My first SaaS failed badly.

I added features to chase users. I didn't have a solid distribution channel. The product became confusing, traffic fell, and I still didn’t know who it was for.

The second time, I reversed the order: distribution before product.

Before building, I:

• Grew to 5,000+ followers on Threads
• Grew to 1,000+ followers on X
• Joined communities

As a developer, I chose to build a dev tool. Essentially I tried to leverage my already established network and communities.

I started with my own problem, then validated it through conversations and community research.

That became SocialCrawl, an API for accessing social media data through one integration.

What worked:

• Distribution before building
• A clear, single ICP
• Blogs, backlinks, and SEO from day one
• Consistently posting cringe posts
• Talking to users and fast feedback

What didn't:

• Adding features to chase growth - the product became too confusing, ICP was too abstract and unclear
• Building without a clear ICP (eg. building sth you 'think' is cool or without a specific persona)
• Being lazy with distribution and content posting
• Cold outreach (maybe I didn't do enough..!)
• Paid ads, content promo, paid influencers (if you have established substantial audience yourself, organic marketing can work 100X better)

Summary of everything that worked: know exactly who your ICP is, find where they already hang out, and show up there consistently.

Summary of everything that didn't: being unclear on who you're building for.

If you're early and it feels slow, keep going, it compounds.

A year ago, I thought if I could just learn how to build apps, everything else would fall into place.

Then AI showed up.

Now I can build faster than I ever imagined. The funny part is building stopped being the bottleneck.

The new bottleneck became, getting someone to try it or explaining why it matters. Then you have to earn enough trust that people actually listen.

I've realized I spend just as much time learning marketing, writing, and having conversations as I do writing code. In a weird way, AI made building easier, but it also made distribution more important than ever because everyone can build now.

I'm curious if other founders have felt the same shift. Did AI solve one problem only to expose a much bigger one?

Trésora is my first ever commercially released product of any kind, and it just went live on the App Store today, with Google Play launching a few days ago.

Inspired by my wife's vintage glass collecting hobby, it helps antique, vintage, and thrift shop enthusiasts organize and capture their entire collecting life all in one place.

You can find shops near you (or anywhere else), plan shopping outings, and keep track everything you see and buy – identifying items (and their value), in seconds, using AI.

Last but not least, you can use Trésora to manage your entire collection (and wishlist) – keeping track of purchase dates, prices and locations – and documenting everything in detail, with category-specific fields for over 35 types of collectibles.

Trésora is much, much, more than the dozens of cookie-cutter antique identifiers in the app store. My goal is to add in-app sharing features and build it into the worlds largest community of collectors – similar to what Goodreads and Letterbox'd have done for readers and movie enthusiasts.

Please check it out and let me know what you think! Do you collect anything antique or vintage? What would make it an indispensable tool for making your hobby easier or more fun?

App Store link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tr%C3%A9sora-antiques-thrifting/id6768168495

Google Play link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.jumpstartsolutions.tresora

I've been building OrzattyCDN alone for months, from Venezuela. It started as a simple proxy so I didn't have to manage 5 different domains for fonts, npm packages, and GitHub assets. Today I shipped v2, and it went from "a proxy" to a full edge infrastructure suite.

What it does:
Serves npm, GitHub, JSR, cdnjs, esm.sh, Google Fonts, Iconify, Tailwind, IPFS, and even WordPress, all under your own domain. Sub-10ms latency across 300+ edge locations, no third-party dependencies.

What's new in v2:

• Web console with its own login (OAuth2 + PKCE) to manage tokens, repos, and anti-hotlink protection
• Real edge metrics: requests, countries, top assets, egress quota
• Official GitHub Action: every push to main auto-syncs your public/ folder
• Private registry to publish your own packages with versioning and SRI
• AI-powered image optimization (Unsplash search + on-the-fly WebP/AVIF conversion)
• Security layer: anti-hotlinking, SSRF protection, XSS sanitization, rate limiting

Everything runs on Cloudflare Workers + R2 + D1, with smoke tests before every release.

It's free to start. If anyone wants to try it or break it, I'd really appreciate the feedback — that's what I need most right now.

🔗 https://cdn.orzatty.com

My SaaS serves a niche market with a ton of potential but almost no sales at all. I believe I have several issues main of em is driving traffic and retention. Basically many of the prospects actually find the solution a little complex or confusing and I believe a lot of content could help them understand it. But I don’t have the budget or honestly the time that it takes to make quality content so I’m leaning mainly towards AI to make it work. Any advice?

