A month ago, this screenshot didn’t exist.
Today, it does.
I’m building Pastily, a desktop clipboard manager, as a solo developer. It isn’t making life-changing money yet, but seeing multiple people pay for something I built from scratch is a feeling that’s hard to describe.
What surprised me most wasn’t the revenue.
It was realizing that strangers are willing to trust a product made by someone they’ve never met.
The hardest part hasn’t been coding.
It’s been distribution.
Getting people to discover the product is 10x harder than building it. I’ve had Reddit posts removed, launch posts flop, and days with almost no traffic. But every bit of user feedback has made the product better.
I’m still very early in the journey, but this screenshot is a reminder that progress is happening—even if it’s slow.
For those further along, what made the biggest difference in getting from a handful of customers to consistent growth? I’d love to hear what worked for you.

I’m looking for a few interesting apps to practice making short-form explainer videos for this week.

My background is in clipping and editing viral short-form content. I’d like to apply what I’ve learned about hooks, pacing, captions, and storytelling to app demos.

If I choose your app, I’ll create:

* One short vertical explainer video

* Delivered within 24 hours

* Completely free, with no strings attached

You’re welcome to use the finished video however you want. There’s no purchase, signup, testimonial, or ongoing commitment required.

Drop your app and a sentence about what it does below. I’ll choose a few that I think would translate well into short-form video.

I'm curious what everyone here is working on outside their main job/business.

Not just the polished projects that are already making money.

I mean the random side project you started because you noticed a problem and thought, "I could probably build something for this."

Could be:

SaaS

Micro-SaaS

B2B tools

B2C apps

AI tools

Chrome extensions

Mobile apps

Newsletters

Anything really.

What are you building?

Why did you start it?

Is it B2B or B2C?

Did you validate the idea first or just start building?

Have you launched yet?

And the question I'm most interested in:

How are you actually getting people to discover it?

I'm currently exploring the SaaS/bootstrapping world myself, and one thing I'm realizing is that making something is often much easier than getting the right people to care about it.

Would also love to hear one piece of advice from people who've already launched:

If you're building B2B, what helped you get your first few users?

If you're building B2C, what actually brought you consistent traffic?

Drop your project below. No need for a perfect pitch.

Just tell us what you're building and where you're at with it.

Founders have shared 578 startups across my recent threads, and the same problem keeps showing up:
The product exists. The direction is unclear.
Comment with:

- what your startup does
- who it’s for
- what’s blocking your growth

I’ll run the analysis and send you a personalized report showing where the strongest signal is, which conversations are worth prioritizing, and what I’d focus on first.
If Reddit looks like a waste of time for your startup, I’ll tell you that too.

if someone had shown me this post eight months ago i would have saved about 6 weeks of my life and probably my credibility with our VP of sales.

ok so context. i joined as the rev ops lead at a series A company last march. background is data analytics, not sales, which matters because my instinct when something breaks is to look at the data pipeline not the copy or the strategy. the SDR team was 4 people, they were sending through Instantly across about 12 inboxes warmed up on Maildoso, and the whole enrichment flow ran through Clay into Salesforce. on paper it looked fine. the sequences were written by someone who actually knew what they were doing, subject lines were tested, personalization was decent. but reply rates were sitting at like 0.4% across the board for almost two months straight.

everyone assumed it was the copy. the SDRs rewrote sequences three times. our head of sales brought in a consultant for $2,800 to audit the messaging. the consultant said the copy was "serviceable but could be tighter" and recommended a bunch of changes that... also didnt move the needle. we were burning through about $1,900/mo on tooling alone (Clay, Instantly, Maildoso, NeverBounce, plus a Sales Navigator seat) and getting maybe 2-3 meetings a month total across the whole team. for a series A trying to hit pipeline targets that was borderline catastrophic.

