Hi all, I am not sure if you remember my last post 2 months ago. I posed about my SaaS and it was at $3.5k MRR.

Well, I just crossed $4k MRR and it's officially making more money than my 9-5 job which is crazy to think.

I started it as a side project along with my 9-5, I needed a simple tool for myself only. I told one friend about it and he was interested to try. At that time I didn't even think anybody else would be interested into it. Today, 1 year later 250 people are subscribed, more than 10k people registered and it's doing fairly good so far.

So what changed to bring more money:

- I increased the lowest price ($11 to $19)

- I added bunch of AEO and SEO pages

- I started talking with people (app is asking them to join my channels so I can take over and help)

I was very skeptical about the price plan but it turns out people are happy to pay more + weirdly it's sign of a quality product.

SEO and AEO pages is something that is constantly bringing new people, people find about my app in ChatGPT, Claude and other AI providers.

Talking to my customers was the hardest part for me, it's time consuming, it's hard to get people to talk to you and you end up with bunch of small specific ideas/requests and you need to figure out how to implement it while keeping simplicity of the app.

It's still bootstrapped and I am not planning to add any VC money. It's still 0 ads.

MRR proof is here: https://trustmrr.com/startup/opentweet

I've been building a SaaS in the startup discovery space, and one question keeps coming up in my mind.

There are thousands of startups being built every month, many of them operating quietly before they get media coverage, funding announcements, or any meaningful traction.

For someone working in venture capital or angel investing, discovering these companies early could be valuable. But there's a catch.

More sources don't necessarily mean better opportunities. You could monitor hundreds of websites and still end up with an overwhelming amount of noise.

That's the problem I've been exploring with Alpha Scout, a platform focused on discovering early-stage startups across different countries and sources.

I'm trying to think beyond the obvious feature of aggregating data. The real question is whether a tool like this can meaningfully improve discovery, save research time, or surface opportunities that investors would otherwise miss.

For those of you building B2B SaaS products, how do you validate a problem when your target customers are a relatively small, specialised audience?

And if you were building for investors, what would convince you that startup discovery software provides real value rather than just another dashboard full of data?

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts, especially from founders who've built niche B2B products.

Just want to ask , is there any free hosting platform, that you guys are hosting, without worring about money generation ?Can anyone give me walkthrough.

for python backend and frontend React or next js

I'm trying to find someone to help build an AI SaaS MVP, and I honestly can't tell what's real anymore.

Every agency says they build AI products. Every freelancer says they can ship fast. Every platform says you'll own the code and avoid lock-in. Then you get on calls, and half of it sounds like vague strategy, polished demos, or ChatGPT glued to a dashboard.

I'm not looking for a pitch. I'm trying to avoid wasting months and money. For people who've actually hired someone to build an AI product: what questions exposed whether they knew what they were doing? What red flags did you miss? And would you go agency, freelancer, or product/app builder if you had to do it again?

For the last few months I've been building a tool where you paste a job link and get a CV and cover letter tailored to that job.

I knew going in that this niche is crowded. Big resume apps have been around for years. They have the SEO, the budgets and the brand names.

So I couldn't win by having the most features. I had to find another way in.

What worked: blog posts and free tools

I wrote a lot of blog posts aimed at the questions my users actually search for. Then I built small free tools: an ATS checker, a keyword checker, a bullet rewriter, a weak words checker, a gap explainer, and a few more.

Each tool solves one small problem without asking for anything. When you finish, it offers the next step: "want to fix this for a specific job? sign up and tailor your CV." Some people sign up, some of those tailor a CV, and a few of those pay.

It's slow, but it's the only channel where I'm not up against companies with 100x my budget.

Mistake 1: one payment option

At first I only sold a single one-time payment. Lots of people got all the way to checkout and then left.

My guess was that job seekers are already stressed about money and don't want another bill, so a one-time price made sense to me. The checkout data said otherwise.

What I changed: let people pay the way they want

Now there are three options:

- Monthly: $9.99

- Lifetime: $29.99

- Just this one CV and cover letter: $3.99

The surprise was that people buy all three. Some want monthly. Some want lifetime. And some don't want an account they'll forget about. They need one CV for one job, today, and that's all they'll pay for.

I'd been treating "won't subscribe" as "won't pay." Those are two different people.

Mistake 2: one price for the whole world

$29.99 is an easy yes in some countries and a week of groceries in others. I live in one of the second kind, so I should have seen this sooner.

