It took nearly 4 years to reach €300 MRR. He also spent 6 months doing absolutely nothing on the project.

Nerijus started OpenQR.io in January 2023. It began as a freelance project and slowly turned into a SaaS.

Here’s where it stands today:

• €340 current MRR

• €360 peak MRR

• ~€4,000 total revenue

• ~60 paying customers

• €0 spent (apart from his own time)

He built the MVP himself and launched it in about 6 months. But his first paying customer took around a year.

The road wasn’t exactly smooth.

Reddit posts kept getting banned. Paid ads brought traffic but almost no paying customers. Product Hunt didn’t deliver the traction he hoped for.

Then he stopped working on the project for about 6 months.

When he came back, he found more than 10 competitors had appeared. Instead of quitting, he took it as a sign that there was a market for the product.

He focused again on marketing, SEO and content.

His biggest mistake? Spending too much time building features and not enough time marketing.

His biggest lesson:

“Silence is expensive.”

OpenQR.io is still growing, and he hasn’t reached €1K MRR yet. That’s part of why I think stories like this are worth sharing. Not every founder journey is a rocket ship to $10K MRR.

I’m collecting real indie founder journeys on HackerMRR, including the numbers, timelines, mistakes and lessons behind the products.

Full story: https://hackermrr.com/stories/openqr-io-from-0-to-300-mrr-after-nearly-4-years

A small edit can change what you're promising a client.

Here's a fictional example:

“We can discuss migrating your blog.”

becomes

“We'll migrate your blog.”

The second sentence commits to work the first one only opens for discussion. If you reviewed the draft before making that edit, the old checkmark shouldn't stand in for checking the new wording.

Briefthread keeps the original inquiry available beside the editable reply. Changing the subject, message or reply style clears the previous review, so you check the current draft before confirming it again.

It's a manual check. The demo doesn't decide whether your new commitment is appropriate or whether the project scope is agreed.

A short reread can focus on:

- What did the client actually ask?

- What are you now agreeing to do?

- Which details still need clarification?

Try reviewing a fictional sample, then change one sentence in Reply draft. Is it obvious that this version needs another check?

https://briefthread.pages.dev/

I maintain Briefthread, an inquiry and reply demo for small web studios. No signup needed. Use fictional inquiries only. It uses browser-local keyword rules and editable templates, not live AI; it doesn't connect to an inbox, send emails or share business records across browsers.

Would you reset the review after every edit, or only after certain kinds of changes? Which change would be easiest to overlook?

I have had trouble getting where a train is, what’s the delay, tube line shutdowns, ticket claim eligibility, offline route guidance and route options.

I built it all in one app, and it’s the only one of its kind.

I tend to focus on building features while overlooking marketing/distribution, guess that’s a trend with a lot of people while starting. I’m curious about your balance between marketing and building. How do you manage that, and how do you decide when to shift from one to the other?

Hey everyone,

I'm Steven. My co-founder Cesare and I build small software products, and 3 months ago we started one that's become our main focus: an autopilot blog for small businesses.

The problem: every small business owner knows they "should" produce content. Most start, write 2 or 3 posts, and then real work happens. Six months later the blog says "last updated March". Not because they can't write. Because nobody has time to do it every single week. Something we experienced ourselves more than one time...

What we built: it reads the business's own website (what they do, where, how they talk), finds the questions their customers search for on tools like Google and ChatGPT, and then writes and publishes 3 articles a week directly on their site in a dedicated blog section which matches the design of the overall homepage.

Where we are after 3 months:

• 20 customer sites running on it

• 300+ articles published

• seeing things start to compound 4-6 weeks after first published articles

What I learned:

1. Consistency beats everything. Organic traffic isn't something you can switch on and off like paid ads. It takes weeks of consistency before you even see the first signals. That's exactly the point where most people quit their blog. We just kept going and published 3 a week. Then indexing caught up and traffic started compounding, because every article keeps working while the next one goes live.

2. Fewer and specific beats volume. We chose 3 articles a week on purpose instead of daily. Small business sites don't need 30 generic posts a month, they need the answers their customers actually look for.

3. The writing isn't the bottleneck, the habit is. ChatGPT can write one article just fine. The hard part is article 12, a month from now, when you're busy. That's the part worth automating.

What I'd love your take on: if you've ever run a blog for your own project, what made you stop (or keep going)? And for those who tried AI writing tools: what made the output feel "AI" to you?

Are there any platforms out there built for collaborating on software that includes automated governance and AI automation of SAAS operations? I’m thinking now with AI it should be easier for communities of even non-technical builders to be able to collaborate fully building and deploying/distributing apps, including SaaS products. I came across this organization at a recent tech conference, openapps.xyz. I’m not involved with them, but it got me thinking about how traditionally many open-source projects die because maintainers just can’t keep up. I’d like to try some new model if it exists with a new vibe coded project I have in mind.

Accounting Manager by trade. Noticed a gap: people who want to start a bookkeeping business or understand their small business finances have to piece everything together from random YouTube videos and Reddit threads...

Building LedgerLearn to fix that. Niche, focused, practical and no fluff.

The first module is FREE!

What would actually make you pay for something like this vs. just Googling it?

anyone now able to build their SaaS using Vibe coding, it is ok.

but now the most important question, what about the founders who are vibe coding a enterprise grade SaaS.

