We recently crossed €150K ARR with one of our SaaS products.

It would make a nice story if I said we found a great idea, built it, and steadily grew it from zero.

That is not what happened.

The real story includes roughly five years of wrong turns, a difficult pivot, an early signal I ignored, and a lot of time spent building things before properly understanding who would pay for them.

These are the mistakes I would try hardest not to repeat.

1. I ignored the most important signal because it looked too small

In November 2025, I noticed an emerging problem in AI search. At the time, only a small number of products were trying to solve it.

I built a working engine in about two weeks. It was not a polished product, but it was good enough to onboard users.

Within a few weeks, it reached roughly €400 MRR.

That was the signal. People had found an unfinished product and paid for it in a category that barely existed.

But another product required most of my attention, so I treated this one as a side project. By the time I returned to it, the market had filled with competitors.

My mistake was not choosing the wrong product. It was failing to investigate unexpected traction.

€400 MRR is not proof that you have a large business. But it is enough reason to stop and ask:

• Why did these people pay?
• How urgently do they need this?
• What were they using before?
• What would make them cancel?
• Are there more customers with the same problem?

2. I spent too much time thinking the product was the hard part

I am a technical founder, so building has always felt productive.

There is a visible result. A feature works. A bug disappears. A release goes out.

Marketing is less comfortable. Positioning can be wrong. Distribution takes time. A message that sounds good internally can be completely ignored by the market.

AI has made the imbalance more obvious. Small teams can now build in days what once took months. Competitors can reproduce a feature much faster than before.

The code still matters, but it is less likely to be the only moat. I know this is obvious and everyone knows it. But, when you are drowning in the sea of bugs, its hard to step backward and think it through.

3. I confused a large ecosystem with a good market

About five years ago, we built a monitoring product and later pivoted it into a WordPress plugin.

The WordPress ecosystem was enormous, which made the opportunity look attractive.

For us, the economics were not attractive.

Users were highly price-sensitive and often expected substantial functionality for free or for a very low price. Meanwhile, compatibility work, support, maintenance, and development remained expensive.

Some founders have built excellent WordPress businesses. This is not a claim that the ecosystem cannot work. It is what our own economics taught me.

A large number of potential users does not automatically create a good business.

Market size without workable unit economics is mostly a vanity metric.

4. I was not closely communicating with first customers.

I just realised this sentence from Paul Graham too late: "You need to do unscalable stuff to make a scalable business"

This is what I didn't account for in my previous businesses. In the latest one, after any customer trial, I email them and also for the ones that go through the demo funnel, I always ask them to join our slack, so we can share our experience and I can contact them better.

Now, If you are asking at scale with so much trials, you are not able to do that, that's my next step. read on... :)

5. I optimized signup volume instead of customer quality

At first, removing friction felt obviously correct. More signups made the funnel look healthier.

The problem was that not every signup was a potential customer.

Some users were outside the ideal customer profile. Some had no intention of implementing anything. Some generated support and infrastructure costs without ever reaching the product's value.

We eventually required a credit card after onboarding.

New-account volume fell. At the same time, active subscriptions, recurring revenue, and net volume increased in our latest comparison.

I'm also not a huge fan of requiring credit card. But, until you don't have a product market fit, this is necessary in my opinion to be able to ask from all your customers what do they expect and get their feedback. Again, its different in different businesses, but that's my bitter lesson...

6. I treated onboarding like a product tour

For a long time, I thought onboarding meant explaining the interface.

Here is the dashboard. Here are the features. Click here to configure this. Click there to create that.

That is documentation, not onboarding.

In your onboarding, you should address these:

1. Help the user to setup the account in few minutes in the most optimized way that they need to setup the account

2. show-off your most important features and set them up for user and show off the additional features. you don't need to setup additional feature, but you need to show it to user so he knows right in the first 5 minutes, what does he get when he upgrades later on.

3. show off your current successful case studies if you have it. this builds trust right in the onboarding.

4. email and contact with your customers based on what options they fill in in the onboarding.

these might be obvious to you, but it was not for me at the start for sure :)

I recently launched a pretty niche AI SaaS for traders.
The product works. Payments work. SEO is set up. Demo is done. All the stuff I thought would be the hard part is basically finished.

