Reddit posts

I built a 3D cube where startups can claim their own spot I’ve been working on a little side project called [**SaaSCube.**](https://saascube.app) Most startup directories are basically: logo → description → website → submit I wanted to make something that actually feels like a **place** rather than a list. So I built a 3D cube with **6,144 spots**. Founders can come in, claim an empty spot, and put their startup on the cube. You can rotate around the cube, zoom in/out, explore startups and click on the ones that catch your eye. We’re currently at 43 **startups and 46 claimed tiles**, so there’s still a *lot* of empty space I’m trying to figure out whether this is actually useful/fun for founders or if I’ve just spent way too much time playing with Three.js Would genuinely love some feedback: Does the 3D cube make discovering startups more interesting? Would you claim a spot for your own startup? What would make you come back after claiming your spot? If you’re building something, feel free to check it out and **claim a spot** if you like the idea. **SaaSCube:** saascube.app⁠ **I’m especially curious what other founders think.**

[Giveaway] ClingNote - Notes That Attach to Your Files | 10 Lifetime Pro Keys I finally launched ClingNote, a Windows notes app I’ve wanted to build for years. **The idea** is simple: notes attach to your files and follow your work. Open an Excel file, PDF, or project and its notes are right there. Switch files, and ClingNote brings up the notes for that one instead. ClingNote is a full, familiar notes app with rich text, Markdown, export, print, and PDF support. It has a workspace for larger notes and small pop-out notes you can pin anywhere on your desktop. Everything is stored locally, and your notes are easy to export to other note apps. **No lock-in.** It’s been about two weeks since launch, and I’ve just passed 70 downloads. Still early, but exciting to see people starting to use something I built! ClingNote is freemium: the full notes app is free. The file-following feature is part of Pro. To celebrate, I’m giving away **10 lifetime** Pro keys. No subscription or expiration. **To enter:** Simply comment with how you’d use ClingNote. I’ll randomly pick 10 commenters and DM each winner a lifetime key. **Download:** [clingnote.com](http://clingnote.com) or find ClingNote on the Microsoft Store. The direct installer is digitally signed, but some PCs may still show a Windows “protected your PC” warning. If you’d rather avoid that, use the Microsoft Store version. Feedback and criticism are very welcome, even the harsh stuff! I’d love to hear what you think. **Windows Only** for now..

Went from 100 to 200 DAU in a week. Hi guys, Last week I posted about my app Pebbles. We had around 100 DAU that time and I'm so happy to see that this number has gone to 200+ and it is around that for 2 3 days. This seems like a positive sign to me that users are coming back and actually loving the app ❤️. In case you have installed the app from my previous post and have any feedback please do share and if you haven't had the change to install it please do and share your thoughts. Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.offclock.pebbles IOS: https://apps.apple.com/in/app/pebbles-relationship-app/id6787056016

My SaaS had 38,305 monthly users. 87% of sessions depended on one page. I run AI Undetectable, an AI rewriter and humanizer designed to help AI-generated text pass AI detectors. It did well early on, then lost most of its search traffic. I went back through Analytics this week. September 2023 had 38,305 users and 56,664 sessions. Of those sessions, 49,319 landed on the homepage. That's 87%. Organic search sessions fell from 23,172 in February 2024 to 111 in December. I can't pin that on one Google update, and fixing a few meta tags won't explain or reverse a drop that big. The useful part of the audit was finding things I could actually repair: old URLs that no longer reached the right pages, an editor hidden behind signup, and conversion reporting that didn't clearly separate trial starts from payments. Those are fixed now. That is not the same as recovering the traffic. The humanizer now has a public editor and complete before-and-after examples. You can inspect them without an account: [https://aiundetectable.com/ai-humanizer](https://aiundetectable.com/ai-humanizer) Running the tools requires a three-day trial, then a paid plan. I'm trying to rebuild demand from people who need the product, rather than assume the old rankings will come back. For anyone getting most of their customers from SEO, the landing-page breakdown is worth checking alongside the headline traffic number. Founder post, written with AI assistance.

How they grewOrganic search

Solo dev here with a small SaaS. I'd like some advice from people further along. Over the last 7 days I've had about 1.32k visits (screenshot below). I know that's small compared to a lot of you, and some of it is probably bots. I'm not sure if Cloudflare filters those out. Traffic came from a mix of posting on Reddit, other SM sites and a few small ads. It's a file sharing site with a heavy focus on privacy, so I keep analytics minimal on purpose. I can't see much about visitors, but I can see that people are uploading files (currently just have a number incrementing when upload/download api is hit), so some of the traffic is real. What I don't know is how to turn that into paying customers or just frequent users. So I'd love to hear how you do it: * How do you advertise your SaaS? Where is your main source of traffic coming from? * Anything you tried that was a waste of money or time? * If you get traffic from reddit, how did you do it - like what was your post about? Any advice is heavily appreciated, including “you’re doing it wrong”.

How they grewReddit, other social media sites, and a few small ads

I forgot how good this feels: First $39 with pre-order, without a finished product. As context, I used to be a Notion creator, in total I made over $50k (including selling the business). That was like 3 years ago. But the one thing that I really missed, were these Gumroad notifications. I remember waking up in the morning and checking how much I've made while asleep. Now I'm back baby :D It all started with Hermes Agent. I started using it and wanted to create a dashboard for it. From that idea, I was thinking, why don't I build my very own all-in-one app, that I will use to monitor basically everything in my life from tasks, notes, goals, to finances, health, recipes and more. So I started building it. After a month in, I decided, why not turn this into a product. Similar to a Notion template, I could sell this as an "app template". For sure a lot of people would like to do the same: building their very own all in one app. **The idea is simple, instead of 100+ hours and $200+ in AI spend, you get a pre-built codebase with step-by-step instructions, that you can deploy and edit to your liking.** This is how [Solum OS](https://getsolumos.com) was born. It is still not ready, I have a lot to work on before I can officially launch it (fixes, features, onboarding & video guide, etc.), but I decided to build the landing page, and add a "pre-order" option. And bamm, after two days, my first pre-order came. This gave me a huge motivational boost, so I can keep building, and soon launch it. Reddit was a big part of this, so huge thanks for the community!

