Just woke up one morning. The account I had spent months building. Real posts. Real conversations. Real karma from actually contributing to communities. Gone.
The timing was the worst part. Three days into launch. Momentum was just starting to build. People were engaging, asking questions, some were even coming back to update me on how they were using it. And then silence. Because the account they were talking to just ceased to exist.
I sat with that for a full day doing nothing.
Then made a new account and kept going. Not because I had some inspiring moment of resilience. Just because stopping felt stupider than continuing.
But here's the thing that actually bothered me more than the ban itself I still don't know why it happened. Not knowing means I don't know what to avoid. Which means I'm building on a platform that can pull the rug with zero explanation and there's genuinely nothing you can do about it.
Reddit is simultaneously the best and most brutal channel for getting early customers. The organic reach is real. The conversions are real. But you are always one silent algorithm decision away from starting over completely.
Has anyone else been through this? How do you protect yourself from building too much on a platform you don't control?
About two months ago I put my mind to researching SaaS ideas, I'm sure most people automatically come across ideas from social media. These ideas mostly involve either high competition SaaS or more interesting tools to develop (e.g AI automation, Travel Planner etc).
After doing research, I realised the best place to be is to be in a boring sector which actually solves a problem that has little solutions available. If you can beat the low competition with lower prices, more features & more accessible, you will dominate that sector. Even if you capture 1-2% of that market which could be relatively small, say that sector of SaaS generates 1M /MRR then you claim $10,000 - $20,000 of that.
They are also notoriously easy to market, if you try to promote a product in a large audience you will get ignored and word of mouth won't spread easily. However if you target a small audience, your product can become very popular and well recognised without being disregarded.
I'm hoping to release soon after around a month of building and will document if it succeeds. If you disagree with any of these takes then I'm happy to take any comments.
My last project: 4 months of coding, launched, 6 signups, dead. Classic.
This time I refused to open my editor until strangers proved they wanted the thing. So the entire "product" for the first 5 weeks was:
- a one-page site on a no code website builder
- a form that dumped into a spreadsheet
- me doing the actual work manually behind the scenes and emailing results back
Slow, embarrassing, completely unscalable. But 34 people signed up and 9 of them came back a second time without me chasing them. That's when I started writing real code, because now I knew exactly which part they cared about (it was not the part I would have built first).
The thing that surprised me: nobody noticed or cared that the backend was me in a spreadsheet. Users judge the outcome, not the stack.
For those further along: at what point did you kill the manual version? I'm worried I'll cling to it too long because talking to every user this way is honestly the best feedback loop I've had.
I had this idea to create a free veteran benefits site that shows veterans every benefit they're eligible for based on a few non invasive questions.
I went ahead and created a foundational site, it caught a ton of traction and hit 180,000 active users in the first month of launching and now I've turned this project into a new goal of becoming a one stop shop for all veterans, we've now created a mapping feature that in its final stage will show veterans every business in their area that offers military discounts within a 35 mile radius.
Its been a great experience so far that has helped a ton of veterans!
i noticed something weird about six months ago. people would land on my site and they already knew what my thing did, which features mattered, how it compared to the obvious alternative. they weren't reading my homepage to figure that out. they'd already made up their mind somewhere else.
turned out the somewhere else was ChatGPT. they'd typed "best tool for X" or "X vs Y" into a chat box, gotten an answer, and shown up to either confirm it or buy. by the time they hit my site the real selling had already happened in a conversation i wasn't part of.
so i stopped writing pages for Google rankings and started writing pages that a model would feel safe quoting. a few things that actually moved the needle for me:
answer-first structure. the first two sentences of every page state the conclusion plainly, before any preamble. models lift the part that directly answers the question, so i make sure that part is the top of the page and not buried under a story.
real comparison and alternatives pages. not the fake "we're better at everything" kind. honest "use them if you want A, use us if you want B" framing. models quote pages that read as balanced way more than pages that read as a sales pitch, because the balanced ones look like a trustworthy source.
FAQ schema on everything. literal question-shaped headers with tight answers underneath, marked up so the question/answer pairing is machine-readable. a lot of what gets pulled into AI answers is just well-structured Q&A.
the site's at roughly 32,000 Google impressions a month now (from search console, march), and i'm starting to get cited directly in AI answers when people ask about my category. the second part matters more to me than the first, honestly, because a citation in a ChatGPT answer reaches the buyer before they ever run a search.
quick disclosure: i write free growth playbooks as install-able skills for AI coding agents (i'm ex-COO of AFFiNE, the open-source Notion alternative). the answer-first / comparison-page / FAQ-schema approach above is packaged as one of them if you'd rather run it than rebuild it. catalog's here: https://gingiris.tools/skills
curious if anyone else is seeing the pre-sold buyer thing. are you tracking how much of your traffic already decided before they arrived, and if so how?