So I added regional pricing. Visitors from African countries see $16.99 lifetime, $6.99 monthly and $2.99 for a single CV. I also translated the site into Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Arabic and Chinese.

Where I am now

40 paying users and $55 MRR. Most of them paid once, through lifetime or a single CV, so they don't show up in MRR. Not huge, but it's real moneyfrom strangers in a market I was told was too crowded.

What I'd tell myself at the start:

- In a crowded niche, free tools and useful content get you in the door before ads do

- Offer more than one way to pay. "Won't subscribe" is not "won't pay"

- One price doesn't fit everyone. Price for where your users live

I'm still testing all of this, so it may change. Hope it helps someone building in a crowded space.

(Disclosure: I'm the founder of FitMyCV, the tool in this post.)

Say a team is unhappy with its project management software. They've found something that fits better, at a reasonable price.

But three years of tasks, comments, attachments, and workflows live in the current tool. Someone would have to move everything and get the whole team comfortable with the replacement.

So they renew for another year. The vendor sees a retained customer. The customer sees a migration they've put off.

Of course, integrations and established workflows have real value. Switching being difficult doesn't automatically mean the vendor has done anything wrong.

But making exports unnecessarily difficult, or leaving important information out of them, feels like a different issue.

How do you tell satisfied customers apart from customers who just haven't found a practical way to leave? Beyond another payment, what tells you they actually want to stay?

I’m building a product and getting close to finishing it. Let’s assume it actually solves a real problem and is useful. After launch, how much do I need to spend on ads or advertising before I start seeing results?

I know every case is different and experience varies, but I’d like to hear from people who have already made it:

• How much did you spend before you got your first paying customers?
• Which channels worked for you (Google, Meta, Reddit, LinkedIn, something else)?
• How long did it take before ads started paying for themselves, or did they never really work and something else did?
• Looking back, what would you have done differently with your budget?

Real numbers (including failures) would help a lot. Thanks!

Here's my 2 years worth of SaaS dump, today i added my last product here too. Going to take a break from building until next year.

If you're on X, you've seen the trend of tools that give you "high-quality backlinks", "high-quality articles", and all that lies. Sharing my experience below.

I'll start with something that you should already know - if it works for everyone, it works for none. This is 100% true for SEO.

I WILL NOT SELL YOU A TOOL FOR ARTILCES OR LINKS IN THIS POST!

I'm mentioning my products below, as you can see also my DR, so you know I might have some idea what I do.

I was about to talk about all that in a Podcast, but it got cancelled, so I made a YouTube video about it, in how you can scale a SaaS business with tactical decisions, and some tips how I scaled my own SaaS (PostFast) in a crazy competitive niche, social media scheduling. I'm trying to do the same for my newest saas with email automation and sequencing (sendheron).

I'll give you a brief overview what might happen to your site if you use those automated tools.

• Google decides to penalize you for backling exchanges scheme, and your SEO NEVER gets back to the point where it was, and you'll need to find other channels
• Google decides that your product is actually in a different niche, and starts deranking it in the one you want, since some "automated" article goes viral and you start seeing as a leader in a different niche

This should be enough to get you into thinking, that just having a lot of clicks in GSC, means nothing, and the picture below with high DR would mean nothing if there were no proper backlinks from reputable sources and traffic into the pages.

A few tips you can get without watching the video that would always help you:

• Get a dofollow links ONLY from websites that are associated in a way with your niche, and avoid gambling, casinos, link farms, etc
• Create "vs [competitor]" pages
• Don't fight for high KD and high volume words when you start

Note that some tools might work for you, until a point, and i've also tried some, but the risks above stay, and I wouldn't risk it anymore, and its not helpful anyway.

If have been building an app since November 2025, and just like many people, I had zero revenue for a long long time.

It was of course frustrating at first, but I at least saw some usage of the free tier of my app relatively early, so I didn't give up yet and tried to optimize.

The subscription for my product is super cheap, only about ~2 €, and it's almost laughable how long it took me to get these now 5 subscribers now. But I am still a little bit proud and hope this number will continue to grow. Every time I get a new user now and I noticed they stopped using the app, I at least try to find things to optimize in the app. Trying to find out what made them stop using the app. But it's hard.

When users sign-up, I also always reach out and ask for feedback. But so far, no one has responded, ever.

