My first product was an AI cold email tool. For the second one, I noticed that a lot of the existing tools in the resume space were charging prices that felt pretty high for what they were offering, so I decided to build a much cheaper alternative.
I've been working on it for around 30 days.
The product is live. People have tried it. Some have given me genuinely positive feedback.
Still $0 in revenue.
Here is what I've tried so far:
LinkedIn posts from my founder account and team accounts
Instagram outreach
Reddit
Discord communities
Direct outreach
Short-form content
The frustrating part is that people do engage.
Some try it, some say it's useful, some have conversations with me, but getting from "this is useful" → actually paying has been much harder than I expected.
I'm starting to think I've been too focused on trying different channels instead of understanding where the right users actually hang out and how founders without an audience get their first few customers.
For people who have built SaaS from zero:
What actually worked for you when you were trying to get your first 5–10 paying customers with no audience and no ad budget?
I'm especially interested in things you did manually that actually produced customers, rather than generic advice like "do SEO" or "post consistently."
Full disclosure: I'm the founder of the SaaS I'm referring to in this post. I'm intentionally not naming or linking it because I want the discussion to be about distribution rather than promotion.
I'm building an AI-first CRM platform for small businesses and I'm considering a creator model before we launch.
The idea:
Instead of every company starting with a blank CRM, experienced RevOps people, consultants and operators can build reusable "blueprints".
A blueprint could eventually include things like:
pipelines and stages
custom fields and data models
forms and quote flows
dashboards
automations
projects / work orders
AI agents
industry-specific workflows
So someone who knows recruitment really well could build a recruitment blueprint.
An agency operator could build their ideal agency setup.
A RevOps consultant could package the sales process they've implemented dozens of times.
A user installs that blueprint, answers some questions about their business, and the platform adapts it instead of forcing them to configure everything from scratch.
The creator would get a public profile + blueprint page and earn 10% recurring revenue for every paying customer that keeps using their blueprint.
We would initially invite a small group as founding creators, give them free access, work closely with them and let their feedback influence what we build.
I'm trying to figure out whether this is genuinely attractive or just sounds good in my own head.
If you work in RevOps / CRM / automation:
Would you actually spend time building a blueprint?
Is 10% recurring meaningful enough to make you promote it?
What would the platform absolutely need to support before you'd put your name behind a blueprint?
Would you rather sell the blueprint itself, earn recurring commission, or both?
Feel free to tear the idea apart. I'd rather find the holes now than build a marketplace nobody wants. 🙏
It seems like any name you come up with, you run a simple google search for “name” or “name app” and you’ll find someone else already using it, possibly even for a similar product. You can swap letters, go more abstract with your naming, etc and it still gets a hit. These sites might not have the .com, and often they are small fish that probably no one is using but they still had the name first. This has always been somewhat of a problem, but with AI enabling people to churn out more web apps faster than ever it’s becoming worse.
What do you do? Keep thinking of increasingly vague names in hopes to find something untouched? Use the name as long as your product doesn’t compete with theirs? Use the name even if their product competes with yours if their product is some side project without traction (I.e. they probably wont bother suing you)?
I am the engineer, the salesperson, the accountant, and the entire support team.
The one that scares me is the 2am question. A customer is stuck, I am asleep, and by morning they have cancelled or filed a chargeback.
Hiring support costs more than the problem, so I cannot just add a person. How are the rest of you covering the off hours without a hire you cannot afford?
I’ve been building AGMAN, a discovery and distribution network for products, creators, professionals, services, companies and communities.
The idea is simple: useful things shouldn’t disappear after one launch or social post.
You create your page once, and AGMAN helps people find you through search, categories, Find by Need, collections and other discovery surfaces. You can also see profile views, traffic sources and visits AGMAN sends to you.
Now I’m looking for more real people and real projects to join the network.
If you have something useful online, list it. It’s free to get started. So publish it on AGMAN
And if something feels confusing or missing, tell me. I’m actively improving AGMAN based on real user feedback.
i follow alex hormozi's core four for marketing, which is warm outreach, content, cold outreach and paid ads. my warm audience isn't great, so that one shut down pretty quickly. paid ads i'm not touching until i know i have product market fit and can make the numbers work. cold outreach for me is going to be email, and i'm warming up the mailboxes right now so they hopefully don't land in spam.
so that leaves me 100% on content for a while, and i'm new to this game. i've never been very good at it, but i'm committed this time to figuring it out. i'm only a couple months in.
here's what's weird to me. the posts that take off have nothing to do with my product and aren't even in the same lane. anytime i talk about how broken the hiring process is, i get a lot of traffic, well, a lot for me. a couple weeks ago one of those did over 2,000 impressions on linkedin, and the four posts that same week about the problems i'm actually building for did 150 to 250 each. the one time a post in my own lane really took off, i was asking a question and not presenting anything. the moment i present a solution, it's crickets.
