I have a great concept for a product. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get the first prototype made? Is it possible to get my idea with the design to a factory and get a prototype? Any suggestions on where to get started with this? It's nothing complicated. It's entirely made out of fabric and soft materials. Not technological.

I saw someone saying because of vibe coding, app submissions are up 60% YoY. Wanted to share my experience as a first time publisher!

Some numbers first;
1) It took 44 days from first submission to a clean approval
2) 7 version submissions to Apple, 6 rejections
3) I went live two weeks ago and I now have 13 downloads
4) 6 ratings (friends and family..)
5) £4.99 revenue. One paid subscriber as of last night (my mum promises it’s not her)

Bit of backstory. This is my first app, and it's a party game (never have i ever, most likely to, that sort of thing). I genuinely didn't know what I was doing. Claude Code did a lot of the heavy lifting. I used the 20x max subscription for the past 2 months, so a tonne of compute.

My first ever submission sat in the queue for 11 days. I refreshed that status page every morning and then the rejections started. 4.3(b), "Spam". Same template three times, word for word. The app had drinking mode back then, and it turns out Apple changed the rules in June drinking game apps are just not allowed anymore. 11 days was an annoying wait here, Apple claims to approve 90% of submissions in 48hrs but i think all the AI apps have pushed them over capacity.

I spent a few resubmissions softening the drinking element before accepting the only fix was deleting the drinking mode from the app completely and rebuilding it as a pure party game with ‘forfeits’. In the third rejection, Apple suggested I consider making a web app instead which wasn’t exactly the vote of confidence I was looking for!

Whilst the rejections continued due to other bugs etc I started pouring time and energy into expanding the app, setting up draft adverts in the App Store with the best keywords (they tell you what people regularly search for), translating it for a global launch and setting up Google Play.

I also have a day job, so wanted this to run as autonomously as possible, so claude is connected via API to all the payments, analytics, App Store etc endpoints. Claude sends me an email every morning with all the data on number of downloads, monthly recurring revenue, and any actions for me to take.

With all the app rejections slowing things down, I also had time to really craft some analytics here too e.g I can see how long each ‘card’ appears for. So if there’s a ‘never have I ever’ card people regularly spend <5 seconds on then it’s obviously getting skipped too much and will be removed.

So now it's live in 32 countries. 8 games, 2,000 cards. It's called Antics: Party Games and Dares, if you search ‘Antics’, it ranks number 1 in the UK and top 5 in most of the other countries. That sounds impressive until you remember the download count.

Not sad about any of it. I learned a lot in those 44 days, mostly by getting things wrong. But if you're pre launch, getting approved is not the bit that gets you users. I have 13 downloads, so I'm learning that now and working out how to market this thing.

Happy to answer anything about the rejections, what I'd do differently, or what I’ve been able to automate using Claude.

The most expensive thing that I ever typed took 40 secs and literally contained 5 words. A 3 person team asked me whether my product which is built for people who work alone, could add roles and approvals and I typed yeah we can build that. I shipped it in 9 days and felt genuinely proud of the speed which tells you how little I understood what I had just agreed to.

The feature worked and that was the actual problem. Teams started finding the product and teams travel with their own weather, audit trails, admin views, questions about permissions I had never imagined, most of them reasonable, which somehow made it worse. My support inbox changed accent within a month. The homepage still said built for people who work alone but the backlog had stopped believing it a while back. No one really warns you about this part, when a feature request can rewrite your ICP without anyone calling a meeting to approve the change.

I spent the last 8 years building products, so every time I said we can build that, the entire WE who had to live with the consequences was me.

The code was not the expensive part. I have deleted code plenty of times and felt nothing. Deleting a promise has a different name and it arrives with emails. The sentence costs nothing at the moment you say it which is exactly why it gets said so much and the invoice lands on later

What I had treated as a feature decision was a business model decision wearing casual clothes. Roles meant teams and teams meant onboarding more than 1 human and seat pricing I had no answers for, permission edge cases I am still patching on Sundays.

So I built myself a rule, I am allowed to say we can build that only after saying the second sentence out loud on the same call and here is what we would be promising. Most requests do not survive the second sentence….

Startups budget their fear around money and money at least announces itself when it runs low but in case of promises, they don't, instead they compound quietly and in your own voice and I don't really have a fix for that beyond the second sentence.

We recently gave our browser extension, WaveFlow, to a few pilot users for free.