Since my app has a free tier and also allows usage without signing up, I learned now that it's so, so incredibly important that you make it as easy as possible for your users to do thinks like sign-up. I completely ignored this for a long while (implemented things like Google signup wayyy to late) and lost many users and ofc still have lots to learn here.

One upside though is that the cost of running my tool is really low: I run two servers that cost around 7 $ each, 2 $ for domain costs and the API costs is covered by the API allowance of my 20 $ Mistral AI Pro subscription. So I still have plenty of time to experiment.

One of the hardest things about selling software is reaching people at the moment they actually need it. Google got pretty good at this. But ChatGPT could take it a step further. Someone asks ChatGPT to compare insurance policies, value a property, or help them prepare for an exam. There's probably a company somewhere that has spent years building software to solve that exact problem. Until recently, ChatGPT could mostly answer the question itself or point people elsewhere. Now it can bring third-party apps directly into the conversation.

I think this changes something quite fundamental about how software gets discovered. A small SaaS company might not need to compete for the same Google keywords, spend money on ads, or convince someone to visit its website first. It could become useful to someone who has never even heard of it.

Obviously, this depends on whether ChatGPT actually recommends these apps, how often it does so, and whether that usage turns into customers. We don't know much about any of this yet. But I suspect there's a short window where some existing software companies could get a disproportionate amount of distribution simply because so few have thought to make their products available this way.

It reminds me of the early web, when being discoverable was sometimes a bigger advantage than having the best product.

I'm particularly interested in whether anyone has already acquired paying customers through ChatGPT apps. Not impressions or installs, but actual customers. It's surprisingly hard to find numbers on this.

If you use Apollo job data with MCP, this post can save you weeks.

You want jobs that companies posted in the last 30 days, and Claude will pull results for you.

But Apollo puts the posted_at field only in the response for organization job postings, so you cannot use it as a filter when you request jobs.

The date range filters sit at the organization level, and this means you can get companies that posted any job in that period.

We pulled 580 such jobs, and we had to verify them by scraping from the original job links, and we ended up with 70.

Solo founder here. I built SmritiOS, which joins Google Meet calls and converts them into decisions, owners and deadlines on a task board. Hindi/English/Hinglish supported.

I'm at the very start: just launched, free 30-day trial, no paid plan yet.

What I'm trying to learn:

- Who actually feels this pain: sales teams, agencies, or engineering teams?

- Would you pay for action-item tracking, or only for transcripts?

- What's the first thing that would make you not trust a notetaker bot?

Happy to share what I learn from your replies. Link if you want to try it: smritios.com

I'm about to release my own SaaS, and honestly I'm a bit worried that once released, if there's traction, it will be quite easy for any company to just throw a team and LLM to copy the whole thing in a few weeks.

The product is not simple on its own, it has taken me months so far and I'm a well seasoned software engineer. Without LLM it would have taken at least 1 year probably or more.

But the issue is that this applies to anyone.

So it has taken me months to come up with refactoring and taking the hard decisions and trials and errors. So someone can simply take screenshots of the final product and copy it. Especially since a big portion of the stack is frontend JavaScript so visible to the end user.

So is the better solution to just make it non-worthy for someone to copy? By giving a big chunk of the features for free? Is this where we're heading?

Every hackathon goes the same way: “need 1 frontend dev” gets posted in five WhatsApp groups, nobody knows who can actually build, and half the teams form the night before.

So I built CrewForge:

crewforge.online

Hackathons sync daily from Unstop. About 75 open coding hackathons right now. Business-plan contests and quizzes are filtered out, and each card shows the deadline, team size and mode.

Post your team with the roles you’re missing (frontend, ML, design…).

Solo? Apply to a team with your role and a short note. The team owner accepts or declines, and gets your contact only if you choose to share it.

No real names or emails are shown. Everyone appears as an anonymous builder handle, and your GitHub or portfolio is optional.

Free, and open to every college.

It’s early, and very few teams are on it yet, which is exactly why I’m posting. If you’re heading into a hackathon in the next few weeks, put your team up and see who applies.

What I’d love from you:

Would you actually use this over WhatsApp or Discord?

What would make you trust a stranger as a teammate?

What’s broken? Tell me.

https://crewforge.online

I went through 24 well-known SaaS homepages and checked every line of copy against a list of 55 things: clarity, trust, friction, that kind of stuff.

The most common failure by a distance: 21 of 24 put a signup button on the page and say nothing next to it. No price, no "no card needed", no "takes 2 minutes". The visitor has three questions at the moment of clicking and the page answers none of them.

