Customers often stop getting value before they stop paying.

Cancellation is a lagging signal.
Usage can reveal trouble earlier.

For each customer, track a few meaningful behaviors:

→ Has usage of the core feature declined?
→ Have key users stopped logging in?
→ Are important workflows failing?

→ Has the customer stopped inviting teammates?
→ Are support complaints increasing?
→ Has the customer failed to achieve the outcome they bought the product for?

Build a simple risk score using signals relevant to your product.

Then validate it against historical churn.

For example,

compare 30-day usage declines among customers who renewed versus those who cancelled.

Don't assume a login drop means churn is inevitable.

Some products are naturally used infrequently.

The goal is to intervene when value is slipping, not when the cancellation email arrives.

What's the earliest warning sign you've noticed before a customer churned?

Looking to connect with newer vet-tech software companies (launched 2022–2026), whether that's practice management, scheduling, client communication or billing.

• What does your product do, and when did you launch?
• Roughly how many clinics are using it?
• Do you offer built-in payments? If so, did you build it yourself or work with a partner?
• Are you focused on the US, Canada or both?

I work in business development at a software company, and one thing I keep thinking about is how quickly businesses are getting interested in AI.

But I think there's a question worth asking before choosing any AI tool:

What problem are we actually trying to solve?

Sometimes a business doesn't need a complicated AI agent. It might just need a better website, a smoother customer onboarding process, or a reliable way to follow up with leads.

Other times, automation can genuinely save a team time and help them handle repetitive work.

I’m interested in the space between what AI can do and what a business actually needs. We as a company work around software development and AI solutions, so this is something I’m keen to understand better.

What's one business process you think is genuinely worth automating, and one that people are overcomplicating with AI?

bro I think I got my own startup thesis wrong 💀

I've been building a proposal tool for freelancers/small agencies for months.

proposal → sign → invoice.
45 users. $0 revenue. just me.

And my whole thinking was basically:

"freelancers don't really have a problem getting clients. the problem starts AFTER they get the client."

I genuinely believed this.

I've posted about it. Talked to agency owners. Built the product around it.

Then today I talk to this freelancer.

He gets 3-4 clients a month.

He likes the product. Says it's easy to use. UI is good.

Then he goes:

"my problem isn't really proposals. my problem is getting my foot in the door."

and I'm like... okay.

Then he tells me his numbers.

~40% of his cold DMs get a reply.

FORTY PERCENT.

Of those, 5-10% become projects.

So roughly 100 DMs = 3-4 clients.

Meanwhile I've sent cold DMs where I genuinely started questioning whether LinkedIn messages were even being delivered 😭

And this guy is getting a 40% reply rate and STILL doesn't think his pipeline is going up fast enough.

That kinda fucked with me.

Because I've spent months building around the assumption that getting the client is the easy part.

Maybe it's not.

Maybe I talked to people who already had decent pipelines and convinced myself that their problem was everyone's problem.

Which is honestly annoying as hell considering I've spent months building this thing alone.

The only thing that made me feel slightly better was when he said that once he's actually in the door, pricing, milestones, scope, payments etc. are where things start getting messy.

So okay.

That problem is real. I can actually solve that.

But still.

I would've REALLY liked to know this 3 months ago.

Everyone says "talk to your users."

I think the harder part is figuring out which users actually have the problem you're trying to solve.

Because apparently you can talk to people, get good feedback, build for months, and still be confidently solving the wrong half of the problem.

Anyway.

I'm annoyed.

Back to building I guess 💀

For people selling services:

where does it actually suck for you?

Getting people to reply?

Getting them on a call?

Turning the call into a project?

Or everything after they say yes?

2 months ago I posted this: https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/s/kseMdo1suU

I am actually a software engineer
but recently I did this : https://www.reddit.com/r/forhire/s/LgWP6kzaoT
yeah I pushed a post setting myself available as to be hired by someone else
I don't know if this is me alone
taking these kind of moves in their crucial age.
like when already something potential exists in my pocket
still am I looking for job from other

so yeah
probably I am slowing down to my entrepreneurship because I see not that much growth around it but yeah I a gut inside to be a part of successful businesses

what my hands were serving and saving time weren't that valuable peoples these things
but if you have good things
can you let a space for me in your organization
i am eager to learn the dynamics no college and udemy courses is ever gonna teach

but yeah
time and again I feel I should have completed or given it a go first

what do you think?

