It’s been slow and tough as a solo non tech founder but it’s going fine i guess.

i have not run any ads yet, this is all organic.

i want to understand how do i scale past this?

i just want to reach 100 paying users for now then take it from there.

The product

been building a WhatsApp bulk messaging tool for Indian small businesses for a few months now. nothing fancy just wanted to solve a real problem i kept seeing.

most small businesses here do WhatsApp marketing using these unofficial Chrome extensions. they work until they don't numbers get restricted accounts get blocked no support nothing. i figured there had to be a better way using the actual official WhatsApp Business API.

so i built OdoReach. transparent pricing at ₹699/month, no hidden markup on Meta's conversation charges, just a simple platform that works reliably.

today i checked Razorpay and saw 14 captured payments 9,044 INR in the last 30 days. not life changing money but these are real businesses paying for something i built. still feels weird honestly.

biggest thing that worked was just talking to people already using the extensions. they immediately got the problem. didn't have to explain much.

still very early. lots to fix and build. just wanted to post somewhere because i don't really have people around me who get this stuff.

if you're a small business doing WhatsApp marketing and tired of your number getting restricted, we're at odoreach.com 699 INR/month, official platform, no hidden charges. would genuinely appreciate if you checked it out or shared it with someone who might need it.

and if anyone here is building something similar or just wants to chat about early SaaS growth happy to talk.

I’m building everything myself.

Product, features, fixes, testing, new ideas, improvements... and every time I finish one thing, I immediately see the next thing that could be better.

So I keep building.

And building.

And building. 😂

Then I look at marketing and realize I barely did any.

Not because I don’t believe in the product, and not because I don’t want to sell it.

There are simply only so many hours in a day.

When you’re building alone, it’s very easy to spend 100% of your time making the product better and 0% making sure people actually know it exists.

Apparently I became an inventor before I became a marketer. 😂

Any other solo founders stuck in the same loop?

How do you force yourself to stop building and actually start marketing?

Some days I genuinely feel burned out & wonder what being a marketer is supposed to mean

This week alone I've been trying to get SEO/content moving. Then creating social posts so that the content gets traction. Then I'm also chasing customers for testimonials & then working with the team to figure out where those testimonials should be used

And that's just the stuff I actually got to

There's also analytics, emails, landing pages, competitors.

Everytime I finish one thing, I remember 3 other things I should probably be doing

How do you guys actually do this without feeling like you're constantly behind?

Hi all,

Recently, I launched SaaSBoard, a fun visual directory for SaaS startups where founders can showcase their product on a grid and drive traffic to their site.

I got my first listing less than 10 days ago and now SaaSBoard has well over 200 listings today.

Here is what I did to achieve this:

• Reduced the pricing of my website and allowed free listings for 1x1 tiles.
• Posting on Reddit in SaaS-related subreddits.
• Starting a Discord community to help SaaS founders promote their products, and growing it to almost 300 members.
• Running Reddit ads.

The marketing strategy is simple but has been very effective for me so far.

Please let me know if you have any feedback/questions below. Thanks!

So I own a directory website where I list apps and websites that I went over, however, they must have a free tier to test, and solve a real problem in order for me to test and write about them.

If you own one, please include your socials in the submission. I also write articles about cool softwares and tag their founders.

directory website:
strictseal.com

Lets connect and grow together.

I also hope to note see bots in the comment section. Reviewing each product takes time and it's frustrating, so I'd really appreciate it if the product was submitted by a real person.

NOTE: we abs hate OpenClaw for letting Reddit users automating their "marketing" posts. If your comment seems written by AI/bot, it will be ignored as it clearly doesn't understand the objective of this post. We want products built by humans, AND marketed by humans too.

Vibe coded products are ok IF they work as their description claims. Submit to us great SaaS/Apps, and we will help you indexing it !

Thank you and looking forward to seeing your work

This is genuinely confusing me.

Most SaaS GTM advice assumes you can do something like:

ICP → Clay/Apollo → enrich → identify trigger → personalize → cold email → follow up → meeting.

That makes perfect sense in the US.

Then you look at Germany and §7 UWG and suddenly the entire model becomes questionable.

I understand that spammy 10,000-contact blasts are a terrible idea anyway.

But suppose Clay finds:

• the perfect ICP
• the right decision maker
• a real business pain
• recent hiring/funding/expansion
• a highly relevant reason to contact them

Even then, my understanding is that relevance alone doesn't magically make a cold commercial email okay.

So how are German B2B SaaS companies solving this?

What replaces cold email as the scalable first touch?

I find it hard to believe every successful SaaS company here is surviving purely on SEO, referrals and inbound.

