Reddit posts

Small SaaS win today :) Someone found the attendance app I’ve been building organically, created a company workspace, and started inviting their team. No ads or outreach involved. It’s only 2 users so far, but seeing a real company actually start using something I built feels way more exciting than just seeing signup numbers. First little sign that maybe I’m building something people actually need. Website: https://slidesclock.com App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/slidesclock-attendance-app/id6804278786

How they grewOrganically; no ads or outreach

AI made building easy. It didn't make selling easy. How our commercial + technical co-founder setup got us past €5k MRR I'm the commercial co-founder of a small SEO SaaS in the Netherlands. My co-founder is the technical one. My background is sales, but in a completely different market. One where everything was about relationships. Long conversations, meeting people in person, building trust over months. Now I sell a SaaS with subscriptions for a relatively low monthly price. And I quickly found out my old way of selling didn't fit anymore. You can't spend weeks on one customer when the subscription is a small amount per month. The math just doesn't work. So I had to change how I sell. That took time. A lot of trying, failing and adjusting. But now I really see it working. Less about long relationships with a few people, more about reaching the right people fast and making it easy for them to start. The trust part is still important, but it has to happen quicker and at a bigger scale. We're now past €5k MRR and it's starting to really pick up. Not huge numbers yet, but steady growth and it feels like things are finally moving in the right direction. And this brings me to something I keep noticing. A few years ago the hard part of starting a software company was building the product. You needed developers, time and a lot of money. Now? With AI tools a lot of people can build a working product in a few weeks. New tools launch every day and many of them are actually pretty good. But most of them get no users. Because building was never the only problem. Distribution is. Who is going to find your product? Who is going to trust it? Who is going to pay for it? AI didn't solve that part. Maybe it even got harder, because everyone is launching and the noise is bigger than ever. That's why I think the combination of a technical founder and a commercial founder is stronger now than it ever was. In our case it works like this: - My co-founder builds and improves the product. He doesn't have to think about how to sell it. - I talk to customers, do demos, run outreach and write content. I bring back what people actually ask for. - We're developing a lot right now and almost everything we build comes from customer feedback. People tell us what they miss or what could be easier and we use that to keep making the product better. That loop is honestly the biggest reason it's working. We don't guess what to build. Our customers tell us. It's not always smooth. We sometimes disagree about priorities. He wants to fix something technical, I want a feature a prospect asked for yesterday. But those discussions usually lead to better decisions than either of us would make alone. And to be honest, sometimes I'm the problem. I want too much. With AI it feels like everything is possible and everything can be done tomorrow. But in the end someone still has to actually build it, test it and make sure it works. AI speeds things up, it doesn't make the work disappear. Being careful has become really important for us. Our tool is now used by around 100 websites. That means we can't just push something out and hope it works. If something breaks, customers notice right away. And with a low-priced subscription they don't complain for long. They just leave. So we started planning a lot more seriously. Every week and every month we decide what we're actually going to do. Not everything we'd like to do, but what's realistic and what matters most. That keeps us from wanting too much at once and running ahead of ourselves. Sounds boring maybe, but it's one of the best changes we made. What I see with solo technical founders is that they build for months and only then start thinking about marketing. And commercial founders without a technical partner often depend on freelancers or agencies and lose speed. So my honest take: if you can build, find someone who can sell. And if you can sell, find someone who can build. Building got cheaper. Selling didn't. And whatever you do, plan it and don't try to do everything at once. Curious how others see this. Are you a solo founder or did you split roles like this? And for the salespeople here: did you also have to change your approach when moving to low-ticket SaaS?

How they grewOutreach, demos and content

I don’t know how to express but finally we crossed 10K registered users Few time ago I shared how after many months we were able to at least handle the server cost. There were around 9K users into the platform and today when I checked 10K+ users are finally into our platform. When I worked as a software engineer, really guys I used to think who will use the product or service. Even in company when I worked on a product where 300 users were active I really felt great. My dream was “one day I will have 1K registered users and they will actually use my platform”. And after creating a product and marketing in my own college and after few content collaboration I actually got 1K registered users in two months. I really feel like ah what to say. I am handling 10K users into my own platform. Few dbs has millions of records as we process words preserve history breakdown sentence and all. So in this 1 year of journey what I realised is making a product is very very simple but actually introducing uses, making them purchase is very hard. Also our product focuses students and getting students convert is a way tough process because every penny matters and we need to solve the real problem. What we are doing at aitextools.com is having an ecosystem from where students can actually re-wire ai generated sentences, check there , also can paraphrase and even check plagiarism. So this entire ecosystem is helping them to perform well academically. I don’t know where this will go but always I see the metrics, reply to the customer support, add organic content into our channels and actually I educate students via our social platform. I am open for questions.