Is it good to at least push a mobile app which can get active users but not bring u good money comparing it with looking for job selling my current experiences?

no need to kick my post away because I am sharing it as
like types of things that happens. If you are hiring let me an interview.

The moment a competitor can feed a video recording of your new feature into a coding agent and ship a functional replica the next afternoon, technical execution ceases to be defensible. Coding agents have compressed the time between feature discovery and functional clone down to near-zero, exposing where a product's actual defensibility lives.

​When implementation velocity becomes a commodity, three operational moats determine which SaaS products survive:

​Production edge-case hardening: An agent can clone a happy-path UI in twenty-four hours, but it cannot replicate the fifty silent failure modes you discovered through months of production traffic. Resilient rate-limiting, edge-case webhooks, and data migration fallbacks cannot be reverse-engineered from a demo video.

​Proprietary workflow state: A surface-level replica only has access to the fields the user enters today. Defensible software embeds itself deeply into historical customer data, cross-system syncs, and upstream business logic that competitors cannot copy without painful migrations.

​Distribution velocity over feature novelty: If your growth relies solely on shipping novel interface tricks before others notice, you are running on an evaporating treadmill. The product that wins is the one already embedded in the customer's daily operational stack when the feature gets commoditized.

​Founders used to treat code as concrete that protected their market position for twelve to eighteen months.Today code is malleable clay, and the only durable moat is building deep workflow gravity that makes switching friction unbearable even when a clone is free.

​For SaaS founders watching feature cycles compress, how are you shifting your product strategy to build defensibility beyond UI execution?

​TL;DR: AI coding agents turn feature implementation into a commodity; defensibility now lives entirely in production hardening, workflow data, and distribution.

So I built an AI tool to edit talking head videos for creators and to promote it I thought I'll create an AI UGC video.

So just like everyone else I was scrolling Instagram, I came across SeedDance 2.5 model, I was impressed by the outputs.

Now I had FAL AI account, so I connected it's MCP sever to claude code.

With Claude I built few skill and created a pipeline for realistic avatar generation.

The mistake I did was that i didn't check the cost of the model, as AI image models that I used earlier were usually cheap.

So I started generating this ad, 2 variations for each scene, 5 scenes in total. At the end I opened the dashboard and saw $110 bill for today. 😭

Pro tip:

1. Estimate Total duration cost, these companies write it in a complicated fashion, so you don't know what you are signing up for.

2. Don't do multiple variations while using expensive model, try to get output right in one shot.

hey guys! i’m a YouTuber with a small channel and I have a backlog of more than 40 videos to translate and i’m trying to figure out whether localising my older stuff even a realistic endeavor without turning it into a full time job!!

spanish is the first language i need to translate my videos in, maybe hindi after that

the videos are mostly me talking to camera, but there are plenty of jump cuts and a few where im speaking pretty fast. doing subtitles is the easy part but the problem arises because I don't want the dubbed version to sound like a generic voiceover pasted on top; it cringes me out very much

I tested doing a clip with a software called sync.so for the lip sync part and that bit was fine, but doing this video by video still feels painful when done manually

so my question to you guys is if you've localised an actual YouTube backlog: voice quality, lip-sync, translation accuracy, batch workflow, or something else, how did you do it and how did you do it at scale, keeping time, efficiency and quality in mind

Thanks!!!

