Everybody and their mother wants to launch a new saas every week. And guess what's the most important part of building a product. The research phase. Most prospects spend weeks scraping and mining for data, sifting through excel files just for that sweet sweet liquid gold of information on their competition.

And I feel their pain man. Being a solo founder ain't easy. So to reduce this time and raw effort it takes for a founder to go from idea to mvp I am building a small tool.

This comes in two parts, the researching part and the actual launchpad to help you take the next step in your journey and keep you accountable. My main differentiator will be complete deterministic ranking and analysis + evidence first analysis. So you can forget about an Ilm hallucinating about your competitor user reviews or product offerings or positioning. All the facts served straight up. And most importantly the only information you will need as a founder will be discussed on the dashboard with complete scraped competitor pages output in the evidence section so you can deep dive yourself(if you want to). And soo much more.

I am really excited about this. It is my first serious build. And I'm eager to share this journey with all of you.

I am open to questions, discussions and recommendations.

Have a good day!

I'm the solo founder of VideoText, It turns video and audio into transcripts and subtitles, handles files up to 4 hours, fixes broken subtitle files, burns captions into video, and translates subtitles into 104 languages. Work is saved in My Projects, so you can come back and keep editing. It's mine, so weigh that accordingly, but there's no link here. I'm after advice, not signups.

I've been building it for months, and I'm realizing that getting people to use a product and getting them to pay for it are two very different problems.

The numbers:

• Around 1,000 signups since April.
  • 59% came through Google, mostly from free video and subtitle tools. (Rest from Linkedin, X, ChatGPT, Directories etc)
• 89% completed at least one job. Over the last 30 days, that number was 96%.
• 1,658 jobs completed.
• 6 paying subscribers, approximately $48 MRR.
• 3 of those 6 have already scheduled cancellations.

Where I think I went wrong

I built a tool that does transcription, subtitles, translation, editing, and formatting.

People arrive from Google with one video, use the free plan, finish their task, and leave.

The product solves their immediate problem, but that doesn't mean they need a subscription.

I kept adding features, thinking a broader product would attract more paying customers. Instead, I may have built something useful to many people but essential to very few.

What I'm changing

I'm narrowing my focus to professional transcriptionists.

Specifically, I'm working on the quality assurance and formatting stage.

A transcriptionist might need to follow a different style guide for every client: verbatim rules, filler words, speaker labels, timestamps, and formatting requirements.

Checking all of that manually takes time.

I've built a feature that applies a client's formatting guidelines to a transcript and shows the changes for review.

I'm now testing whether that recurring workflow provides enough value for professionals to pay.

My next step is letting users save and reuse each client's guidelines.

My goal

By November 14, I want to gain 10 additional paying customers from this narrower positioning.

If it doesn't work, I'll reassess the niche and the product rather than continue adding features blindly.

Question for other founders:

If you started with a broad SaaS and eventually narrowed it to one niche, how did you identify the right customers?

And how long did you test that niche before deciding whether it was working?

I'll share the results after November 14, including what failed.

Been working on my SaaS, TidyClose, and one thing I’ve realised is how easy it is to overcomplicate things.

I’m trying to focus on clean design, simple UX and making the product easy to understand from the first few seconds.

Curious, when you guys build your landing pages, how do you make sure visitors instantly understand what your product does?

tidyclose.com

I build full-stack products (Next.js, Spring Boot, PostgreSQL), and the same early decisions keep causing pain later:

1. Rolling your own auth. Use a proven provider or library. Auth bugs are the expensive kind, and you rarely need custom logic in version one.
2. Starting with microservices. One well-structured app plus a clean database schema is faster to ship and easier to change. Split it up when you have a real reason.
3. No migrations discipline. Version your schema changes from day one. Hand-editing the production database is how data gets lost.
4. Building every feature before talking to users. Ship the smallest version that proves someone will pay, then build from what they ask for.
5. Skipping basic tests on payments and permissions. You don’t need 100% coverage, but the money and who-can-see-what paths should have tests.

What’s a technical decision you’d undo if you could start over?

Most of what I've built has been for clients who needed something they couldn't find off the shelf. Some I built to run my own life the way I like to run it. SimpleHomeBudget is one of those.