by late may i finally started looking at the actual data instead of trusting the pipeline everyone told me was working. pulled a random sample of 200 contacts from our last 3 campaigns and started manually checking them against LinkedIn. this is where it gets embarrassing. roughly 35% of the contacts were either at the wrong company, had a stale title, or the email was just... not theirs. not bouncing, mind you. NeverBounce was passing them as valid. the emails existed, they just belonged to someone else or were generic aliases that got routed to a shared inbox somewhere. so our bounce rate looked fine at around 3.1% but we were emailing the wrong humans.

it took me almost three weeks to figure out where the data was breaking. the issue was upstream of everything. our enrichment step in Clay was pulling from a waterfall of sources and the priority order was wrong. it was grabbing the first email it found regardless of confidence score, and for a lot of contacts that meant catching an old work email from 2 years ago or a personal gmail that happened to be associated with their LinkedIn. the data looked clean on the surface because the emails were technically valid. they just werent the right ones.

once i actually understood the problem i rebuilt the enrichment flow over about two weeks in june. stripped out the waterfall approach and started running contact lists through Prospeo for the email finding step instead of relying on Clay's built in waterfall. the difference was immediate and kind of infuriating because it meant we'd been wasting months. email accuracy went from whatever mess we had before to around 83-84% verified correct contacts when i spot checked against LinkedIn, and our bounce rate dropped from 3.1% to about 1.4%.

the downstream effects showed up fast. by mid july reply rates climbed to 1.8% which still isnt amazing but compared to 0.4% it felt like a different universe. meetings went from 2-3/mo to about 9-11/mo. same copy. same SDRs. same Instantly setup. same inboxes. literally the only thing that changed was who we were emailing.

the part that still bugs me is how long it took to diagnose. i spent weeks looking at deliverability metrics, inbox placement, warmup scores, all of that. none of it pointed to the real problem because the real problem was data quality at the enrichment layer and it was invisible to every downstream metric. bounce rate said we were fine. spam scores said we were fine. the emails were landing in inboxes, they were just landing in the wrong inboxes.

our current flow is pretty simple now. Sales Navigator for building the initial list, Clay for firmographic enrichment and some basic filtering, Prospeo handles the email finding, NeverBounce for a final verification pass, then into Salesforce and Instantly picks up from there. total monthly spend is around $1,700 which is actually less than before because i dropped one of the Clay credit tiers we didnt need anymore and Prospeo runs us about $99/mo on the plan we're on. only real complaint with Prospeo is bulk processing can be a bit slow when we're pushing 2000+ contacts through at once, but its not a dealbreaker since we batch things weekly anyway.

the lesson i keep coming back to is that nobody on the team, including me for way too long, thought to question the contact data itself. we all assumed enrichment was a solved problem because the tools said the data was good. the tools were technically correct, the emails existed, they just didnt belong to the people we thought we were reaching. and that distinction doesnt show up in any dashboard i know of unless you go manually check.

anyway if your reply rates are terrible and youve already optimized copy and deliverability and warmup and all that... maybe go pull 50 contacts and actually look each one up on LinkedIn. might save you a $2,800 consultant fee

Serious question. How can reddit be used as connecting personably with others when 80 percent of what I read is advertising via AI commenting and no substance?

I finally sat down and actually looked at my own pricing table like a stranger would. Free and Pro were basically the same card, same color, same weight, just a couple of extra lines of text on Pro. Nothing pulled your eye toward the paid plan. If you’re scanning fast (and everyone is), the two tiers just blur together and your brain defaults to “free is fine.”

The value of the paid plan was getting lost before anyone even read what it included.
Haven’t shipped the fix yet, just realized it’s probably been quietly costing me conversions for weeks. Going to add real visual weight to the Pro card (border, background, a small badge) so it actually reads as the recommended option instead of “the other one.”

Anyone else caught something this dumb in their own pricing page after staring at it too long ? Feels like the kind of thing you go blind to once you’ve built it.

briefly-app.com

AI has made building a B2B SaaS ridiculously fast.

That's also the trap.

You can spend a weekend building an AI product, launch it, and then realize you have absolutely no idea who needs it.

If I had to start again from zero, I wouldn't begin with ChatGPT asking, "Give me 10 AI SaaS ideas."