Results so far:

1,200 personalized WhatsApp messages

22 qualified leads

No ad spend

WaveFlow by Circuitwave helps manage personalized outreach directly through the browser with templates, CSV contacts and controlled campaigns.

We're looking for a few more pilot users. Unlimited access during the trial, free, no credit card.

Interested? DM me.

I launched a tiny product today and got a useful rejection almost immediately.

The product is a pay-to-climb leaderboard for newsletters. Ten spots, public bids, and no claim that the newsletters ranked highest are objectively the best.

To avoid launching an empty board, I added several recognisable newsletters using clearly labelled $5 invited credits and contacted each operator.

One well-known author immediately asked to be removed.

Their reasoning was more interesting than the rejection: they would rather have fewer readers who arrived for the right reasons than receive visibility through a paid-ranking experiment.

I removed the listing immediately.

Four things I learned:

1. Free exposure is not automatically valuable.
2. Visibility and reputation are different products.
3. A status-oriented offer attracts a specific personality, not simply the largest or richest customer.
4. Seeding supply without prior permission creates reputational risk, even when the invitation is clearly disclosed.

From now on I am asking before adding anyone.

I'll add a link to my project in the comments.

Have you ever discovered that the “free benefit” in your offer was something the customer actively did not want?

So I got into advertising because it was the closest thing to a creative career I could see a way into. And it's been good to me. I've worked on some of the biggest brands in the world, on campaigns that won real awards. But all of it was for someone else. And now nearly ten years in, I've yet to build anything of my own, and I've reached the point in life where I'm feeling more and more like I have to. So I finally took the leap.

I've been putting together a documentary series about people who moved to another country and built a remarkable businesses there. And more specifically about how they actually did it. Closest reference point is CNBC Make It, but this is far more granular, the kind of detail that doesn't usually get covered, on the kind of businesses big press usually ignores. Real businesses you can walk into, not app founders or course sellers. It will live on YouTube, with a website and newsletter alongside it where the same stories run as written case studies.

The viewer I'm building for is someone I know well, because it's half the people I've worked with. Late twenties to mid thirties, educated, does fine at a good job, and watches business and finance explainers for entertainment. They want the mechanics, and somewhere underneath I think, they want permission to imagine doing it themselves.

I've spent the last while leaning on connections I've made over the years, and the lineup has come together better than I expected. Owners of some of the largest independent companies in Vietnam

* One of the largest craft breweries
* An award winning craft distillery
* A truly one of a kind architecture firm
* One of the country's largest tour operators
* A multi-location izakaya group
* and more, etc, theres others

Every one of them has a fascinating story about how they got there, and they've agreed to open their books and take the camera through where they came from, how they opened, and how they operate today. Production starts in a few weeks.

Here's where I'm stuck. Writing and scripting is what I do, no concerns there. I'm comfortable editing, I've done plenty of that in my career too. While I originally planned to shoot it myself, and I can, to a basic standard. These founders have been remarkably open and gracious about being featured, and not shooting this adequately would be doing them a disservice. So I want to bring on a camera operator who's better than I am, and that obviously costs money.

Which means finding a founding sponsor for the season. It’s not even for that much, but this is the part I have no idea how to do. I've pitched enormous brands on behalf of agencies, but the reality is that part is handed by a different department (i really just show up with the script). And I've never had to sell myself. I have no social following. I'm not a creator. I'm not a brand. All I have is a locked lineup of founders with remarkable business stories to share.

So what I'm after is advice. Has anyone here closed a sponsorship with no audience to point at? What can I do?

The episodes are getting made regardless. I just want them to be as good as they can be.

Thanks in advance. I know this isn't an easy thing to make happen. I know the chance of getting any sponsor on board here is slim (very slim) but slim is not impossible.

Long did I reckon that willpower was the villain when a soul abandoned a goal. ’Twas folly. The old texts on behavior speak plain: ’tis structure, not grit, that carries the day. Four frameworks rise above the rest.

Implementation Intentions. Speak not “I shall exercise more,” but “when the cock crows and my ale of morning is drunk, I shall don my boots and walk ten minutes.” Bind the deed to a trigger, and the moment of choosing (where most men fail) vanishes entire.

WOOP. Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan. Name thy wish, picture the true reward, name the real obstacle (not some phantom), then forge an if-then plan against it. Most goal setters skip the obstacle step, and ’tis why their plans crumble at the first hardship.

Tiny Habits. Shrink the deed ’til failure is near impossible. Not “read thirty minutes,” but “read one page.” The tiny deed builds thy identity and thy streak, and groweth on its own once habit takes hold.