How they grewmarketing in my own college, content collaboration, organic content

So I've listed at Betalist for 39$ and what I've got? I'm building a LinkedIn to CRM extension (messages auto-logging, saving profiles, companies, CRM management) called Ln2crm, and now marketing it, so I bought a listing in Betalist - one of the large SaaS listicles. Waited nearly a month for them to publish, and now my page has been on the flight for 2 days. So what I've got: - decent do-follow link from 65+ DR - a couple of listings on some other platforms automatically (they reached out and told me they listed) - some security 'reviews' with some points that made sense to fix - generic AI-generated website review with an offer to build a new one - suggestions to list on some platforms I didn't know about -about 50 people of traffic to the website (from India, Pakistan, Singapore, Nigeria, Morocco) - a letter with different proposals for video making, QA(with crazy pricing $1200-4200 for testing), SEO services, link building services. - I get a letter literally every hour (you can see how my morning started), so my inbox is flooded - Threats from scammy 'white hat' hackers. P.S. All I wanted was a backlink, so no expectations of new users or anything

How they grewBetalist listing

Why I ditched auth and recurring subscriptions for a local-first utility (and what 10k views showed about paywalls) (Disclosure: I'm the solo developer behind Subtrack, sharing this as a build/metrics retrospective) When planning a simple utility SaaS, the common playbook is almost automated: spin up an auth provider (Supabase/Firebase), set up cloud database tables, block access behind a login screen, and charge $5/month. I originally went down that route, but the product fundamentals felt contradictory: people looking to audit and reduce recurring subscriptions are usually exhausted by the idea of adding yet another monthly bill. On top of that, forcing an account creation before delivering immediate utility creates a massive drop-off for simple tools. I decided to rebuild the project as a zero-login, local-first web app (localStorage only) backed by a flat lifetime unlock ($14.99) instead of monthly billing. After tracking roughly 10,000 views across recent posts and analyzing initial event data, here are the main technical and business takeaways: Removing mandatory logins completely transformed initial interaction. Over 80% of new visitors jumped straight into testing the pre-populated demo dashboard. However, zero-friction created a different product problem: users treated the demo as a static sandbox and did not naturally realize they could reset it to input their real data. I had to build an explicit "clear demo & start fresh" onboarding banner to bridge the gap between passive testing and actual active usage. - Zero server maintenance vs. Data risk: Storing user records client-side eliminated server maintenance, database scaling costs, and sensitive financial compliance concerns entirely. The trade-off is user retention: if a user clears their browser cache without exporting their CSV backup, their records are gone. The next logical step will be optional local file imports rather than centralizing data on an external server. - One-time fee resistance vs. Churn management: For micro-utilities, charging a one-time unlock ($14.99 after 5 free entries) eliminated the recurring churn problem completely. While it limits MRR predictability, initial conversion intent signals were noticeably higher than asking for an ongoing subscription. The project is live here for context on how the local flow works: https://getsubtrack.lovable.app For solo founders building utilities, how are you balancing local-first privacy architectures with long-term user retention? Do you see a sustainable resurgence in flat-fee utility pricing over recurring SaaS?

How they grewRecent posts

Desperate. 3 months building this and 0 users. I got obsessed with fitness and nutrition and none of the apps I tried felt right, so I built my own (I code, and I have spent a lot of time with AI).You tell it what you ate in plain words, like "add the vanilla protein drink to dinner", and it logs the meal and counts the calories. You can also just ask it about food. Screenshot is in Spanish, I am from Spain.I have been using it myself for a while and I love it. Nobody else uses it though. Zero customers, and I honestly do not know where to go from here.

Update: 12 days ago I was at 7 Users 1 Paying Now at 15 Users 1 Paying. My software that harvests data and sources govement contracts has had 12 sign ups this past month. Every signup within the past 12 days Ive tried to host demos with users so they understand the product better. Out of the 8 that joined in these past 12 days through email campaigns I had demos with 2 who said they would switch to paid after the trial ended and they did not. They are not receptive to follow up emails and emails stating their trial is ending. Stuck in a pattern where users join and then are active for a few days and fall off. Its clear as day the demand is there. There is a problem. I can't figure out why users don't switch to paid. I have a demo next week with user 15 who wants to switch to paid once the trial is over ill see how that goes and use any tips or feedback offered here. This demo is scheduled at the end of his trial showcasing the paid version of our software. Feedback/constructive criticism wanted.

