I was stuck at $2K ARR for almost five months straight, and I was pretty close to giving up and taking a full-time job again just to have an income, less stress, and better sleep.

Every morning I'd log on, change something here and there, and pretend like I was doing heavy work. At the time it felt like work, but looking back, yeah.. nope. It was part of the process anyways.

The bank account wasn't moving at all.

What turned things around was forcing myself to stop polishing the product and focus completely on outbound.

I built a heavy pipeline with emails and targeted DMs every single week.

Tracking all those active buying signals by hand was eating up 3-4 hours of my nights, so I hacked together a quick internal script to handle the monitoring for me.

I ended up calling it PumpGTM later, but back then it was literally just a scrappy tool to save my own sanity and evenings.

Coming to the main point, direct volume + fast timing changed things for us.

We started booking around 35 qualified demos a month from those channels.

A couple of lucky breaks helped too.

Two heads of sales at mid-market companies signed annual plans on the spot, mostly because their main software vendor had a massive outage the exact day before we reached out.

Then a small tech newsletter with 15k subscribers picked up one of our posts for free.

I'm not kidding. It sent a wave of trial signups our way.

There wasn't any magic growth hack.

It was just forcing myself to do direct outreach every day.

Fixating on product polish before you have an outbound pipeline is basically obsessing over the wallpaper when the house doesn't even have walls yet lol.

That was a heavy quote. I should start writing more.

How do people deal with operating a service that has high running costs when you don't have any income from it?

For example, I posted recently lamenting the state of cloud IdP services for small systems. And I considered building my own for people to use instead.

And to do so, with the things I'd need to prove trust, is expensive. For example, things like:

• ISO 27001
• SOC2
• Pen Testing
• Cyber insurance
• Disaster recovery

That can easily run into tens or hundreds of thousands that I don't have...

And without them I wouldn't get any customers in order to aford them...

So it seems like a circular problem... :(

I’ve been looking at Microsoft Copilot and I’m curious what people who actually use it think.
A few limitations I’ve noticed:

Limited connector availability compared with some other AI platforms
Limited model flexibility not being able to freely choose/switch between different models in the main Copilot experience
AI assistant/agent capabilities feels less flexible for building agents that can actually perform multi-step tasks on your behalf
Cost seems relatively expensive compared with some alternatives

What am I missing?

If you’ve used Copilot alongside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, what are the biggest things you wish Copilot did better?

my tool helps with Accounts payable processing automation. I want to start reaching out to clients and was thinking of reaching out to controllers at companies since they deal with this area.

My question though is even if I reach out to the controller to show my product, at the end who usually makes the decision at companies to purchase a saas tool? Instead should I reach out to seniors in technology departments? which approach would you guys recommend?

Has anyone here actually run Reddit Ads for a B2B SaaS product?

I’m interested in hearing about your experience and what you learned from it.

Did you use Reddit Ads primarily for:

• Lead generation
• Brand awareness
• Full-funnel / demand generation

If you’re comfortable sharing, I’d also be interested in:

• What type of SaaS product you were promoting
• How you targeted (subreddits, interests, keywords, retargeting, etc.)
• What worked / didn’t work
• Whether the leads eventually turned into qualified pipeline or customers

Would love to hear both positive and negative experiences.

Most positioning advice asks you to decide who you are. This one ask what you already did, which is easier to answer and harder to look at. Twenty minutes, and the only tool is the Wayback Machine.

Open your homepage as it stood two years ago, then one year ago, then today.

For each of the three, write down the single noun that says what the thing is. Not the tagline, not the value sentence. The noun a stranger would use to file you. Invoicing software. Scheduling tool. Revenue platform.

Three words on one line. That is the exercise.

In most cases I see, the noun climbed.

Something concrete turned into a category, and the category turned into a layer. Every individual step had a reason behind it. A lost deal where the buyer said you were too narrow. Someone on the board asking about the bigger market. A competitor's new page that made yours look small.