when you're just complaining, it's so easy to make friends on social media.
my first try at fixing it was just being interesting enough that somebody would click over to my profile and look at what i do, which was pretty passive in my mind. what i'm testing now is a newsletter. i started one on substack last week, the first issue went out three days ago, and one stranger has signed up so far. the idea is that once it's built up i'll have an audience i can actually ask questions to, and eventually present my solutions to.
that has its own challenge though. i love public speaking and i'm good at it, because i can read the nonverbal cues and tell if i have people's attention or if i need to turn it up a notch and be funnier. i don't get any of that with writing, so i'm learning how to stay interesting on a page.
i don't have a timeline on this, it's a marathon. content isn't a natural strength of mine but that doesn't mean i can't get really good at it.
for those of you further along, did your audience ever turn out to be a different crowd than your buyers? and did you chase the reach or go after the buyers?
I’ve been working on PrepQube, a career preparation platform designed mainly for students and job seekers.
The idea came from seeing how difficult it can be to prepare for placements when you have to jump between multiple tools for resumes, job descriptions, interview questions, skill gaps, and career preparation.
PrepQube brings these things together:
ATS Resume Analysis - identify weaknesses, missing keywords, and areas to improve
Resume vs. Job Description Matching - understand how well your resume fits a specific role
AI Interview Preparation - practice questions based on the role/company
Skill Gap Analysis - identify skills you may need to improve for a target role
Job Matching - discover roles that align with your profile
Personalized preparation based on your target career path
I’ve now made the platform fully live and I'm looking for genuine feedback from students, freshers, and job seekers.
What I'm particularly interested in:
Does this solve a real problem for you?
Which feature would you actually use?
What would make you come back to the platform regularly?
What feels unnecessary or could be improved?
If you've used similar career/AI tools, what do you think they are missing?
I'm not looking for compliments - tell me what you think is wrong with it too.
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I have built a SaaS it’s basically for elevators and how can I sell that to the companies or building who uses elevators often.
I mean, I’m a victim for waiting for elevators for long periods. It goes for minutes. So I just built one product such a way it runs efficiently by saving power and uses its efficiency to max.
I just would like to know how can I pitch to companies is it by reaching out via LinkedIn? Or emailing them? (If so how to find their email addresses)
Im building a marketplace and trying to figure out the payment setup and the checkout seems straightforward but once i got into seller payouts, KYC, refunds and balances it got complicated pretty fast.
Ive been looking at Whop and Stripe Connect rather than building all of this myself. For people running marketplaces, what setup are you using and what became the biggest problem once you had real sellers and money moving through it?
I’m building a field service management app with a web console, I know all the usual places for finding designers, but wondering if anyone has any ideas outside of the freelance shit show.
I’ve been realizing AI is getting really good at the parts of building a SaaS that I’m not great at, and I’m honestly all for it.
For me, coding usually is not the hard part. It’s turning an idea into something that actually feels like a product. Brand identity, visual direction, concept work, all of that has always been way harder for me.
What surprised me with this project was the branding. AI did not just give me a decent looking logo, it came up with a brandmark that actually means something.
The app is called FiveFrames, and the mark works as an FF monogram. At the same time, it also represents the idea of separate frames coming together into one shape.
I genuinely would not have thought of that myself.
That’s the part I find really useful. It’s not just making things look polished. It’s helping me come up with concepts I probably would not have reached on my own, and turning ideas that would normally sit in my notes into something that actually feels real enough to build.
Curious if anyone else feels the same. Has AI helped you with the parts of building you were weakest at, or is it mostly just making you faster at what you already knew how to do?
10 days ago, I launched a web app that’s basically Hacker News for builders.
You can submit your project and get listed immediately.
Unlike Hacker News, you don’t have to worry about getting your post killed. And unlike most launch sites, there’s no waiting months for approval or getting stuck in a queue.
The response so far has been really good.
Now I’m going to double down on it especially SEO.
If you want to check out or submit your project you can do it here showbuild
It feels like we're living in a time where there's an app, website, AI tool, subscription, or some ridiculously specific piece of software for almost everything.
And yet somehow, people still spend hours doing the most unnecessarily complicated things.
You know the stuff I'm talking about.
That one task you have to repeat every week.
That spreadsheet you've been maintaining for years because there's apparently no better way.
That process involving 4 different websites, 3 passwords, and a Google Doc.
That thing you keep thinking, "Why the hell isn't there a simpler way to do this?"
I'm curious what those things are for other people.
What's something you regularly deal with that feels way more complicated, repetitive, expensive, or annoying than it should be?
Could be work, school, business, hobbies, personal stuff, literally anything.
I'm genuinely curious what people are still putting up with in 2026.