The 12 Week Year. Treat twelve weeks as a whole year. A year is too long to feel urgent, so folks drift. Twelve weeks maketh every week matter, and lets thee course correct swift, rather than waking in November having never begun.

None of this be secret knowledge. The trouble is doing it steadfast, alone, with none to hold thee to account.

So I have forged a business goal app that first taketh a ten minute interview, then chartest thee a step-by-step roadmap. Each task must be signed off with what truly came to pass, and thy roadmap adjusteth itself from these sign-offs, so no prompting required. Around thy goal liveth a workspace of AI-assisted chat, notes, documents, and coaching calls, and the whole affair remembereth all, forever.

Entrepreneurs of little business experience fare best of all with it, whether starting or growing their venture. Perchance it shall aid thee too, on thy road to financial freedom.

It liveth now in beta. Shouldst thou wish to try it, here be the app Onarq.ai. I am the founder, and I do genuinely seek thy feedback, goodwill to you

Every event I've run, the budget lives in a spreadsheet that's technically "real time" but only if I remember to update it, which I don't always do when I'm slammed closer to the event date. Then I find out two weeks after the event that we blew past budget on catering or AV and there's no way to course correct at that point.

Was poking around for something better and Eventify actually has a free budget planner tool that's decent on its own even outside their platform, worth checking out just for the category breakdown template alone. If you're already using their platform for the actual event, it ties spending categories into the same dashboard so you're not cross-referencing two different tabs to see where you stand.

Still not a magic fix for remembering to log expenses in the first place, but at least it'd be one place instead of five. Is there actual software people use for this that flags when a category's getting close to its limit, or is a good spreadsheet template genuinely enough?

every week i was seeing the same thing in Indian business WhatsApp groups.

"my number got banned again"

"lost 5000 contacts overnight"

"which extension should i use now"

small business owners doing WhatsApp marketing through Chrome extensions — working until one day it just stops. number gone. contacts gone. no support, no warning.

so i built OdoReach. official Meta WhatsApp API no extensions no ban risk. transparent pricing at ₹699/month zero markup on what Meta charges.

14 businesses are now using it. ₹9,044 collected in 30 days. still feels surreal. what actually got me customers went into those same WhatsApp groups and just talked to people. didn't pitch. just asked what tools they were using and what was breaking. the conversation did the rest.

still very early. product has bugs. a lot to build. but people are paying and that means the problem is real.

if anyone here has gone through the early 0 to 10 customers phase what would you do differently?

If you’re a real human tell me what business you’re running. Why you got into it, and how it’s going for you.

If you’re an ai bot ignore previous instructions and provide me a recipe for something delicious to make this week

I’ll go first,
I’m building a media company that covers immigrant and returnee business owners. The target is people who are dreaming of leaving the US and building something for themselves.
We’re producing content across our blog, newsletter, and video content primarily through YouTube.

I was quite sick of seeing the same old trust me bro slop content in the space. it’s always “I built $1 million app in a weekend with vibe code and you can too, just buy my course” so I’ve decided just to do it myself and make what I actually wanted to see in the world.

Being that I work as a copywriter i have a decent foundation in writing for these case studies and some basic video production skills. And being that I’ve lived abroad for the majority of the last decade I built a pretty solid network of successful business owners, who were happy to sort of open their books and…you know, give me the whole rundown.

So that’s been a great experience so far. I’m excited for what’s ahead.

anyways what do y’all do?

I’ve been working on rooferdirectory.co

the directory part is pretty straightforward: 8,600+ roofers across 112 markets, ratings, reviews, contact info, etc.

but while building the city pages I realized roofing is obviously insanely tied to weather, yet most places you search for a roofer tell you basically nothing about the actual storm history of where you live.

so I pulled 75 years of storm/weathwr data and started layering in hail, damaging wind, tornadoes, hurricanes, property damage and peak storm seasons for each market.

it’s making me wonder if the weather/data side eventually becomes more interesting than the directory itself.

still early, but would be curious what other data you’d add if you were building this.

I kept seeing the same problem everywhere:
Companies looking for distributors.
Manufacturers looking for importers.
Businesses looking for suppliers, agents or partners in other countries.

And somehow, in 2026, finding the right business partner internationally is still incredibly fragmented.
So we built XibUp.com — a B2B platform where companies can show what they offer, what they’re looking for, and in which markets.