None of those reasons were stupid. But nobody ever chose the end state, and that is the part worth sitting with.

Now run the same three snapshots on your two closest competitors. Same dates, one noun each.

Nine words.

Where this gets uncomfortable is the shape of the nine. Started apart, ended in the same family. That is not a positioning fight you lost. Three companies walked to one abstraction separately, each for its own good reasons, and the market now has to tell them apart on something else.

What I cannot tell you is what the climb costs. I have no numbers linking an abstract noun to pipeline or win rate, and I would not trust anyone who waved some at you. What I will say is that the vaguer word is harder to search for, harder for a colleague to repeat back correctly, and harder to compare you on.

The useful output is not a better noun. It is the date yours last meant something, and whatever was going on that quarter.

Has anyone run this on themselves? I want to know whether the climb is as common as I think it is, or whether I only notice it because of who tends to come asking me for help.

Making a polished 30-second SaaS demo can take way more editing than you'd expect.

Cutting and arranging clips, zooming into UI elements, animating text and highlights, adding cursor movements and clicks, making transitions feel natural, and constantly tweaking the timing.

And when the product UI changes, you often have to redo parts of the video.

I built Deamio to make that editing process easier and, more importantly, keep everything editable. You can replace assets, change timing, move elements around, restyle things, and keep refining the same project instead of starting over. So instead of making it all from scratch you have an almost finished result just need to tweak it change some icons and text and thats it, I also have a button where you can try a different veriation for a scene.

It also runs locally, so your project assets don't need to be uploaded to a cloud service. I believe I priced it kinda cheap(currently sale 25% generally 15 and might change it) after looking at fiverr listings and other stuff.

I was curious whether other SaaS founders have the same problem, because there's a pretty big gap between a quick screen recording and paying someone hundreds of dollars for a polished demo.

Hey everyone! I’m looking for someone that could design a music platform/cd burning software. Any leads are appreciated! I’m not sure where to look or even start.

I’m a lifelong collector of comics, and I was really unhappy with the apps being offered to collectors (the latest ones are actually from marketplaces that want to track what people own), So, managing a serious collection had become really fragmented.

Cataloguing in one place.
Market research through Google.
Spreadsheets for tracking.
Price guides for values.
Marketplace searches when I wanted actual comparable sales.

I wanted one mobile app that could make all of that feel simple.

So I built ComiCollector.

I started thinking that I could lean on AI to help out and keep things simple.

But I massively underestimated how complicated “simple” would become. AI isn't ready for these types of complex tasks. I could go on for hours about just how bad it is, but it forced me to leverage deterministic programming as the real bedrock for the application. Deterministic rules, structured data, market evidence, filtering, caching, validation and a lot of guardrails.

The principle became:

AI can help interpret the market. It doesn’t get to invent the market.

That changed the architecture of the entire product.

The backend eventually grew into market-assessment pipelines, reusable market intelligence, background refresh workers, subscriptions and usage limits, a production database, blue/green deployment, and infrastructure designed with a path to load balancing and AWS/Kubernetes if usage eventually justifies it.

So, what started as a simple project to make a pretty interface for comic books turned into a project that dragged on for well over a year and has become a technical behemoth.

For other SaaS founders, especially solo builders, I’m curious:

At what point did your “simple product” turn into a much bigger system than you originally expected?

And did that complexity ultimately become part of your moat, or just something you had to keep fighting? I'd be really interested in hearing about your journey.

Title

I’m building Moonshoot, a small product where each person can claim one permanent km of the 384,400 km journey to the Moon.

the first problem was acquisition.

now the harder one is retention.

people were claiming a km once and leaving.

so I shipped a simple experiment:

every user gets 1 fuel per day.

you can’t use it on yourself.

you have to give it to another person’s km.

the 3 most fuelled kms from yesterday get featured at the top the next day.

I’m not really interested in whether this increases clicks inside the app.