Tiny product, one person, a few hundred paying users. Late last year every thread I read was some version of "your exact tool but as a prompt," and I spiraled. If an AI writing tool can spit out what my product does in a chat window, why would anyone keep paying me a monthly fee. I lost most of a season to that fear.
What pulled me out was not a pep talk. It was actually asking my users, one at a time, why they were still around.
Almost none of them mentioned the feature I was panicking about. What came up over and over was boring stuff. It always works. It does not change on them every week. When something breaks, a real person answers and fixes it. A couple of people literally said they had tried the do it yourself AI route and came back because they did not want to babysit a prompt to run a part of their business.
That reframed the whole threat for me. The thing a general AI tool is worst at is exactly what a small paid product can be best at: being boring, stable, and accountable. It does not wander off. It does not hallucinate their data. There is a name attached to it who will pick up.
So I stopped racing to out feature the panic and put that energy into reliability and uptime instead. Fewer new features this year, more of the product just quietly working. Retention went the right direction.
For other one person founders: when the "AI will kill your product" wave hit, what did you find people were actually paying you for underneath the features?
I spent the last few months building an AI security auditor called Aedis, and building it changed what I think actually matters when you're about to ship, sell, or inherit a codebase.
The stuff that actually scares me isn't the one-liners a linter catches. It's the bug that spans three files, where input gets trusted in one place, passed through another, and only becomes a hole in a fourth, because no quick scan connects those dots. And worse: whether whoever built it left something in on purpose. A hardcoded admin bypass, a hidden endpoint, a "debug" route that's really a way back into the app.
What makes it different from a single-model scan: Aedis runs several flagship AI models over your code independently, then cross-checks their findings against each other. One model flags something, another has to confirm it before it makes the report, which kills the false positives that make most AI scanners useless and catches things any single model misses on its own. It reasons across the whole codebase instead of file-by-file, so it catches the multi-file stuff and the deliberate-backdoor stuff, plus the usual broken-access-control and known-vulnerable dependencies.
Straight up about the limits: it reviews the code, it doesn't run or exploit your app or touch your infra, so it's not a full manual pen-test, but it catches the expensive, deal-killing stuff. And it writes findings as "does this kill a deal / cost you a week of engineering," not useless "CVSS 7.8" scores.
I want real micro-SaaS codebases in front of it instead of my own test cases. First 3 people to comment below, I'll reply with a coupon for a completely free full audit. All I ask is you tell me honestly what it nailed and what it missed, and if it turns out genuinely useful, a writeup would help me a ton, but zero pressure.
solo founder, launched about 5 weeks ago. the product is crawlmouse.com, it crawls your site and grades your internal linking A to F, finds orphan pages, stuff buried too deep, weak hubs. paste a url, get the grade, no signup. i built it because the desktop crawlers are overkill when you just want one question answered.
the numbers so far, since this sub likes receipts: 20 free users, 1 paying. google organic clicks after 5 weeks of doing SEO properly for my own site: zero. literally zero, DR 0 domain, everything ranks page 4 to 9. every single user came from reddit, mostly from comments where i answered someone's question and the tool happened to fit. two posts brought 9 site audits within 4 hours. my only google clicks are people searching "crawlmouse" by name after seeing it here. so reddit feeds google for me, not the other way around. if you're pre-traction and grinding blog posts, that's your cautionary data point.
the accidental marketing lesson: the thing people keep reacting to isn't a feature, it's the pricing structure. free tier is actually free forever, no credits, no trial countdown, no "you've used your 3 audits this month." i did that originally because i just wanted people to use the thing, but it turns out the entire SEO tool market has spent two years making people miserable with credit systems, ahrefs is sitting at a 1.8 on trustpilot mostly over credits, and people burn a month of credits in an hour. so "no credits" has become the line that gets quoted back to me. i didn't plan that. sometimes your positioning is just the wound the incumbents left open.