How they grewEmail campaigns and demo calls

I changed one sentence on my paywall… and free trial starts dropped. Which version would you choose? I changed my paywall copy and got a weird result I have a small mobile app for n8n users and I changed the wording on my paywall a few days ago. Old one said: “Continue with Pro” “Activate my space” New one says: “Try free for 7 days” “Start 7-day free trial” Same product, same price. I thought the second one would work better because it's much clearer about the free trial. But so far I'm not seeing that. I checked PostHog again after 6 days. The old version had 146 users see the paywall and 6 start a trial. The new version had 164 users and also 6 trials. What's weird is that more people are clicking the new version (31.7% vs 27.4%), but that isn't turning into more trials. Small numbers obviously, so I'm not trying to draw a big conclusion from this yet. I'm curious though. If you saw both versions, which CTA would you personally prefer?

we got 2000 downloads and then killed most of our app hi everyone! I'm building oro, an AI fashion stylist you can text we originally had an ios app that does the same thing, got ~2000 downloads then decided to pivot to SMS our new thesis is basically that you should be able to treat oro like an actual stylist. so the same way you'd be able to talk to a personal stylist, iterate on things, or give them context into your personality. we're beta testing the sms version now: https://www.askoro.now/ PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE roast the hell out of this idea. like if you think it's not working out pls shoot!

We launched Eddie for your Mac’s notch and it already got 3 paid users We launched our Mac app 24 hours ago. We already made 3 sales. This feels unreal. We’ve been building Eddie for the last little while, and yesterday we finally put it out into the world. 24 hours later, three people have actually paid for it. I know 3 sales isn’t a huge number, but when you’ve built something yourself and a stranger decides it’s worth paying for, it feels like the biggest thing ever. So what is Eddie? Eddie lives in your MacBook notch, so the stuff you keep reaching for is already at the top of your screen. You can use it for: Clipboard Notepad Music controls Focus timer Seeing today’s sales And a few other little things If you run coding agents like Claude Code or Codex, Eddie also shows you when an agent is working and lights up when it needs your attention. One of my favourite things we’ve heard so far is that people like being able to leave their agent running while they’re doing something else in the browser, and only come back when Eddie tells them the agent needs them. That’s actually the idea behind Eddie: Don’t keep checking your computer. Let the things you need come to you. We’re still very early and figuring out what Eddie should become. But getting those first three sales has given us a ridiculous amount of motivation to keep building. If you’re a Mac user, I’d love for you to check it out and tell me what you think. Check Eddie here

I got tired of $20 mo AI subscriptions, built my own pay-per-use plugin, and immediately got destroyed by free-tier abuse. Senior dev here. I hated paying a flat $20/mo for Copilot/Cursor on weeks I barely coded. I just wanted a clean, lightning-fast DeepSeek V4.1 autocomplete and chat right in my sidebar, without all the forced "agent window" bloatware. So I built CrickCoder (a VS Code/JetBrains plugin) where you just pay the raw API cost plus a tiny margin. To get users, I offered free starting credits on my website. Huge mistake. I got 120 signups but 0 installs. People were just farming the credits to hit my backend via API for their own scripts on my dime. I just nuked web signups. Now you only get credits after installing and authenticating inside the IDE. It stopped the bots completely, but obviously killed my top-of-funnel conversion. Is there a better way to offer free trials to real devs without getting farmed?

How they grewFree starting credits on the website, then credits after IDE install and authentication

Day 10 of building my first SaaS Day 10 of building UseShipReady - 13 visitors today - 20 page views - continued working on the hackathon feature - got replies from 2 more hackathon organizers Trying to get UseShipReady into more hackathons and see how teams actually use it.

How they grewTrying to get into more hackathons

Feeling de-motivated on a project I spent 3-4 months on So, I built a Pokemon eBay deal finder app, which was built originally for me, where it watches eBay and finds products under market value based on PulseTCG market data, then notifies the user as soon as the bot finds the deals. I personally think it's great, and i've hit 55 users now in total, but it's massively slowed down, and I've tried doing some social media posts as well, ads, and the general stuff, but I feel like I'm failing now because I can't seem to get any real feedback to know do people like it, and why it's not growing much recently. This is a bit of a vent tbh, but equally would love any genuine feedback on maybe how yourselves tend to deal with a situation like this, thanks. https://www.dealwatcha.app/ https://preview.redd.it/tiixhxm6ynsh1.png?width=2786&format=png&auto=webp&s=bc5ed006deb816eb42dfc73af80e335c0637f560

How they grewsocial media posts, ads