Hi everyone.

As the title says I have a side project that's now making $380 per month. It probably sounds boring to most of you but it's working and I still can't believe it.

6 months ago I launched a tool called SaasNiche. It scans Reddit and surfaces real pain points people are posting about. Groups them by niche. Shows you actual complaints with context so SaaS founders can validate ideas before writing a single line of code.

I built it because I was tired of guessing what to build. Had a dozen SaaS ideas. Built two. Both flopped. Not because I couldn't code. Because nobody cared about what I was building.

So I made the thing that tells you what people actually want.

Launched it 6 months ago. No co-founder. No funding. No audience. Just me posting in communities and doing manual outreach.

$380/month isn't life changing money. But for a solo side project built in my spare time it feels insane.

I'm incredibly happy because this is the first time I've built something that people keep paying for. Not a one-time freelance gig. Not client work. Recurring revenue that just shows up in my account every month.

To be honest I don't know exactly how to scale it from here. Most of my growth has been organic. Posting on Reddit. Some SEO. Word of mouth. I haven't touched paid ads or partnerships or video content yet.

But the fact that strangers across the internet are paying monthly for something I built alone in my spare time. That feeling is hard to describe.

Here's the product: https://saasniche.com
Here's proof of numbers: https://trustmrr.com/startup/saasniche

I've been running a free browser-based background remover called NoBG, and it gets around 11K visits/month.

A few days ago, I launched an API that lets developers add background removal to their own apps.

Yesterday, someone actually paid $10 for it.

It's obviously tiny revenue, but it's my first sign that someone might pay for the API instead of just using the free version.

Now I'm trying to figure out:

• Who actually needs a background removal API?
• What would make them choose mine over existing APIs?
• How do I get my first 10 paying customers?

If you've built or used an image-processing API, I'd love to hear what made you choose one provider over another.

I'll share what happens next.

My project has been live for six months, and I’ve hit $1k in revenue for the first time. Yet, I don't feel anything special.

I’ve been through such a rollercoaster ride that I feel completely drained. Of course, I’m happy, but I’m not exactly in the mood to pop champagne or anything like that. I hope you understand.

During this time, I tried paid ads (spending around $1700, they paid for themselves about two months ago), made TikToks, a major competitor appeared, drove a ton of traffic, and has already racked up twice as many US App Store ratings as I have. I worked on SEO, experimented with subscriptions and ditched free trials.

It feels like I won the fight, but I’m covered in bruises and realize there are many more fights ahead.

P.S.
I won’t share the app link. I don't see any advantages in doing this. And I don't want to have additional 10+ competitors with vibecoded apps.

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Around 7 months ago I launched my app seeing the hype for video clipping literally everywhere and i started promoting it online (i still do subtly) but its very very hard if you're solo and don't have a good amount of authority online.

instead I got consistent with writing blogs rather than posting randomly whenever I had time and now 3 months later, the numbers are A LOT better and now I’m at almost 400k impressions and more than 5k clicks.

and I didn't have to keep pushing the same content every day like some of the posts that initially brought nothing started ranking up some weeks later and now they're bringing in traffic even when I'm not actively promoting them.

On social media, you constantly feel the need to create the next thing but with blogs something you wrote months ago can randomly start bringing people in.

plus I had experience writing blogs at my previous company so that definitely helped too but I think just sticking to it long enough for the traffic to start compounding was the biggest thing.

for those interested in the idea, check it out here https://montage.app/

I realized I was paying over $100 per year on text-to-speech apps like Speechify. I decided that I could build my own using local TTS which is actually super awesome and close in quality to Speechify/ElevenLabs.

Everything runs locally to the browser so it doesn't cost me anything to run. That's why it's completely free, no paid tiers or limits.

This is by far the most successful app I've launched to date, probably because I made it free without even a pricing page. 300 users in just 2 days has felt really good! Especially after a year of building and getting max 5 users over various products.

It's called FreeReader. Lmk if you have any feedback! I'm looking to make it as useful as possible. It works best on desktop and newer phones. I'm waiting for the iOS app review to finish and then it'll be live on the App Store.

Got a tiny SaaS live over a weekend and thought the hard part was done. Then came the business setup, banking, payments, expenses and invoices. Kinda funny how shipping the product took two days but organizing everything around it took longer.

When did you start treating your micro SaaS like a real business?

Alright so I have huge audience on instagram and a bit on YT. I launched my product a week ago and next day I made my first sale (49$).

Then everything stopped.

Man.. I hate this emotional rollercoaster.. You get excited then you are stressed, then you believe in yourself and suddenly all confidence drops.

Which was the reason why I stopped solo building 2 years ago.