Hey, I’m trying to market my app through Reddit, but I don’t want to come across as spammy or get banned from any subreddits. Does anyone have advice on how to find the right communities, provide value, and promote the app naturally? I’d appreciate any tips or examples of what has worked for you.

I’m an architect based in Istanbul, and for a long time I was frustrated by how fragmented architectural work had become.

A single project meant jumping between parcel maps, zoning documents, spreadsheets, CAD/BIM software, permit files, emails, task trackers and countless folders. Most “AI architecture” products I tried focused on generating impressive images, but very few understood the actual work between receiving a parcel and delivering an approved project.

So I started building RONCHAMP.

RONCHAMP is an operating system for architecture offices. It combines AI-assisted floor-plan generation, an in-browser BIM environment, parcel and planning-data workflows across 15+ countries, permitting and document processes, project archives, automations, and an AI office assistant.

The goal isn’t to replace the architect or make design decisions behind a black box. I want the system to handle repetitive work, preserve project knowledge and give architects more time for the decisions that genuinely require judgment. Generated plans remain editable, revisions are traceable, and the architect stays in control.

A lot of the product has grown directly from real permit files and the problems I encountered in practice—not from hypothetical startup use cases. I’m still improving the planning intelligence, floor-plan generation pipeline and BIM tools, but the product is live and usable today.

I’d genuinely appreciate feedback from architects, designers and anyone working with permits or zoning. I’m especially interested in hearing which part of your current workflow wastes the most time.

You can see it here: ronchamp.io

Hi all,

After months of grinding away as a solo founder, I finally shipped my product, LLMGraph. Yeah, it's another AI workflow builder. It's aimed at businesses that want a low or no-code way in, but still a high ceiling for configuring and building on it later. The product could go a bunch of directions, but I'm starting by leaning into its customer support assistant use case.

I know this space is crowded, and there are way bigger, better-funded competitors out there. Honestly that doesn't scare me off. I take it as a sign there's a real market here, and I want a slice of it.

Since I'm early and don't have a marketing budget, I'm trying to find creative ways to get the word out without resorting to bot slop and spamming people. So I'm building in public. I'm reaching out to my own network. I'm cold emailing. I'm genuinely proud of what I've built, and I think it's good. I'm also happy to work closely with a few good customers to build bespoke stuff for them.

So my question for you all: what would you be doing to take this to the next level? For those who've been here, how did you get past the hard part?

I'm a 16 year old solo dev building a personal finance tracking app in Flutter for emerging markets. My MVP will require offline capabilities (users have spotty internet), and I need to connect to local bank APIs to fetch transaction data.

For the stack, I'm currently planning

-Local DB: Hive or Isar for offline storage.

-Backend: Firebase (Auth & Firestore) for cloud sync and user profiles.

-Bank integration: Using Open Banking SDKs (like Okra) to get read-only transaction history.

My questions

Is Hive/Isar + Firebase Firestore a scalable combination for a solo MVP or should i look for other alternatives?

When handling local transaction data on the user's device, what are the critical security practices I must implement? I want to protect users even if their phone is lost.

Should I make the Open Banking API calls directly from the Flutter app, or should I run a lightweight Node.js proxy server to handle the token exchange?

I know I have a lot to learn, but I'm committed to the long game. Any seasoned advice would be greatly appreciated!

I believe this aspect of becoming a solo founder is very interesting that i get to learn new things in domains I have never dared to set foot. My app is dealing with some bot DDoS and I have to run through different measures and methods to fight them. It is quite fun and challenging not gonna lie. What is the most unexpected thing you had to learn in the solo founder path?

hi everyone,

I have been hearing about the vibe coding app's are entering the market and anyone can do it now,however i still have few doubts about the survival of the app as anyone like me who do not have much experience with building app and trying one.
What are the chances of that app competing and the security of the app against the one who is well known tech person build the app and know what to look for,what to add,what to remove,how to make sure this app will not have any loop holes which will land me in trouble atleast until i have any tech team or tech co-founder.Being a solo founder who is building an app for students it is hard to know all the things and ai only answer to us for what we ask it not what should we be doing instead,what to avoid,what are we already doing wrong.

I've been using a home-made link shortener for my private clients for over 10 years. After millions of clicks, it occurred to me that others might use it, too, if it was easy to use.