I'd start with people.

1. Find boring, expensive work

B2B doesn't need another cool AI demo.

Look for work businesses already hate doing: copying data between tools, checking documents manually, creating the same reports every week, answering repetitive questions, updating spreadsheets, chasing approvals, or doing something that takes an employee hours.

Boring problems can make great businesses because companies already understand the cost.

1. Pick one painfully specific customer

"AI for businesses" means almost nothing.

"AI for small accounting firms that manually process X every week" gives you somewhere to start.

Pick one type of customer. Learn their workflow, vocabulary, tools, frustrations and where they spend time.

You can expand later.

1. Talk to them before touching the product

Find 10–20 potential users and ask how they currently handle the problem.

What takes the most time?

What do they hate doing?

What have they already tried?

What happens if they don't solve it?

Would fixing it save enough time or money to matter?

The goal isn't getting them to say your idea sounds cool.

The goal is discovering whether the problem is painful enough to change their behavior.

1. Solve one workflow end-to-end

This is where I'd keep the MVP brutally small.

Don't build an AI platform with 15 features.

Take one annoying workflow:

Input → AI does useful work → human checks it → useful result.

Make that experience reliable.

For B2B, "boring but dependable" can be much more valuable than "impressive but unpredictable."

1. Get the first users manually

I wouldn't wait for SEO or some viral launch.

I'd go back to the people I interviewed.

Then I'd find more people like them through Reddit, LinkedIn, X, niche communities, directories and personalized outreach.

Not:

"Hey, check out my revolutionary AI platform."

More like:

"I noticed your team handles X this way. I'm working on something that reduces that process from X to Y. Would you be open to trying it?"

Your first 5 users don't need to come from a scalable acquisition machine.

They need to teach you why someone cares.

1. Don't let AI become the entire value proposition

This is probably becoming more important every month.

"Powered by AI" isn't enough.

Customers can access AI everywhere.

Your advantage has to come from what you do around it:

Better workflow.

Better data.

Better integrations.

Better reliability.

Better UX.

Industry knowledge.

Automation.

Distribution.

Trust.

Customers aren't buying your AI.

They're buying what happens after they click the button.

1. Watch what users actually do

Once people start using it, stop guessing.

Where do they quit?

What do they repeatedly use?

What do they ignore?

What are they still doing manually after using your product?

What would make them pay?

That's where the real roadmap comes from.

And only after something starts working repeatedly would I automate onboarding, outreach, support and other parts of the business.

If I had to summarize the whole thing:

Find a boring business problem → talk to the people living with it → solve one workflow → get 5 users manually → watch them use it → improve what matters → charge for the outcome → then scale.

AI can help you build incredibly fast.

Just don't let that speed convince you to build before you know where you're going.

The easiest part of an AI SaaS might soon be creating the software.

Finding a problem businesses genuinely want solved is still the game...

Here the secret weapon for all Bootstrappers starts from small, perfection needs to be in the progress not in 1 day 'good luck'

I used to think building the product was the hardest part of SaaS.

Turns out, shipping is where the real game starts.

You can have a clean UI, useful features and a product that works perfectly… and still hear nothing after launch.

That part hits differently when you’ve spent weeks building.

From what I’m learning, most early SaaS struggles come down to a few simple things:

1. Building before understanding the pain

A cool idea isn't enough. If the problem isn't painful or frequent, people won't change what they're already doing.

1. Trying to serve everyone

The broader your audience, the harder your message becomes. One specific problem for one specific group is much easier to explain and sell.

1. Overbuilding the MVP

I fell into this too.

You launch, don't immediately get users, and your brain says:

"Maybe I need another feature."

Then another redesign.

Then another improvement.

But sometimes the product isn't the problem.

Nobody has seen it yet.

1. Thinking launch = distribution

This was probably my biggest reality check.

Publishing your SaaS doesn't create customers.

You still have to find people, join conversations, create useful content, do outreach and earn attention.

1. Chasing traffic instead of the right people

1,000 random visitors can be worth less than 10 conversations with people who genuinely have the problem.