Only three got it right. Monday, Mailchimp and ClickUp put "No credit card" directly under the button. That's about five words of copy.

Other things that showed up:

16 of 24 had at least one high-severity issue. These are big companies with real copywriters and real budgets.

Zero of the 24 H1s lead with the visitor's problem. Almost all of them describe the product or a vague outcome instead.

Testimonials often didn't match the buyer. A solo founder landing on the page sees a quote from an enterprise VP and has no reason to believe it applies.

On headline clarity, Mailchimp, Trello and Basecamp read fastest. Webflow, Asana and Airtable were the hardest to parse in one pass.

I'm not claiming the missing line costs them conversions. I can't see their data. The research on friction says the line should help, but a company at that scale has probably tested something I haven't seen.

Has anyone actually A/B tested that one line?

Hello Founders,

I wanted to share the story of SERPSpur as it started an year ago and finally its getting alot of traffic as well as engagement rate of 1.7% engagement rate.

conversion rates : around 1% approx which was low in start because of targetting wrong audience,

Initially I targetted everywhere (means worldwide to see whats we are getting and where is the potential)

So we got the correct path and welcoming audience in multiple places, basically SERPSpur is the competitor or giants like Ahrefs, Semrush, moz etc and its the next generation tool which offers following stats
Where old giants offer use it or loose it approach and SERPSpur offers never expiring credits
Small businesses are worries about the services they dont want to use and softwares pushing them to buy , so I solved the problem and offered credit system with PAYG as well as subscription (including credits) so users can use it for anything they want.
There are also outdated metrics in the market e.g Domain authority, Page authority, Spam scores, AS as authority score and Domain Ratings, which can be manipolated easily and you can get the gig of $5 to reach the highest. so I introduced TAI (Traffic authenticity score ) which can't be manipolated and strogly checkes the bot footprints, traffic sources, keywords, difficulty, and alot of other things to analyze the Authenticity score for the traffic which helps the website owners to get the real traffic of prospect they want to get backlink or buy a website .

I need your suggestions on this and how also looking for experts who would like to join the team , or provide suggestions how we can increase the engagement rate of the organic and paid ads

Thank you.

I've been experimenting with AI tools to create animated YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels, and one thing I've noticed is how difficult it is to get a video that actually feels complete.

Generating individual images or clips is relatively easy. But getting a consistent animation style, a decent storyline, matching visuals, voiceovers, and smooth transitions is a completely different story.

I've been exploring a few styles, like 2D animated explainers, horror illustrations, clay animation, graphic novels, and animated history/map videos.

What interests me is the possibility of going from a simple topic to a complete animated short without spending hours switching between different tools.

But I'm curious how people here actually approach this.

If you're creating faceless Shorts or Reels, what's your current workflow? Are you using AI for the entire video, or just parts of it and editing everything manually?

And do you think AI-generated animated content is getting good enough to build a channel around, or does it still feel too generic?

Would love to hear what has and hasn't worked for people who've tried this.

Hey everyone! 👋

I'm currently building eShopFoundry, a project aimed at making it easier to create and customize online stores.

I've been working on the foundations of the platform, and the store template is getting close to completion. So far, I've built the product pages and shopping cart, while also setting up the company website, policies, and email templates.

But I have a bigger vision for the project.

I want to make creating and managing an online store as simple as possible. One of the main ideas is to integrate AI so that users can describe what they want in plain language and have the AI make changes to their store for them.

Instead of spending time navigating settings or figuring out how to customize everything, you'd simply tell the AI what you want.

The AI integration is still part of the roadmap, and right now I'm focused on getting the fundamentals right.

This is my first time sharing the project here, so I'm curious:

What do you think is the most frustrating part of setting up and customizing an online store?

I'd love to hear your experiences!

Hi everyone !

I'm a solo developer, and I am about to start building a tool to help startup founders and indie hackers research and validate their SaaS ideas in few minutes before spending weeks or months building them.

My goal is to help people -

• Research Competitors and identify their weaknesses

• find real customer complaints and unmet needs.

• understand whether an idea has genuine market demand.

• figure out what opportunities exist and what direction to take.

Before I start building, I wanna understand how founders currently handle this process and where existing tools fall short...

If you've researched or built a SaaS idea, what was the most frustrating part of the process ? What do u wish existing research tools did better ?

Honestly, I am still in the research phase and your honest experiences would help me build something genuinely useful rather than just another tool with 50 features, you know...