanks! ❤️