How they grewReddit

I hit 250 users with my SaaS now what? I built a tool for real estate photographers to automatically label drone photos. It's been pretty cool seeing people actually use something I built but now I'm trying to figure out how to get it infront of more people. The product is very niche and I am trying to figure out how to get it infront of more real estate photographers. I've tried social media, facebook groups and ads but Its not reaching my audience. Thinking about affiliates and referrals. For anyone who has built a niche SaaS what worked for you other than ads and the basic stuff?

How they grewsocial media, Facebook groups and ads

I built a language learning tool, but I have no idea how to find my first users [ I won't disclose my product here, genuinely need some tips for this niche ] I started marketing yesterday and got 8 visitors to the landing page, no sign ups at all. I built this tool to solve my own pain when learning a new language because most apps out there especially the most popular green mascot app, they're not that effective and people know it that's why there's lots of complains. I did research before building it, so I’m confident other people deal with it too, and I think some would pay if I can reach them. My problem is that I don’t know where to start with marketing. I’m not gonna disclose my product here. I just wanna understand how people approached their first few weeks when they had no audience and no channel that was working yet. If you were starting a small SaaS from zero today, what would you spend your first month doing to find people with the problem? I’m especially curious how you chose between: * talking to people in relevant communities * writing useful content around the problem * direct outreach * paid ads * something else entirely What did you try first, and what turned out to be a waste of time? What platforms is effective? I'd consider this month a success If I end up with 10 paying users on any plan. I have monthly and annual with a discount offer for founding members.

How they grewStarted marketing; unsure which channels to try first.

100+ visitors, 0 signups. How would you market this micro SaaS? I recently launched a small SaaS propertystoryapp.com and I’m struggling with the marketing side. It’s designed for landlords and property owners to keep the full history of a property in one place: repairs, maintenance, appliances, warranties, receipts/invoices, contractors, documents, expenses and reminders. There’s also AI receipt/invoice scanning, and the free plan lets you manage one property. I’ve had 100+ website visits so far, but 0 free signups. I know that’s still a very small sample, but it made me question whether I’m targeting the wrong people, using the wrong channels, or not communicating the value clearly enough. For those of you who have successfully grown a micro SaaS, especially a B2C or landlord/property product: Where would you start? Reddit communities? Facebook landlord groups? Google Ads? Meta Ads? SEO/content? Direct outreach? Something else entirely? I don’t have a big advertising budget, so I’m especially interested in what actually worked for you when you were trying to get your first 10–50 real users. I’m not looking to spam the product here. I’d genuinely appreciate advice from people who have been through this.

Got my first $9.99 sale today Today I got my **first $9.99 sale** for Indie Apps It’s a small thing, but honestly, it feels pretty big I built **Indie Apps** because I always found it surprisingly difficult to discover good apps made by independent developers. So I decided to build a simple directory where indie developers can list their iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps, and people can discover them. I’m still very early, and there’s a lot I want to improve especially getting more apps and users onto the platform. But seeing someone actually pay for something I built today was a pretty great feeling. Now onto the next one **Indie Apps:** [https://indie-apps.com](https://indie-apps.com/)

Got our first paying customer yesterday after months of signups and zero revenue. Some honest notes. Building a backend platform for React/Next.js SaaS founders (auth, billing, workspaces, RBAC, feature flags, webhooks, etc. as one npm install, BYO Stripe, no revenue cut). Two brothers, closed source, no funding. Numbers up to yesterday: 100+ signups, 0 paying customers, months of build-in-public posting. Yesterday: first sale, $99/month plan. What I actually learned: 1. Distribution was never the bottleneck. Signups were fine. Activation was the problem - people bounced at the org-creation step before seeing any value. Fixing that mattered more than every post combined. 2. One paying customer is worth more than every impression we got before it. Not because of the money. Because it's the first evidence a stranger will pay for this specific thing. 3. Staying paid-only was the right call. Free tiers would have given us more signups and the same zero. Not calling this traction. Calling it proof the market exists. Second customer is the next milestone. Happy to answer questions on the stack, pricing, or the activation fix.

How they grewBuild-in-public posting

had my first 2 sales ever last week and ngl I'm still smiling about it 😄 Quick backstory: A couple months ago I had this idea: get all my conversations across different chat apps (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, whatever) into one folder, so I could talk to them through one interface - kind of like pointing Claude Code or any agent at it. That was the whole idea. Started building [Carry](https://carry.md), core came together in like 10 days. Getting the UX right took longer - I wanted it to be very very simple, more like set-and-forget. Made it live on the [Chrome Web Store ](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/save-chatgpt-claude-grok/mlligjaffhiphbpkjejefoibcclbdfll)and... nothing much. 1-2 installs every couple of days. But I kept using it myself daily, and that's when I realized how fragile this extension actually is, it uses the undocumented internal APIs of these chat apps, which can break anytime, and any fix means going through Chrome Web Store review all over again. There were nights I thought about dropping the price, just so someone would buy it and I could feel like I "did it" and move on. But it's a one-time purchase, if only 1-2 people ever buy, I'm stuck maintaining fragile integrations for a long time for basically nothing. So I would just dodge the whole decision and let it sit there, will figure it out tomorrow. Then one night, right before sleep, I checked my email and someone actually paid $59 for it. Someone had this exact problem, and paid for the thing I built. Insane feeling, no other way to put it. The second that registered, my brain wouldn't stop, okay, there's something here. Started spinning through how to actually fix the API-fragility problem instead of dodging it, landed on something I think works, been building it out since. BTW I got two sales last week 🫰🤩 [https://trustmrr.com/startup/carry](https://trustmrr.com/startup/carry) Feels stupid to be this hyped about two sales. But can't like I'm still smiling about it 🤩