honest downsides so nobody thinks this is a victory lap: 1 paying customer is not a business, my email capture is basically zero so i can't even follow up with the users i do get, and reddit found two real bugs in my grading logic within hours of my first post, which was humbling and also weirdly the most useful QA i've ever gotten. one guy's site is navigated entirely through a search box and my tool gave him an F, we ended up debugging his site architecture together in the comments and he went F to C in a day. that thread converted better than anything i've written.
the thing i'm building now, and honestly the most fun part: an AI readiness score. the tool already reads the raw html your server returns, which happens to be exactly what GPTBot and claude and perplexity's crawlers see, because none of them run javascript. so a site can look perfect to you and be half empty to an AI crawler. i keep running audits where the human version of a site and the bot version are basically two different websites, and the owner has no idea. so i'm turning that into its own score next to the linking grade, how much of your site an AI crawler can actually access and read. it's not a "you'll rank in chatgpt" promise, nobody can honestly promise that, it's just showing you what the machines actually see, which right now almost nobody checks.
so my ask from this sub: run your side project through and tell me if the grade feels fair, the edge case reports are how i'm improving it. and i'm curious what founders here actually want to know about their AI visibility. like if you could see one thing about how chatgpt or claude sees your site, what would it be? genuinely shapes what i build next
This started as a personal itch. I kept bouncing between a dozen single-purpose text sites (case converter here, dedupe there, a sketchy regex one I didn't trust), all buried in ads and cookie banners. So I built my own. It's called TextArray.com, now 300+ text tools in one place plus a builder to chain them together.
I'll skip the pitch and share the stuff that was actually useful to learn, since that's what I'd want to read here.
Tech stack:
Astro for the frontend. This turned out to be the single best decision. Astro ships zero JavaScript by default and only hydrates the interactive island (the actual tool), so every page is basically static HTML with one small interactive component. Pages load instantly, which helps both the user and the rankings.
Chrome, Edge, and Firefox extensions from mostly one codebase using the WebExtensions API. Cross-browser was less painful than I expected, though Firefox and Chromium disagree on enough manifest details to be annoying.
The builder logic is the core. Every tool is a pure function, string in, string out. The builder just pipes the output of one into the input of the next. Once I settled on that model, no tool needs to know about any other tool, and adding a new one is almost trivial. That's honestly why I'm at 300 and can't stop.
The SEO lesson (the actual point of this post):
I didn't plan this. Because each tool is its own statically generated page, I ended up with 300+ pages (and counting up), each targeting one specific long-tail query. People don't search "text tool," they search "remove duplicate lines" or "convert csv to json." Each of those has a dedicated page that loads fast and does exactly the one thing. That's a much better SEO surface than one big app behind a login.
A few things that mattered:
Auto-generated sitemap so all 300 pages actually get crawled.
Per-page meta and descriptions rather than one generic template, so pages don't cannibalize each other.
Internal links between related tools, which also happens to be good UX.
Keeping the pages genuinely static, so Core Web Vitals stay clean without me fighting them.
Revenue: none. It's free, no ads, no signup, and I want to keep it that way, because ad-riddled tool sites are the reason I built it. I might add a Buy Me a Coffee at some point, and that's the entire monetization plan.
If you've done programmatic or many-page SEO for a utility product, I'd love to hear what worked. And if the builder is confusing the first time you see it, tell me, that's the part I most want to get right.
I'm an ex strategy consultant who built a small tool for my own client work and started selling it on the side. I don't post much, but this lesson was worth writing down because it cost me months to learn.
For a long time I described the product by what it did. Structured workspace, report builder, that kind of thing. Accurate, and nobody cared. Signups trickled.
On a whim I changed the positioning to a "notion alternative for consultants." Didn't touch a line of code. Just rewrote the landing page and how I talk about it in comments and DMs. Signups roughly tripled over the next several weeks off basically the same traffic.
Why it worked, best as I can tell: "notion alternative" is a search people actually type and a mental slot they already have. Consultants know they're overpaying in time wrangling Notion or Google Docs into deliverables. When I named the thing they were already frustrated by and stood next to a tool they know, I stopped having to explain the category from scratch. I borrowed a category and narrowed it to my niche.
The lesson I'd pass to other micro founders: your positioning is doing more of your selling than your features are. "A tool that does X" makes people work to place you. "The [known thing] alternative for [specific person]" hands them the frame for free. You can test it in an afternoon.
Anyone else seen a positioning change move revenue harder than a feature ever did? Curious how far this goes before it stops working.