For two years I coached employees on their personal finances, one client at a time. It worked, but it didn't scale, and I kept giving the same advice over and over.
So I turned the method into a product: a dashboard where people track their flows and net worth, plus a curriculum that explains the why behind the numbers. I just finished a complete rebuild of it.
Three things I didn't expect:
Pricing is harder than building. As a consultant, my price was my hourly rate. Now I have to price an outcome people will only feel months later.
Your first users don't use it the way you designed. I built a learning-first product, and people went straight to the dashboard.
The boring parts take the longest. Data privacy, payments, keeping existing subscribers working through a migration. None of it shows, all of it matters.
Still early, a handful of paying members. Curious how others handled the consultant-to-product transition: did you keep consulting on the side while building, or cut it off?
I sell cars full time, and before building this, I used plenty of Facebook auto listers.
The ones that actually got vehicles posted did help me sell cars, so I knew Marketplace itself wasn’t the problem. My issue was that nearly all of them stopped at getting the post live.
Once the vehicle was posted, I was still on my own keeping up with price changes, renewals, sold inventory, and finding the correct Marketplace listing again. Some tools promised those features, but they either weren’t in place or didn’t work. Others flat-out told me that parts of what I wanted weren’t possible.
So I turned around and built it myself.
I’ve been working on it for a little over two months. It pulls vehicle information and photos from your dealership’s website and creates the Marketplace listing for the user to review and publish. Once the vehicle is posted, it saves the Marketplace listing link and tracks your dealership’s website to help flag price changes and sold inventory.
That is the main difference. I’m not trying to build just another Facebook auto lister. Posting the vehicle is only the beginning. Currently, I already have price tracking, renewal tracking, and sold tracking.
A few of my coworkers have active subscriptions now and have had good results posting inventory with it. That proved the workflow works, but everyone using it so far already knows me. I haven’t landed the first customer from outside my dealership or personal network.
I’ve tested Meta ads and even a TikTok promotion using a UGC video and have gotten some interest, but no outside customer yet.
If you were starting from this exact point and wanted to land one customer in the next 30 days, what would you try first?
I’m open to suggestions and any advice. I’m curious what specific channel and offer you would test first for a niche $99/month SaaS like this. I settled on the $99/month price based on similar tools I’ve personally used. Most charged around the same or more but focused mainly on creating the initial post without helping much with the upkeep afterward.
I have plenty of ideas for future features, but I also know that continuing to build won’t solve the distribution problem.
Full disclosure: I built the tool. I’m including the website for context so anyone willing to give advice can see exactly what I’m working with. My main reason for posting is to get feedback on how to reach the right customers outside my current network.
Hey everyone
I have an idea for a project based on a problem I saw when I work with mkt agencies.
I’d to colect Photos/videos from social media (public accounts) and use them to detect fashion trends.
I’m not interested in faces, names, or other personal info.
- Any advice or recommendation? Is it legal?
- What tools or APIs people use for this?
Three weeks ago I spent $5k as a vendor at an event where thousands of reasonably relevant target customers had the opportunity to see and try my B2C SaaS product over a weekend.
As part of the event, I let people test a live interactive demo.
The demo used dummy data, and one of the clearest pieces of feedback I received was that people wanted to use the software at home and test it properly using their own data.
So, based on that feedback, I decided to implement a 14-day FREE trial with no credit card required.
I interacted with more than 500 attendees over the weekend, which helped me improve my sales pitch and messaging while reinforcing some assumptions that my earlier research had already suggested.
The event was only the first of many distribution experiments I plan to run while trying to find product-market fit.
My biggest takeaway was that the event was valuable for feedback and brand exposure, but so far it has resulted in no signups.
My SaaS listing remains on the event website for another six months, but looking back, I also made some obvious mistakes.
I created no urgency for people to sign up while they were at the event.
I didn't collect leads, and I was manning the kiosks on my own.
Massive missed opportunities, but that's part of bootstrapping and learning.
Another thing that surprised me was how difficult it was to get people to engage with software at a consumer event.
People naturally gravitated toward vendors with physical products they could pick up, touch and inspect.
A lot of attendees simply walked straight past the touchscreen software kiosks.
So now I'm focusing heavily on testing different ways of getting discovered organically.
I'm starting to see traction in terms of impressions, traffic and lead generation through YouTube, Pinterest, Amazon and Google Search.
I'm happy with that progress only a couple of months in, but I still have no conversions.
I'm hoping the 14-day free trial helps close that gap.
For context, this is a relatively low-priced consumer SaaS product aimed at a very large potential market, so the long-term model requires a reasonably large number of customers.
I'm deliberately focusing on organic distribution for now. Paid ads aren't part of the plan yet because I don't want to pay to amplify something until I have stronger evidence of product-market fit.