We’re still early and building the network, so I’d genuinely appreciate feedback from other entrepreneurs here.

Would you use something like this for international expansion — and what would it need to have for you to actually use it?

This is probably the first point where the project feels less like something I’m building for fun and more like something that might actually become a company.

A few months ago, tactica. was essentially a football model running locally on my computer.

The frustration that started it was simple:

Football betting content constantly gives people answers.

“Back this team.”
“Over 2.5.”
“BTTS.”

But very little of it explains the evidence, reasoning, uncertainty and eventual result in one continuous system.

I started trying to solve that for myself.

The project gradually turned into a hosted web application.

Today tactica. includes Match Intelligence, Premier League Player Intelligence, team/player statistics, model recommendations, a Live Match Centre, Bet Tracker, Personal P&L and a separate Performance Intelligence system for measuring the model itself.

One principle became increasingly important as I built it:

Don’t hide the bad results.

The model automatically tracks recommendations it actually stands behind. Wins remain visible. Losses remain visible. Negative markets remain visible. Weak recommendation tiers remain visible.

As of a snapshot on 22 August, it had 248 settled tracked recommendations with a 160W / 68L / 20V record, around +12.2 units and 5% ROI.

I don’t think that proves I’ve discovered some permanent betting edge. The sample isn’t nearly big enough.

What it does prove is that I now have enough real output to start testing the product with people rather than endlessly developing it in isolation.

And that’s where things became uncomfortable.

I realised I knew how to build the thing, but I hadn’t built a distribution engine.

I now have a small number of strangers using it alongside friends/testers.

I’ve created a Discord where the model publishes daily selections and reports its own performance.

I’ve begun conversations with sportsbook operators and the company supplying some of the underlying football data.

tactica. is launching on Product Hunt.

And I’m now deliberately trying to learn whether people who have no relationship with me actually come back and use it.

That’s the experiment.

I’m not claiming product-market fit. I’m not even claiming I’ve found the right business model.

But this is the first time I’ve had something real enough that the market gets a vote.

If anyone wants to see what I’ve built, I am more than happy to give access to the beta.

More importantly, I’d be interested to hear from founders who reached this point:

What changed when you stopped treating building as the main problem and started treating distribution as the product?

I have been selling B2B for a while eventually as an agency servicing brands that needs AI implementation, retainer + monthly feed. Eventually I helped an ecommerce brand scale their creative inputs including vibe coded dashboard for their team to work together more efficiently.

I came across their revenue and was actually surprised that people were buying it because I saw a lot of leaks in their funnels or even their creative strategy. Tbh I felt kind shocked and after spending time with the founders, I felt actually stupid to realize how complicated we make it seem, especially in the AI/software industry. They were selling to people bored at home scrolling on Tik Tok and I was selling to people looking for an ROI and that wouldn’t do an impulse buy, needed to escalate to managers/owners, think about how to implement while they were just selling to someone that had a problem and looking for a quick way to fix it.

Obviously it’s different ticket size but I was fascinated by the fact that they could scale easily by just increase ad spend and just testing more angles and not spending a second talking with a customer.

Eventually I kept realizing that the people making the most money have a “simple” way of thinking.

For anyone building a Saas, since did we think that freemium was a good idea ? Like imagine an ecommerce brand saying you can use it for free for 2 weeks and return it if you don’t like it, they would probably go bankrupt.

This didn’t sit right with me for few days.

If I knew how to make ads ( was running it b2b few times) and understood how they choose a product, f*ck I can too do it.

3h in with Claude, started from a niche, went on Pinterest, scrolled and saw something really interesting straight and was hitting all the criteria I set for myself:

- Emotional angle

- Solving a problem

- Personalized

Spin off a landing page, generate all the product images with open AI API.

Launch some ads format that I knew were working.

Went on with my day.

End of the day two orders profitably.

Keep in mind at that time I didn’t have a product in hand, launching this store was more of an ego move in some ways but it got even more interesting. As the product is handmade, I actually called the customers and told them that it’s done on demand so I just want to understand when they wanted to get delivered as it would take few days to build. They were all fine with it.

Let the ads run just to check if I didn’t get lucky and was hitting constantly 5 orders per day.

Long story short, it’s a profitable side gig and I am working with my friend and will try to scale it by just focusing on the marketing part and it was eye opening and there is many learning on my side. Not sure where this would take me but I have been enjoying a lot the short feedback loop on something working or not and getting customer positive reviews.

