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

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

One month:

50 leads.
10 demos.
3 customers.

Next month:

15 leads.
3 demos.
0 customers.

So, the team responds:

“Let's increase ad spend.”
“Let's do more outbound.”
“Let's hire another SDR.”

But before adding more activity, diagnose the pipeline.

There are 5 things I'd look at:

1. ICP
   

Are you consistently targeting the people most likely to buy?
If your audience keeps changing, your pipeline will too.

1. Positioning
   

Does your prospect immediately understand:

Who you help.
What problem you solve.
Why you're different.

1. Acquisition channel
   

Do you have one channel that consistently puts your ICP into the funnel?
You don't need 7 channels.

You need one that works well enough to build on.

1. Conversion
   

Where are prospects dropping?

Visitor → Lead
Lead → Qualified
Qualified → Demo
Demo → Opportunity
Opportunity → Customer

Don't fix the whole funnel.
Find the biggest leak.

1. Demand creation
   

If you're only generating pipeline when you actively prospect, you don't have a demand engine yet.

Build assets that create demand before the buying conversation:

→ Founder-led content
→ Customer stories
→ Educational content
→ Case studies
→ Lead magnets
→ Communities
→ Partnerships

The goal isn't to generate more leads every month.

It's to make your pipeline more predictable.

And that starts with understanding:

Who → Why → Where → How → What converts

That's also why I believe you should diagnose your growth engine before scaling it.

If your pipeline feels unpredictable right now, where is the biggest leak?

ICP → Acquisition → Qualification → Conversion → Closing

Drop it below.

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.

Hey everyone! I’ve been building a tool that consumes a lot of AI tokens, and my API bill is getting pretty high.
I’ve already tried using smaller models for simpler tasks and larger models for more complex ones. I’ve also implemented prompt caching and optimized my backend as much as possible. I’m fine with slower response times as long as the results are accurate, so speed isn’t a priority for me.

I’ve also considered hosting a model from Hugging Face myself instead of relying on smaller API models, but the accuracy has been pretty disappointing.

For those of you who’ve dealt with similar issues, what approaches have worked best for you to reduce AI costs without sacrificing accuracy? Is self-hosting a good option, or are there better alternatives I’m overlooking?

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 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.

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.

Hi.

I'm relatively new to SaaS, and I'm sure this has been asked a number of times. However, I have a hard time finding it (might be a skill issue...).

With a technical background, I initially did what many others in here probably did as well. I just started programming and then started looking for a problem - lesson learned...

For my newer projects, I really wanna validate my idea before programming. Through my network, I've had one validation conversation, which I got from a referral. The guy was super nice, and we had a good talk. He wasn't really a technical person, and he wasn't in charge of or even connected to the part of the company my SaaS idea would help, so he couldn't help me. However, he said he would refer me to a technical person on their team... Surprise, I've been left on read.

I've written 50 cold emails to date, just asking for a cup of coffee or a short 15-minute Teams meeting ("I've got nothing to sell" style) - very few replies, all rejections.

I'm left wondering, if I need to talk to 5-10 people, firstly I need to find their pain points. From there, in a possible second meeting (or the first if it goes well), I will have to ask them if they are actually willing to pay for this service.

It just seems a bit out of reach?

I'm a natural introvert, and that's definitely working against me. However, I love the challenge.

I'm completely blown away by how hard it is to actually get these conversations.

Am I doing something wrong, or is it just very hard?

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.

so I am working on project where you just need to give it the link of your website or any content and it will make an explainer video or promo video like the video attached with the post , the system is running locally only my device mostly its code based and some local models.
I used it for two clients as extra bounce and they loved it shared with afew fiends and they said you should saas it . but before going through all that . I though will take more opinions .

what do you think could this sell ?
and what target customer or nite I should make it for ?
in case you honestly think it could see what's the monetization model or the price per video ?

if you like to give it a try and a honest feedback and useful advice .
please drop your website or saas link in the comments
and I will drop you the result for free and without watching it even . so its an honest build in public test .

I can't give the whole context but I'm working on an app that requires users to enable sms permissions on their app (It's not anything suspicious lol). Now since apks aren't trusted by the android OS and inorder to use it through an apk you need to do the following -

1) Disable play protect before downloading

2) Enable restricted settings as sms permissions are qualified as restricted settings

Now as you'd figure this app is obviously way out of scope for an apk as no one would go through all this hastle while downloading.

Launching it on playstore is something that could be done but yeah I haven't researched that well on it but I've heard it's quite difficult to get it out there and have them enable permissions as well.....

I cant launch this as a website either as sms permissions won't work in the background while the web app is closed...

Guys if anyone has any genuine solutions or loop arounds please let me know...🥹 Any help is genuinely welcome

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.

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

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

In this example, it is creating a tutorial video for one of its own flows on how to get started in Cormaa.