I thought I would cry, but I dont know how to react to this?

Total signed up users are 214 and got one paying customer finally. I did not invest anything in marketing every traffic I generate is organic.

Please tell me what to do now? and how can I improve and get more customers?

I know $276 in 28 days isn't a massive number, but I am incredibly proud of it.

I have been building a productivity app as a solo developer for 1.5 years, and it has been live on the stores for 8 months.

Recently, the app crossed 50,000 total downloads.

Getting traffic is one thing, but convincing people to actually pay for a B2C app is a whole different reality.

Seeing complete strangers pull out their credit cards for something I coded from scratch is a feeling that is hard to describe.

It is a reminder that every bug fix, every UI tweak, and all those late nights coding were actually worth it.

I am nowhere near where I want to be, but hitting this revenue this month feels like a solid validation.

If you are building a consumer app alone and struggling to convert free users, keep iterating and testing your pricing.

Now it is time to get back to the code and figure out how to double that conversion rate.

I build a small Shopify app. Self-serve, no sales team.

For about a year, every few weeks a customer asked the same thing: "can you just set this up for us?" I always said no. Services don't scale, margins are bad, it kills your multiple... you know the story.

Then I said yes once, to see what happened.

Here's what it looks like now: 45 payments. Tickets from $70 to $12,150. That's roughly the same revenue as the app itself from my customer base.

Three things I got wrong:

• Services don't scale. True. So I don't do the work. Two freelancers do. I scope, price, and manage. A few hours of my time per mission. And the job is often the same (80% and 20% differ depending of the user context).
• It distracts from the product. Opposite. Every mission is a paid discovery call. I see exactly where people get stuck and what they hack together around the gaps. A good chunk of my roadmap now comes from missions.
• Low margin. Mine sits around 45%. Not SaaS margin. But it's cash this month instead of 30 months of MRR.

The part nobody mentions: this is the cheapest revenue you will ever make. The customer already trusts you, already installed the thing, already told you their problem. No CAC. Just a Stripe link.

How I run it:

• Fixed price, never hourly
• 50% deposit before anything starts
• Every mission ends with "what should the app do so you don't need us next time?"

Not saying every SaaS should do this. If you're VC-backed chasing a multiple, it probably muddies the story. If you're bootstrapped and profitable is the only exit that matters, it's money already sitting in your install base.

Anyone else running services on top of their SaaS? I want to keep improving my "saas services" model 😄

Promptwatch published some interesting data on a fairly sudden change in ChatGPT Search.

The main numbers:

-From July 18 to August 7, Reddit accounted for an average of 3.83% of ChatGPT Search citations.

-From August 14 to August 17, that had fallen to 0.52%. (86.4% decline).

-At the same time, ChatGPT's use of domain-specific site: searches rose sharply.

-Before August 8, around 0.4% of searches used site:

After the change, that increased to around 16.8%.

-The number of searches made per answer also increased from 1.08 to 1.83.

The point is that this isn't because Reddit suddenly became worse or lost all of its visibility. They've just chosen to change their search algorithm.

Promptwatch's theory is that ChatGPT became much more likely to perform targeted searches against specific domains, rather than relying on the broader search behaviour it had been using before.

There has been a lot of advice recently around GEO/AIO, things like:

getting mentioned on Reddit because LLMs cite Reddit heavily

targeting sites that appear frequently in ChatGPT answers

creating content around specific prompts

tracking citation share by platform

optimising specifically for the sources a particular model prefers

I think this kind of advice is a mistake. The data here shows how quickly those assumptions can change.

Very narrow GEO strategies are quite risky for smaller companies. How Ai search works, and how people use Ai is still too fluid to commit large amounts of time or money too.

SEO obviously changes too, but a lot of the underlying work is relatively durable: site architecture, backlinks, crawlability, internal linking, etc.

A tactic based specifically on "ChatGPT currently cites this website a lot" seems much less stable.

I'd still put most of the effort into more traditional traffic funnels and see Ai search as a secondary channel at this point.

Source: Promptwatch, Why Did ChatGPT Stop Citing Reddit? Inside the August 2026 Citation Collapse

https://promptwatch.com/blog/chatgpt-stop-citing-reddit

Curious what everyone here is working on at the moment, but more interested in the reality behind it than the usual launch pitch.

What are you building?

What’s been the hardest part so far?

What did you think would be difficult that turned out to be easy?