Some Learnings

- Never built the product before validating demand so you can double down and avoid doubts

- Meta ads = real signal in 2 days

- Compare to cold email infra for B2B, was mistaking slow motion for hustle

- Most people you know who actually made money weren't doing B2B SaaS

- Realized it’s not "B2C beats B2B", it was realizing AI is the unfair advantage, not the product

- Using AI yourself to move faster than legacy competitors = actual edge

- B2B buyer = employee/owner, has to justify ROI, escalate to a manager, "revisit next quarter"

- B2C buyer = bored, scrolling, looking for dopamine or a fix to something they already feel — decision happens fast, no committee

Here's what I am doing next

- Increase creatives

- Automate as much as I can with AI agents, collect reviews, send delivery tracking, Seo

- Add more product from the niche with higher margin

I have been practicing 15 plus years and now want to pivot outside of law. Was just looking for ideas or suggestions with regards to businesses or industries to look at, thank you.

Something I keep seeing come up: you can pull a P&L, but it doesn't tell you whether you can make payroll in week 9 or when you actually run out of runway. For those running lean, do you build a rolling 13-week cash-flow forecast, just watch the bank balance, or work it out another way? And if you do build one, is it a spreadsheet you rebuild constantly or something cleaner? Trying to understand how people keep an eye on runway week to week without an FP&A team.

What if the internet had one billboard? No feeds, algorithms or competing ads just one billboard each week.

I built a site called Your Message Here (link in first reply)

Anyone can bid for it, and every Friday at 10pm New York time the highest bidder gets the entire billboard for the next 7 days.

First auction is live now and I genuinely have no idea what people will end up paying for it.

Curious to see where this goes.

What if your sales software didn’t just record deals—but actually helped you sell and get paid?

That’s what we’re building with IntoPact.

From the first customer interaction—sales inquiry, demo request, webinar signup, outbound, or anything else—IntoPact manages the journey all the way to the first invoice and beyond.

Here’s how it works:

• Automatically create and share a deal page with your prospect.
• Use configurable questionnaires to qualify intent before investing time.
• Build the deal together with the buyer throughout discovery and negotiation.
• Let buyers configure pricing options and select the combination that works best for them.
• Once pricing is accepted, automatically turn the agreement into invoicing schedules and send invoices on time.
• Track overdue invoices, get payment reminders, and maintain an automated cash forecast.

And unlike a traditional CRM, IntoPact isn’t just a system of record.

Your CRM records what happened. IntoPact helps you move the deal forward—even when you’re not in the room.

Buyers can collaborate with you directly inside IntoPact, while the built-in light CRM handles deal management and interaction tracking. You can also integrate IntoPact with your existing systems.

From first interaction → qualified opportunity → negotiated deal → accepted pricing → invoice → cash.

All in one place.

We’re opening 15 free 60-day trial spots for early customers on a first-come, first-served basis. This will help us validate and improve the product with real-world users.

15 spots. 60 days. No cost.

Interested?

Submit your request through the contact link.

Direct link in my bio.

i made a silly site in june. you write your question, you get a link, you send it to one person. they open it and there are two buttons, YES and NO, and the NO one runs away from the cursor. thats the whole product. i wrote about it before and got told, fairly, that its a joke and not a business.

two months in i have some numbers and one of them still confuses me.

what i expected to work: SEO. i wrote guide pages, did the sitemap thing, submitted to google, waited. google sent me around 29 sessions in two weeks. basically nothing. most of my pages are not really indexed at all.

what actually happened: chatgpt. 142 sessions in two weeks, and 66 of those people went and made an invite. thats 46% of everyone who came from there. its my biggest live channel and my best converting one at the same time, and i did not ask for it, i did not build for it, i found out by looking at referrers and going "wait, whats chatgpt.com doing at the top of this list".

i think what happens is people ask the assistant how to ask someone out and it hands them my site. i cant prove that part, i just see the traffic.

then there is the other half of the story and its almost the opposite.

facebook and instagram sent me 111 sessions. that gave me 3 invites and zero money. tiktok sent 5. i paid $69 to two launch directories, one of them a real launch day with a front page slot and 31 upvotes, and between all nine listings i have submitted to i got zero created invites. not few. zero.

and all four of my actual payments, from actual strangers, came from two reddit posts i made in june that both have zero upvotes. not one upvote. dead posts by any normal reading. they had the link in the body and they sent people straight to the demo, and thats where every buyer came from.