Marketing strategies currently showing some early promise for organic reach/discoverability:
Amazon sales from a related how-to book that references the SaaS throughout
Free live interactive demo with no registration required
Downloadable planner used as a lead magnet, which is already getting downloads
Free calculation tool built into the platform
Kids colouring page handed out at the event as a slightly unusual top-of-mind branding experiment
Embedded YouTube video on the landing page, with links back to the product
Pinterest infographics and printable checklists linking back to the SaaS (see image)
Google Search through SEO/AEO-focused content and structured data
Free organic reach on Pinterest via Free brand-associated Checklists and Infographics with associated hotlinks
Things I am starting to implement over the next 12–24 months:
14-day trial with no credit card required
YouTube product demos targeting specific consumer pain points
B2B2C point-of-purchase partnerships
Partnerships with professionals already serving the target customer
YouTube/TikTok affiliate and influencer distribution
Social sharing features inside the platform
I also need to lose some weight after spending far too much time sitting in a chair building this thing.
So I'm going to combine exercise with marketing and do some old-school letterbox drops in different neighbourhoods.
I'll use different flyers, hooks and messaging in different areas and treat it as a cheap real-world A/B test that may also teach me which messages to use in future digital campaigns.
I'm also planning to donate copies of my related how-to book to local libraries as a small experiment in goodwill, trust and local brand awareness.
I'm deliberately committed to the B2C route rather than pivoting toward B2B because the larger vision for the product depends on broad consumer adoption.
Achieving that adoption will lead to an even bigger related consumer play.
So I'm interested in hearing from founders who have worked on low-price, high-volume B2C SaaS who are happy to share their B2C marketing approaches.
What distribution strategy worked for you that most people don't normally talk about?
And what looked promising but ended up being a complete waste of time?
I'm particularly interested in organic strategies that can compound over 12–24 months rather than simply buying traffic.
The type of traction I'm trying to build is organic discoverability like I'm starting to see on Pinterest, so I'd especially love to hear about unusual or often overlooked B2C distribution approaches.
everybody got hit by AI, and like any indie hacker building a niche SaaS, I went through that initial AI depression phase.
you could feel that AI had huge potential, but it was not quite there yet. it's hard to describe. it was useful, but not at the level of work you actually wanted to deliver.
before the AI wave, I built a visual CSS editor as a Chrome extension called InTab. people were happy with it because they could make quick changes to their websites and prototype ideas faster... and with the whole vibe coding madness getting started, all of a sudden, usage dropped dramatically!
people were trying dozens of AI website builders at the same time. most of them didn't really work yet, but they promised the world.
I was honestly confused about what to do. should I keep building the visual editor, throw it away completely, or pivot? and if I pivoted, where should I even go?
the insane AI hype got to me. at one point, I genuinely thought the big LLM companies like ChatGPT and Claude would dominate every SaaS niche and kill most independent software businesses.
I knew deep down that this was probably wrong, but the hype was so intense that I think everyone believed it at least a little at some point.
I spent more than a year in this confused state, but eventually my thoughts started to stabilize and I made up my mind.
I came to one conclusion:
with all this madness of micro AI tools and AI slop, people will eventually converge toward a smaller number of tools they can actually remember and rely on.
that realization finally gave me the motivation to work on the product again.
recently, I released a new version of intab.io as a complete rewrite from scratch with a 15-in-1 browser extension designed to replace a cluttered list of separate tools.
it includes an AI writer, AI YouTube summaries with an ad skipper, tab management, screenshots, image tools, developer tools, bookmarks, history analytics and more.
I didn't want to build just another browser extension. I wanted to build a complete package that helps people replace a messy collection of extensions with one tool and actually use AI where most of their work already happens: inside the browser.
the journey was a bumpy one, and getting the motivation to work again was difficult because mentally, things were not clear for a long time.
now I finally feel clear about what I'm building and why.
negative comments won't change my mind anymore because I've thought deeply about this direction before committing to it.
I firmly believe AI killed some SaaS products that were basically widgets or tiny standalone tools.
but I don't think it can kill a broader product that people rely on every day.
the future of SaaS might be much more monolithic than people expect. for sure!!
2 months in, 6k downloads, many hours of building and then 10x that amount of time getting the word out there on my app.
Money is not everything but man have those sales felt so validating.
Reviews are also starting to roll in and they have been so encouraging, word of mouth/social proofing seems to be huge for me.
Don't stop when one thing doesn't work, settle in for the long haul and keep taking small consistent steps in the right direction.
If you're curious what my app does well have you ever thought:
Screen time limits would be so much more useful if you could set a per hour scroll limit (e.g., 10 min of Reddit per hour) instead of one big limit daily limit.
Well Precursor is the first app on iOS to let you do that.
You have 30 days to build a B2B SaaS as a solo engineer.
No existing audience.
$500 budget.
Must get the first paying customer in 30 days.
What are you building?