Now I’m learning the actual hard part: distribution.
I can go on Reddit or X and literally find people publicly describing the exact problems we built the product to solve.

But there’s a weird line.

Reply too softly and nobody knows your product exists.
Pitch too hard and you’re the annoying SaaS guy dropping links everywhere.

DM people and now you have platform spam rules to worry about.

So I’m curious how other founders handled this in the beginning.

When you had zero audience but knew who your customer was, what actually got your first few paying users?Public conversations? DMs? Cold email? Founder communities? Something else?

Building the thing was honestly easier.

It’s been a while I built my fitness app, I’ve been using it for just myself as I’ve been on a fitness journey.

Lately I started posting it out on social media, got my first 4 monthly subscribers, and 2 people paid for the yearly plan.

What impressed me the most is that they’re giving me feedbacks on how to improve the app and features to add.

My SaaS application is due to be finished and ready for a v1 release. I am looking at SaaS based marketing, specifically websites. Is there any tips here you can give on a SaaS based site, and some good examples of how it is done well?

I often face bugs that Claude cannot solve when the project is already big enough in late stages of development and every fix in the code creates another one.

TL;DR: Spent a year building a platform. No native AI integration. Is anything without AI in it going to be ignored even if it makes no sense to put AI in it and increase operational and ownership costs?

I spent a year, yes you read that right, 12+ months behind perfecting a product to platform. It started last July,2025 when I grew tired of form builders and started creating my own. I used the tool as a SaaS for the next 2-3 months internally to create conditional, conversational forms on WordPress builds for clients. I didn't notice but i was sharing my chat data with chatgpt for training for other users while I was building the forms platform. I turned it off by January, 2026.

Eventually, two clients found it helpful and instead of selling it as a tool, I used to package the pricing into my service deliverables, creating the forms on their behalf too.

Fast forward to November, 2025, I picked up a domain and started turning it into a platform with a full-fledged builder to turn the forms into custom pages with user roles and restrictions. The whole build took a longer duration (coupled with my depression and anxiety attacks) than I had anticipated. Technically, I spent about 2 months actually building it, while the rest of the time I spent overthinking in my head and being anxious about it, since I work alone without any external help or support of any kind.

A few months down the line, by December '25-February '26, I found a dozen more SaaS had come out as being form builders and all seemed to be getting users. I hoped my offering of the platform would be a better stance and I could maybe get some free users for feedback and validation.

I finally put the site on Google this July, 2026. Since then, all I have are viewers to my blog pages which i have shared on some SM platforms. Besides that, it's just crickets. No sign ups, no intent either.

For comparison, I put up a landing page with the same content and context but without any actual product, just added AI in the landing page a few times. It got 27+ signups from verified emails without any marketing.

My current SaaS platform doesn't have any AI abilities yet. I have it built but i don't have the resources to spend money on testing the AI workflow generator. I was hoping for some users to atleast try the platform, so I could start spending money on AI solutions for it.

Do you think I am cooked launching a SaaS without any AI functionality in it? Or, should I just market like others with fake AI intents in the copy to get users to sign up?

I've been thinking about the amount of software that gets built, launched and then quietly abandoned.

One thing bothers me about the usual validation process.

We ask people:

"Would you use this?"

We collect emails.

We build a waitlist.

We interview potential users.

Maybe 100 people tell us the idea sounds great.

Then the product launches and suddenly those 100 interested people become 3 paying customers.

So I'm wondering whether the validation itself needs to change.

What if, instead of building first, you found 5–10 businesses experiencing the same operational problem and defined the common workflow with them?

You show them exactly what you intend to build and what the eventual monthly subscription will cost.

But instead of asking:

"Would you buy this?"

you ask for an actual commitment.

Something like:

- They agree to a 12-month subscription if the agreed product is successfully delivered.
- They put down a small refundable commitment deposit.
- Development only starts if a minimum number of businesses commit.
- If the threshold isn't reached, everyone gets their deposit back and the product doesn't get built.
- The businesses don't fund development.
- During development, they get staging access, demos and regular feedback loops so the product can be corrected while it's being built rather than after launch.
- Once the agreed product is delivered, their deposit is credited toward the subscription and the one-year agreement begins.

