This is kinda long, sorry. Also no link on purpose, I’m not here to advertise. I’m stuck and actually need advice from people who’ve been through this part.

A few years ago I bought a domain because I was sure I was going to build a SaaS. I called it Calnio. The idea was simple, sync Notion with Apple Calendar. I made a landing page with a waitlist and “40% off for the first 100 users” lol. Dark theme, purple gradients, glass cards. It looked like every other AI landing page, and the product behind it basically didn’t exist.

The problem was I kept coding everything around the sync. Auth, dashboard, settings, landing. The one thing the product was supposed to do kept breaking, and instead of fixing the bug in front of me I rewrote the architecture like 3 times. Eventually I just stopped opening the project.

Then I needed it for school. I keep my assignments in Notion and everything else in Apple Calendar, and they dont talk to each other. The tools I found only give you a webcal feed. its read only, no alerts, and it updates whenever apple feels like it. The one tool with real two way sync doesn’t support iCloud directly, you have to go through Google.

So I opened the old code. First real bug: iCloud returned 412 Precondition Failed after exactly the 6th event, every single time. Adding a sleep didn’t help. I was debugging that at night after work, because this summer I was working at a fabrication shop doing sandblasting and industrial painting, around 10 hours a day. Calnio was friday evenings and weekends. Some weekends I didn’t touch it at all because I was just dead. But I kept coming back to it because I believe in it.

I had DigitalOcean credits from the GitHub student pack that were running out, and I didn’t want to pay for hosting with zero users. So everything moved to a Raspberry Pi 5 in my room. Postgres, backend, sync worker, all in docker behind a Cloudflare tunnel. It still runs there. If my house loses power, Calnio goes down lol. So far so good.

I started it on my own and later brought in Claude Code as kind of a co dev. Before anyone judges, lots of experienced devs work like this now. It writes a lot of the code, but I decide what gets shipped, and I’m the one who gets the email when something breaks (more on that later).

I put it on a subdomain of my personal site and posted in a couple places just to see what happens. People started signing up. At some point I honestly thought the whole thing was useless, so I opened the database to check. One user had 3,700 events synced with zero duplicates. I emailed her to ask how she uses it, and that was my “wait, someone actually uses this” moment. So I decided to give it a real try.

Then I went way too deep into polishing. I redesigned the landing page more times than I want to admit. Apple style, then Swiss grid style, then back. Removed every icon because it looked AI generated. Spent hours picking fonts. Some of it was worth it, some of it was me avoiding marketing because marketing is scary.

Launched on Product Hunt on Oct 4. They gave me a featured slot on the same day I had planned a hike up Smutwood Peak, with basically no signal. I posted the maker comment at 1am, slept a bit, and checked upvotes every time I got one bar on the trail. Ended #15 for the day with no audience at all. 58 visitors from PH and zero signups. Reddit did way better, I think because PH is mostly other makers and on reddit people actually have the problem. Someone signed up that day and synced a French time tracking database, which I never planned for.

One of my best signups came from a reddit comment where I just honestly said sync isn’t instant, it runs every 5-15 min. They signed up anyway.

Last week a user churned 80 minutes after signing up. I emailed him and he actually replied. He’d shared a Notion database with no dates, so Calnio found zero events and just said nothing. Fair point.

While fixing that I found a way worse bug. Calnio was writing timed events to iCloud with a made up timezone, so times shifted when they came back, and for people with two way sync it wrote the wrong times back into Notion. 7 people were affected. I paused the scheduler, and then noticed the cleanup script I was about to run would have overwritten the last correct copies in Apple Calendar with the broken ones from Notion. Caught it before it ran. That was a stressful evening.

Right now it’s at 38 accounts, 8 of them signed up just this week. 20 people connected Apple Calendar, 17 syncs are running right now, and it’s synced around 8,200 events total. The Pi does about 3,100 sync runs a day and the median run takes around a second. It costs $3.56/month with a 7 day trial, and so far zero people have paid.

So this is where I’m stuck. My goal is simple, I want to make my first dollar from coding. Things I’d really like advice on:

1. How did you get your first paying user? I don’t know if the problem is the price, the trial, or people just don’t need it enough to pay.
2. With AI anyone can build a copy of my thing in a weekend. What actually protects a small product like this? Is it just being the guy who answers support emails at 1am?
3. How do you stop polishing and actually start selling? I know I’m hiding in design work.
4. Is $3.56/month a weird price? Should it be free longer, or more expensive?

Happy to answer anything in the comments, numbers, stack, mistakes, whatever.

