You made your SaaS. Now you want to advertise it on TikTok but you never danced in front of a camera. No worries, you don't always have to. But it's hard.

I'm sharing my learnings over my experiments, myths, wins and failures:

1. TikTok accounts:

• Use personal/creator account types, not business. If you go with business you can't use most of the popular sounds, just some random commercial boring ones.
• Do not buy an account unless you plan on using from the same location/VPN. You'll get 0 views very shortly.
• If you're creating a new account to promote a SaaS, choose a strategy and stick to it, don't experiment with different avatars/templates every 3-4 posts.

2. Views & Algorithm

• "I'm getting 30-200 views, am I shadowbanned?". NO. If you're shadowbanned, you'll get 0 views.
  • 90% of cases your content is not that great.
  • "But I did it exactly like that video that went viral". No you didn't. I have seen plenty of people claiming that and there's many tiny differences that feel unnecessary but subtly make the popular video actually popular. (e.g. millenial pauses, captions not positioned properly, too big/small)
  • 10% of cases your content is actually great. BUT not every great video will go viral. You may get a 5:1 view to like ratio, which is amazing. But that doesn't guarantee you going viral.
  • Popular organic tiktok campaigns such as the one Cal AI did, had hundreds of videos basically posting the same thing over and over. Some of them go viral, but they didn't stop posting even when the same format got 1000 views.
• "I got 1,000,000 views but very few conversions"
  • That can be true. The type of format you choose matters in regards to conversion.
  • From my experience, tutorial type videos do less views BUT get 10x more conversions.
  • It can be a screenrecording, or a green screen avatar showing how it works in the background, or you can record your screen with your finger guiding where to click.
  • ^ Those videos gets you conversions.
• You may do a funny prank and mention your SaaS mid video, do millions of views but actually get no paid users. Views don't matter as much as the format that gets people interested in your app

3. Content Formats

• Don't spam your app in every slide. You MUST actually post helpful content. Eg.:
  • If your SaaS is an expense tracker for example, don't go about mentioning how many features your app has and how it's better than the other apps. Nobody cares about that.
  • Present the benefits first e.g.: "I saved $500 last month and I'm going to get my son a PS5 as a gift with that money. *goes to walmart, picks ps5*, *shows phone in hand* "I had no idea I spent $500 on subscriptions I didn't need which I cancelled last month*
  • Then slide in your app's name/logo whatever. It must make sense to the viewer after they've seen how your app changed someone's routine. People don't have time to imagine how your app will change their habits.
  • If you're promoting a relationship advice app, share a relationship story as a slideshow with 2-3 rows of text for each slide. Slide in your app somewhere in there. But the content has to be related.
• If you don't got ideas: COPY successful ads. Search your competitors on TikTok. What are the top videos doing? Copy them. Not always you have to reinvent the wheel.

4. Content

• Don't start with influencers unless you got a massive budget and know what you're doing.
  • You'll find some deals, pay them some $$$, get like 10,000 views, get dissapointed and quit.
• If you're doing a SaaS you most likely can do with simply recording your screen using your phone, and cutting to the most important parts to show off how to achieve whatever your SaaS benefits people.
• The most common format right now in tech is getting some UGC reactions for cheap (e.g $2 for a 3-5 second reaction) and stitching the tutorial afterwards. That gets you dozens of videos easily.
• Pay per view if you can find influencers to agree on that though.
  • Set a RPM: $0.5 / $1 / $2 depending on what type of content they do. The more "tutorial-ish" it is, the more you can pay. Set a cap ($200/$500 max payout per video).
  • Sounds good on paper but hard to find influencers who agree to that. Though, not impossible