How they grewChrome Web Store

I built a harry potter recognition system and 90% of the company used it (now I launched my own product) Okay so this isn't the typical "solo founder grinds for 3 months" story, but hear me out. I was an engineering manager at a 150-person tech company and we had the classic problem: recognition software didn't work. people used it for a bit, then it sits there collecting dust. We tried multiple services, but nothing felt quite right. So me and someone from the people team came up with a cool idea. We decided to build a custom recognition system and themed the entire thing around harry potter. We divided the company into four houses (each named after a founder). Every time someone gave recognition, it counted toward their house's points. The results were quite impressive. Within months, 90% of the company was actively giving or receiving recognition. People were talking about it in slack and in person and were genuinely invested in the "house cup". I realized that the problem isn't recognition, it's that recognition software is boring and corporate. Nobody wants to fill out a form or do some manual entry on a website. Nobody cares about "kudos" or whatever jargon corporate recognition software sells. Our recognition platform felt like ours because it was our culture, our inside jokes, our competition. That's when we decided to build it as a product: **KaBoon**. Fun themes, customizable values, customizable teams, seasonal resets, team competition and more. If you're interested: [https://kaboon.io](https://kaboon.io) Any feedback is also appreciated

What actually worked for getting your first real users? I've been building a hosted mock API tool for frontend devs (MockBase, mockbase.org). You get a live URL to point your app at before the backend exists. I think it's pretty solid by now, but I can't get people to actually find it. So far I've written a bunch of blog posts for SEO and posted in a few dev subreddits. Google shows me a few dozen impressions and barely any clicks, and I've got 10 users. Not sure if I'm just too early and SEO needs months for a new site, or if I'm spending my time in the wrong place entirely. If you launched something small and niche, where did your first 50 users actually come from? Honest answers welcome, even if it's "it took a year and a lot of boring work".

How they grewSEO blog posts and dev subreddits

Raised money to not hire, then got buried by our own launch we raised $6m last year for Swan AI and the plan wasnt to hire with it. the whole idea was that a lean team plus agents could get to a few thousand customers. and not needing a huge team for every single thing for most of the year it held. our engineering was one person, niv, building against companies like clay and n8n with real engineering teams behind them. i spent a lot of that year waiting for a customer to notice, and it didnt happen quite the level that i'd expect. our product was great, customers used it, and we got comfortable. then we announced the raise and launched publicly and 250+ companies signed up in 72 hours. we were not ready for it honestly. traffic we hadnt planned for, conversations we couldnt keep up with. and as a result, escalations coming in faster than we could read them. then the reviews started. slow responses, things falling through, people feeling like nobody was looking after them. shipping was the thing we had solved. butthe part where you take care of people, and that turned out to be the harder problem to solve thats the part of the model i'd say we're still learning. a small team plus agents can build a lot more than i expected. whether it can look after a few thousand customers properly is a different question.

How they grewPublic launch after the raise

6 months ago I launched my SaaS. Today it crossed $1,000 revenue and $414 MRR About 6 months ago I launched AutoTube. Today I got this email from TrustMRR saying it crossed **$1,000 in verified revenue**. This probably isn't a huge number compared to some of the revenue screenshots you see here, but this one means a lot to me. I built it while working a full-time software engineering job. In the beginning I had the classic SaaS problem: people were signing up, using the product, generating videos... but almost nobody was paying. At one point I had hundreds of users and only a few paying customers. I kept working on it instead of abandoning it. I improved the video generation, added longer videos, AI clips, lip sync, a proper editor, YouTube publishing, automation, changed pricing, worked on SEO, emailed users, and honestly tried a bunch of things that didn't work too. Slowly, people started paying. First one customer. Then a few. And now **$414 in recurring monthly revenue**. The biggest thing I've learned so far is that building the product was actually the easier part for me. Distribution, positioning and figuring out *why someone should pay* have been much harder. I'm still nowhere near where I want this to be, but today is probably the first time I've looked at it and thought: **Okay... maybe this can actually become a real business.** Next target is **$1,000 MRR**. For founders who went through the $300–$500 MRR stage, what made the biggest difference in getting you to $1k?

How they grewSEO, emailed users, and tried several things

I built a free version of an expensive app and I've gotten over 300 users in 2 days I realized I was paying over $100 per year on text-to-speech apps like Speechify. I decided that I could build my own using local TTS which is actually super awesome and close in quality to Speechify/ElevenLabs. Everything runs locally to the browser so it doesn't cost me anything to run. That's why it's completely free, no paid tiers or limits. This is by far the most successful app I've launched to date, probably because I made it free without even a pricing page. 300 users in just 2 days has felt really good! Especially after a year of building and getting max 5 users over various products. [It's called FreeReader.](https://www.freereader.io) Lmk if you have any feedback! I'm looking to make it as useful as possible. It works best on desktop and newer phones. I'm waiting for the iOS app review to finish and then it'll be live on the App Store.

How they grewMade it free with no pricing page

I told my mom that I’d earned $175 online I think I finally saw pride in her eyes 🥲 I’ve always spent my time developing projects and trying out new ideas. But every time, I hear the same thing: **“Maybe you should find a real job!”** It hurts, and in that moment, when my heart tightens and all I want to do is walk out of the room I keep my head up because I know what drives me. I can’t be understood by everyone, after all. Because everyone has their own journey, and that’s especially true of my parents, who still say “the internet” instead of “internet.” So be it I kept working on my projects, and recently one of them surpassed $175 in revenue! **35 people.** $4.99 for life (we can all agree that’s not my best business plan… 😅) But anyway, I was able to proudly tell my mom about it. And I could tell her expression had changed. I can’t quite explain what it was. But it was like, **“Maybe he’s not such an idiot after all,”** or something along those lines 🥲 In any case, I could tell she was reassured. And you have no idea how good that felt, and how much it boosts morale! Can’t wait to show you what’s next and the other projects coming up! By the way, the project I told you about is [Focus Mode](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/fcajcgfjhilkdnbnmighhcbogikibkmh?utm_campaign=1310MS), a Chrome extension that lets you focus on a single tab by opening your current tab in an interface without a URL bar, bookmarks, or tabs—and it even works in windowed mode! (I’m sure I’m not the only one with the bad habit of having 45 tabs open every day.) **Thanks, by the way, to everyone who helped make this happen, and with whom I continue to exchange ideas 🙏** Have a great day, everyone! ☀️ And happy building! Alex