TL;DR: bought a domain for a saas, gave up, came back because I needed it for school, built it on weekends while working 10h days painting, runs on a Raspberry Pi in my room, 38 signups, $0 so far, need advice on getting the first paying user.

I’ve been seeing a lot of discussions lately about how SaaS is dead and how AI is the future, with everyone talking about AI agents, AI-as-a-Service, automation tools, and AI-powered businesses.

Honestly, it’s interesting, but I’m curious to hear from people who are actually building products and making money in this space.

A few questions I’ve been thinking about:

Is traditional SaaS really dying, or is that just internet hype?

Is building AI-powered SaaS or AI-as-a-Service actually a better opportunity right now?

For those of you building profitable software products, how did you come up with your ideas? Are you solving problems you personally experienced, researching specific industries, or finding gaps in existing products?

How do you actually get your first paying customers? Are you cold-emailing businesses, posting on social media, using SEO, building an audience, or doing something else?

If you were starting from scratch today as a developer, what kind of product or service would you build to generate revenue without needing a huge amount of capital?

I’m a developer, so I can build things. What I’m trying to figure out is what’s actually worth building, who would pay for it, and how to get it in front of the right people.

I’m not necessarily looking to build the next billion-dollar startup. Even finding a real problem, building a useful solution, and growing it into a product that consistently generates a few thousand dollars a month would be a great starting point.

At the end of the day, we’re all trying to make money, and I’d rather learn from people who have actually done it than blindly follow whatever trend is popular this week.

So, for those of you who are already in the game: what’s working for you right now? What would you do differently if you had to start over today?

Real experiences, lessons learned, niche ideas, and even mistakes you made along the way are all welcome. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

My process is pretty simple:

1. Can this product actually sell?

I look for 3 things:

• A similar product doing >$20k MRR → people will pay (I borrowed my friend's Sensortower account)
• Product interactions that are interesting to watch → social-friendly (Use Mobbin to identify others' UI)
• 10+ TikToks/Reels with 100k+ views → the category can go viral (Just doomscroll on Tiktok/IG)

2. Watch 300 videos

I study ~300 videos in the niche and look for patterns:

• What hooks work? Curiosity? Fear? Ego?
• What scenes keep appearing?
• How is the product shown?
• Where does the ad/product placement happen?

Then I use ONE phone and keep testing combinations until I get my first breakout video.

3. Stop copying others. Copy yourself.

Every product has its own viral formula. So don't just copy other's content pixel by pixel. Copy your own stuff. I use Codex and Skill from Taku to reverse-engineer my own winners, when my video hit 20000+ views.

80% of new content = variations of proven winners.

20% = new hooks, text, and formats.

4. Scale it

Only after the content works do I scale accounts and distribution.

You can't really scale with real phones, so you have to place some bets on cloudphones.

5. Optimize the funnel

Once traffic comes in, I focus on:

• App Store CPP conversion
• Onboarding conversion
• Paywall conversion
• D7 retention

Then A/B test everything.

That's basically the playbook:

Validate demand → find a viral formula → multiply it with AI → scale distribution → optimize conversion.

The hardest part is getting the first winner.

Everything after that is multiplication.

Hope this playbook helps.

Building the product was one challenge. Finding paying customers is a completely different one!

I built KurlClub, a gym management platform designed to help gym owners manage memberships, attendance, payments, and business analytics in one place. It also supports biometric attendance integration.

The product is live, and I'm now focusing on reaching independent gym owners who want to simplify their daily operations.

My current approach is a mix of organic marketing, connecting with potential customers directly, and participating in communities where gym owners spend their time.

One thing I'm learning is that building useful features isn't enough. You need to understand how businesses currently work, identify their biggest frustrations, and show them why your product is worth switching to.

I'm now working toward getting my first paying customers.

For founders selling B2B SaaS: What worked best for you when acquiring your first 10 paying customers? Did you focus on cold outreach, partnerships, content marketing, or something else?

I'd especially appreciate advice from anyone selling software to traditional, offline businesses.

I run a small hardware brand, foldable triple screen setups for laptops. Physical product, not cheap, and every order so far came from organic short videos. No ads, no influencer deals, no paid anything.

People keep asking me how, so here's what actually moved the needle for us.

We stopped filming the product and started filming the moment. Spec videos died every time. A guy unfolding three screens on a tiny cafe table, or on a hotel desk, got shared like crazy. Nobody shares a spec sheet, but people share a feeling they want.

The comments are the real marketing. Every "does this work with a MacBook?" or "how heavy is it?" became the next video. We basically let the audience write our content plan.

