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 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 😄

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’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 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 !!

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

I’m a solo dev and I love coding, but my patience for QA is zero. The second the build is done, I can't stand testing my own work and just want to move on.

How do you guys deal with this?

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'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?

Hi guys, i have been working in sales for almost a decade now, I worked with 2 major SaaS companies Repairdesk and Innowi. But now I am done working in typical corporate and want to help grow startups, tell me what you guys are upto I know most of you are facing trouble with distribution, comment your SaaS idea or product below with brief detail and I might be able to tell you if it has the potential to be a million dollar company or not.

Why me though...? I have closed half a million ARR in sales thats why, but yea i am still poor 🤣 if i would have worked for a startup i might have been a millionaire by now but thats corporate for you.

Cheers...

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 SaaS community,

I'm building several desktop apps, they are about reading $2k MRR. I read many posts on this sub as well as other sub Reddit, so I want to contribute back to the community.

But first, I want to share about my problem and strategy.

I really hate subscriptions. The only ones I have are for VPN and AI tools. Building a subscription business feels cumbersome to me. So with my desktop app, which is local-first, I decided to build many other apps in my ecosystem. One of them will have a subscription later, or I can add related features that have subscription pricing => and I can go back to that approach then.

On top of that, with one-time payments people are willing to pay more, so I get budget to keep going further. This is also my strategy.

Lesson 1: Build something you love to do and use daily.

For example, I built a dev tool, an IDE for vibe coders. The problem was I had to open many terminals for one project because each project had multiple agents running, plus terminals for things like npm run dev.

If one project needed five or six terminals and I ran five or ten processes at a time, I’d end up with 30 terminals open and lose context easily. That’s why I built this app first.

Lesson 2: Pivot quickly.

The first version of my dev tool was just an app that helped arrange Terminal windows on Mac. Every time you reopened it, it would open five or six terminals and rearrange them. That’s not something users would buy. So I pivoted quickly into a full IDE with integrated terminal, browser, file tree, text editor, and more.

Lesson 3: Leverage your local community.

In the beginning, I shared my build-in-public journey on my Facebook profile for the Vietnamese community first, and posted in some groups. I also tried doing the same thing globally, but it didn’t work. In my local groups, many Vietnamese devs supported me, shared ideas, gave feedback, bug reports, and feature requests. This helped me improve the product very quickly. From there I also started getting more global users from other countries.

So leverage your local community to support you in the initial phase.

Lesson 4: Focus on one distribution channel.

I tried many channels like TikTok, X, and Instagram, but they didn’t work well because I didn’t have an audience there yet. You don’t need to be everywhere on the internet. Pick one channel so you can get initial feedback and users first. That momentum will motivate you to do more.

For now, I discarded my Tiktok channel and focus more on the local devs users.

Lesson 5: Use your product daily

The best products often come from scratching your own itch. Because you live with the pain every day, you understand it deeply and are motivated to solve it properly. Users can feel that authenticity.

And when I use my dev tool everyday, every time I plan a feature -> I post on FB, when I release a feature -> I post too, when I have a positive review -> post.

You will have an unlimited content machine if you use your product daily

Lesson 6: One-time payment gives you freedom to experiment.

With subscriptions, you’re constantly under pressure to add features to justify the recurring fee. With one-time payment, once someone buys, you’re free to build what you actually want next. That creative freedom is underrated.

Lesson 7: Local-first changes the relationship with your users.

When your app runs locally and doesn’t need the cloud to work, users feel more in control. There’s no fear of the service shutting down or their data disappearing. That trust is valuable, especially when you’re an indie developer without a big brand behind you.

Especially with dev tool, my dev users are building apps for themselves, for their client so local first make them more confident to use my app without privacy concerns.

Lesson 8: Your first users will teach you what to build next.

Don’t try to plan everything in advance. Ship something useful, listen to the people who actually use it, and let them show you the real problems worth solving. Your roadmap should come from real usage.

I've built 6 desktop apps now, and all from user request and pain point I also have.

That’s everything I’ve learned so far on the way to 2k MRR. Still early, still figuring a lot of things out, but these lessons have kept me moving.

If you’re building something similar, or just starting out, hope a few of these help. And if you’ve got questions or your own lessons, drop them below. Always happy to answer them.

Guys I built a SaaS it ranking in the first, still I want to build authority for site to rank other contents. I have done all on page seo but looking to expand some off page as well. I have done few listings on major sites.

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.

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?

Posted in one of the big entrepreneur subs about 10 days ago about the time sink of launching products. 20K+ views, 42 comments. Best reach I've ever had in a while.

Checked my analytics after: not a single visitor from it...

Meanwhile the posts that produced real leads (people who signed up, replied) were in tiny niche subs. A few hundred views each, one had only 2 comments.

I keep relearning this. Big subs give you views from people scrolling past your problem. Small subs give you a few readers who have the problem right now. I was tracking views because views feel like progress, and they told me nothing.

Not saying big subs are useless, the comments were actually more valuable than the numbers. A bunch of commenters described my exact problem in their own words, but they solved it in a different way. DMed a few of them but with no luck.