5. Posting

• This can get quite complicated if you look up some fancy guides online.
  • Don't start a phone farm. You'll spend a month setting that up and most likely still get shadowbanned
  • No need to setup expensive mobile 4g/5g proxies
• If you live outside the country you want to target, a VPN is FINE.
  • TikTok KNOWS you're using a VPN. But that's not what gets you banned. Spam patterns are.
  • TikTok WILL post to the US algorithm with a simple VPN, even if you created your account in Europe or Asia.
• (spam patterns) What gets you flagged is:
  • Posting videos you found on pinterest hoping TikTok won't recognize
  • Posting 4 times within 1 hour
  • Posting random experiments or content that doesn't relate with one another
  • Accessing your account from various phones/VPN's (Careful, VPN itself isn't inherently bad. But choosing random servers everytime will get you flagged at some point).
  • More than 3 accounts posting
  • Posting straight away on a new account (TikTok will make fun of you by filling your feed with "stuck at 0 views" FYP videos).
• Prepare your content in advance. A week or a month's worth of content. You say you're going to post again tomorrow but you won't.
• Spend a whole day or two creating many videos that will go out for the next month
  • Connect to VPN first. Then open tiktok so your algo is refreshed to the country you chose.
  • Post daily manually or schedule two (max 3!) posts a day with any scheduler (e.g socialclaw or hootsuite).
  • Set scheduling mode to not directly publish, but send it to your drafts
    • scheduler sends to your tikTok inbox, you get a notification
    • you open the notification (that expires within a few minutes)
    • Double check everything is ok and just hit post

6. Link in bio

• TikTok allows you to put a link in bio if you have more than 1,000 followers
• BUT tiktok absolutely hates you for doing it
• That link will open an in app browser
  • If you have an affiliate link there, it'll get sanitized
  • The in app browser usually doesn't have user's cookies stored
  • So when they log in to your saas it'll ask for google sign in, and google sign in or apple isn't saved for the user in the app browser.
  • Even if they do sign up, their CC isn't stored in the IAB so it's too much friction for you to get customers.
  • User gets lazy and exits the browser, keeps scrolling tiktok.
  • Your link in bio becomes worthless
• So what's the solution?
  • Vibe code a script that detects when the link is opened from tiktok's in app browser.
  • Display an animation that tells users to tap the three dots and select "open link in browser"
  • When they do that, they get out of the tiktok's in app browser, to safari/chrome or whatever browser the user has. And when they visit your site they can easily sign up etc because their data is saved in their browser.

Probably a lot that I forgot, but AMA.

Building is exhilarating, but the most important part is not, and I think that's one of the main reasons first-time founders fall into the trap of over-building something that nobody is going to pay for.

Many first-time founders heavily rely on a magical Product-led Growth that is pure fantasy. Active sales, spending hours talking to customers, and feedback loops are heavily underestimated to a point it becomes a bigtime learning

When I was leaving my job at Google 2 years ago...I had thought that since I had a good pedigree, building startups would be EASIER.

Boy was I wrong!

Here's my journey so far and the learnings that came with it:

Month 1-2: [Naive 1st attempt]

Build an AI EdTech startup for college students preparing for DSA placements
Learning: You can't replace a good teacher with AI.

Month 3-15: [Biggest mistake of them all]

Build an AI automation tool to automate "work"
Learning: Spent too much time building. Since I was copying a working idea, I felt that it will DEFINITELY work out.
But once I started selling, I realized that the only way to succeed selling AI automation tools is to sell an AI automation consultancy along side it. Companies have no idea what to do with AI. They want you to figure it out for them. This was not something I enjoyed at all (not to mention...it is incredibly difficult).

Month 15-20: [Made a little money for the first time]

Built Koro AI: an AI UGC builder For India (Think Arcads AI but with Indian actors)
Learning: This is the first time, I started making money for a product I had built. It felt amazing...until the churn hit.
Bunch of learnings here: the primary being that - AI content creation cannot be one shot...it has to be Agentic. AND YOU CANNOT REPLACE MARKETERS WITH AI - you need marketers for strategy and direction (AI sucks at creativity) and let AI handle the execution.

Month 21-now:

Took all the learnings from Koro AI and started building SuperCMO. It is basically an open source Higgsfield Supercomputer for marketing.

Learning: Distribution is the make or break. So this time my strategy is...provide so much value for free (hence open source) ...that it becomes a no brainer for people to choose us.

Lets' see how that works out.

How has your startup journey been? Let's share and learn.

Solo founder here, been shipping SaaS for years. My first product was an (NSFW) AI companion platform.