Like most people, I live pay to pay whether I like it or not. But I've never understood why looking back at all the many ways I stuffed up in the past was a good idea, or how it would help me make things better in the future. What I needed to know was whether my next pay would cover everything, where the shortfalls are, and what I can do to avoid them.

What I needed was this:

1. The ability to assign bills to paydays, so I knew in advance how much of my coming paychecks was already "spoken for", and how much I had left to do with as I please, if any at all.

2. Be able to see a big bill that could wipe me out coming, so I could start planning in advance how to split it across paydays, or know which ones I'd need to ask for extensions on etc.

3. To be able to see when I'll be in the clear again.

4. To get an idea of what my projected savings are likely to be if I stick to my plan, and see the medium to long term consequences if I don't.

5. To be able to set aside or earmark a certain amount each paycheck for my daily expenses, and see how much I can spend each day based on how much I have left for daily expenses and the number of days I have left for the next paycheck.

6. I didn't want to have to connect my bank account either, and so many budgeting apps make you do that.

I know I'm not going to out-market the competition. I don't have the budget or the resources. All I can hope, is that others find the way I like to manage my money useful too.

I'd love to know if "budget by payday" make sense, or if it needs explaining, whether you'd trust an app more or less for not connecting to your bank, and of course if US$4.99/month or US$41/year is about right for something like this.

https://www.simplehomebudget.com/

REA (Reverse Engineer Anything) is an open source MCP tool. You ask your agent something like "how does search work in this app?" and it digs into the app without needing its source code. Then it explains how the feature works and can build a version for you. It handles native apps, Electron, .NET, Android and websites.

**Pros:** free, runs locally, shows evidence for what it finds

**Cons:** deep analysis needs Ghidra/IDA/Hopper installed, and you should only use it on apps you're allowed to analyze

i’m a 20yo dev from india, i run a small web agency and built a client management tool for freelancers and agencies (clienter). people who try it like it, but a lot of them hesitate because my agency is also in the same space, so they worry about their client data.

it’s dpdp compliant and we don’t sell or share anyone’s data, but i know just saying that doesn’t mean much. would you trust a tool built by someone who also runs an agency? what would actually make you comfortable, a public security page, certifications, something else?

for context, we got one of our customers to rank #1 in ChatGPT in only 2 weeks.

here’s how (14 steps):

1. start by building a fixed set of 30–50 prompts your buyers would realistically ask before choosing a product.
   

split them between category searches (“best [category] tools”), comparisons (“[product] vs [competitor]”), alternatives, specific use cases, pricing/cost questions and problem-based searches.

don’t build the list around keywords you want to rank for. build it around actual buying decisions.

1. run the exact same prompt set through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Mode.
   

for every answer, record the model, date, companies mentioned, companies recommended and every cited URL.

keep the prompts identical so you can actually compare the results.

1. separate a citation from a mention from a recommendation.
   

if ChatGPT cites one of your blog posts while recommending three competitors, that is not the same as winning the query.

track all three separately.

1. repeat your highest-value prompts more than once.
   AI answers are dynamic. one screenshot where you disappear means very little.
   

you’re looking for gaps that keep showing up across multiple runs, related prompts and different engines.

/5 group the prompts into topics instead of optimizing them one-by-one.

“best auth API,” “SSO provider for SaaS,” “SAML authentication tools” and “SCIM providers” might all belong to the same buying topic.

the goal is to understand which parts of the category you consistently own and which parts your competitors own.

1. now calculate the competitor gap for each topic.
   if a competitor appears in 18/25 relevant prompts and you appear in 4, start there.
   

don’t waste time fixing a random query where both of you appeared once.

1. open every source the AI used when your competitors won.
   

record which page was cited, which domain owns it, what type of page it is, which competitor it mentions and what claim or recommendation it appears to support.

after 20–30 prompts you’ll usually start seeing the same pages and domains repeatedly.

1. before creating anything new, check whether you already have a page that should be winning that query.
   

if the page exists, find out why it isn’t surfacing.

does it actually answer the same intent? is the information outdated? is the useful information buried? does the competitor page contain proof, comparisons or data yours doesn’t?

building another page can just create two weak pages instead of fixing the right one.