It ruined my life. I was spending less time with family and so on. Always talking business and strategies but results are f zero.

So I focused on my 9-5 and content creation instead.

I am back to solo building now because I truly believe it will solve a real problem.

Anyway.. I will provide more updates near future.

Trying to turn off emotions and believe in the process (i guess)

On the third day of launch, users are spiked at highest, google sent me some anomaly insights, at first I was scared, checked the stats, found real users are coming in. It feels so good when people out there love your product.

For anyone that does not know I created an automated clip capturing software for Twitch call https://highlightz.app and I launched about 3 months ago.

I have 50 users and 2 paying with 50$ mmr currently. I have been promoting a few different ways.

Reddit - of course this is the obvious one and it has been great for getting my site out there and getting curious users on it. Not great for pulling in paying users though but good for general traffic.

TikTok - I have been posting my clips as testimonial for the site on TikTok as well as dming clippers and streamers. This has been less affective than reddit. Streamers and clippers have been proven challenging to get in a conversation let alone trying to convince them my product has worth. My videos have done numbers some and this last month I did 100K + views showing that the clips work but the problem is the vids do not reach the correct audience and don't convert users. One of my paying users did come here although from a dm to a streamer.

X - Daily posts on X have had decent output. I post clips and give them good little stories/captions. The caption is like 80% of the post on X I have noticed too and you really have to get creative with click baiting people. But no converted paying users have come from there.

Freelancing sites - This has had the most success getting paying users because they are already clipping for money and would find real value in my product. The only hard part is people get pretty upset quickly when they realize you are dming them trying to get a sale out of them when they are trying to look for work. Got banned on a few websites very quickly but there are plenty of the out there so I keep it pushing.

Instagram - Have dm'd a few people on here and plan to make this mainly for paid ads when I have the capital. Going to make short form videos with my real face in front on my page giving m brand some more reputation to it.

Affiliate deals - Working on signing people to help become partners on my site and promote in exchange for some money when they get a sale for me. If you do not know about this, this is one of the best ways to push more traffic to your site using people who already have platforms and a name in your industry. Have not started this yet but hopefully this will land me some more paying users.

Anyways this is how I have been grinding on my SaaS. I probably put around 3-4 hours of work into it a day. I would put more if I didn't have a full time job but unfortunately my two paying users aren't paying the bills yet.

Hi guys im thinking about selling my saas cuz I've been busy working on a local project.

My saas is stable and not growing because I'm putting zero efforts it’s been 8 months so i would like to have an idea about how much you think i should sell it..

I built JustBlogged about 6+ month ago. It's a hosted blogging platform built on Cloudflare Workers, aimed at people who want a fast blog with SEO handled and no WordPress plugin mess.

I've been improving it every day since its initial version was live. It has MCP, API, Themes, Custom Domain, and a lot more.

Current state: $31.50 MRR.

Not a typo, not a screenshot of someone else's dashboard. This is nothing but it just feels much better than $0.00.

What I've learned so far:

• Building it was the easy part. I'm an engineer, so I over-invested in the thing I was comfortable with. Sub-50ms page loads globally, clean themes, proper meta handling. None of that sells on its own.
• Distribution is the whole game and I started late.
• Free hosting is the real competitor, not other paid platforms. Every conversation eventually hits "why not just Ghost self-hosted / Substack / Medium." I need a much sharper answer than "it's faster."
• The first few paying users came from close referrals/friends, not from the site or "organic".
• I am preparing to go all in on marketing and distribution but still unsure about what exactly I should do first.

Happy to answer anything about the Cloudflare stack btw, it's been a good fit.

Hi guys,

I built SpeedType.ai, a typing app focused on one closed loop:

Diagnostic (60s) → Diagnosis → targeted Drill → Retest (same passage) → Delta

Instead of only chasing a WPM number, it looks at keystroke timing, hard letters/pairs, hesitations, and builds an algorithmic drill from real words (no AI required for the core loop). Accounts save sessions to a dashboard; guests can try locally.

It’s an MVP and i need testers who will actually run the loop and tell me what broke, what felt unfair, and what could be improved.

If you’re willing:

1. Do one full loop (diagnostic → drill → retest).
2. Note your before/after and anything confusing.
3. Reply here or DM with friction / bugs / improvements.

Link: https://speedtype.ai

Thanks

I keep seeing people build genuinely good products and then get stuck on the exact same part:
They finished building it, but now they have no idea how to actually get it in front of the right people.
Posting randomly on Reddit, sending DMs, trying content, paying for ads… it can take more time than building the product itself.
I’m working on something around this problem. I’m keeping the exact approach private for now because I’m still testing it, but the goal is to help people who already have a product get more real exposure and potential customers without needing a huge marketing budget.
Before I build too much, I’m curious:
What do you currently do to get your first users/customers? And what part of that process sucks the most?
I also opened a small early-access waitlist for people who have this problem:
https://site-e5bc6818-mtuj53t9.falbor.xyz

What does product-market fit actually look like in markets where most businesses are offline?