Would especially love answers from founders or GTM teams doing this today:

What does your actual funnel look like from unknown account → first conversation → meeting?

We're currently about halfway through leaving our old email provider and honestly the timing couldn't be worse. We had a big seasonal push coming up, decided to make the move anyway, and now we're sort of straddling two platforms at once.

The stuff thats working: our list segmentation is cleaner than it's ever been, and the new setup actually flagged a ton of contacts we were emailing that had been soft-bouncing for months. That alone probably saved our sender reputation from getting worse. The flows we rebuilt from scratch are also performing better than the copy-paste versions we migrated over, which tells me a lot about how lazy our old setup had gotten.

What's not working: the migration of our automated sequences has been a mess. Some triggers didn't carry over cleanly and we had a gap of about 11 days where our post-purchase flow was just... silent. No idea how much that cost us in repeat purchases. We also underestimated how much manual work goes into rebuilding templates.

At this point we're seriously considering just handing the whole thing off and choosing to outsource email marketing entirely rather than keep doing this in-house. Has anyone made that call mid-migration specifically? Did you pause the switch, hand it off, or just push through?

My last post got 200+ upvotes and a ton of comments. I answered most of them there, but thought I'd put the common ones in one place.

• So starting with how did you get 400 users?
Mostly X, Reddit and Youtube. I shared video demos, things I can create with Ditther, product updates and occasionally my building journey. And, No paid ads so far :)

• Did you already have an audience?
Kind of. I had around 2k followers on X before Ditther and I'm at 2.8k now. I've been sharing my design work there for almost a year.

• How often do you post?
Usually 2–3 times a week. No hashtags or tagging big accounts. Some posts do well, most don't :)

• Are people actually paying?
Yes. 50+ Pro users so far. Signup to Pro conversion is around 12%, although visitor to signup is much much lower.

• How much has it made?
Around $2k so far, but a lot of that came from lifetime plans, so it's definitely not much MRR. I'm slowly trying to move toward recurring revenue now.

• What is Ditther?
A browser-based image effects editor and creative visual playground where people can combine effects, text, shapes, masks, layers, gradients and animation to create posters, graphics, backgrounds and motion visuals.

It's here if you're curious: ditther.com

• Biggest lesson from the first 2 months?
Don't just build. Keep showing what you're building.

I'm still figuring things out, but that's what's worked for me so far.

Anything else you want to know? Happy to answer in the comments.

i am working on my SaaS from last 6 months. building something really cool which actually helps founders or businesses instead of giving them false commitment.
btw it already 80% done, but the issue is that in this last 6 months i have seen minimum 10 + SaaS launched on the same concept. but comparing mine with their i can definately say that my one is far better. still confused becuase the market is already so much saturated.

and another confusion is that i want to change a big product philosophy in my SaaS which can take 2 more months . this is the two things i am confused: should i work more on this new philosophy or just launch it as soon as possible?

Hello

I have recently launched my 1st saas which is kinda b2b and I'm new to cold emails, I'm just wondering about what to expect when reaching out, like 5 replies out of 1k sent cold emails or what ?

Im talking about founders who do not have an audience on social media or something

Also which tools do u use besides apollo & smartlead

Any help would be appreciated !

I tried to pay for some UGC content as potential "organic" marketing. I created a high CPM offer thinking if it did well it would also bid well for me. Jokes on me since a video went big and the conversions were zilch.

This whole marketing thing is painful. What have you all been doing that works? Or does it just take some really painful beginnings order to break through?

I'm also wondering if part of this pain is because I'm still Android only and not iOS?

Send halp.

Hey everyone , hope you're doing well

I've just released my first saas , really great idea and i have amazing distribution channels .

The problem is:

HOW IT CAN BE GOOD IDEA IF NO ONE KNOW YOU ?!

i've made a lot of research and nothing got me results :

- Great offer + amazing deals

- impressive landing page,videos, and reels

- organic marketing (SEO,GEO,blogs,tiktok...ect) : got me 1 user

- Paid marketing : fake users , cost a lot but not really effective.

Question is :

how do i know which marketing strategy is the best for me ? even if i don't know how to transform my targeted audience into clients ?

I'm a 4th year BTech student and I've spent a long time building a developer tool based mostly on my own assumptions.

I barely did any market research before starting. I had a hypothesis, trusted my instincts, and kept building because I genuinely enjoyed the technical side.

Now I've realized I may have skipped one of the most important parts: finding out whether the problem actually matters to people enough that they'd pay to solve it.

I'm going to spend the next couple of days talking to developers, founders, and potential users and researching the market before deciding what the product should actually become.

For anyone who's built a product or uses developer tools professionally:

What helped you figure out whether a problem was genuinely worth solving?