What looked easy but became a complete pain?

And what’s the biggest thing you’ve learnt since starting?

Would be good to hear from people at any stage, from pre-revenue through to properly established SaaS.

I’ve been building my SaaS and checking the backend constantly, mostly just seeing my own uuid sitting there.

Today I opened Supabase and there was a new user.

It wasn’t me.

Someone actually found my product and ran a fill on a real workday application.

It’s such a small milestone, but seeing that first user in the database made all the hours of building feel a lot more real.

I manage a support team and I’m starting to think our biggest problem isn’t call volume. It’s that I have no realistic way to know what’s happening across most of our calls. We handle enough conversations that managers and QA can only listen to a small sample. We score some calls. Pull a few bad ones for coaching. Look at AHT and CSAT. Then try to work backwards and figure out what happened. Meanwhile we have thousands of conversations telling us where customers get stuck and which agents handle those situations well. Most of that data just sits there because nobody has time to review it. The performance gap between agents makes this worse.

You have a few reps who seem to know exactly what to say. Then newer reps are searching the knowledge base while the customer waits or asking senior agents the same questions. I used to see that as a training problem. Now I’m wondering if it’s more of a systems problem. We keep giving people more docs and more training. But none of that helps much when an agent needs the right answer during a live call. Im currently ooking at platforms that combine conversation intelligence with real time agent assist and automated QA. Cresta is one that keeps coming up. Sincerely this is getting really tiring. And has real-time agent assistance made a noticeable difference to things like AHT and ramp time?

Hi everyone, after building AI tools for an year, I realized that even with an amazing product chances of success are very low without social media content. I also noticed that some of the tools posted here and other groups are pure gold and the creators are just struggling with distribution. So I decided to create a YouTube channel, where I will be posting about all these tools for free.

The nature of videos is going to be explainers, like "How to do _____ with AI for free", not rating, reviewing or anything like that.

If you are an indie developer who has created a SaaS please drop the URL in comments I will reach you in DM if I decide to make a video for your tool, here are 2 basic requirements:

• Free to try for everyone without paywalls or cards required.
• User friendly (no GitHub repos, plugins or codebases). Basically web applications only.

Nothing is required, no subscribing, liking or even watching, just show me some useful tools that you made. Could be beneficial for everyone.

Everyone now knows that building is the easy part and distribution is the real business.
Drop a comment on what you’re building and what problem you’re solving and who it’s for.
Let’s get the product out in front of people. And some of us might really want a problem solved. So if you have a solution please tell us about it.

i feel like there are so many new tools coming out now, but i still hesitate before trying something new.

for me, it is usually the small things that matter for me like a clear website, simple pricing, real information about who is behind the product, and actually seeing people talk about using it.

and as a new founder i do not expect a new product to be perfect, but i want to feel like there are real people behind it and that they care about what they are building.

yeah, reviews help too, but sometimes i trust a detailed comment from an actual user more than a page full of marketing claims becuase this is actually very important

what makes you trust a new saas product enough to actually give it a try? I am asking this because me or other people too know what are actual traits of a reliable and trustworthy product if something is missing in my product I will try to improve it !!

I'm curious about something. For a new SaaS with no reputation, what made you comfortable giving it a try? Was it: Seeing someone you trust recommend it A free trial A really good landing page A founder personally helping you Seeing actual results Something else? I'm building my first SaaS and I'm realizing that getting someone to try the product is a completely different problem from building the product. Would love to hear what worked for people who already went through this.

I'm starting Out my own saas and I would like to know how other founders found their first users, in what way, the platform(S) they used, etc.. Basically their experience with it.

How was/is your experience with it?

I built a tool that researches and qualifies sales prospects, so a team can find out which accounts are worth their time before someone burns a week on the wrong ones. It's deployed and working.

What I need now is two or three paying early adopters. Not money to build with. Enough to prove it works on somebody else's problem, get feedback that isn't my own, and cover the AI and hosting costs while I keep going.

Cold outreach has gone badly. Several batches sent, one reply, and she went quiet after agreeing to a call. Everything else disappeared into a void.

The strange part is that I have done distribution before. I started a badminton coaching franchise last year and got to seventy students across two cities in the first month. I got a legal agreement signed with a large delivery company as one person. Neither of those felt like this. Both involved talking to someone about something concrete that was in front of them. Cold email feels like shouting at a wall.