As the title says, I want to guest post or publish on "write for us" , in my industry. I see guest posts you can buy but they are too broad and anyone with money publishes random topics and has no moderation. So I thought to ask this community if anyone knows anywhere I can write content for, mainly in career, LinkedIn, or jobs kind of fields.
I'm building a service where the main feature calls an LLM API, so each free use has a real variable cost.
A free tier would let people see whether the product is useful before they pay. My concern is that it could mostly bring in people who never planned to pay, plus abuse and extra support work.
I'm considering a few setups:
- a small number of free calls each month
- one-time trial credits
- a cheaper model for free users
- no free tier, with a clear demo instead
For anyone running an AI product with usage-based costs, did free access improve paid conversion enough to justify the API bill? Which limit worked best without making the trial feel useless?
After building and launching 4 B2C macOS apps, I decided to release one of our internal tools that helps us evaluate and track marketing channels.
Days of preparing for the launch, setting up onboarding, landing page, redesigning the dashboard, testing, and more.
Converting an internal tool built for our needs into a standalone product is not as straightforward as you might think.
The deadline was set.
Monday 20th of Jul.
I announced hackathon weekend: finish the launch checklist no matter what.
Launch day tasks list
Time was running out.
Sunday came with half the list still to do.
After a full day and a half night, working almost non-stop, at 2:00 everything was done.
Launch Day
Woke up ready to send the launch link for everyone I know,
Upvotes started to go up,
But halfway into the day, the picture began to reveal itself.
We are not going to finish in the top 10, and even worse, only 2 signups for our new product.
Final score 🥲
350 Visitors, 2 signups, endless disappointment.
BUT here is the plot twist 😁
What if the goal for this launch wasn't customers?
Launching a new SaaS product on Product Hunt that targets B2B, with subscription payments and no initial customers or community, hoping for customers is the longest long shot a builder can take.
And I know it already.
This is not my first B2B startup,
I already built a company that reached 30K MRR before and sold it to a big public company in an 8-figure deal.
We didn't launch that product on Product Hunt at all, no Ads or hundreds of dollars of cold email campaigns.
It was raw, door-by-door, month-to-month, attending conferences, SEO, and more real, physical-world marketing.
This is how I know to market B2B products.
So why launch LnkFlow on Product Hunt when I know it will probably lead to nothing?
Because I wanted to run a real-life test of how our new product can help me, and others, find the marketing channels that really work!
Set Up the Scene
We started this launch by finding a few influencers to help us gain more exposure for the launch page and product page.
Each one should get 2 links, one for our homepage and one for our Product Hunt launch.
So the first challenge was ready: how to create this campaign and all the links for each one of them fast.
The answer: LnkFlow MCP integration 🤩
2 prompts, and done.
The campaign was created, the influencer was created with all the needed metadata, links were generated, and I got a file ready to send.
And I felt just like I want our future customers to feel.
Using this method, we generated all the necessary links for this launch and started putting them everywhere we could.
Each channel had its own subdomain, so it was super easy to track everything and see it all in a clean way.
Getting the results
After a few hours, we already started to get valuable data.
Some promising cooperation brought ZERO clicks.
Literally ZERO.
Something that we didn't have any way to know before.
Some channels worked very well, but the funniest one was one of our Reddit posts.
We got zero comments or upvotes, but thanks to the tracking link we were able to write this comment:
And get some feedback back 😄
The long tail effect
Another perk of using LnkFlow is that we can see how the link performs over time. Even on non-launch days, I can see clicks, and over the long run I will be able to get a better understanding of channel performance.
So what now?
Now it's time to real B2B marketing.
What worked for us on our B2C apps will not work on this one.
This required a different approach, but one I already know.
Just need to remove some rust 😁
I will share more here, but to provide interesting content, I need to grow my business through real marketing channels.
I'm the Marketing Head at Deliveryman AI, and today has been one of the busiest days I've had in a while.
We've spent months building the product, but launch day made me realize something:
Building the product and getting people to discover it are two completely different challenges.
Over the last few hours, I've been reaching out to communities, replying to every comment, talking to users, and trying to get honest feedback. It's been a great reminder that distribution is just as important as product.
For anyone curious, Deliveryman AI was built to simplify cold outreach by bringing together domains, inbox setup, warmup, verification, campaigns, and inbox management into one platform instead of juggling multiple tools.
We're currently in a close race for Product of the Day on PeerPush, with less than 3 hours left.
If you're into SaaS, outbound, or just enjoy supporting products built by small teams, I'd appreciate you taking a look. If you think we've built something worthwhile, an upvote or comment would genuinely help.