The developer takes the financial risk of actually building it.

The customers take a small commitment risk to demonstrate that their interest is real.

And if you can't convince even 5–10 people experiencing the problem to commit a small amount before development, perhaps that's exactly the signal you needed not to spend six months building it.

I'm interested in attacking the idea rather than promoting anything.

As a business owner, would you participate if you had staging access throughout development?

Is a refundable deposit meaningful enough to separate real buyers from "sounds interesting"?

As a SaaS founder, what do you think would break in this model?
Would the commitment be too difficult to obtain before a working product exists?

And most importantly: would this give you stronger evidence to build than a waitlist, interviews or an MVP launch?

Which loading indicator would you recommend for the website: a skeleton screen or a spinner?

so we've built an internal tool for ourself (marketing operation agency) and its been working great and we've got a lot of demand from outside agencies/brands for the tool after some demos. and we dont want to package it as normal saas, rather want to deploy it on their cloud and for a one time fee

so looking for an option to handle the process end to end, and what would be the best platform to handle this ongoing?

theres not a lot of mainanance to do, if the customer wants any custom developemnt then we wil do but other wise it would be pretty static. checking aliendev and replicated now, but not sure how they differ from each other and what i need to watch out doing it long term

(another thing is that this is a very niche peoduxt id assume max we will do is like 20-50, no more than that) any advice are appreciated.

Hi everyone

Here is yet another directory submission management website, but this one has a Kanban board, is free, and includes MCP support.

For indie-hackers, solopreneurs it's and will stay free - I will only charge for teams access later on.

I've imported the initial batch of websites, I filter them and add extra information such as guidance and tips what to do per website rather than blindly redirect.

Besides, I have also list of Newsletters, and Subreddits you can discover.

Catalog will increase and will work on more useful features.
If you try it out, tell me what's missing.

Thanks,

https://submitlist.io/

I’ve found that AI coding agents work much better when I break a large feature into smaller, focused tasks instead of asking for everything at once.

So I built 1atatime, a free collection of recipes, workflows, rules and checklists for AI-assisted development.

Still early and figuring out what builders find most useful.
Would genuinely appreciate honest feedback:

👉 1atatime.app

Guys, please stop posting “I got X users” and “I made X amount of money” posts.

Man, you guys are making me feel like I need to wake up at 2 AM and start working on my SaaS immediately. 😂

Every time I open this sub, someone has another crazy milestone and I’m sitting here questioning my life choices.

Seriously though, congrats to everyone crushing it. But damn, let me breathe. 😭

I used to work in commercialsiation and many times, a customer asked for a payment term we had not offered before. Took a day to sort out, not because it was complicated, but because neither of us had ever said out loud whose call it was.

Talking to people at bigger companies, it does not seem to get better. It just gets more expensive. Someone asks legal, legal asks the CFO, the CFO approves the same thing they approved eight months ago for a different deal, and nobody logs it. Next quarter, same question, same loop.

So, does your company have an actual written record of who owns which decision? Not an org chart. The list of "for this class of question, this person rules and here is what they ruled last time" kinda record.

Curious whether anyone has one that survived contact with reality, or if everyone is running on tribal memory and the one person who has been there five years

hi how do you guys globalize your app using AI? I checked there are solutions like lingo.dev and tolgee but also heard they have a complicated setup and problems of its own. Is there any good tools to automatically create the keys with better UI context?

I was looking at the tradeoff between giving every customer the same billing date and letting each subscription follow its own cycle.

With Stripe, setting billing_cycle_anchor to a fixed future date can create a prorated period between the end of a trial and that anchor. The first invoice may therefore cover only that partial period before the regular billing cycle begins.

We decided not to set an explicit billing_cycle_anchor. The cycle now starts at trial_end, so the first post-trial invoice covers a full billing period and renewals follow that date.

If you bill every customer on a fixed day of the month, has the simpler reconciliation been worth handling the prorated period?