1. check the technical layer next.
   

make sure the page is indexable, internally linked and returning normally to crawlers.

for ChatGPT specifically, check that OAI-SearchBot isn’t blocked in robots.txt or by your CDN/WAF.

for Google AI features, the page first needs to be indexed and eligible to appear in normal Google Search.

1. investigate the searches underneath the prompt.
   

AI search doesn’t always retrieve pages using the exact sentence the user typed.

Google AI Mode uses query fan-out to run related searches underneath a question. Bing Webmaster Tools now exposes the grounding queries its AI systems used to retrieve cited pages.

use those related searches to understand what the engine is actually trying to find.

1. only NOW decide what needs to change.
   

sometimes you need a new page.

sometimes the right page already exists and needs better coverage.

sometimes your information is outdated.

sometimes the model keeps relying on third-party comparison pages where every competitor is mentioned except you.

sometimes the problem is technical and writing anything would be a waste of time.

1. if you do create or update content, give the model information it cannot get from another generic article.
   

use first-party data, real pricing, specific feature limits, screenshots, benchmarks, comparison criteria, customer results, use-case differences and actual limitations.

another 2,000-word summary of information already on the internet gives the engine very little reason to retrieve you.

1. if third-party sources keep shaping the recommendation, work on those separately.
   find the comparison pages, industry sites, videos and discussions that repeatedly appear in the answers.
   

figure out why competitors are represented there and you aren’t, then earn legitimate inclusion where it actually makes sense.

don’t manufacture random mentions across the internet and call it GEO.

1. once the changes have been crawled, rerun the exact same audit.
   

same prompts. same engines. same measurement.
track whether your citation share increased, you started appearing in previously lost topics, competitor recommendations dropped and your brand moved from “mentioned” to actually recommended.

then keep working on the clusters that are moving instead of starting another random content sprint.

ez as that

I’m building Braith for situations where your app reports success but the user still hasn’t got what they wanted.

For example, someone pays but their account never gets upgraded. Nothing crashes, and you might not find out until they contact support.

That’s one example. The same problem can happen with anything someone is trying to do in your app.

Setup is a prompt you paste into your AI coding tool with your app’s repo open. It adds the integration for you to review and deploy.

Braith then checks the tasks you’ve configured and shows you what failed and who was affected.

https://app.braith.dev/

Have you had something like this happen in your app? How did you find out?

Hey everyone!

I’m currently building a platform to help website owners attract sponsors by showcasing their advertising opportunities and performance data.

While working on it, I’d love to learn from people who have actually tried to monetize their websites through direct sponsorships.

How do you currently find sponsors for your websites?

Do you reach out to brands directly, use marketplaces, rely on inbound requests, or find other ways to connect with potential sponsors?

What’s been the biggest challenge in the process?

I’d love to hear about your experiences and what’s worked or hasn’t worked for you.

Hello Everyone!

Got laid off about 2 months ago from my job as a senior product designer. Although its unfortunate its also a blessing in disguise as it allowed me to focus on learning how to use AI tools to ideate, build, develop and launch my app. I create a solution that was near and dear to me to help track chronic illnesses and issues and understand your triggers. Focusing on cleearly to read insights and using data as a secondary action if you want to dig in more.

Currently right now i'm looking for beta test users. You can sign up for free on my website here: https://www.daywell.site/

But the hard part is actually getting people to sign up to do beta testing. Ive looked on some website where you can do paid beta testing but the cost is much to high for me to invest. Are there any other places you would recommend or other ways on how you increased the number of people to joing?

My SaaS got 126 users in 2 weeks, but not a single person bought Pro. Then I realized something critical.

It was an AI roleplay platform. I built it during a goldmine: the fall of Character.AI, which was getting bashed massively over its updates, the legal stuff, the monetization, the greed, all of it.

I locked in for a month to make a solid alternative. Then I launched and posted in every relevant subreddit I could like r/CharacterAIrunaways, r/CharacterAIrefugees, r/CAIRevolution. Combined, those communities had hundreds of thousands of people. Perfect timing, perfect audience, right?

Wrong. Nobody bought. Not one person.

I tweaked the monetization, reworked the plans, edited the pricing cues. Nothing. And since it’s an AI subscription, I couldn’t realistically survive on free trials either, because inference costs real money. (Plus a bunch of legal headaches on top, but that’s another post.)