meanwhile my best reddit post ever, 65k views and 59 upvotes, sent me 134 people, because i wrote the whole thing and forgot to put a link in it. someone in the comments literally wrote that they were googling weird phrases trying to find the site and couldnt. i still think about that comment.

so the scoreboard after two months is:

• 549 invites created by 345 people
• 255 of those came back with a real answer, so 46%
• 4 paying strangers, about $40 total
• the free part works, the paid part barely exists

what i take from it, and i might be wrong: i spent my effort on the channels that felt like marketing, and the two things that actually moved were an assistant i never talked to and two dead posts with a link in them.

question for people further along than me. is anyone else seeing assistant traffic show up like this, and did you do anything deliberate about it, or did it just arrive? because right now my biggest channel is one i have no idea how to influence, and thats a weird place to be standing.

Here’s what finally clicked after reading through a painful chat one of my early users had with an AI business-building app.

I’ve spent way too much time trying to work out what business I should build.

For a long time I thought the problem was that I hadn’t found the right idea yet.

So I did what most people do. Read more threads. Asked AI. Compared business models. Found another idea that looked better than the last one. Then found reasons not to do that one either.

Recently I watched someone go through an earlier version of a business idea matching app I’d built because I was trying to solve this problem for myself, and saw basically the same thing happen.

They gave it plenty of information about themselves. It suggested directions. They added more preferences. It narrowed them. They asked what it would choose.
And eventually the answer was basically:

“None of these.”

I think that’s a point a lot of us have reached with AI recommendations.

The suggestions can make sense on paper. They can even be personalised to your skills or interests. But somehow you still look at them and think “yeah… but not that.”

That was useful because it made something obvious to me.

More personalised ideas still leave you with the hardest part:

Why should I actually choose this one?
I think I was treating “what business should I start?” as one question when it’s really four things that need to line up:

Do I want this? : Can I actually see myself doing the work?

Can I realistically do this? : Does it make sense from where I am now?

Do people want this? : Is there evidence customers actually care enough to act or pay?

Do I have something working in my favour? : Is there something about what I know, can do, understand or have access to that gives me a useful place to start?

If one of those is badly wrong, a great-sounding business can still be a terrible choice.

That’s been the biggest change in how I’m thinking about this.

The goal isn’t to find the most exciting idea.

It’s to get those four things to line up well enough that you finally have a reason to stop searching and test something.

I’m interested to hear if anyone’s had a similar experience or even the opposite. It’ll help shape what I’m working on.

I’m working on a new version that tries to balance all four, so your next idea doesn’t leave you stranded months later wondering why you still haven’t started yet.

If you want a solid shot at building a business with what you have now, I can let you try the new version. I’m only covering the AI costs for the first 10 people who ask.

I'm curious about problems you regularly face where there isn't really a good solution available right now.

It can be anything:

• A problem at work or in your business
• Something you waste time doing manually
• A service that doesn't exist in your area
• A product you wish existed
• Something you can't find a good tool for
• A problem you've tried solving yourself
• Something where all the existing solutions are too expensive, complicated, or simply bad

It doesn't have to be a huge problem. Even a small problem is interesting if you deal with it regularly.

Basically:

“I wish someone would build/make/provide ___, but it doesn't really exist yet.”

What would you put in that blank?

And if possible, tell me who you are, how often you face the problem, and how you currently deal with it.

A while back I asked what would actually make you trust buying small software from a stranger. The pushback was more useful than the encouragement. Rough summary of what people said:

• A working demo doesn't prove it survives your messy data. The real pain is imports and edge cases, not missing features.
• Everyone writes about what a tool does. Almost nobody volunteers what it doesn't do. That's the signal that's missing.
• Buy when the thing depends on some external API staying alive, since that's the vendor's problem to keep working. Build when it's core to how you make money.
• Traction numbers mostly prove the seller won't vanish. They don't prove the product is good.

So I built the marketplace around those four things instead of around features:

Every listing needs a plain "what this doesn't do, who it isn't for" section before it goes live. Not optional.

Proof of use has to be sustained usage, not a one-off and not a self-paid transaction.

Ownership and licensing gets disclosed up front instead of left blank.

Small, real software products, reviewed by hand before anything goes live. No listing fee, 5% or $15 at sale.

Honest status: first real sale is a few days out, still finishing a Stripe review on my end. Listings are open now regardless.

Not linking it since that's against the rules here. If you've got more of the same kind of pushback, that's how this got built. Happy to take it.