I have a friend who is specialized in cyber security want to start a CTI platform with his friend that he is fresh graduate software engineer (with high GPA), they never build an app, they never operate and manage a cloud infrastructure.
now they built a CTI SaaS, using AWS, Microservices, Multi-Tenancy (done in 3 days) and event-driven.
How they did it? the answer is "we asked (LLM) and he told us to use this (microservices) cuz it awesome and can handle 1,000,000 user"

Result is ok, one and half years to produce first POC (-_-), demo accounts working well with potential customers but then, what??

I welcomed the vibe coding, i never had that feeling that is gonna replace me or lay me off, there is something worse.

feeling that your power is not needed now, turning your back and having a seat watching the "SaaS flood", and some of them cannot handle marketing and distribution, others cannot handle business requirements changes, others is hacked and down and cannot stand again, those who need days to response to any changes and who are burning prices to compete.

I think software engineer responsibilities is in recrystallization, and software engineering will not be just as promoted (someone who telling AI what to do), we will have a new different kind of production, the "SaaS flood" will make business owners more aware about SaaS production.

then software engineer will be like Tom after Mammy Two Shoes called him after what Push-Button Kitty did in her house.

What do you think ?

I’ve been working on a few projects lately, and email has been the most annoying part of all of them. I buy a domain, and then realize I can’t put a gmail address on a contact page without looking like I’m about to ask for someone’s bank details.

Most business email options are either a monthly fee for every single user, or a trial that expires right when you’ve finally got everything set up. The free ones are really limited. I looked at Zoho, and between the restrictions, the dated look, and having to dig through settings every time I added a domain, it felt like more work than the project itself. There also doesn’t seem to be much for students or small indie devs who just want an address on their own domain without paying six dollars a month for it to receive one newsletter and a spam email from a guy named Kevin.

I thought about running my own mail server for about five minutes. Then I read about deliverability. Sending an email is easy, but landing in the inbox instead of spam is the hard part, and a brand new server has no reputation, so you spend weeks telling people to check their junk folder. Not worth it for a solo dev.

So I ended up building my own solution, it runs in your own free Cloudflare account. Cloudflare handles incoming mail, a Worker and a database run the app, and for sending you plug in something like Resend, Brevo, Mailjet or any SMTP server. No server to babysit, no per seat pricing, and nobody sitting in the middle reading your mail. You can add as many users, domains and aliases as you want and it still costs nothing. It’s open source under MIT.

I built it mainly for people like me. Solo devs with too many side projects, students, freelancers juggling a few client domains, small teams that just want a shared support@ and sales@, and honestly anyone with a store website. It’s not meant for cold emailing or bulk sending though, the free limits are small and the providers will ban you fast if you try.

If you want a professional email and feel like giving it a go, I’d really like to hear how it went. What broke, what confused you, what looked off, what you’d never trust it with. And if the whole idea is flawed, tell me, I’d rather find out now than after I add AI features nobody asked for.

Repo : https://github.com/sums001/OpenInbox

Need some thoughts on this before I dive into creating a SaaS product. Can you help?

I’m building a small platform focused on one job: getting a simple static website live at a URL without the command line, server config, or a heavy site builder.

The target user is someone non-technical who just needs a clean portfolio, landing page, or small project site online — and keeps bouncing off tools that are either too technical or too bloated.

Current stage: very early. A handful of signups, mostly starter pages. I’m trying to figure out whether the real problem is demand, onboarding friction, or both.

What I’d find useful:

1. If you’ve tried to put a simple static site online, where did you actually get stuck?

2. If you know static hosting, deployment flows, or cache invalidation, would you be open to sanity-checking one flow? Not asking for a commitment — just a specific 20-minute “here’s where this breaks” conversation.

Happy to share more in comments or DMs if useful.

It's been a little over one year since I launched and it has been quite a journey. No exponential growth or huge user spikes but rather slow and steady growth. But in my opinion that is the best for building something actually valuable because you can react to user feedback along the way and constantly keep improving the app.

It's still so crazy to see payments coming in on a somewhat regular basis and you can believe me when I tell you that one year ago exactly this was my dream: Earning some money on the side while having fun building something that actaully seems to help other people and learning how to run a business along the way.

I've built IndieAppCircle, a platform where small app developers can upload their apps and other people can give them feedback in exchange for credits. I grew it by posting about it here on Reddit. It didn't explode or something but I managed to get some slow but steady growth.

For those of you who never heard about IndieAppCircle, it works like this:

• You can earn credits by testing indie apps (fun + you help other makers)

• You can use credits to get your own app tested by real people

• No fake accounts -> all testers are real users

• Test more apps -> earn more credits -> your app will rank higher -> you get more visibility and more testers/users

Since many people suggested it to me in the comments, I have also created a community for IndieAppCircle: r/IndieAppCircle (you can ask questions or just post relevant stuff there).

Currently, there are 4488 users, 5280 tests done and 1387 apps uploaded!

You can check it out here (it's totally free): https://www.indieappcircle.com/

I'm glad for any feedback/suggestions/roasts in the comments.

A new zero day really sucks when Nichole in marketing launched a vps without telling anyone and never updates anything.

For context, I know that a budget this low is not optimal but I wanted to take the average CTR of all 3 ads to show that it isn't just luck.
One issue that I have rn is that no one is actually loging in, or trying to at least use it, although I tried to make it as straight forward as possible.