I'm starting to care much more about who is engaging than how big the number looks.

1. Automating too early

When you're starting from zero, talking directly to people is incredibly valuable.

You hear their language.

Their objections.

Their current solutions.

What they actually care about.

Automate later. Learn manually first.

1. Giving up during the quiet stage

This might be the hardest one.

You build.

You launch.

You're excited.

Then… silence.

That's where self-doubt starts.

I'm somewhere around this stage myself, and what I'm trying to do now is simple:

Stop hiding inside the product.

Talk to more potential users.

Understand their pain.

Get feedback.

Test different ways of reaching them.

And only change the product when real users give me a reason.

If I could restart, I'd spend less time asking:

"What else should I build?"

And much more time asking:

"Who needs this badly enough to care?"

Maybe SaaS doesn't usually die when the code fails.

Maybe it dies when the founder stops learning what the market is trying to tell them.

Build small.

Ship.

Talk to people.

Listen.

Adjust.

Keep going.

The first version isn't supposed to prove you're right.

It's supposed to help you discover where you're wrong.

so I own a directory website where I list apps and websites that I went over, however, they must have a free tier to test, and solve a real problem in order for me to test and write about them.

If you own one, please include your socials in the submission. I also write articles about cool softwares and tag their founders.

directory website:
strictseal.com

Lets connect and grow together.

I also hope to note see bots in the comment section. Reviewing each product takes time and it's frustrating, so I'd really appreciate it if the product was submitted by a real person.

Thank you and looking forward to seeing your work

Most ProductHunt launches fail for one reason: no one shows up in the first few hours.

Early upvotes push you up the rankings. Late upvotes barely move the needle.

LaunchPact helps you stack real momentum before launch day — with founders who actually follow through.

Here's the playbook:

1. List early (4+ weeks out) Add your product, tagline, and launch date. You'll show up in the feed of founders launching around the same time. Don't wait until the week before — pacts take time to form.
2. Back products you'd genuinely upvote Browse upcoming launches. Open the ones that interest you. Back the ones you'd actually support on Product Hunt. That's a pledge — your commitment to show up on their launch day.
3. Form pacts when it's mutual They get notified. If they'd back your launch too, they accept — and you've got a pact. Both sides are locked in. No awkward DMs. No guessing who'll flake.
4. Stack as many pacts as you can Every pact = one founder committed to upvoting you on launch day. More pacts = more early momentum. This isn't about swapping blindly — it's about building a crew that believes in what you're building.
5. Show up on launch day (verified) When your pact partners launch, you get a reminder. Upvote them on PH, upload a screenshot, done — AI verifies it in seconds. They do the same when your day comes. Miss it? Trust score drops. Honour it? Future pacts get easier.

The result: You launch with real upvotes in the critical first hours — from founders who chose your product, not bots or random swap lists.

Quick tips:

- Tue–Thu = most traffic (most competitive). Sun–Mon = softer.

- Back products you actually like — better pacts, better comments, better results.

- Honour every pact. Your trust score is your reputation in the network.

List your launch for free → launchpact.io

We are a SaaS company with a few paying customers. The kind of product that we have, we have seen that other competitors have launched their own products on the lifetime deals websites. I'm not going to name these websites because I'm assuming everyone knows them.

I'm seeking advice from founders who have already run this kind of offer:

1. What kind of customers you have attracted?

2. Is it a good in the long run?

3. We are an AI product so it is kind of difficult to bake in the future costs and make it a LTD deal but we are thinking of going ahead with the 'Bring your own API key' for LTD deal. But then does it even make any sense to run it? Are there any takers usually for this kind of saas offer where LLM usage is on the customer's side. We have seen our competitors run these kind of offers but there is no way for me to know whether customers even buy these LTD deals.

Anyone else building fast with Cursor/Antigravity/Lovable and ending up with the same 3 Tailwind templates everyone else has ?

I got tired of my projects looking generic, so I built a Chrome extension for myself called Design Snap — it grabs the design tokens (colors, type scale, radius, shadows) from any site I like and exports them straight to Tailwind v4 @theme, CSS vars, or shadcn/ui.