More importantly, I'd love to hear from other founders and marketers:
What's been harder for you: building the product or getting people to discover it?
I have been working on a bunch of different SAAS ideas at this point, some of them are just parked right now as I have decided to market others or have lost passion for the project.
Its hard to check logs in a unified fashion for a bunch of different sites, I have backend's on Fly io, Heroku, Vercel, Hetzner and AWS (for varying reasons, some consulting, some work etc). just wanted like text message updates for things with a summary, like "3 new users on ```something.com```, 300MRR created etc, usual latency across all sites".
I made canaryhub.ai, so you can just throw in your site and then have pings for health and then can upstream certain events and get summaries and notifications via Telegram Discord sms etc. I love getting a text saying "hey a user just signed up" even if they aren't a conversion.
Its free for your first project with three monitors so if you have your frontend on Next, webapp on Remix and then maybe another api etc.
Just launched it so feel free to comment with any feedback and improvements.
Title: I built a free, open-source toolkit with 100+ developer utilities
Hey everyone!
Over the past few months I've been building SopKit, a completely free and open-source collection of developer tools that I kept finding myself searching for while coding.
Instead of opening 10 different websites, I wanted one place for everything.
Some of the tools include:
Code formatters
JSON, YAML & XML utilities
Markdown ↔ HTML converters
HTML → JSX converter
Base64, URL and JWT tools
Hash generators (MD5, SHA-256, etc.)
UUID & password generators
Validators
Color & CSS utilities
And many more
The goal isn't to invent new tools—it's to make everyday developer utilities fast, clean, and accessible in one place.
Hi everyone, drop what you're building in the comments and I will be your user and let you know the friction point from my view. I will also list your SaaS on my directory so that your product gets some more attention and help you with SEO!
Bootstrapped micro SaaS, tiny B2B numbers, but the change was big enough to write up. Mostly a note to past me.
For months my post-demo follow-up was a paragraph in an email. Prospects who were clearly interested still went cold, because the person I demoed to had to sell it internally with nothing but their memory of a call.
So I started sending a one-page leave-behind the same day. It is not fancy. Top of the page is the exact problem they described, in their words from the call. Middle is the outcome and what it replaces. Bottom is pricing and one next step with a date. The whole thing exists to be forwarded to a boss who was never on the call.
On tooling, since someone always asks: I draft it fast with an ai document generator so I spend my time on the words, not the layout. I used gamma for the last few. Honest caveat for anyone copying this, the pptx export got janky when I dropped in a small comparison table (it flattened into a blurry image), so I ended up exporting a clean pdf instead, and honestly a plain Google Docs template would have done the same job. The tool was never the point. The point was that a forwardable page existed at all.
Result: the "went quiet after a good demo" rate roughly halved. Two deals I had written off came back specifically because someone forwarded the page internally.
For B2B founders here: is there a format that consistently gets forwarded for you, or do you find the follow-up disappears no matter what you send?
I’m in the US, my family isn’t — so every call started with “wait, is he even awake?”
Built a tiny tool for it: set your hours once, share one link, and whoever opens it sees (in their time and yours) if it’s a good moment to call. Green = go. Shows if you’re asleep or on another call. No accounts, no booking, no app.
Not trying to be Calendly — no scheduling, just “are they free right now.”
I spent way too long on the wrong artifact. Sharing the small numbers because the lesson cost me weeks.
Early on I was convinced I was losing deals because my materials looked amateur, so I built a proper sales deck template and reused it everywhere. Deals kept stalling anyway. 12 paying customers later, here is what actually moved the needle, and it wasn't the deck.
**1. The pricing page did more selling than any call.** Half my customers told me they had basically decided from the pricing page before we ever spoke. When it was vague, people ghosted. When it named who each tier was for in plain words, they showed up to the call already sold.
**2. Three tiers beat one number.** A single price is a yes/no question, and "no" is free. Most people picked the middle tier once there was a middle to pick.
**3. Anchoring the value before the price.** One honest line about what the alternative costs them (their time, a tool they already overpay for) did more than any feature list.
**4. Removing choices, not adding them.** Every extra option on the page lowered conversion. The version that converted best was almost aggressively simple.
The deck? It closed exactly nobody on its own. It was fine as a leave-behind, but the buying decision was happening on a page I had barely touched.
For those further along: what is the one asset you underinvested in that turned out to be doing most of the selling?