Finally $100 MRR after 2 month of hard work . Have you ever spent an hour creating a TikTok post that gets 200 views and zero users? I did that enough times that I started questioning whether marketing was harder than building.I have a few apps, and like most indie hackers, I was constantly looking for ways to get more users. Everyone kept saying the same thing: "Post consistently on TikTok." The problem wasn't posting.The problem was everything before posting. Coming up with hooks. Finding slideshow images. Writing captions. Repeating the same process every single day. After a few weeks, I realized I was spending more time creating content than building the products I actually wanted people to use. So I built a small internal tool for myself to speed up the whole process. I wasn't thinking about a startup. I just wanted to save time. I started using it for my own apps and it genuinely made things easier. More importantly, I was finally posting consistently because the process no longer felt like a chore. After some time, I started noticing that the content was actually bringing in users and conversions. That's when it clicked. If I was struggling with this, other solo developers were probably struggling with it too. So I cleaned it up and let a few other developers try it. Today, 4 of them are paying customers. And those 4 customers pushed me past $100 MRR. I know $100 MRR isn't going to change my life but seeing people pay for something that started as a scrappy internal tool is honestly one of the most satisfying moments I've had as an indie hacker. The biggest thing I've learned is that sometimes your best product idea isn't found through market research It's hiding inside the problem that's annoying you every single day.

How they grewTikTok posts

I GOT MY FIRST 6 USERS 😭 I know it’s small, but I’m not at 0 anymore. Just launched my SaaS . This is the start. ( For everyone asking about my SaaS, here’s the link: [https://marketfast.online/](https://marketfast.online/) )

How they grewLaunched the SaaS

I built a boring tool nobody asked for. 3,000 people use it every month hey everyone! been quiet for about 40 days, small update since last post! # quick background i started building spaceplanner 2.5 months ago and have already posted here a few times about the progress. it is a simple floor planning tool, in a seriously boring niche. nobody dreams about floor plan software. and that is exactly why it worked. # why i built it i needed one myself. everything good was paid, or made you sign up before you could even try it. so i made the opposite. free, instant, no account. figured a few people might use it. # how i shipped fast This is super important and big part of the journey, i run a bunch of ai agents on claude at the same time. one with design skills(impeccable, etc) , one for SEO, one with lots of MCPs and integrations for GA4, GSC, Webmaster, Clarity to help with analytics and reports, and one write code and tries to break it. i basically became the guy who decides what to build, and they do the heavy lifting. that is how a solo person ships fixes almost every week instead of every few months. i spun up a VPS, opened claude on my max subscription, connected it to the Claude phone app, and started building even from the bus or the bathroom. loaded a bunch of skills and built a solid foundation for the model on how to deliver features with tests, so i can ship fast without breaking the whole system. # the numbers, 2.5 months in * close to **3,000 users a month**, and over **6,500 plans built** (GA4 showing \~500 active users on last 7 days, but i have some gaps in analytics) * 70% never make an account, 30% do, and i am fine with that. it is a free tool with no signup. * **100+ pieces of feedback** so far: bugs, features, ratings * average rating sitting at **4.6** # the feedback part blew my mind this is the first time in my life i have heard from hundreds of real strangers. and a few of them turned into something i did not expect. **super users,** one guy emails me 3 or 4 bugs and feature ideas every single week. every week. some of the feedback was so good and so detailed that i just started sending those people **amazon gift cards** to say thank you. best money i spent this year. you cannot buy that kind of insight. > one very interesting idea i just delivered is a [public roadmap page](https://app.spaceplanner.co/roadmap) that shows every bug and feature i got and its status, so the non-registered users who left feedback can check on their request (i do not have their email to tell them it is fixed). you can see the roadmap here: [https://app.spaceplanner.co/roadmap](https://app.spaceplanner.co/roadmap) # then SEO started to compound i made a dedicated page for each thing people search: room planner, bathroom planner, and so on. and i made sure google and search console actually see the real content, not an empty react shell (huge trap, check this if you have a web app). it was slow at first. then it snowballed. * search impressions **tripled in a month** * organic went from basically nothing to **almost a third of all my traffic** * chatgpt straight up started recommending the tool without me doing anything. THAT ONE FELT LIKE MAGIC TO ME! # the 40 day experiment then i decided to post nothing anywhere for 40 days. no reddit, no nothing, just to see what would happen. it kept growing, roughly **10 to 15% more users every week**, just from search and word of mouth. that slow organic climb feels a hundred times better than a spike from one viral post that dies in two days. # my 2 cents for anyone building * boring niches are quiet for a reason, and that is the gap. no hype, few competitors, real need. * free with no signup is a cheat code. let people get value before you ask for anything. * your first 100 users teach you more than anything else. treat every bug report like a gift, because it is. * find your super users and take care of them. a gift card is nothing next to the feedback they give you. * you do not have to post every day. build something people actually use and it starts carrying itself. that is it. if you are sitting on a boring idea that would genuinely help people, just build it. free, simple, useful. it might end up being the best thing you do this year too. happy to answer anything below, i didn't want to go too technical but ready to share everything if its interesting! **Edit: A bunch of you asked how i actually built this, so here is the whole setup** the short version: i stopped being the person who writes every line, and became the person who decides what to build. a team of ai agents does the heavy lifting. **the mindset** i run several Claude Code agents at the same time, each one good at one job. i am the guy who decides what to build and in what order. they do the building. that is the only reason a solo person can ship fixes almost every week instead of every few months. **the agents (each one has a role, and runs on a different model depending on how hard the job is)** * **design agent** runs a stack of design skills together, **Claude Design**, `frontend-design`, `ui-ux-pro-max-skill` and **impeccable**. this is what makes new pages and UI actually look designed instead of looking like genai slop. it handles layout, color, spacing, the whole visual system, so i never ship a page that screams "a dev made this at 2am" * **SEO agent** runs a skill i built called `ga4-gsc-seo-audits`. it connects through MCPs to Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and Microsoft Clarity all at once, reads the live numbers, then hands me a ranked list of exactly which pages to fix, what to change in the title and copy, and why. no guessing, no generic seo advice, it is all tied to real impressions and clicks * **analytics agent** does the number crunching. daily, weekly and monthly active users, guests versus registered, growth rates, revenue projections. it pulls from the database and Google Analytics directly so every decision i make is on real data, not vibes * **code agent** writes the actual feature, then switches hats and tries to break its own work with tests before anything ships. for a normal fix it runs on a fast model. but for the hard stuff, big architecture changes or a nasty bug that has been hiding for days, i hand it to **Fable**, which is the heavy model i keep for exactly those moments * **the orchestrator** is the always on brain that sits above all of them on **Claude Opus**. it is the one i talk to from my phone, and it decides which agent and which model each job goes to. quick searches and summaries drop down to **Sonnet or Haiku** so i am not burning a big model on small work **how the agents reach the outside world (MCPs, APIs and OAuth)** an agent is only useful if it can actually touch real services, and there are three ways i wire that up: * **MCPs** are the cleanest. think of an MCP as a standard plug. i hand an agent the MCP for a tool and it can read that tool's data and act on it right away, no glue code * **APIs** are for services that hand you a key or a service account. Google Analytics 4 and Search Console work like this, the agent authenticates with the key and pulls the numbers straight from the source * **OAuth** is for anything that needs a real login handshake, like posting or reading from an account. the agent goes through the proper sign in flow once, gets a token, and from then on it can act on my behalf the point is the same across all three: the agent stops being a chatbot that talks, and becomes something that actually reads live data and does the work, instead of me copy pasting numbers around. (most nights at 1:00am i can just say "do some SEO analysis" it knows how to do it, it knows how to build the report and share with me (very cool, i abuse this one :D) **the infra** * spun up a cheap [Hostinger VPS](https://www.hostinger.com/il?REFERRALCODE=JJ9MOHAMAPRZ) (a small always on server, i like them, but you can use whatever suites you) * installed **Claude Code** on it and ran it on my **Claude Max** subscription, left running as an always on service so it never resets (daemon) * connected it to the **Claude phone app** with Remote Control, so i can literally build from anywhere. i type what i want, it goes and does it, pushes to main, vercel auto-pick -> deploy) * [Resend](https://resend.com/) handles all the emails the app sends, like sending you a copy of your exported plan (FREE plan is more than enough). * everything lives in one **GitHub** repo that syncs automatically, so the agents and i are always working on the same code. **the foundation (this is the part people skip)** before building features i spent time teaching the model how i want things delivered. every feature has to come with tests, has to pass checks, and has to not break the rest of the app. i wrote all of that down as rules and skills the agents follow every single time. that is the difference between shipping fast and shipping fast while everything quietly falls apart. **how the work gets split** for the hard stuff (big architecture, nasty bugs) i point a stronger model at it. for small stuff (quick searches, summaries) a lighter faster model. and when a job is big i let them run in parallel, each on a different part, so four things get done at once instead of one. that is basically it. i am one person, but on a good day it feels like a small team. happy to answer specifics in the comments.