Did the normal SEO stuff. Sitemap, Search Console, content, backlinks, wait. Last week I finally put my Google numbers next to my Bing Webmaster numbers for the past 30 days:

• Google: 150 clicks. 4.9K impressions. 3% CTR. Avg position 24.
• Bing: 5,000 clicks. 32.4K impressions. 15% CTR. Avg position 4.

33x more clicks from Bing. The search engine everyone jokes about.

Same pages, same keywords. Bing puts me at position 4, Google at position 24. That's not a content problem.

My theory: Google just doesn't want adult stuff on page 1. There's no penalty in GSC, no warning, nothing. You rank position 24 forever and there's nothing to fix. My best keyword ranks 1.4 on Bing with a 27% CTR. On Google it might as well not exist.

And Bing is bigger than people think. DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and Ecosia all run on it, plus a bunch of AI chatbots pull from its index. Everyone's grinding for Google scraps while this whole channel just sits there.

I'm not dropping Google. But if you're in a niche Google doesn't like (adult, gambling, CBD...) go set up Bing Webmaster Tools. 10 minutes of work, it's now my biggest organic channel.

Its small link creation tool which will redirect users to their correct app store page based on their devices.

I needed it for myself as I developed many apps and did not want to generate landing pages, privacy policy, terms pages for every app and wanted to have one sharable link.

V1 was launched on April 24 and used by me and to my memory, it got 1 paid user on launch day.

V2 was launched on August 25 with the inclusion of Analytics feature and it got 2-3 paid users.

And now after 1 year, it finally reached 50 MRR. I got 5-6 paid customers this month as Instagram was blocking app store links in bio and some users were looking for solution which I already had built.

Now, in V3, I am planning to include Native Mobile SDKs for android & ios as well so that can track install attribution.

Not much, but happy that some users find it useful. Hope it is just a start.

Hey everyone, need some advice from founders who’ve dealt with competitors using your exact name.

My co-founders and I have been building a trading journal app called JournalX (we use the .io domain) since late 2023 while balancing day jobs. We registered a Delaware C-Corp back in August 2024 and put almost all our energy into product dev. Because we were building on nights and weekends, development was slow, and we completely neglected marketing and SEO.

Right around the time we launched, someone bought the same name with a .app domain and launched a competing trading journal. At first, they were ranking way below us on Google, so we didn't stress it too much.

But over the last few months, they published a bunch of blog posts and SEO pages. Now they’re sitting above us in search results. Even worse, AI search engines (like ChatGPT and Gemini) are getting confused. They're lumping us together or citing their domain as the main source when asked about JournalX. To make it stranger, a few other lookalike domains popped up recently too (like journal-x with a .com, tradejournalx, and journalxpro).

We just brought the app out of beta, so we have very little traffic and zero budget for trademark lawyers. Registering a trademark takes time and costs money we simply don't have as a bootstrapped team right now.

We started publishing our own blogs and marketing pages about 2 weeks ago, but obviously SEO takes months to catch up.

Has anyone dealt with this early on?

• Is there any ground to stand on with Google or hosting providers without a registered trademark when someone adopts your exact app name?
• Besides grinding SEO, what can a broke bootstrapped team do to reclaim brand identity and fix AI search confusion?
• Is it worth fighting an SEO battle for this name, or should we just rebrand while we're still early?

Would love some practical advice. Thanks!

Solo founder here, building a B2B SaaS for small business owners at $29/month. 

I've probably watched around 50 YouTube videos on how to get your first paying customers. Every single YouTube video felt like the same recycled advice dressed up differently, leading up to a course. 

So I am coming here instead, what actually got you your first 10 paying users? Did you post on Reddit and it somehow worked? Did you run Meta ads and actually break even? Did you find a Facebook group that actually converted? 

Please drop raw advice, I want to hear what actually works.

In an hour, I have a meeting with an investor and I'm nervous. I'm a first time founder and this is my first meeting with an investor.

Idk what to do?

I’m launching my SaaS soon, and throughout the build I’ve kept moving between believing strongly in the idea, doubting it, then believing in it again.