If you’re drowning in long, messy links full of tracking junk, wb.io can be a super clean fix. To get the ball rolling, I'm offering Redditors a month of the Business level service for free with the coupon code REDDIT. All I ask in return is your honest appraisal of where it could be improved.

It turns bulky URLs into short, shareable links that actually look good in posts and comments. Way easier to drop into Reddit threads, DMs, bios, or anywhere character count and readability matter. No wall of random parameters, no visual clutter — just a tight link that people are more likely to click.

Biggest value prop IMO:

Cleaner posts (especially on Reddit where ugly links stand out)

Easier sharing across platforms

Device-specific forwarding: send Apple users one way, Android a different way, everybody else a third way

More professional look

Simple + fast, no overcomplicated dashboard vibes

If you share links often, it’s one of those small tools that just makes everything smoother.

I recently launched Sudoku Grid9 as a solo developer under Cexor Studio. It’s a clean classic Sudoku game featuring daily challenges, six difficulty levels, progression tracking, detailed statistics, notes, hints, and local game saving.

This is my second published mobile app and I’m currently learning the distribution and marketing side of building products independently.

Available on iOS:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sudoku-grid9/id6783469136

I’d especially appreciate feedback on the onboarding experience and difficulty progression.

The building part turned out to be the easy part. I put the whole thing together over a weekend on a no code website builder, shipped it, and it slowly started making money on the side while I kept my day job.

It now covers my expenses. Probably. If I am careful.

That word probably is doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence, and it is the reason I have not quit. On a good month the number clears my rent, my software, and the boring adult stuff. On a slow month it does not, and I make up the difference from the salary I am trying to leave. So which month is the real one. That is the whole question, and "probably" is how I avoid answering it.

What I have realized is that "when do I quit" is the wrong question, because it has no answer that feels safe. The better questions I am forcing myself to put actual numbers on: how many months of expenses do I have saved if every month is a slow one. What is my trailing six month average, not my best month. Would I still make this leap if the product grew zero percent from today, because betting on a number that does not exist yet is how people quit too early.

I do not have the nerve to pull the trigger yet, and I am suspicious of the founders online who make it sound obvious. It is my rent.

For the people who did leave the job for the side thing: what was the actual threshold? A savings number, a months of runway number, a trailing average you wanted to hit. Not the vibe, the number you told yourself in advance.

Hey everyone 👋

I built ListMySaaS (https://listmysaas.xyz), a growing SaaS directory where founders can showcase their products and gain additional visibility.

A recent milestone: the site's Domain Rating has reached 41, with consistent growth driven by ongoing SEO work and Google indexing.

Why submit your SaaS?

🚀 Get your product in front of people looking for new tools.

🔗 Earn a backlink from a DR 41 directory.

📈 Increase your product's online visibility.

💯 Free submission.

If you're building a SaaS, I'd love to have it listed on ListMySaaS.

I'm also happy to hear any feedback on the website or submission process to keep improving it for the community.

Drop your product below or submit it on ListMySaaS.

Happy building! 🚀

I’ve spent the last 8 months building a fintech app after work.
Going into it, I thought the biggest challenge would be writing the code.
After talking with a founder who has successfully built and scaled a fintech company, I realized I’d been focused on the wrong problem.
Here were my biggest takeaways:
1. Traction solves more problems than features.
I kept thinking I needed to finish every feature before launch.
His advice was simple: get people using it first.
Infrastructure, partnerships, and even fundraising conversations become much easier when you can show real users.
2. Business development is a completely different skill from product development.
You can spend months building something great.
That doesn’t mean anyone will find it.
Learning how to talk to users, build trust, and distribute your product is its own full-time job.
3. Validate the experience before perfecting the technology.
I originally wanted real money moving through the app from day one.
Instead, I was encouraged to launch with a fully simulated experience first.
If people don’t enjoy the core experience, the technology behind it won’t matter.
That completely changed how I think about building.
I’m now shipping a TestFlight beta that’s intentionally simulated while I learn from real users.
Curious if anyone else has had a conversation that completely changed how they approached building their startup.

Small win, but I have no cofounder to tell, so here it is. First paying customer this week, four months after launching. Solo, building a scheduling tool for small tutoring businesses.

For months my "sales" was a wall of text. Long DMs, a features page, a Notion doc explaining everything. People would read it, say "looks cool," and vanish. I was explaining the product instead of showing it.