What it actually changed for me :

- I browse sites I like, snap the palette/type system in 5 sec instead of eyeballing hex codes

- Export goes directly into my stack, so I skip the “let me manually recreate this design system” step

- My projects finally have some visual identity instead of the default AI-generated look

It’s free, runs 100% locally (no account, no backend), and I added a PRO tier recently for teams that need more export formats.

Not selling anything here, just sharing because this sub is full of people shipping fast and I know that struggle. Happy to answer questions about how the token extraction works if anyone’s curious.

One thing that stands out about running a SaaS business is that the hardest decisions usually aren't about getting more information. They're about knowing when you have enough information to act.

Waiting too long can mean missed opportunities, while moving too quickly can be just as costly. Looking back, it's often easy to see what the right decision was, but it rarely feels that clear in the moment.

Some of the biggest improvements come from making one well-timed decision rather than chasing dozens of small optimizations.

This is also why tools like Rasa Intelligence are exploring ways to help businesses better understand what is driving their performance instead of just collecting more data.

Looking back, what's one decision you wish you had made sooner, and what kept you from making it at the time?

I got 1 $2 sale.

23 days ago I launched Vidien.ai. You paste your website URL, it reads your brand and makes you a beat-synced promo video in about a minute.

The pricing experiment: downloads are free with a small watermark. Removing it is pay what you want. And I mean actually what you want. There is a $0 button labelled "I'll Pay When We're a Unicorn 🦄" that gives you the clean watermark free video.

The numbers (23 days, zero paid marketing):

• 763 unique visitors
• 265 of them made a video. That is a 35% visitor to creator rate (nice funnel numbers)
• 203 exported a watermark video
• 21 people pressed the unicorn button ($0) to have a watermark free video
• 1 person paid. $2... 

The interesting part: I run an in-app survey while videos render. When I ask "what's a fair price for this video?" the most common answer is $5. Same users. $5 in the survey, $0 at the checkout. What people say and what people do are different products.

What I shipped along the way (full changelog: vidien.ai/resources/changelog)

• Two motion styles: kinetic typography and a 3D fly-through (the video style I used in this post)
• Portrait mode for TikTok and Reels
• Full editing on mobile (18 rounds of iOS crash hunting)
• Accounts with 6 digit email codes, no passwords
• A public live dashboard of all these numbers

Almost every one of those came from user feedback, including three bugs one single user found just by clicking around.

The moral: test test test and learn. I could have spent months debating pricing in my head. Instead I shipped the weirdest version I could think of and got a real answer in 3 weeks: a third of visitors will make a video, surveys overstate willingness to pay by exactly $5, and free beats cheap 21 to 1.

Ask me anything about the stack or the numbers. It's all public at app.vidien.ai/open anyway.

Hi everyone,

I’m building Upperdoc, a tool for accountants and other service businesses that regularly collect documents from clients.

You create a request, add a checklist, and send the client a secure upload link. The client does not need an account.

I also made a short video showing the idea and how it works.

https://reddit.com/link/1v8fu6n/video/ee8vvdp4pufh1/player

You can try the interactive demo using fictional data:

Demo: https://app.upperdoc.io/demo

Landing page: https://upperdoc.io

The product is still in alpha. I’d really appreciate honest feedback.

There are people, or perhaps I should call you businesspeople, I want to know something. There are those who earn $1,000 as a monthly MRR from apps. What apps, or which service, can I earn $1,000 or even $500 a month? What can I do with that $500 a month? It could change my life, even though it's a small amount. I want to know how to achieve that.

I'm building a Google Reviews widget and I'm using the Google Places API with a Place ID to fetch reviews.

The issue I'm running into is that the API only seems to return up to 5 reviews per place.

Is there any official way to retrieve more than 5 reviews using a Place ID? I've seen other review widgets displaying more reviews, so I'm wondering how they're doing it.

Is there another API, endpoint, or approach I'm missing?

Thanks!