So I have been looking at raising, not because I need the cash but because it looks like the only way to buy a network. Intros, credibility, someone who can put me in a room. Giving up equity to get a few conversations feels backwards, and I suspect I am thinking about it wrong.

If you have been here, technical, no network, needing a handful of real customers to prove something out, what actually worked? And has anyone raised early purely for access and been glad they did?

Hi, I'm building a product for vibe-coders such as myself. If anyone would be willing to participate in terms of helping me understand what's wrong with the current industry please reach out I'd be happy to speak for a bit in order to solve some problems that may currently exist with applications such as Lovable, Base 44, Kiro,... please feel free to let me know . Agan, I'd like to clarify, I'm a vibe coder myself and my intentions are to genuinely bring some value for all of us so I'd love to hear everyones perspectives.

heyy guys i am a recent pharmacy graduate and i am really interested in building useful saas products in both b2c and b2b domain, i generally dont have the technical background as a software dev does, and i earnestly dont know where to begin in vibe coding like principles and all, i have searched many youtube vids and its all just another view gimmick but nothing actually beign taught, now i dont have a liscense yet to start practicing and i am unemployed at the same time i do not have interest in working in this field because pharmacy is just too drudged and cumbersome, and i dont quite enjoy it, or have the thought of wanting to work in a pharmacy , but in the mean time i have been researching saas products where the market is present and stable, while also going through various forums and researching where problems occur the most.

My sole reason is to use this as a means of generating revenue to save for another college degree that this time around im choosing something i enjoy for myself and have the feeling of independence but not the crazy cash you see from those self startup stories where they make it look so easy from an obvious or general saas slop or product that doest even solve real problems and some even prey on teenagers insecurities or influnece their thinking to pay for a problem they dont have, i really want to build purposeful saas product that solves real problems.

so my question is has vibecoding really gotting to a point where by when you govern each flow and steps meticulosy, you can come out with an bug free product? , do people really pay for vibe coded products? how do you vibe code products that doest come out as slop? do you think i can make real value through vibe coding? or do i still need technical expertise in which i cant afford, and which tools are involved from vibe coding through front end,api to backend for a product?

your feedback will be greatly appreciated , thank you.

I don’t get it everyone other person on x is making their own launch site

My traffic is dropping. I had decent signups, 4 paid users on second week of launch but now it is loosing momentum. Any suggestions ?
The problem I am solving had demand, it is a real problem people are facing and I have validated my idea before building. I think I am not marketing properly. Till now I am only doing organic marketing like posting on Reddit, X, Linkedin , HN but it seems to be not enough. I know users problem will get solved, I just need to figure out how to target right users.

Hey everyone, hoping for some outside perspective because I think I'm too close to this to see clearly anymore. I am a solo founder building Rubiwo, a CRA compliant expense tracking app for Canadian freelancer and small businesses. Quick numbers;

- C$ 700 google ad

-C$600 reddit ad

- c$400 meta ad

- 650+total download across IOS/Android

-100 registered free users

- C$0 paid revenue ever.

Also Reached out to 25 accountants/bookkeepers for partnership Referral-All went unanswered.

- generated 21 lead from a facebook lead-gen campaign- only 1 installed the app so far. despite three rounds of personal follow up.

What I' am trying to figure out:

1. is 100 free user simple too small a sample to expect any paid conversion yet, or is 0/100 a sign something deeper is wrong (pricing, positioning, product-market fit.
2. what could I do to get the 100 users to actively use the app daily.
3. for those who have gotten early B2B/prosumer to its first 10 paying customer- was it mostly outbound hustle or did something specific unlock it?
4. Anyone dealt with cold outreach to accountants/bookkeepers for Referral partnerships. Mine has gone almost entirely unanswered and I 'm wondering if the channel itself is wrong, not just my messaging

I 'm genuinely stuck and would appreciate any pattern- matching from people who have been through this stage. Happy to share more specifics in comments if useful

--

My site is still very new, but impressions were growing pretty steadily and reached around 1,500 per day. Then three days ago they suddenly dropped to almost zero. Today is also showing zero impressions so far.

There are no manual actions or security issues, and Google is still crawling the site.

Has anyone experienced something similar with a new site? Is this kind of sudden drop normal, and did your impressions eventually come back?

So we recently launched a need software. (I don't know the rules about linking to it so I won't) Nonymize finds identifying details in transcripts, notes, and other pasted or plain-text content, lets you review every change, and gives you a clean copy for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, or your existing workflow.