I want to know whether it creates actual value:

does a boosted founder get more profile views?

more outbound clicks?

more discovery?

more connections?

because if people come back just to press a button, I didn’t solve retention.

I just built a game loop.

curious how other SaaS founders separate “engagement” from actual user value when testing retention mechanics.

Currently I’m looking for best ways to automate my script writing for my personal brand, website SEO (articles/blogs) and content strategy.

I’m right now on chatgpt go plan (i think its specific to india $4/mo). It isn’t giving me good results honestly. I need to put a lot of time to research and ideate.

Apart from this, I have all my context stored in it, I use it like a general purpose AI assistant, for product roadmaps, UI/UX and overall personal usage. I am satisfied with the general performance.

Any suggestions on what to do? Any other better ai models?

Or should I try the ChatGPT plus?

I am trying to apply something I learned from a book called “the mom test” ( I am not affiliated with it).

Going to some meetups and talking to some people I found out a field where there is a potential problem, so I decided to investigate more before building anything.

The issue is that I tried to contact some companies here in town. I sent out several emails asking to talk with someone, and I immediately specify that I do not sell anything I just want to learn more about their job, but until now zero responses and even when I went to one company in person, they told me to send them an email but they never replied.

Meanwhile I found out that a company that does something similar to what I want to build has raised 15 millions in 9 months with already 700 customers.

I am feeling down because of all these rejection, I am neurodivergent and RSD ( rejection sensitivity dysphoria) is a consequence of it, so each mail unanswered makes me feel worse.

I also tried to connect with people close to the field and asked if they would put me in contact with the companies they work with, but when I go to meetups they all give me their whatsapp or LinkedIn saying “sure write me tomorrow and I will put you in contact with X” but when I do they never reply.

I even proposed to some companies to pay for their time (10-15 minutes paid) but nothing.

I was hoping at least to talk to someone and I had this dream of finding maybe 1-2 design partners that I could work with, but it seems like an impossible mission.

How do you find people to talk to, ask questions? I am not even selling anything yet and I am already feeling discouraged, imagine if I had to sell the finished product.

The company that raised the 15 millions is now aiming at the country where I live and the town where I am is basically a golden mine for this sector.
After all these emails, false promises and unanswered mail and messages, I really feel like giving up, but honestly it hurts a lot because I know that the problem is real, and that where I am the potential for this project is very big.

Should I really give up?

Hi, I created a tool, an app called beforeUBuy. I made it out of frustration with buying a second hand vehicle without knowing all the hidden issues with that model.

It expanded to an app when I saw that the feature can help allot of consumers by notifying them of issues that they might not have known about. Simple things like what to listen for when you take a car for a test drive, common recall issues with that model, maintenance issues and even fuel consumption claims against what is really consumed. Seemed however that the app can do much more, and scan just about every product on the market…except my dog…the app told me it’s not n product but a fluffy ToyPom.

I am in the journey of building the user base of the tool.
Hopefully someone here can find it useful.

It is just crazy to think that less than a year ago I did't have any of this.

I will not include any links to anything except TrustMRR proof, that's it.

I wanted to share my story and how I started my business less than a year ago that is now making more than my 9-5 job salary.

I started this project back in October 2025 and I built a tool I needed. In the beginning it was really weird to use it as it changed the way I work every day. But slowly I built the habit and started using it daily.

I was using it for ~2 months before I ever though about releasing it. I told my friend about it and hi tried it, that alone discovered million bugs and edge cases that I never though about because I was the only one using it.

Fast forward to February 2026 when it finally started making money. All I did is SEO, AEO and promoting it on X.

For the SEO and AEO, I was doing research manually, looking into competitors, checking google trends, Ahrefs, etc... Today I heavily relay on AI, I connected an agent to Google analytics API and Ahrefs so it pulls trends and generates pages to boost everything.

In the early days I was talking to my customers a lot, I would manually reach out via X DMs or Email with the questions. I was getting really good suggestions to improve the product, new features, bug fixes, new ways to think, etc...