How they grewSearch pages for specific terms, plus search and word of mouth

Our SaaS is being used across 70+ websites, but are we targeting the wrong customers? Earlier this year, I quit my job to start a SaaS company with a friend. I handle sales, he handles the technical side. We’d done our research and thought we had a pretty good starting point. Seven or eight months later, our tool is being used to optimize more than 70 websites. We’ve made progress, but I’m finding the customer side much harder than I expected. The idea came from our own craft beer webshop. Outsourcing SEO was expensive, and doing it ourselves took a lot of time. We wanted a tool that could figure out what needed improving and then do most of the work, with us reviewing it before anything went live. So we built SEOptimate. It brings together Search Console data, your sitemap, keyword data, and competitor analysis to recommend changes and create or improve content. That includes product descriptions, category pages, and blog posts, which users can approve and publish through their CMS. It worked for our own webshop, so we figured there must be plenty of other store owners with the same problem. There are. But having the problem and being willing to do something about it are apparently two different things. A lot of the owners we speak to want better visibility in Google and AI search, but have limited budgets and very little time to get involved. Even reviewing suggestions or going through onboarding can be a hurdle. I sometimes catch myself thinking, “You want the results, but you don’t want to spend time or money on this?” Then I remember they’re running a business, dealing with orders and customers, and SEO probably sits somewhere near the bottom of a very long to-do list. Maybe we’ve underestimated how much support this audience needs, even with a tool designed to do most of the work. Our response has been to keep improving the product. Easier onboarding, clearer recommendations, more automation. But I’m starting to wonder whether we’re solving product issues or trying to build our way out of a targeting problem. Meanwhile, we also have marketers and agencies using it for their clients. Those conversations are very different. They understand what it does, know how to use it, and give us useful feedback. They already know why the work matters; they just want to get it done more efficiently. The challenge is that we haven’t found a consistent way to reach more of them yet. So we’re at a bit of a crossroads. Keep focusing on webshop owners and make the product increasingly hands-off, or focus on professionals who already understand the value? For anyone who’s been through this with their SaaS: what helped you distinguish between “the product needs to be easier” and “we’re selling to the wrong people”?

Roast my micro SaaS: paste a domain, get 134 checks in about three seconds, no signup Disclosure: I built it. I am a solo indie dev. Revenue so far: zero. It went live this week. Backstory. I used to be a CIO. Checking if a website was really healthy took most of a day. Domain expiry, certificates, DNS, mail authentication, what a page actually does in a browser, what it loads before the visitor agrees to anything. Nobody ever had that day, so it did not get done. I wanted the tool for myself. Then I saw who else wants it: agencies and freelancers. A report like this helps them win a client, and then keep one. Stack. Java 25 and Spring Boot 4 for the engine. Postgres. Selenium driving Chromium for the browser part. React and TanStack on the front end. One VPS I manage myself. No third party API does the checking. Every check runs against public records and the site itself. Try it. No account needed. Paste a domain and you get 118 of the 134 checks in about three seconds. [finetooth.net](http://finetooth.net) What I want from you: tell me what it gets wrong. A check that fires when it should not is worth more to me than a compliment. Roast the landing page too. I have read it too many times to see it.