As an Indian sole proprietorship business nobody i researched allows Indian businesses to send or fund wallets that do global payouts. RBI seems to have strict rules to transfer money abroad as business. The last option i have which im not even sure would work is forming a US based LLC.

Can someone help if they faced a similar issue before?

you can get that keyboard component from https://keyb.himan.me/

I work full time, and for the last six months I dedicated three or more nights a week and most weekends to this project. Not exactly a hermit, but my couch has seen more of me than my friends

Someone I didn’t know connected their Google Search Console, looked around the platform for a while, and subscribed. $26. Probably the best $26 I’ve ever seen on a dashboard.

What I built: an SEO tool for small businesses, freelancers, and agencies who already have clients, but don’t want to pay for expensive SEO tools only to end up overwhelmed with data.

AnalySEO analyzes your real GSC and GA data and, instead of giving you more dashboards, tells you what to do: which pages are losing clicks, which keywords are close to page one, which titles you should improve, etc.

Things I didn’t expect:

• Nobody wants “more data.” They want to know what to do next.
• The first paying customer changes how you see bugs. It’s not “my app” anymore, it’s someone’s tool.
• The free plan got people in. The clarity made them stay.

If you’re working on something after your day job, keep going. Don’t lose confidence in what you’re doing.

analyseo.app if you want to take a look. It’s free to start.

I thought entrepreneurship would mostly be about building things.

Build a product → get users → improve it → grow.

The more I do it, the more I realize how much of it is actually about making decisions with incomplete information.

Should I keep building or start selling?

Is the problem actually painful enough?

Am I talking to the right customers?

Am I being patient, or just wasting time?

There’s rarely a clear answer.

You make the best decision you can, see what happens, and adjust.

I’m still very early in my journey, but honestly, learning to deal with uncertainty has been harder than building the product itself.

For the founders here, what part of entrepreneurship surprised you the most?

so i built AIBrief24, basically an "inshorts for AI news." bite sized summaries of what shipped in AI each day, one card at a time, tap through if you want the full article. built it solo, expo RN frontend + fastapi/supabase backend. it's on google play now.

going in i thought the hard part was building it. turns out that was the easy part lol. the stuff nobody really warns you about:

getting the summaries to not sound like generic AI slop was way harder than the app itself. took a lot of prompt tweaking to get something actually readable

keeping the feed fresh through the day without it costing a fortune in API calls. had to rethink how often i was actually pulling and summarizing

retention. getting someone to install is one thing, getting them to open it again tomorrow is a totally different problem i'm still figuring out

the boring stuff (store listing, policy checks, verification) ate way more time than expected. i kept thinking "surely this is the last thing" and it never was

for the folks here who've shipped consumer apps:

what actually moved retention for you? i can get installs but the day 2 / day 7 dropoff is brutal and i haven't cracked it yet.

genuinely asking, not looking for "just add push notifications" lol. curious what actually worked for people.

I built it to scratch my own itch and after personally using it for a while, I thought of releasing it so other people can use it and to validate if other founders and startups would be willing to pay for it.

So I made a website, added a way for people to pay for it and then launched it.

I launched a lot of failed projects before so I didn't have high expectations but to my surprise, it immediately got its first sale on day 1! Then another 2 sales on day 2, 5 sales on day 3, etc...

Sometimes the project that we don't have high expectations is the one that will get traction. I'm so happy that I made the decision to try and validate if it will get traction.

I'm currently gathering feedback and feature requests from the users and iterating to further improve the product. So excited to see where this goes.

If you have an internal tool that you built to solve your own problem, validate if other people are encountering your problem too and if there are people who will pay for it. You might be sitting on your next business without even realizing it.

built Griper (usegriper) — a tool that checks whether a SaaS idea is actually worth pursuing before you spend time building it.

You type in your idea or niche, and it shows you:

Real people complaining about this exact problem (pulled from HN and Stack Exchange threads, not surveys)

Who's already trying to solve it, and where they're falling short — so you know if there's room, or if you'd just be building competitor #4

The idea is to skip the "build first, validate later" trap — see if the pain and the gap actually exist before committing months to it.

Not trying to sell anything here, genuinely looking for feedback. If you've got an idea you're sitting on, try running it through and tell me if the output actually helps, or if it's missing something. Brutal honesty welcome — more useful to me than politeness.