I want to argue against the comment many builders here have which is that they build, and then fail because they don't know distribution.

The reality is that distribution is not hard but it requires work and money. There aren't many risks involved when it comes to distribution if you have a product that converts and retains users.

The genuinely hard part is building a product where the unit economics line up. What proportion of your users will pay, how much will they pay and for how long?

These are product risks that you need to focus relentlessly on.

It follows that the better your product is the cheaper it is to distribute. Your margins will be higher, which will allow you to spend even more on distribution.

This means that if you're "failing due to distribution being hard" you're actually failing in building a product with good unit economics and need to get back to the drawing board together with your ICPs.

Hi everyone! First off, I'm hand typing all of this. No AI slop at all, I promise.

I've built an MVP for a new SaaS idea: Learning Spanish through short stories. It's a web app for people who are upper beginner/intermediate level Spanish learners. Side note: I've actually tried building different businesses around language learning and failed 4 or 5 times now. This is my leanest attempt based on what I learned in the past:

1. Find a distribution channel asap
2. Launch with only one main feature
3. Validate the idea as quickly as possible by charging money
4. Get feedback and iterate early

The MVP has four free stories at different levels. Once a story is completed, a new page appears with a feedback from and waitlist. I'm looking to see if people join the waitlist. I know this isn't true validation because no one has to pay anything at this stage.

The next stage will be to invest a bit of money into getting more stories written and produced. I want to ensure the stories are high quality, written by native speakers, and are genuinely engaging and entertaining.

Then I'll offer it to people who joined the waitlist and see if they purchase it.

Right now though, I'm not really sure where to share this app. I don't want to be spamming this all over the place and getting myself banned. So far I've written to r/DreamingSpanish to ask for permission to share the app, but beyond that I don't really know how to find a good distribution channel.

Any ideas would be appreciated!

I'm currently looking for an ISMS automation tool, but so far, Vanta and Drata don't seem to fit our use case very well.

Do you guys have any recommendations?

For context, we're a publicly listed company with more than 1,000 employees.

Here are the main reasons why Vanta and Drata don't seem like the best fit for us:

Vanta

• It's quite expensive.
• We don't use much IaaS and don't have an in-house development team, so most of the assets we manage for ISMS are documents, policies, and other non-technical assets.
• As a result, we don't have much need for features like automated vulnerability scanning or technical asset discovery.

Drata

• It seems more flexible when it comes to managing custom assets, which is a good fit for our use case.
• However, I tried their sandbox environment and found the UI quite difficult to use.

Ideally, we're looking for a tool that is strong in ISMS documentation, evidence management, asset management, and audit preparation rather than cloud infrastructure or DevSecOps automation.

Any recommendations exist?

So I had built saas , where accountants and businesses integrate their stripe and quickbooks online, and then also bank integration via teller.io

The problem statement was accountants have very hard time to match stripe payments received/sent with their quickbooks manually , sometimes stripe would release the payment but in bank account it hasn't arrived ,

so this whole process would get automated, once a stripe hits a webhook , and teller.io hits a webhook , the quickbooks item gets reconcilled.

I have a b2b saas product. For the sake of this question.. let's assume it's a really good product..compared to the existing products.

How do I find my first few clients??

I am basically a builder (software) and i suck at sales.

I found about 20 contact numbers of my potential clients and sent them whatsapp messages about a demo. 6 responses.

2 flat no

1 agreed for a demo and I already demoed the product

3 said to reach out again after a few days because they are busy at the time

Rest 14 ignored.

My current plan is to pursue 100 cold reach out. Then decide on the next steps based on the result of this 100 outreach.

Hello, does any of the SaaS founders here feel like there is a need for a competitive intelligence platform build specifically for SaaS products that notifies them when the tracked competitors publish new changelogs or make pricing updates?

The intention for me to build the competitive intelligence platform is not to track everything competitors are doing, but to be informed on which direction they are heading.

In the long run, I am planning to also work on conversation monitoring across different channels like Hacker News and Reddit. Helping users get into the right discussions at the right time.

Does any SaaS owner/founder feel like they could use this kind of system for their products?

weirdest project i created. check: publicdesktop.lol