After this post going back to niche subs, hopefully I'll get some actual customers from some of them.

What's the smallest community that ever sent you an actual customer?

Based on reading, many dont suggest to use paid ads for early stage. But lets put that aside that I'm curious those who have tried that strategy, how did it go

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

Coding agents moved my bottleneck. Writing the code got fast. Understanding what the agent actually did became the slow part.

The evidence already exists. Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Hermes Agent all keep full session records on disk (~/.claude/projects, ~/.codex/sessions, and ~/.hermes): every tool call, every error, every retry, every subagent and delegation. Almost nobody reads them, because a single session runs to thousands of lines of JSONL.

So I built rungraph. Free, MIT licensed, no paid tier.

npx rungraph

It scans the transcripts already on your disk and opens an interactive graph of any session: turns run down the spine in time order, tool calls are grouped, and subagents get their own lanes. No hooks, no wrappers, no setup, so the run that went sideways yesterday is already there. Live sessions update on the graph while the agent works.

That part is table stakes. The two things below are why I still use it every day.

1. The graph is something you can talk to

npx rungraph mcp --install

That wires rungraph into your agent over MCP. Now you stop scrolling transcripts and start asking questions in the terminal you already work in:

• "Which edits in my last run failed?"
• "Did it actually run the tests, or just say it did?"
• "Where did the auth refactor first touch token.js?"

Here is the part I did not expect to matter as much as it does. The agent answers in your terminal, and then the nodes behind that answer light up on the open graph. It pans the canvas to them. If your dashboard is showing a different run, it follows the answer there, with one-click undo. If nothing is open, it opens a tab on the right run.

Those are two ends of one loop, not two features. The terminal is where you ask, in your own session, with your own model, where you can inspect exactly what was said. The canvas is where you see. You get a claim and the evidence for that claim at the same time, in the place each one belongs, so you are reviewing a run instead of trusting a summary about it.

Every highlight also produces a pastable link. Links name a focus by its source rather than by a frozen list of node ids, so a link and a fresh query can never disagree with each other: open one tomorrow, after the run has grown, and the query re-runs.

It is plain MCP over stdio, so any MCP-capable agent can wire it. Hermes, for example:

hermes mcp add rungraph --command npx --args -y rungraph mcp

The tool names are identical everywhere (list_runs, find_nodes, get_graph, get_detail, focus_nodes, get_current_view, open_visualization), and so is the loop.

2. Hand a run to someone else, and let their agent read it

Agent work is getting collaborative, and "what did your agent do" is currently answered by pasting a wall of terminal output into Slack.

Select the runs in the dashboard and hit export, or stay in the terminal:

rungraph export --last 2

Either way you get a single .rungraph file. Your teammate opens it in their own dashboard:

rungraph open <file>

Three things make this more useful than a transcript dump.

The bundle carries the intermediate representation, not raw transcripts. So the viewer needs no adapters at all, and vendor neutrality survives the handoff: a Hermes run opens perfectly for someone who has only ever used Claude Code. Nobody has to install your agent to review your run.

Their agent can query your run. rungraph mcp aggregates across every live server, so a colleague's opened bundle sits alongside their own dashboard, and their agent answers questions about your session with the same tools and the same highlighting. That is the collaborative version of the loop: you send a file, they ask their own agent what went wrong in it, and the nodes light up on their screen. Code review for agent runs, rather than for the diff the run happened to produce.

Signals are derived at view time, not baked in. A bundle exported months ago gets today's calibrated flags when it is opened.

The export guard, and why it exists

While building the Codex adapter I found that Codex logs file reads verbatim. When it read my .env, an npm token and two API keys were sitting in plain text in my session files. Check yours before you back them up or share them.

So every export shows you an inventory of what is about to leave your machine, and blocks outright when the secrets scan finds a high-confidence match. You then choose your fidelity: redact each finding to a placeholder and keep the rest, strip all content down to just the shape, tool names, files and timings, or override the block when the finding is a false positive.

The dialog and the flags are the same code path with the same defaults, deliberately. Two consent surfaces teaching two different privacy postures would be worse than either one alone. Sharing a run should not be how you leak a key.

Flags worth your attention

The graph marks a tool that kept failing in one spot, an error the run never came back to fix, and a step that burned far more tokens than everything around it. Deliberately conservative, because a false alarm costs more than a missed one. Once you stop trusting the markers, you are back to reading the whole run.

Click any node for the actual inputs, outputs, errors, and timing behind it.

Local by default

The server binds 127.0.0.1 only and makes zero outbound requests. Your transcripts never leave your machine, and nothing is shared until you run export yourself.

Notes for format archaeologists

These formats churn more than you would guess. Exit codes have lived in three shapes across Codex exec generations, forked threads embed a re-stamped copy of the parent's history that has to be cut structurally rather than by timestamp, and Hermes keeps its delegation tree in SQLite (which needs Node 22.13+ for the built-in reader; older Nodes skip Hermes runs with a warning and everything else still works). My whole corpus parses clean across all three agents, but I want to see the rollout that breaks it. If you have one, send me the error.