My coworker just became my very first user, and he has no clue I built the platform Dus ik ben de afgelopen paar weken aan een side project aan het coderen—een site om ontwikkelaars te werven die alle standaard flauwekul wegsnijdt en kijkt naar echte publieke GitHub-data en code-DNA. Ik heb een anonieme "Shield Mode" gebouwd zodat devs niet worden blootgesteld aan recruiters terwijl ze nog een dagbaan hebben. Anyway, ik moest testen of echte mensen het überhaupt zouden gebruiken, zonder dat ik mijn dekmantel op m'n werk opblies. Ik heb een paar dagen geleden op LinkedIn iets laagdrempeligs gepost, alsof ik zei: "check out deze coole tool die een vriend van me heeft gemaakt." De huidige cijfers zitten op zo'n 4 totale gebruikers en 16 bezoeken, maar de gemiddelde bezoekduur is om de één of andere reden ineens boven de 8 minuten geschoten—dat sloeg echt helemaal nergens op, zo van: wauw. Ik probeer dit door te trekken naar 25 geverifieerde profielen de volgende keer, zonder mijn dekmantel te slopen. Is er iemand anders die ooit iets heeft gebouwd dat zich richt op devs en een stealth launch heeft geflikt binnen z'n eigen netwerk? Hoe ben je door die koude start heen gekomen?

How they grewLinkedIn post framed as a friend's tool

I just got my first paying customer 😭 This feels unreal After 1 month of building and 2 weeks of marketing my workout tracking app, I got my first paying customer from India 🇮🇳 And it happened in the gym as well. I feel like life just split before and after. I want to thank all you guys for your support for Pawer. I learned and still learn a lot from Reddit and this community was very supportive. If you want to give [Pawer](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gym-workout-tracker-pawer/id6805974421) a try — you are mostly welcome.

How they grewReddit and community support; in-person at the gym

Launched my freelance business SaaS on Product Hunt today, after my first month of marketing got exactly 1 signup. Honest numbers inside I build OIO (oio.app), one login for a freelance client business. Projects, tickets, invoices, the money. Freelancing since 2014, got sick of running five apps, built one. Honest numbers: \- First month of marketing before today: exactly 1 signup, from one Discord post \- Launch day today: 11 signups so far, 30 total \- Product Hunt position: #254, near zero votes. Every signup today came from Reddit, Discord, Instagram and YouTube instead \- Paying customers: 1 What I learned so far: 1. Product Hunt without an existing following there does basically nothing. Still worth doing once, it forced me to get every asset, screenshot and line of copy in order. 2. Distribution is the whole game. I spent a year building and a month marketing. Should have been the other way around. 3. Posting where the actual people are beats every launch platform. My one paying customer came from a Discord post, not from any launch. AMA about building solo, the stack (Next.js, Supabase, Cloudflare), pricing, or what I would do differently.

How they grewDiscord, Reddit, Instagram and YouTube; one signup came from a Discord post

hit 15 paid subscribers!! small number, but feels like progress couple days ago I posted that I was at 13 and wanted to hit 15 by the end of the week, just hit it!! 3,212 total users 15 subscriptions 32 new signups still a long way to go, but seeing the paid number slowly move up feels way better than just watching total users grow lol next goal is to make 20 paid subscribers!! for people who grew from their first 10-20 paying users, what helped you most after this point? better conversion, more traffic, or just improving the product?

hard gates convert 5x better than freemium and nobody talks about it 0 to 3K MRR in a month. The product was really the easy part it’s a meal planning app. A few things that worked for me 1. hard paywall, not freemium. Free users don’t use convert eventually 2. the paywall shows your generated meal plan blurred behind it 3. One channel until it worked. TikTok carousels, 2 a day, 60 days straight. here is the app link: https://apps.apple.com/app/plate-weight-loss-meal-plan/id6801901992

How they grewTikTok carousels, 2 a day, 60 days straight

Got my 1st paying user for my micro saas after 12hr of launching paid plan , yup its soo less but i was happy some one paid to user my web yeah i run a web called jeeplanner , indian based entrance exam planning web, today i launched paid plan , and i got 1 paying user thats a lot to me and looking forward , happy to share my journey

Made a game, pricing it like a SaaS app - over $1k in revenue, so far. I've made like 10 apps in the last 2 years, for my latest I had an idea for a game and have been building it for the last \~5 months. Launched it a few weeks after starting building it. Initially priced it as a one-off payment on the app stores of £4.99. I'm in the UK, so I do all my costs & pricing in £'s, but the app stores convert it into the relevant local prices. I got something like 150 sales, it was paid only, no free usage. Not bad, but I realised that I would need to keep getting new users every month in order for it to pay for itself, just to cover costs. I switched it to a subscription (already paid users got to keep lifetime access, they saw no change) at £3.99, but I don't think anyone signed up. I'm in a AI founders WhatsApp group so I shared some stats about my game and asked for advice on pricing. Someone who works for a well-known tech company sent me a long voice note with advice on how to price: * monthly, yearly & lifetime price * experiment with different amounts of free usage to see what converts best I did basically exactly what they said as I have no reason to have an opinion otherwise. I guess the three different pricing tiers create anchoring. Now, I've had something like 10 people subscribe, mix of monthly & annual, and I think 3 people buy lifetime purchases. The monthly price is still £3.99, the yearly is £24.99 and the lifetime is £69.99, which means that people are paying more for my game than a AAA title like Grand Theft Auto, which is pretty cool. My game still doesn't cover its costs, it has quite a lot of AI generation in real time and heavy server loads for rendering programmatically generated maps, based on the real world. But, it is forecast to cover costs and I've done basically no marketing, apart from ad-hoc posts online. I'm spending my time improving the game: adding new features & fixing issues. But, it seems to be going well and I have a community of players giving me feedback. I have never built a game before and have zero experience of working in the game industry, but I have a pretty good knowledge of what is possible with technology, e.g. mobile cameras, GPS, APIs, AI, and have a good intelligence for what is fun, I think. I don't take advice from how traditional games work really and just priced it how I wanted to and it seems to be working.