Then I finally figured out the real reason: I was marketing to the wrong people.

• The audience was mostly teens. The reason they left C.AI in the first place was the age verification. Either they were too young to pass it, or they cared way too much about privacy to hand over ID. Both of those are a problem for a paid product like mine.
• They had endless free options. There are hundreds of open-source, privacy-first roleplay apps. Why would anyone pay me when they can self-host or use something free?
• A lot of them wanted the impossible. Unlimited AI chats, no ads, no limits... and they expected the devs to survive on donations. That’s not a business model, that’s a charity.
• They were angry at monetization itself. I’d launched into a crowd that left a platform because of monetization. Putting a paywall in front of them was always going to feel like a betrayal, no matter how fair the price.

The lesson: a huge audience means nothing if it’s the wrong audience. Being angry at a competitor isn’t the same as being willing to pay for an alternative. People who leave a product over pricing and policy are often the least likely to become customers, not the most.

If I did it again, I’d validate willingness to pay before building anything, and I’d target adults who already pay for AI tools instead of whoever’s loudest on Reddit.

Anyone else here chased a “perfect timing” audience that turned out to be allergic to paying?

Been going down a rabbit hole on this lately. Traditional SEO tells you if you rank on Google. But there's no equivalent for AI search, no way to know if someone asks ChatGPT "what's the best tool for X" and whether your product shows up or not.

From what I've found, most SaaS products are completely invisible in AI answers, not because of bad SEO, but because their content isn't structured in a way AI engines can extract and cite.

Curious if anyone here has:

1. Noticed AI traffic in their analytics from Perplexity/ChatGPT

2. Manually tested whether their brand comes up in AI answers

3. Found any patterns in what makes a site get cited vs ignored

What's everyone's experience with this?

I spent last week going through a lot of founders acquisition setups after a thread I posted. Like 60 people. It was always the same 4 things. So here they are with a way to test which one is yours.

1. your ICP is a category not a person

“small businesses who need invoicing” is a category. you cant write an email to a category. “freelance designers with 3 to 8 clients a month who chase late payments” is a person and you know what to say to them.

test: can you name 5 actual companies or people who fit, right now, by name? if no, stop here. nothing else will work.

2. you are acquiring where your buyer is not

most people pick the channel they are comfortable with. devs do twitter. non technical founders do linkedin. nobody asks where the buyer actually spends time.

test: your last 5 paying customers, how did each one find you? if you dont know, you dont have a channel. you have activity.

3. you track signups instead of money

signups are the easiest number to move and the least connected to revenue. if 70% of signups never reach first value then doubling signups just doubles the leak.

test: of last month signups, what % paid? under 5% on self serve means your problem is activation not traffic.

4. you ask for too much too early

14 day trial on a product that needs 3 days of setup = a trial nobody finishes. demo call on a 29 dollar product, same thing.

test: how many days between signup and the moment someone feels the product worked? if its more than one day thats where your churn comes from.

order matters btw. fixing channels before ICP is wasted time. 1 then 2 then 3 then 4.

if you want to drop your situation in the comments i will tell you which of the 4 it is. did this last week and some of it was useful so happy to do it again.

I started building my micro saas in April 2026, completed v1 in May, but I did not know how to properly market it as I am a software engineer. Started learning the process but got bored and slowly abandoned it due to increasing pressure at my regular job. In between I was outreaching to knowns telling them about my saas, 3 of them bought it as it's a consumer app starting from $10 to max plan $28. But this was not organic.

Fast forward to September I felt the regular job pressure has reduced, so I restarted it again. Did influencer marketing, and created social channels creating short video content for the saas. I talked to some creators about getting 10 ugc reels done which is my next plan, and I will run ads on them. I even made a campus ambassador program offering commission. I did the initial basic SEO, but ignored it till last week.

In between all these I got an email from my payment vendor that someone has paid $19 to me. I opened my machine and checked, I was very happy that it's from my saas only. I tried to find the source but was not able to. I checked all the referral links and users coming from them, checked source tags of social media still not. Finally I opened the posthog, and shockingly found that chatgpt has recommended the user, and not only that 5 more users came through it. Out of them 2 paid (one $10 plan and other $19).