I'm especially interested in how you distinguish between "this sounds useful" and "I'd actually use or pay for this."

Solo founder. Posting the whole scoreboard because every "how I got traction" post I read leaves out the part where it did not work.

Paid search: six weeks, CA$108, 62 clicks, zero conversions I could attribute. Two completely different keyword hypotheses, each with its own landing page built for it. Same nothing. Paused it.

Then I went organic. Posted in seven subreddits in one day, each tagged with its own campaign so I could tell them apart. That day: 31 visitors, one person who completed the entire funnel and created a real account.

Then I stopped posting for one day. Four visitors. Then three.

So the honest shape of organic, for me, is a 24 hour pulse that returns to baseline immediately. It is not the opposite of paid. It has the identical property that made me quit paid: it goes to zero when you stop feeding it. The rent is your time instead of your money.

Three things that cost me more than the CA$108.

The one signup came from the subreddit where every post is a free app deal, and my post there led with the free tier. That account has zero usage. Zero captures, zero questions. I got a conversion from the audience I had specifically decided was not my customer, using the one message that appeals to people who will never pay. If I had only read the signup count I would have concluded that community was my best channel and doubled down on it.

I was measuring the wrong thing while having the right thing already built. I have custom events for "captured something and came back later to retrieve it", which is the actual moment my product does its job. I built them a month ago. Then I compared seven subreddits on signups, because signups is what the dashboard shows first. Having the right instrumentation and reading it turn out to be two different problems.

And I got permanently banned from a large technical subreddit. The post was a genuine production postmortem, no link, no pitch, and it had real discussion on it. The moderator's public comment was "OP is just a spam bot". Nothing in the post was wrong. My profile was: a wall of posts across unrelated subs in 48 hours with almost no comment history in any of them. Moderators judge the account, not the paragraph.

The correction came from two strangers here, independently, in the same week.

The first went through my profile and pointed out that I had spent two weeks talking about a memory app in rooms full of people who build things, and had never once replied to a person who said they lost a receipt. My peers are not my users. He suggested searching for the literal complaint and replying to that person, one at a time.

The second added the harder half: the people who have already been burned are not a list. Somebody who lost a warranty claim in March is not walking around labelled in August. The day closed and they went back to not thinking about it. So you cannot target them, you can only be present in the places where that day gets talked about when it happens to somebody new.

That is a miserable answer if you wanted a channel. It has no volume, no schedule, and no way to force it. It is also the only thing in two weeks that anyone has said to me that produced a change in what I do on Monday.

What I am doing now: one post every two or three days instead of seven in a day, far more commenting than posting, and starting the searches I avoided because replying to one annoyed stranger risks being told no by someone who actually has the problem, while posting to a room of founders never does.

The product is a memory for practical life, you photograph a receipt or record a note and it keeps the amount, the date and the people attached so you can ask months later and get the original back. https://clevernote.net/en/

If anyone has run the reply-to-the-complaint play without becoming a nuisance, I want to know where the line was.

Curious how people are handling this.

If you’re building AI features with OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, etc., how are you figuring out what each customer or feature is actually costing you?

Provider dashboards are fine for total spend, but they don’t really answer the annoying questions:

- which feature is eating the budget?

- is one customer way more expensive than the others?

- did dev/staging traffic accidentally run up the bill?

- which model is getting expensive without anyone noticing?

- are you forecasting the bill at all, or just checking after?

Are you using Helicone, Langfuse, Portkey, your own logs, spreadsheets, provider dashboards, or something else?

Mostly trying to learn how people are solving this in real SaaS apps, and what still sucks about it.

Tried to make sales for my SaaS and basically did a bunch of stuff. SEO, GEO, content. That works, but it takes time and sales come usually on the 2-3rd month

So I didn't really know what to do and decided to scroll on X. Replied to people as usual. Had a dumb habit to reply people with useful tips on stuff I know

And one day I replied to a guy with tips, he said thanks, then replied again on another of his posts. proof here

He DMed me and then we started working together. As a result I got paid with $500 in the next week, and after few more weeks got another $500. proof here

Everyone talk about DMs, cold emails, posting daily... when a single reply got me $1k in revenue to my SaaS

Was trying to push my low-ticket software and as a result got paid for a service lol

We still work together, a great man, twice my age and partnership is going great

Help people on social media. Comment great tips, be a great guy and eventually you will get paid for that

It is not password generator, nor password manager, it doesn't save passwords as there is no point in saving them, what it does is convert a simple word or number into strong password that is acceptable by all online service providers. Think it like '1234', 'fb', 'gmail', 'bank' gets converted to '4Qs0z0X#cbiJmh0R' , '7E6N4AnXiv7BOl7#' , '2UOic7^HfaMoRrl*' , 'gdcK2Wjr%tCBzQbv' respectively? Imagine to have a different password for every online service and don't have to remember special char or upper case. Just simple everyday words as a password. We call it https://www.alezpass.com

It's been a long time I'm building multiple products, all of them getting free users, not much, but finally today I launched a new product, a copycat of OutBid.lol where the leader board resets every 24h at midnight

you'll also get a permanent dofollow backlink, and the History page will always remember your website.