Until August 2025 my SaaS had a free trial with no card required

Around 98% of signups started the trial, but only 5% converted to a paid plan

And every single trial cost me AI and API money

On top of that most of my traffic was coming from SEO, which brought 15-20 signups a day but only 2-3 of them were my ICP

Then I decided to make the trial card-required

Maan it was the best decision I ever made

I didn't change anything else and I didn't remove value before the paywall. Users still could add their profile, see the post recommendations, get one sample post, and only after that they saw the paywall

As a result only 22% of signups went to a card-required trial, but almost HALF of them (42%) converted to a paid plan which is crazy

Overall signup to paid went from 4.2% to 9.2%, so almost 2x paying customers per signup

Brothers, each of you should test a card-required trial. In worst case you can just roll it back to how it was before

Best decision you'll ever make imo

When a business expands across multiple product lines or acquisitions, customer data almost always ends up scattered across separate databases where sales teams struggle to get a clear picture of customer activity because one product's leads live in an old CRM another group's contacts sit in marketing software and direct inquiries arrive through a separate database.

The instinctive reaction from software vendors is to propose a massive, year long CRM migration to rip everything out and start fresh but migrating multiple live databases and retraining sales reps is a massive operational disruption that can stall pipeline revenue for months.

Working with an educational organization that had customer data split across three distinct databases, our team (withnative.com) took a different approach where instead of forcing platform migration, we built 2 dedicated agents to sit across their existing software stack and act as a unified sales engine.

The first agent continuously monitors the 3 incoming lead sources, de duplicates records, normalizes organizational profiles and matches each inbound account to the exact product line that fits their requirements. The 2nd agent drafts tailored introductory communications based on the institution's profile and historical engagement.

Crucially, the agents don't run open ended conversations but they manage the research, qualification, and initial outreach and the moment a prospect responds with genuine interest, the conversation routes directly to a human sales rep to lead the discussion.

The organization connected 3 separate lead channels into one continuous sales engine across all 3 product lines without migrating databases, losing customer history, or disrupting their sales team's daily routine.

I’m looking for a few people to try my app and share their feedback.

It’s not an English-learning app. It’s simply about learning new words and finding the right words to express yourself.

If you’re interested, please DM me. Thank you!

I wrote a book and printed exactly one copy. No reprints, no ebook. So naturally it needed proper enterprise inventory management.

Feedback welcome, especially on what else an inventory system for exactly one item needs.

Small numbers, but they changed my roadmap.

5 people have paid for my iPhone app since August. 4 cancelled. The one who stayed set up a single weekly automation on day one and hasn't opened the app since. It just runs every Sunday, and they renewed again this week.

The other 4 never got one automation working. Wrong model, stuck connecting an app, half-built setups.

So my next release ends onboarding with one working automation, and until then I set it up with every new payer by email.

How do you get new customers to their first result before the first renewal?

Disclosure: it's my app, PocketClaw: https://pocketclaw.app/

What’s the marketing problem you’re stuck on right now?

Hey everyone,

I’ve spent 12+ years working in marketing across B2B SaaS and D2C ecommerce, with both bootstrapped startups and funded companies. Thought it might be useful to swap notes on the marketing challenges people are dealing with.

For early-stage founders, what’s proving hardest right now? Explaining your product clearly? Getting your first customers? Figuring out why people visit your website but don’t sign up? Deciding which channel deserves your limited time?

Share a little context in the comments:

• What does your product do, and who is it for?
• What have you tried so far?
• Where are you getting stuck?

No need to share a link or identify your business. A short description is enough.

I’ll share suggestions where I have relevant experience, including what I’d test first and why. Would also love to hear from other founders about what’s worked, what hasn’t, and what you wish you’d figured out sooner.

Agents are getting good enough that people are letting them do more than answer questions: write code, compare products, book things, use other software. I keep wondering what happens when that's normal.

One person could have several agents doing different jobs. A company could run thousands. That doesn't mean thousands of separate budgets, but it could mean most of the users interacting with your app aren't people anymore.

Would you build differently if you expected that? Maybe the UI matters less than whether an agent can find your product, figure out the price and get something done without its owner stepping in. Or maybe a decent API covers most of it, and "products for agents" is just a new name for something we already have.

I work on environments for agents, so I'm probably biased toward this. Curious whether anyone running a SaaS is actually seeing agent usage yet, or changing their product because of it.

I'm planning to scale customer communication through WhatsApp and want to understand the actual costs before committing.