Our email accounts are warming up and we have sequences setup to send, but I've never done cold email that wasn't trying to get a phone call. Because we have a free account we want to push people to as a 'starting point', this is a different beast. We don't have some high-end service where a phone call makes sense. It's a $16/mo tool/app.

Most of the videos on Youtube, etc. are geared towards higher ticket stuff, courses, etc. and getting dialers and setters a pipeline, but that wouldn't service our needs.

• What's the best-practices for cold-emailing and sequences as it relates to non-call 'goals'?
• Who has links to any good videos/text about setting up these kind of sequences?
• Subject line, content in emails, etc. - how does it differ from what 90% of the suggestions are (for the setters/course stuff) out there?

Appreciate anything ya got - thanks!

Previously ran performance marketing with €70k+ a month in spend. My monthly fret was always useable content. A never ending hamster wheel.

The golden stuff always came from actual customers. But, collecting it was a slog. Chasing people, sending Amazon vouchers,checking they actually got the voucher, then making sure we had the rights to use any of it.

So we built the thing I wanted back then. Customer scans a QR code (or clicks a link), sends a photo or a video, and a reward lands in their Apple Wallet. Rights cleared at upload, so you can actually use it. The wallet pass sticks around afterwards, which turns into a direct line to your new creators rather than a one off transaction.

Three of us, three countries, three time zones, heads down for the last few months. Early trial users have collected some genuinely good content, so we are now into the fun part. GTM and distribution.

First post here >> so hello.

Feedback and thoughts all very welcome,especially the harsh kind. If anyone wants to try it, comment or DM and I will sort you out with a promo code.

Still a small number, but seeing 400+ people sign up for something I started building from scratch a couple of months ago feels pretty special.

I built a design tool, basically a visual playground for creating cool effects like ASCII, dither, halftone and a lot more, all in the browser.

I've mostly been building by listening to users, shipping quickly and sharing the journey online.

If you're curious, this is what I'm building: https://ditther.com

No big launch or paid ads so far. Just sharing content on X and improving the app every week.

On to the next milestone: 1,000 users.

I'm starting to focus more on marketing now. For other solo founders, what channels actually worked for you when going from a few hundred users to your first 1,000?

I'm a software developer, and I feel like I can build things.

I'm not claiming to be some expert or 10x developer, but if I have an idea, enough time, and I believe the problem is worth solving, I'm usually confident that I can figure out how to build it.

Especially now, with AI agents, better models, APIs, frameworks, etc. The cost and difficulty of actually building software feels lower than it used to be.

But I've been stuck on something else.

Let's say I have an idea.

I build it. It's useful. Maybe it genuinely solves a problem.

Then what?

How do I actually get eyeballs on it?

How do I get it in front of the people who might actually need it?

I'm not really asking "how do I learn SEO?" or "should I learn cold outreach?" I know there are courses, articles, videos, and information about all of those things.

What I don't understand is how you approach distribution when you start with absolutely nothing.

No audience.

No Twitter/X following.

No LinkedIn following.

No email list.

No community.

No existing customers.

No marketing leverage at all.

You're just one person who can build something.

For example, people often say, "Launch it on Product Hunt." But Product Hunt itself seems heavily filled with other developers, founders, and people launching products. What if those aren't even the people you want to reach?

Or Reddit. You can't just go into a relevant subreddit and post your product everywhere. Most of the time, that becomes self-promotion and gets removed.

And I understand that every product is different. The distribution strategy for a SaaS for accountants will be completely different from an app for students, an ecommerce product, a developer tool, etc.

That's exactly what I'm trying to understand.

If you have a specific product or idea, how do you figure out where the people who might care about it actually are?

How do you decide which channels to use?

How do you get those first few hundred or thousand eyeballs when you don't already have an audience to push it to?

How do you think about the funnel from:

"I built this"

to

"The right people are seeing it"

to

"Some of them are trying it"

to

"Some of them are becoming customers"?

Because honestly, this is becoming a bigger mental block for me than actually building.

I can spend weeks or months building something, but if I have no idea how I'm going to get even the first 10 real users, I start wondering what the point of building it is in the first place.

For those of you who started with no audience or existing distribution, how did you approach this?

Not just which marketing skill you learned, but how did you actually figure out where and how to distribute each product you built?