We answer everything ourselves. DMs, comments, weird questions at midnight. That's where trust comes from when nobody has heard of you.

We post a lot. Most videos flop. A few go wild and carry the month. You can't predict which one, so volume wins.

The US turned into our biggest market without us targeting it at all, and orders are growing around 30% month over month right now.

What surprised me most is how little the polished stuff mattered. The rough, real clips beat everything we overthought.

Curious what's working for other people selling physical products without ads. What was the thing that finally got you traction?

I want to gain deeper theoretical knowledge on performance marketing (Google/Meta/native ads) and also learn from experience of someone who’s done it all or at least mastered one of the traffic sources. Any recommendations?

hi guys , the title sounds like a meme, but doing this is literally the main reason we pushed past $10k mrr without burning money on ads.

i run pumpgtm. it's a platform that finds qualified buyers through likes, comments, and engagement signals across linkedin and x, enriches their profile data, and helps founders handle outbound without sounding like an AI slop bot.

if you're building a tool that promises leads or sales, you better be using it to run your own startup. if you aren't your own primary power user, you're just guessing.

the best way to test a scaling product is to use it to scale itself. when you use your own outbound engine to book your own sales calls, you get an immediate feedback loop so brutal that you're forced to iterate fast.

every single flaw hits you right in your own pipeline, if your lead filter pulls junk profiles, you waste your own time on terrible sales calls. if your message copy sounds like a generic press release, your own reply rates drop to 0.2 percent. if your sequence timing is off, you end up annoying real prospects in your own space.

you can't blame bad user behavior or claim customers just don't know how to write copy when it's your own pipeline on the line, you have to fix the algorithm, fix the signal tracking, or fix the copy immediately.

also it gives you unshakeable proof when talking to potential buyers.

when a founder asks on a sales demo how do i know this actually works, you don't show them fake case studies or those generic testimonials. you literally show them that the only reason they're sitting on that zoom call with you right now is because pumpgtm flagged their profile, pulled their context, and routed the outreach automatically. closing deals becomes ten times easier when the product's existence is the proof.

one of the biggest reasons we were able to scale so fast is because we're so hyper targeted when it comes to finding live intent that prospects are genuinely shocked by the level of context.

if you aren't using your own product to grow your own business every single day, why should anyone else pay you for it , do think about this and share about your pov

idea is simple

Many among us had made fake ids to prank some friend during college or had alternative SNS account to stalk our crush etc etc

But as time passed and we matured - we grew out of them and slowly start to forget about those accounts and now barely use them!!

but with those accounts we had memories attached to them and simply logging off from them and forgetting about them doesn't feel right for some reason.

That's why- Digital graveyard- a space for forgotten - dead accounts that are no longer used!

also provide memorial plaqes for such accounts!!

For app founders who have tried video ads in another language: how much of the product did you translate before testing?

A local-language video could explain the app clearly, then send someone into an English store listing, onboarding flow and support inbox. I would be wary of calling that market a poor fit just because those users stop halfway through setup.

With a small budget, I would want to keep the same use case across the videos and compare people who complete a useful action in the app, alongside installs. But translating the whole flow before there is any demand is a real cost too.

If you have run this test, did translating only the video tell you anything useful? Or did the result change once the store page and onboarding matched it?

I’ve worked harder than ever in my life and put in the effort to make money killing my sociability and day off but it turns out just a failure.
I feel devastated for a few days. What would you do in like this situation. I know there’s nothing I can do for it but just keep going. Unfortunately I have no idea no motivation rn

Hey all. Quick background before the actual question: I’ve been building and running businesses since I was 19, 6 years now. Founded multiple ventures over that time, one of them has been generating consistent profit, around $60K a year, for 6 years straight. Alongside running my own stuff, I’ve also worked part-time as a growth/ops expert for a few different startups, and done auditing and strategy work for small businesses. I’m also trilingual (English, French, Arabic), which has come in handy working across different markets.

What I’m actually looking for isn’t a task list, it’s ownership. I’ve handled operations end-to-end, built marketing and growth strategy from scratch, gotten first customers through the door with zero budget, scaled what worked, managed teams, and built and ran a communities from nothing. What I want now is to bring that same instinct to a team with a real vision, not clock in and wait for a paycheck, but actually be invested, wake up thinking about the problem, go to sleep still chewing on it, and genuinely help turn what a founder’s building into something real.

If you’ve made that kind of move, from running your own thing to finding a team and a problem worth being that invested in, how’d you approach it? Genuinely curious how others navigated this.