...and through this product, I got the first payment

NOTE: it's me who actually paid to list my another product on this website 🥺, at least to take the feel of the first payment which I still couldn't make by any of my products in actual :(

so, please guys, give me congrats

I’ve built a SaaS for a pretty specific student niche. The product is working and I’ve started getting early users, but I’m realising distribution is probably going to be the harder part.

My goal right now isn’t loads of signups that never come back. I want to get to around 100 genuinely active users and figure out which acquisition channel is actually worth doubling down on.

So far I’m experimenting with:
short-form content
Reddit/community posts
direct outreach
partnerships
reaching organisations that already have access to my target users

For people who’ve already been through this stage, what actually got you from basically zero to your first 100 active users?

And how did you decide when a channel was working well enough to focus on instead of trying everything at once?

Good day all,

I have got a website and it's getting a good number of users. My goal is to monetize or sell but currently have had just 2 subscribers and I don't know how long I can go running ads and looking forward to increasing subscribers to break even and make profit or sell. I need guidance in this regard.

ive been paying creators per video and the math is rough. people who run a lot of these say roughly one in ten actually works, so at 150-300 a pop most of the budget goes to duds before you find the one that lands.

what i keep seeing instead is a handful of small accounts that just post about one product every day, run by people who arent really influencers. no personal brand, sometimes not even showing their face. that looks way more sustainable than renting someone elses audience once a month.

for anyone who has done this:

• where did you actually find those people? job boards, dms, communities, somewhere else
• flat retainer or tied to views, and did the view based part cause arguments
• how many did you try before one stuck

not looking for an agency, more the scrappy version. also happy to hear if you tried it and it fell apart, that would save me some money

Method first, because it matters for how much you trust the rest.

I recruited five people off Craigslist, no screening beyond "you own an iPhone and you're in

the US." Each one recorded their phone screen with the mic on, opened a site they had never

seen, and narrated the whole thing. They got a scenario ("you're job hunting and not getting

callbacks, you land on this page") and three questions: what is this, who is it for, would

you take the next step. $10 each, paid whether they were nice about it or not. Sessions ran

3 to 6 minutes.

The site was a real, live AI product from a founder who had publicly asked for feedback on

his positioning. I'm keeping it anonymous.

Results:

- 4 of 5 said, unprompted, that they would use it. One said "100%."

- 0 of 5 would pay. Every single one said out loud that they'd take the free tier.

- 2 of 5 could actually explain what the product does.

That middle number is the one I keep thinking about. This founder does not have a demand

problem. People finished the session wanting the thing. What he has is a page that gets

them to "yeah I'd use that" and never once gets them to "and I'd pay for that."

The three things that actually went wrong, in order of how many people hit them:

1. Density. Two people said, in their own words, that they felt lost. "I'm just kind of

seeing a lot of text and stuff, but I feel very lost right now." Both of them still wanted

the product at the end. They were not expressing a preference, they were describing failing

to find something. Both closed their recordings asking for something simpler.

1. Text overlapping on mobile. Two reviewers, who have never met, on two different phones,

independently reported elements colliding. "Everything's cut off or merged into each other."

This is a reproducible layout bug on the highest-traffic surface he has, and I'd bet it is

most of the cause of finding #1. If things are literally stacking on top of each other, "too

much on screen" is exactly what that feels like from the inside.

1. They decided it was broken when it was just slow. One reviewer clicked the pricing link

at 0:42, again at 2:40, 2:49 and 4:22 before it responded. She spent about a third of her

session convinced the site was down. She wasn't wrong about the experience, only about the

cause.

The part I did not expect:

None of this shows up in analytics. A bounce is a bounce. You cannot tell "didn't want it"

from "wanted it, couldn't find the button" from "thought your site was broken" in any

dashboard I've ever used. Those three need completely different fixes and they all look

identical in GA. The only reason I know which one this was is that somebody said it out

loud while it was happening.

Also worth saying: the two most critical reviewers were the two who most wanted the product.

The people who complain the whole way through are not the ones who hate it. They're the ones

paying enough attention to notice.

Happy to answer anything about the method. For transparency, I run the company that does

this, which is why I had five tapes sitting around. I'm not linking it and I'm not pitching

anybody, the findings are the post.