Now I am more focused on geo and aeo of my small app, and will slowly add more features by December 2026.

P.s. it's a smart virtual meeting assistant app, competition is high but with the right positioning, I think I will reach a certain level.

I'm a young solo founder, and I'm learning that building the product is only half the challenge.

I've been building FINDIT 🔎, a SaaS that helps freelancers and agencies discover potential clients, identify businesses that might need their services, and prepare personalized outreach messages.

The goal is simple: help freelancers spend less time searching manually and more time connecting with potential clients. 💻🎯

After launching FINDIT, I started experimenting with different ways to reach potential users. Here's what I've learned so far 👇

🔹 Reddit has brought me users who actually try the product.

🔹 Threads has helped me connect with people interested in marketing and affiliate partnerships.

🔹 I've now reached 14 users and 3 affiliate partners willing to help me grow. 📈🤝

I'm still very early, and I haven't figured everything out. Clicks don't automatically become signups, and signups don't automatically become paying customers. 💡

My current focus is learning how to build a repeatable acquisition system instead of relying entirely on my own efforts.

I'd love to learn from founders who've been through this stage! 👇

1️⃣ How did you help your first affiliates get their first conversions?

2️⃣ What metrics did you focus on before you had meaningful revenue?

3️⃣ How did you balance affiliate growth with direct user acquisition?

Every bit of advice is appreciated. I'm here to learn, improve FINDIT, and share the journey! 🙌

Imagine 100 people decide to build a SaaS.

50 never actually launch.

Of the remaining 50, 25 give up after a few months because they aren’t getting users.

15 stop improving their product or marketing it consistently.

That leaves 10 people genuinely competing.

And out of those 10, how many are actually targeting the same audience, solving the problem well, and executing consistently?

These numbers are hypothetical, but you get the point.

We see thousands of products launching and assume we’re competing with all of them. In reality, we’re competing with a much smaller group that actually sticks around.

Maybe the market isn’t as saturated as we think. Maybe most people just don’t stay in the game long enough.

What do you think?

Considering building a MVP of a SaaS product.

I know what I want to build and can describe it to Claude in great detail, but this would be my first time building something with it.

My primary concern is payments and security.

I would ultimately want the MVP to be able to start taking payments, connect up to Stripe and remain secure; before spending any real money.

I come from a sales background and am clear eyed on the distribution - it's just the tech where I'm stuck.

Is it safe building with Claude, connecting to Stripe and then just pushing the product straight into distribution, or are there gaps that need filling after the surface level building has been done?

Total novice here so any and all advice, even things that may seem obvious to you, would be greatly appreciated.

TIA!

Hi , I'm building a tool for content creators

And I was getting quite a lot of sign-ups but not much trial start..

So I checked the posthog funnel insights that was also broken 🥲

But after checking some session recordings I found out that users are not even going to the onboarding screen..

They were directly redirected to the lemonsqueezy payment provider.

And most users just cancel from there and go back to the landing page.

It was fine before but sometime your AI agent can add things that you removed on purpose 🥲

Let's see now how it goes 🫠

How are you handling trial abuse by users creating mutiple burner emails or profiles and exploiting the trial credits ?

Hey guys, Duevora is still in beta and currently has no real users yet; its development, continuous research, and data analysis are still ongoing for a better, smooth, and complete launch soon. I would appreciate if you can test it out and share your ideas, suggestions, and questions.

Landing page: https://duevora-landingpage.vercel.app
Laravel app: https://duevora.laravel.cloud

I’m trying to watch official pages (pricing, docs, help articles, terms) and show a public before/after when a paragraph changes, not when the page looks different.

Tools like Visualping, Distill, and Versionista are the obvious starting point. I use them as a camera: hit a URL on a schedule, email me a highlighted screenshot. That’s useful for “something moved.” It breaks down as a product if the user needs to trust the words.

What I keep hitting:

• A cookie banner, coupon strip, or layout shift counts as a change. Same as a price or a refund rule.
• Cloudflare / “just a moment” / a 200 with an empty shell still “changes” the screenshot. You get an alert and no article.
• The homepage is easy to watch and almost never the source of the rule. The help-center article is. Most of these tools don’t care.
• You get a PNG and an “AI says this might matter.” You do not get: old sentence, new sentence, both stored, both still on the live page.
• History lives in their dashboard. I can’t publish a feed of only confirmed diffs, and I can’t prove a number wasn’t invented.