How they grewAd-hoc posts online; shared stats in an AI founders WhatsApp group

I was going to shut my SaaS down after building for 8 month, now got $500 of sales. So I launched my seo product (kitful AI) on feb, worked for 2 months straight, got a sale and then complete silent for few months, probably because I didn't do any marketing or my product was bad. I was frustated with every failed product - earlier I worked on my previous product for 2 years straight and got few sales only, but finally managed to exit on it, anyway that's a different story. Now the thing is I improved my product, and tested heavily on medium and other article writing sites, promoted in unusual ways through upwork, fiverr by selling and then upselling, still doing. Finally then after 6 months break $500+ of sales. Current MRR is $128 now btw.

How they grewMedium and other article writing sites; Upwork and Fiverr upselling

I am nuts, so I launched in a saturated market without following or VC money. Here is how it worked out 6 months ago I launched my own eSIM service. My friends said I was late and would go broke. I still made the leap, and now my app is making €5,000 per month. I got extremely lucky, but in this post I want to tell you about the few things that work for me and helped me build and market my app: **1. I post content every day** I don't have a content plan, but I know whom I am posting for – people stuck in their 9-5s and looking to build their own business and win back their freedom, like I used to be. You might say it's dumb – I'm not selling a course for indie hackers. But solopreneurs tend to be rich, Europe- or America-based, and travel a lot. They are the ideal customers for my eSIM app. I am posting on Reddit, X, and LinkedIn. There are two ways to market there. You can shill and astroturf, but you will be fighting an uphill battle with the platform. I tried it before and failed. Or you can bring genuine value. I am posting about my struggles, how I build, how I market, how I survive. These posts go viral. Then people Google my products. Some become users. If not, Google sees my search volume go up, and it's good for SEO. This brings me to the second thing I do. **2. SEO** Competing in SEO against big companies is hard. They are VC-backed and don't care about unit economics. When they buy backlinks, they don't negotiate the price. I can't afford that. I set up agents that scout the internet every day for broken links, upcoming blogs without affiliate deals, and new creators. I am picking up whatever big companies don't want or haven't found yet. I am always on the lookout for funky keywords – events, random travel interruptions, obscure destinations. I ship SEO pages fast – the time from content idea to a ranking page is 5 minutes. And here comes the 3rd point. **3. I automate aggressively** I hardly open the laptop anymore – Claude does 99% of my work on its own server. I've been setting up this system for months. I made Claude auto-improve based on my corrections, and access the same tools I am using: code, support, email. First, it messed up a lot: design and copy were pure AI slop. But then it learned. Now I do 1 or 2 corrections per page at most. Support improved as well. It takes Airalo or Holafly between 2 hours and a day to answer a support request. I answer most in under 2 minutes – Claude drafts a response and actions, sends me a Telegram message, and I press "Approve". The users love it – I've never received such warm thank-yous for my support responses when I was writing them myself. You don't need to launch an AI startup to survive. You can absolutely compete in a saturated market – most markets are big enough for everybody, and I hope this post helps!

How they grewReddit, X, LinkedIn; SEO pages; automated support

Today I just made my first sale Just made my first sale today randomly. Was watching YouTube and checked my phone, this is what meets my eyes. I’ve been building different SaaS tools for over a year now and multiple apps including for the atlassian marketplace, distributed through LinkedIn, product hunt, Facebook pages etc everything, and nothing worked. Today, my saas I’ve had and developed for around a month got its first sale. Through organic search of all places.

How they grewOrganic search; other channels tried included LinkedIn, Product Hunt and Facebook pages.

I needed a metrics dashboard for my SaaS, so I built a medieval village instead, every paying customer is a villager I run a small Norwegian SaaS with my co-founder (it helps parents of children with special needs navigate the welfare bureaucracy). We just got our first paying subscribers, and I wanted a dashboard on the office wall; customers, MRR, churn, trend. But boring admin charts felt wrong for numbers that actually mean this much to us. So instead: a cozy pixel-art village, seen from above. **How it works:** * Every active subscriber = one villager wandering around * New customer → a new villager moves in. Someone cancels → a villager sadly walks away * Milestone buildings unlock as we grow: a cottage at 50, a house at 100, a farm at 250, town hall at 500, and a castle at 1000 * Parchment cards around the edges show the real numbers: MRR, new this week/month, progress to next milestone, and a trend graph fed by a daily snapshot job Stack: PixiJS on React, Kenney's Tiny Town tileset (CC0), one admin-gated metrics endpoint aggregating from the database, polling every 60s. The page runs for hours on a wall screen at stable memory. Ocean fills the left edge of the screen and forest the right, at any resolution, so it reads as a little world instead of a floating game board. We're at 45 villagers today. The castle site is still just scaffolding. That's the point, I get to watch it get built. One villager was suddenly standing in the middle of the pond. We've decided this is morning bathing culture and refuse to fix it.