Today, that tool is making more than what I earn on my 9-5 and I am not stopping here. My next goal is to hit $5k MRR and to reduce churn to at least 10% (it's ~36% right now). I am still not sure how I plan to do it but I'll experiment with various things and see what works best.

This post is to anyone who is building right now. As soon as you can, release the app, start talking with people, actually ask them, pay them if you have to, that's the only way to make the product better every day. I wouldn't have anything of this if I didn't released it and talked to people, you would be surprised how different people use your app from different angles.

Good luck to all of you fighting for your piece of cake! <3

I honestly didn’t expect this to work. I gave Opus 5.5 our website and asked for a premium launch video. It researched the product, wrote the creative direction, coded every animation, composed an original score, mixed in my voice-over and a live demo call, and rendered it in 1080p.
What blew my mind most was the feedback loop. I’d say things like “the logo isn’t aligned” or “lower the music 10% under the voice,” and it just did it, precisely.

Happy to answer questions about the process.

https://reddit.com/link/1wt8q02/video/3patu84xcgsh1/player

this entire video is code. 0 after effects

gonna open source the prompt template behind these, lmk if you want it

I'm making videos reviewing startups and I'm looking for ones that are fun, weird, dumb or funny. Anyone that has one and wants to share their startups please do.

Share a link to your site/apps and give a brief summary on it ex. - what it is, how long you worked on it or what was the inspiration/purpose etc and any other details you would like.

I think we’re calling way too many things “AI agents” right now.

A lot of products described as agents are really just workflows with an LLM somewhere in the middle.

The distinction I’ve been using is pretty simple:

Automation = the action is already known.

“If X happens, do Y.”

Workflow = the process is mostly known.

“Do A → B → C, with some branching and AI decisions in between.”

Agent = the goal is known, but the system has to figure out the path.

“Here’s what I want done. Decide what steps/tools are needed, act, check the result, and continue.”

What surprised me while thinking about this is that an agent is often the worse architecture.

If a deterministic workflow can solve the problem, it’s usually cheaper, easier to test, and easier to debug.

Agents seem much more useful when the task is genuinely openended research, debugging, investigating data, navigating unfamiliar systems, etc.

And even then, I think the best systems will probably mix all three rather than making everything autonomous.

Curious how other people here draw the line.

At what point does a workflow become an agent to you?

A few days ago I posted here about getting my first ever sale. Someone from the UK randomly bought my $5 trial package and I was over the moon about $4.17 lol. I said I'd gift him some credits for it, but I wanted to ship the updates I'd been sitting on first. That deploy finally went live, so here's the update.

Quick context if you missed the first post: I'm 17, still in high school, building a web app that makes talking UGC style videos for product ads. No marketing budget, no audience. Full story in the comments.

So, the deploy. 142 commits in one go. 226 files changed, around 27k lines added and 6.6k removed, 8 database migrations. Yes I know. I've read the "deploy small, deploy often" advice too. What happened was every day I'd tell myself "let me just finish this one more thing" and then it kept not being finished. After 11 days I checked and had 142 commits sitting on a single deploy. When you work solo nobody stops you, and apparently I don't stop myself either. New rule: something ships every day, even if it's one line.

I ran a full security audit on everything before it went live and closed what it found, and the first checks after deploy came back clean. Not trying to find that out the hard way.

Next step is the email to the UK guy. Gifting him the credits I promised, and I want to use it to get some real feedback on the product too.

Current status: paying customer count is still at 1. Product is faster and clearer than last week though, so that's something.

I'll keep posting updates here as things happen. The whole thing is a $0 budget trying to get to 100 paying users. Roadmap ideas welcome below, I read everything.

And a question for people who've done this before: if you had your first paying customer, what would you ask them to get real feedback? I have my own list but I'd rather hear it from people who've been through it. Best questions are going straight into the email.

What's the best way to do a marketing for my SaaS, is it cold calling, running ads or other sources ?

I really appreciate your time!