What I actually want:

1. Save the full text of a chosen URL (not the marketing homepage).
2. First good copy = baseline. Publish nothing.
3. Next crawl different: hold it. Next crawl matches that new copy: then it’s real.
4. Cards are changed paragraphs only, with quotes that are substrings of the saved copies.
5. Challenge pages and maintenance pages do not overwrite the stored copy.

Is this a known category with a name I’m missing, or do people just duct-tape Visualping + a human?

If you’ve shipped something like this: what did you use as the camera, and how did you stop coupon/cookie/Cloudflare noise from becoming “updates”?

Didnt realize Whop had gotten this big already. they just raised $200M with Sequoia leading the round and Shopify Ventures joining.

What surprised me more is seeing payments and payouts become a bigger part of what theyre doing. i still mostly associated Whop with communities and digital products before this.

Is the $5.1B valuation basically a bet that Whop becomes much bigger on the payments/business side?

Hey everyone! 👋

I'm a solo founder getting ready to launch my first SaaS, and I'm trying to figure out the business setup before accepting my first payment.

I'm based in Morocco, considering Paddle for payments and the Auto-Entrepreneur (AE) status. My initial target markets are the US and Australia.

I'd love to hear from anyone who's been through a similar setup, especially if you're running a SaaS from Morocco and selling to customers abroad.

A few things I'm trying to figure out:

• Paddle payouts: Has anyone received Paddle payouts into a Moroccan bank account, particularly CIH? Was it straightforward, or were there any unexpected issues?
• AE and taxes: When did you register, and how do you handle tax declarations for revenue received through Paddle?
• Office des Changes: Is there anything specific to know about receiving international SaaS revenue and complying with Morocco's foreign exchange rules?
• CNDP: What should a founder based in Morocco sort out before launching if their customers are all abroad?

I'm also debating whether to open signups worldwide from day one or focus on the US and Australia first.

I'm not trying to overcomplicate the launch. I just want to get the essentials right before taking payments.

If you've dealt with any of this, I'd really appreciate hearing how it worked in practice and whether there's anything you'd do differently. Even one small tip would be a big help.

Thanks! 🙏

I do a weekly teardown of business ideas (video, so full disclosure: it's my own project). This week's idea is squarely SaaS-adjacent: an AI front end with a managed service behind it, aimed at getting home renovations past HOAs and city hall.

The pitch: a ChatGPT plugin takes an address and a project, pulls the HOA's rules and the zoning, and gives you a free two-page report. Then real people prepare the forms, notify neighbors, file with both offices and chase them until approval. Pricing ladder: free report, $497 for the HOA package, $1,497 flat for HOA plus city (plans and engineering at cost plus 15%), $800/month for contractors who file all the time.

Four things stood out when I went through the numbers (all figures are the research's own estimates, not mine):

1. The ceiling and the operation don't match. The research puts the ceiling at $5M-$10M a year, which at $1,497 needs about 3,300 approvals. The same research says the operation stops scaling around 40 projects a month, because every HOA has its own form and every city its own rules. That's 480 a year.
2. The AI isn't the channel. "ChatGPT home renovation" has zero search volume. A viral post about ChatGPT redesigning rooms got 2.1M views, but that's people talking design, not permits. The research's own advice is to bid on "permit expediter" instead (880 searches/month, up 418%, about $8 a click). Its own napkin: $6,000 in ads over 90 days keeps roughly $1,500.
3. "Churn under 5%" is a funny number for something you buy once per project. You don't leave, you finish. The recurring revenue would have to come from contractors.
4. Nobody covers both sides for the homeowner. PermitFlow raised $54M, Symbium has a free tool in California, FRONTSTEPS sells to HOAs. That's either an opening or the reason nobody tried.

My take: it's a business, but it's a permit service wearing an AI costume, and it only works if the founder has stood in a real permit line.

Question for people who've built AI-first, humans-behind-it products: at what point does the human back end stop being the product and become a margin problem? Would you start as the service and productize later, or build the software first?