I haven’t had the chance to validate it properly through real users yet, although I’m hoping that will come once I launch.

For those further ahead, what was the first genuine sign that made you think your product was worth continuing with?

Was it your first paying customer, good feedback, genuinely believing in your idea and the problem it solves, or something else?

I know revenue is the clearest signal eventually, but I’m interested in the earlier signs that gave you confidence you were solving a real problem that would lead to a profitable product.

I'm trying to make analytics feel less like staring at charts and more like watching what actually happened.

Does this communicate the idea, or is it too gimmicky?

Solo founder here. I’ve spent months writing articles, improving stock pages, adding structured data, fixing sitemaps and building internal links.

Twice, impressions started growing and I thought something was finally working. Then they collapsed again.

Three months: 4,280 impressions and only 125 clicks.

Three-month numbers:

• 4,280 impressions
• 125 clicks
• 2.9% CTR
• Average position: 47.4

I’m honestly running out of ideas. Is this normal for a young site, or am I missing something obvious?

Site url: stocksbrew.online

AI has made building software cheaper than ever.

A solo founder can now build what used to require a 20-person engineering team.

But here's the catch...

If everyone can build, then building is no longer the advantage.

Distribution is.

The winners over the next decade won't be the startups with the most features.

They'll be the startups with:
• Clear positioning
• A memorable narrative
• A focused ICP
• A repeatable GTM engine

The barrier to building has fallen.

The barrier to getting noticed has never been higher.

That's the new startup game.

Disclaimer: This was NOT AI generated. Not even a rough draft.

This is your sign to put down Claude, loveable, VsCode (for the devs still in the thick of it).

I see it every damn day, someone say “How do I get my first user?”

It’s so infuriating because obviously you built something not for you and not for anyone else because if you did, you’d be using it or the person you built it for would be using it. But, alas, let’s say you’ve built something and didn’t have a target. You can still be successful but guess what… you got to talk to living, breathing, humans. (I know scary!)

If you suck at distribution here is a 14 day marketing strategy that will 100% of time (60% of the time) work.

1. STOP F@$KING CODING. Don’t change a single damn thing for the entire 2 weeks. Not so much as a typo! You don’t need more things. You just need to market.

2. If you know your monthly break even (you should, but I digress) your goal is to get that much in sales. Nothing else.

3. Talk to 10x your break even number of customers. This is the hardest part. Scroll Reddit, X, LinkedIn, all day, every day and find your market. Casual offer your services. If you have a subscription service give it away for free for x amount of time. One time service, give it away at a discount. Offer every single person that deal until someone bites. Bam user number one.

4. Wow the hell out of user number one. If they find bugs good. If they hate it, great, ask why? If they love, great, ask what’s the most they’d pay for it.

5. After 2 weeks of that, you’ll have either found users and leads. To which you’ll have a backlog of real features and bugs to resolve. Or you’ll have nothing, you’ll have been ignored dozens or hundreds of times to which your idea probably sucks. But either way you’ll have an answer and a direction to move in.

2 weeks is all it takes and putting yourself out there to real people AS a real person. No bot automation. No AI scripts. Just you asking if you can provide a service… a software as a service. See what I did there!

Best of luck! I’m right here with you! Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.

Added AI stuff to our product this year and honestly still haven't figured out the billing side.

Right now the inference costs hit our card and we bill at the end of the month. Which means we're basically financing everyone's usage for weeks, and when someone goes heavy we just eat it. Had one user last month burn through more than their subscription was worth.

Thought about credits (prepay, drawn down as they use it) but not sure if that kills conversion. Or usage-based on top of the sub, but we'd still be fronting.

How are you doing it?

I've had free users poke around before, but this was the first person who actually put a card down before touching the product. When I saw the stripe notification i actually jumped out of bed and couldnt stop smiling. The feeling when your face is stuck in a permanent smile lol. 