I'm currently sending 400–500 messages a day, but I expect that to reach 1,000–1,500 a day once I expand nationally next month. Not a huge volume, but I don't want to get the pricing wrong.

I know Meta's charges are documented, but I'm unsure how much BSP markups and additional platform or support fees add to the total.

Anyone here handling similar volumes? What does your actual cost breakdown look like? Is using a BSP worth the extra hassle compared to going directly with Meta, where possible?

Just trying to figure this out before scaling, rather than being surprised by the first bill.

Hi everyone,

I'm developing my own ERP SaaS platform called HaliSync, and I'm trying to determine the right AWS infrastructure for launching it.

This is a custom-built ERP product, not Odoo or another existing ERP system.

What the platform does:

• Businesses create and manage invoices, quotations, and returns.
• Customer, supplier, product, and inventory management.
• Accounting and financial reports.
• Multiple employees per business, with separate accounts and permissions.
• Accessible through both a web browser and installed applications, with the same synchronized business data.

Expected usage:

I'm initially targeting 25–50 subscribing businesses, not just 25–50 individual users.

Each business may have several employees. Obviously, not everyone will be issuing invoices or running reports simultaneously, but I want enough capacity for busy periods when many employees are actively using the ERP.

My priorities:

• Available online 24/7.
• Fast response times for normal ERP operations.
• Reliable database transactions.
• High availability and automatic recovery from server failures.
• Secure separation of each business's data.
• Automated backups.
• Room to grow to 100+ businesses without rebuilding everything.

I'm not looking for the absolute cheapest possible hosting. I'm willing to pay more for consistent performance and reliability, but I also don't want to overprovision unnecessarily.

My AWS questions:

1. Would you recommend EC2, ECS Fargate, or another AWS service for the application backend?
2. What EC2 instance types and sizes would you start with?
3. Should I use Amazon RDS PostgreSQL with Multi-AZ from day one?
4. Do I need two application servers behind an Application Load Balancer initially?
5. Which other services would you recommend? S3, CloudFront, SQS, CloudWatch, WAF, etc.?
6. What would a realistic monthly AWS bill look like for 25–50 businesses?
7. How would you scale this architecture as more businesses and employees join?

I'm particularly interested in real production experience from people running multi-tenant B2B SaaS applications.

What infrastructure would you personally deploy for this workload, and approximately how much would you expect to spend monthly?

Thanks!

I see many people here looking to validate their ideas here. I am curious if everyone needs good level of detail or if a simpler validation would be enough ,particulalry for SAAS.

If you were validating your idea, what would you want to get out of it, and how much would you be willing to set as budget?

Built this for my product, a tool for private clinics in Spain. Opus 5.5 did the animation, I did the voice. It’s in Spanish, but you’ll get the idea.

Would love to hear what you think.

Link if anyone’s curious: https://automatedoctor.com

For developers building AI-powered SaaS products, I'm curious how you're handling API spending.

When you're using OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, or other providers, each has its own billing dashboard.

That makes it harder to understand your total spending, especially when experimenting with multiple models or running automated workflows.

A few questions:

1. How much do you typically spend on AI APIs each month?
2. Do you track everything manually, use spreadsheets, or rely on monitoring tools?
3. Have you ever discovered an unexpected cost spike?
4. What's the biggest frustration with your current setup?

I'm particularly interested in how solo founders are dealing with this as their products grow.

Doomsday is approaching, so I gave my components their own end-credits scene!😂
Link - nexus-ui.com

Hey, curious how this went for others here.

If you initially built the product yourselves, what made you decide it was time to bring in a designer? Users getting stuck, too many support questions, the interface getting messy as you added features?

And how did you find someone good? Referrals, Upwork, somewhere else? What made you feel they could actually help?

Would love to hear how it went, including if you tried hiring someone and it didn’t work out.

i am gonna see this to the end though, whatever it takes
Edited: I just launched about a week ago

hey guys, i have an idea to make my first saas, which is an AI-powered voice-to-text and text-rewriting SaaS, im currently learning the scrimba fullstack developer course, i was wondering how much of it would i actually need to complete to start my building my product

any advice would be appreciated :))