111k people watched me make $0.000 😅 This is probably the funniest thing that has happened since I started building. Months of coding, shipping features, fixing bugs, and trying to get users. Then I posted my actual revenue: $0.000 And somehow 111k people saw it. At this point I'm not sure whether I'm building a SaaS or accidentally becoming a professional $0 revenue founder 😂 Still building LinkForge though. Back to work. https://www.linkforge.site

My side project finally reached ~$1k MRR after almost 3 years I started Taisly in 2023 as a small tool for myself. Last month it made $808 MRR (via Stripe) + $103 (via Yolfi) from 117 premium users 😅 It’s not one of these “$10k MRR in 30 days” stories. It took almost 3 years, many months without sales, and I still spend only around 2 hours per week on it. Almost 90% of customers come from Google, old SEO pages, and translations. I barely used paid ads Stripe showed me how much money I received, but not which traffic actually brought it. So I connected Taisly to Talivia, another analytics product I’m building, and now I can see the full path from the first visit to payment The numbers are still small, but it feels good to finally see a side project paying every month 💰 Next goal is to understand which channels really work and try to grow it to $2k MRR

How they grewGoogle, old SEO pages, translations; barely used paid ads

My SAAS just crossed 1.7M active users and over 1.2 billion tokens 6:00 AM EST, when this screenshot was taken, the active users go all the way to 1700. When I started this project 8 months ago, I posted here in the same group and asked for suggestions on whether I should make my SaaS paid from the start or free. Instead of chasing higher MRR, I am chasing brand building, and the brand "SuperHumanizer" is searched 100,000 times per month on Google. (Based on my Google SC). This is a free tool with unlimited usage and some premium features. I got most of the credits from Google startups, and that's why the AI inference doesn't cost me much, and I offer the service for free. Over 400M tokens are used every month. Link: [https://superhumanizer.ai](https://superhumanizer.ai) Now it's the most-used AI Humanizer of 2026: [https://www.reddit.com/r/SuperHumanizer/comments/1wjr50e/the\_most\_used\_ai\_humanizer\_of\_2026/](https://www.reddit.com/r/SuperHumanizer/comments/1wjr50e/the_most_used_ai_humanizer_of_2026/)

How they grewGoogle Search Console; brand building

Just launched my app! Bit of background: I'm a PT and coach wrestling for jiu jitsu to help out at my club (as I’m one of the only few that went to a wrestling gym to learn standup), and I train BJJ. The thing that kept bugging me is that loads of people in combat sports would massively benefit from proper strength and conditioning, but a real S&C coach costs a fortune. And a lot of people come into BJJ or wrestling having never touched a weight in their life, so they either don't bother or follow some random bodybuilding programme that wrecks them for training. So I built Combat Coach. It builds your gym sessions around when you're on the mats, what kit you've got and how experienced you are. Total beginners get eased in properly instead of being thrown in the deep end. Built it solo, first app I've ever shipped. It's £7.99 a month and there's a one-week free trial so you can try it properly before paying anything. I'm at zero users right now so any advice is welcome. Cheers 🙏 https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/combat-coach-ai/id6791911051

I just got my first paying customer, and it came from a completely unexpected Reddit post I know it's one customer, but I can't stop smiling. People are actually interested... in something I built! https://preview.redd.it/mlvn4ly0qfrh1.png?width=2140&format=png&auto=webp&s=c81377309ba0602aae60d0c1875eee45b9802cc8 I'm the founder of [QuiddityML](https://quiddityml.com/), an app for learning machine learning/AI (short lessons, coding exercises, spaced repetition). Think Duolingo for AI 😄 I officially launched a few weeks ago, and until two days ago nobody had paid. I tried the usual launch stuff: Product Hunt, directories, LinkedIn, a blog. But each one barely brought any visitors. Then on Tuesday I posted in r/learnmachinelearning. Not about the app, just a long post to the question that sub gets every day: what should I learn in order to get into ML/AI, and in what order. Genuinely trying to just help people using what I learned in my PhD and tech jobs, rather than promote. It got about 150k views, almost 500 upvotes, and people actually gave me awards for it, which I had to learn what it means. Almost 1000 people came to the site that day and 123 signed up. What's even more surprising, is that within an hour of the post I had my first customer! A stranger read a free post, found the app on their own, used it, and decided it was worth a year. So bizarre and heart-warming at the same time. I'm writing this post for two reasons: 1. I want to thank all of you wonderful people for the launch stories and first-customer threads I've been reading here for months. They kept me going when nothing was working 2. I wanted to share my experience to perhaps help others who don't find the usual channels/approach working right off the bat Still very early (1 paying user, a lot of free ones to convert), but this feels like the first real milestone. Thanks again to everyone here!

How they grewReddit post in r/learnmachinelearning

How I got my first 20 paying customers for my SaaS in 65 days with Google Ads and Organic Reddit Marketing. I have started my side project on June-26 and launch on very next day June 27, Which is fully VibeCoded with white and blue color UI. I just simply clone one feature pdf to link from another big whale, set one Supabase DB for text data and Storage for save pdf. So i just created on small landing page with google login and user able to upload its pdf and share link easily. for next 1 week, i got around 1-2 users only. then i got to know about Google ads and i started with $5 per day budget with India and US Campaign. I started got users like 7-8 users per day. And slowly, I started increase the budget from $5 to $20 per day and i reach to 500 total signups and 9k visitors in total. Then, I started improving ui as user like product. Total 5GB of data has uploaded on Supabase. I migrated storage to CloudFlare R2 and keeping DB at Supabase. Add more tracking like PostHog, GA4 and Clarity. Even, Integrate Google Ads <> GA4 for tracking goals like purchase and signup. After 2 month, August 27 I got 800 signups and now i started post on every social channels like Reddit, X and LinkedIn. And now gradually decrease the ads and i got organic traffic and in total 1.6k+ signups and 60k+ visitors. Also, I got around 20+ users have purchased paid plans after 65 days. And I am still counting and making more strategies. Like how to convert user from free to paid plans. How to make product which really needs users in their daily life. All features in [LinkInSeconds](https://linkinseconds.com) are available based on what user really want and they demand. I continuously tracking user events on analytics, what they uploading such as Image, Video, PDF, docs, csv file, Markdown, Html, (40+ file types supported) etc. Even, they really like to host full HTML website with their custom domains. And there is lot more to we add based on user suggestion and what really needs for real file sharing tool. I am really focusing on big one stop solution with single focus what user really wants. And I will keep building in public and sharing my progress here and X. And I hope one day I will reach to $10k MRR. Thanks :)

How they grewGoogle Ads, Reddit, X and LinkedIn