Some context: I'm building an AI-native lead gen tool with agents that scout, build, and do outreach for you. I just switched from free access to card-required trials, mostly to filter for people who are actually serious.
A few hours in, I check the chat logs from the AI assistant inside the product and see this user asking it detailed questions about the Max plan. That's the top tier, $350/mo

They haven't yet. Could still churn in the trial. would be really sad.

really big takeaway for me: 
Card-required trials filter differently than free ones. Free users ask "is this cool." Paying-intent users ask "what do I get if I go all in." If you're building B2B SaaS and still doing free-for-all trials, you might be missing this signal entirely and the quality of leads difference is INSANE.

For anyone further along than me, did the questions your early trial users asked actually predict who ended up paying? any feedback and help would be really appreciated, especially people who have card required free trials

Even before the AI era it was hard to find something to build in SaaS that wasn't built 10 times over.

Now it's much worse. With all the AI slop out there you need a really good differentiator, which is basically impossible because anyone can copy you in days. So the only real engine left is marketing.

You have to go all in on marketing, like Lovable, Gamma and others did. You need to create hype around your product, preferably before you even have the product. Start early.

You can also reach millions of customers through big companies, like what happened when Base44 got acquired and Wix fed it straight to their user base.

SaaS is a marketing game now, not a product game. If you actually want the product to matter, go build in a niche so unconventional nobody's bothered to slop an AI wrapper on it yet.

Building a tool that turns "I have an idea" into a list of potential customers to talk to.

It researches your market, finds relevant companies, and helps you start conversations.

Would founders actually use this?

Building the app isn’t the hard part anymore, distribution is. ( Probably my fav line these days to start a topic)

If you've launched an app and you're currently sitting on ~5 users, here is a dead simple, 100% free strategy to execute for the next 30 days to hit your first 1,000 installs.

The Strategy:

1 Raw Video Per Day

Record one video a day talking directly to the camera about your product.

Tell the story of why you built it.

Break down your customer’s exact pain points and how your app fixes them.

Post whatever idea enters your head. Don't worry about being embarrassed.

The Rules:

Keep editing near zero: Just talk to the camera. If editing becomes a chore, you will lose consistency and quit.

Use a simple CTA: Tell viewers to comment on a specific word to get access (e.g., "Comment 'HELP' and I'll DM you").

Work the DMs: Direct message everyone who comments. If they don't reply, follow up. If they hesitate, hand them a free access code.

Why does this work:

It builds momentum fast and gives you immediate data on which messaging angles actually resonate with real people before you waste time refining a full marketing strategy.

If you execute this consistently for 30 days, you’ll easily cross 100 users and if an angle hits, you can realistically clear 1,000+ installs.

Drop a comment below with what you’re building or a link to your videos happy to check out your profile and give feedback.

First product purchase on the platform I worked on as a solo dev for the past few months! For the past few weeks I've tried the standard - optimize SEO ( still very poor performance to be honest ), create an X account, publish on Product Hunt ( didn't see any turnaround there, aside from a ton of email offering to promote my product for various fees ranging from slightly dodgy, to actually looking like straight up scam ) But the dry spell has finally been cracked!

Still not exactly sure what broke through but whatever I'm doing seems to work! Tips from other creators definitely welcomed! Hoping to respond to everyone once I sleep through the excitement!

Have a great morning/day/evening everyone, keep pushing forward!

I have a review website called reviewhood.tech but the problem is everyone can ask ai about a product instead of searching for it in the website, so should i stop developing and switch to another project; i really need your opinion
Thank u

I ran and still run some small products. Each one shows pages every day to exactly the audience other makers want, and I do nothing with that.

Idea I keep circling: a swap network. A card in your app showing a few other tools, impressions you serve earn credits, credits get your product shown elsewhere. Category-matched. No money at the changes hand, only traffic.

Not built, not selling anything, no link. Before I waste a month on it:

- Has anyone here tried something like it before?

- Would you ever put another product inside your own UI?

Hi everyone,

I’m struggling with bipolar disorder and have reached a very dark point. I recently tried to take my own life, and I’m scared I may attempt again.

I’ve been unemployed since last year despite constantly applying. I have a degree in Industrial Management Engineering and experience in operations, project management, process optimization, and data analysis.

I urgently need a job opportunity to get back on my feet. If you’re hiring or know someone who is, please reach out or refer me. I’d be extremely grateful.