Two weeks ago someone in a tutoring Facebook group asked what my thing actually does. Instead of typing another essay, I recorded a five minute screen demo. Me, walking through the exact mess they described (chasing payments, canceling a session without handing out my phone number), and how the tool handles it. Nothing fancy, one take, a couple of "ums" left in.

She watched it and paid the next day. $29/mo. Tiny, I know. But it is the first time a stranger has paid for something I built, and the demo did in five minutes what my walls of text failed at for four months.

The lesson I am sitting with: people do not want to read how it works, they want to see it work on their exact problem. I have since made three more short demos for the three most common questions, and I just send the right one instead of typing.

Anyone else find a specific format that suddenly converted after a dry spell? Trying to figure out if I should lean all the way into short demos or if that only works this early.

Deployed feedbackqueue.dev, a free-to-usefeedback-for-feedback platform for builders to gather feedback and testers without commenting, posting, DMing, SEO, ads, or doing any marketing bs. you won't even go searching for them.

WELL, we crossed the 1,000 user mark in less than 4 months, haha (selling at this point 😄)

oh yeh, and in case you want feedback but got no time to give it, there's always review credit for that

welcome to the queue, folks.

My SaaS was built to solve the problems my hot sauce business was facing.

I made a couple mistakes that I am trying to overcome. First, obviously I started with the product. Second, I added a full inventory management, COGS, and reporting layer. Now I added it for myself because I was having fun building and it is giving me the tools to manage the hot sauce business better.

Hide sight being 20/20 I would have stopped at the MVP that was working well for us and then started trying to build an audience.

Trying to remind myself that bootstrapping a business is slow and building a content marketing engine doesn't seem to be any faster.

I think the biggest advantage I have is my wife and business partner. Her tolerance for friction within software is incredibly low. So I was forced to really think about and design around someone that one extra tap means she won't do it.

FourFoxes.io makes recording batch production and critical control points extremely low friction. Used it during a health inspection and the inspector asked for a box of cards to give to other food and beverage cpg makers. So I thought that maybe it was worth building it up to be multi-tenant and turn it into a business.

Everyday I am learning something new, and that has been fun. Would be nice to grow this into something though.

Roughly 5 weeks ago the "defract" domain did not exist - so basically zero domain authority. Everyone is using AI to help them decide what tools, products or services to buy so if you don't exist in ChatGPT land you don't exist at all.

My goal was clear - we have to get these LLMs to list us as a great product in agentic development... or we're screwed

The problem is that AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) sits on top of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) - LLMs do web searches for most stuff when you are looking for fresh up to date results - and we weren't even showing up in Google/Bing

LLMs surface only a handful of sources - and those sources are controlled and capped by Google, Bing and others - so you either are on top of the list or you're invisible.

This puts every incumbent with high domain authority at a big advantage - and you can't really outspend them - so don't even try

The solution? Grind with relevant fresh content that LLMs love.

(by the way - I have a playbook with all the tips and tricks that got me here, link is in the comments 👇)

In over a month we've:

- Published 11 "head-to-head" or "vs-pages" - direct and honest comparison with alternative products
- Published 22 blog posts - 40% of these are "opinion" type posts, 60% are guides/lists like "Top 10", "Spec Driven Development How To", "Best Claude Code Orchestrators" etc
- Got the website to a 100/100 score in SEO as reported by Lighthouse, including CLS zero (perfect layout stability) and 1,4 seconds to first paint (FCP)
- Reduced the website content size by ~90% (from mbs to kbs)
- Added Pre-rendered React site for crawlers
- Made the whole site AI first (llms.txt, AGENTS.md, md mirrors like index.md, sitemap.md, glossary, etc) - AI readability score from 63 to 100%

Results:

- Several users have now came from ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini type engines, where the LLMs referred a blog post or a vs page and we were able to attribute the download to that session
- Non-branded queries have now surpassed the branded (people searching for defract specifically vs rest)
- Search engines and LLMs now account for the highest source of traffic (linkedin was #1 for the first 2 or 3 weeks)
- Zero dollars spent and there's now a stream of new users coming in every week in one of the toughest categories out there (developer tools)

I just wanted to tell other founders out there that *it is possible* - don't try to rush for paid adds, or use other tricks, just grind your way with the best practices into an organic traffic strategy to create a stead stream of visitors - it will feel slow but time will compound your efforts.

Happy to take any questions about anything and share more of what worked and what didn't!