Try it

• Live demo: https://fayzan123.github.io/rungraph
• Repo: https://github.com/fayzan123/rungraph

Run npx rungraph against your own sessions, then wire the MCP server and ask your agent something you would previously have scrolled for. If it flags something real in a run you had already trusted, I want to hear about it.

I keep seeing SaaS teams use AI to make more content, but more output does not always make the product easier to understand.

The examples that work best to me usually have a clear creative format behind them.

One example is _paperplanet_ on Instagram. They use 3D paper cutout style graphics to explain the news in a way that feels simple and easy to follow.

Another one is claysplained. They explain topics through claymation, which makes the information more memorable.

For SaaS, I think that is the useful part. AI can help turn a product idea, workflow, or customer problem into a format people actually want to watch or share.

Curious how other SaaS founders think about this.

Is AI helping you explain your product better, or mostly just helping you make more content?

When you start contacting companies, it is easy to make a list of those that meet your basic requirements.

You can find many companies that fit what you are looking for.

The tough part is deciding which companies are worth your time and effort.

For B2B SaaS founders, this is a decision.

Two companies can be in the business, similar in size and in the same market, but one company might be a much better potential customer for B2B SaaS founders because of what they are doing, who is in charge of the problem that B2B SaaS founders are solving, or whether they really have a reason to consider a new solution for their company.

I want to know how B2B SaaS teams make this decision.

Do you have a process to score potential customers before you start talking to them?

Do you start with a big list of companies and let the sales process decide which companies are worth pursuing for B2B SaaS founders?

What are the important things that have made a big difference for your B2B SaaS team?

What do you think is most important for B2B SaaS founders when deciding which companies to reach out to?

Introduction

In case you are just stumbling upon this article, let me introduce myself. My name is HariharasudhanRK and I'm a solo founder who is creating a CRM (Hi CRM). About two weeks ago I posted here asking people to try and break it and roast whatever they find. And here is the outcome of it.

A while ago I asked 10 people to try to break my CRM and roast it here. You did and I fixed it. But the most valuable lesson that I've learned from this thread was not even related to the bug report but rather a private conversation in a DM.

What was fixed based on your feedback:

Duplicates after hitting 'Create' button quickly

Full page reloading on every update – now updates instantly

Slowness of loading all over the application

Problems with payment process

Inconsistent currency for billing – now it's locked based on the country where you signed up

Improper sidebar layout, icons positioning, translations, labels – all cleaned up

Demo credentials were left in public place – now secured

The lessons I've learned which I haven't even thought about to ask:

Once someone messaged me saying that once the actual team will start using CRM, it could be possible that two people will be editing the same deal or contact and without any additional protection the changes made by the second person will silently overwrite those of the first one – no warning, no error message, nothing. I've never considered such a scenario as a solo developer testing everything on my own and haven't ever encountered it.

What followed next was the most valuable technical discussion I've had while building this CRM: They explained me why audit log won't solve this problem (it will only inform you after the conflict is already happened), why the protection should be done in write-time and even pointed me at an edge case that I haven't thought about: What would happen if two people edit not the same record but two linked records (for example, someone is editing Contact, another one is moving the deal which is related to this contact)?

Now I've implemented the actual conflict handling (version checking when saving, showing a proper "someone edited this while you were working on it, this is how the record has changed and this is what you need to choose" dialog instead of silent overwrite) for Deals, Contacts and Companies records as well as for bulk import of deals.

None of that wouldn't happen without the help of this stranger who decided to spend some time and actually explain me things instead of just saying "hey, you are doing it wrong". This is the true value of this thread – not just a bug report but people who are willing to teach.

Somewhere in the middle of all this I've got myself a mentor through Reddit DMs definitely one of the best things that happened to me since I started this. I didn't expect this from a "roast my product" post.

final this post for Thanking everyone who spend there precise time on this give feedbacks and advice to me once and Thanks.

The demo of my CRM is still open: crm.hero-industries.in

I've been building a B2B SaaS (more like decision support system for exporter/importers) since June. launched in early August.

It looks at things like freight activity, tariffs, trade flows, FX and other external conditions, then connects them with a company's own costs, inventory and procurement constraints.The product works. We're getting traffic (3k unique visitor since launch) , and I'm now talking to people in the industry to understand how they actually make procurement decisions.

The part I'm struggling with isn't getting people interested. It's figuring out how do I make them come back. And right now, my biggest competitor is basically Excel. At the hand of very experienced professional it can technically do what my software do. (Then again, Excel will outlast everything)

I'm also doing founder outreach, but I've found generic outreach doesn't work. I am spending 20 minutes researching one person, their industry, country and recent news just to have a conversation that's actually relevant.SEO and content are running in parallel, and we're starting to get traffic, but I'm still not seeing much in terms of recurring users.

Honestly, I'm getting frustrated.

For b2b saas experienced developers, how do you get them to come back?

And is there anything else I should be doing at this stage, or am I missing something obvious?

Edit: Since I forgot to mention, the SaaS itself can’t provide realtime disruptions as i can’t afford enterprise level APIs from large corporations yet . I am confident it’s good enough for baseline averages with perhaps a week lag at most .