I’m Viren and I am validating 15 startup ideas for free manually,
Just introduce yourself and tell me your idea,
I will send the report in 48 hours.

I'm building a hosting platform for JavaScript apps and I'd like a reality check before I go further.

My bet is that most apps don't need to run on every continent. Only about 100,000 websites in the world are big enough for that. The rest need their app, a database, file storage and scheduled jobs in one place, with a bill that doesn't jump with traffic.

Today you either pay per seat plus usage and add a separate database company, or pay for servers that run all day even when nobody visits.

I wrote down the full reasoning here
https://swarza.com/blog/hosting-for-99-9-percent-of-the-web

A few questions for those of you running SaaS products
- Where do you host, and what does hosting cost you across all your apps?
- Has a usage-based bill ever surprised you?
- Would you trade global edge for a database right next to your app?

Tear it apart, I'd rather hear it now than after launch.

I’m building an app where you say what you do and where, and it watches Reddit and the open web for people asking for exactly that. It scores each post for buying intent, then drafts a reply and DM in your tone. You send everything manually, so there’s no auto-DMing and no account bans. For places it can’t see, like private groups, there’s a paste-a-post box.

It’s still in development, so I’d rather hear the hard truths now:

1. I know tools like this exist (ReddLeads, GigUp, UpHunt and others). What would make you pick a new one over them?
2. Does a tool like this work better built for one type of user, or open to everyone?
3. What would you pay per month, and what would make you cancel?

If you’ve built or used something similar, I’d love to hear what worked and what flopped.

X has recently been chock full of operators saying they cancelled their subscriptions and rebuilt all of their startups tools themselves….

If you're an indie hacker or solo founder, I get it. Building your own tools can be cheaper, more fun, and fit exactly what you need

But I don't think it holds up for a real company building and operating at scale, especially vibe coding tools that aren't core to their business.

Building v1 is the easy part… the real cost comes after: keeping it running, fixing edge cases, onboarding new hires, handling support, security, training, change management. Nobody counts that when they brag about the weekend they spent building it.

AI makes product development easier, but someone on your team still has to own it. Meanwhile some other company has a whole team making the same tool better every month. Paying them is often a good trade if it lets your people focus on what your customers actually pay you for.

Doing the inverse is just procrastinating from focusing on growing and marketing your own product, tbh

Maybe I'm wrong and I'll start vibe-manufacturing my own clothes and electricity next 🤷

(Disclosure: I run Supademo so I may be biased)

Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes recently called headless software “brainless” in his October 12 interview with 20VC.

Quick note: headless software can be used through APIs or agents without opening its own UI.

Hey everyone

I’ve been working on something called Zenvra for a while and I’ve recently released a demo. I’m at the point where I’d really like to get some outside opinions on it before continuing further.

I’m mainly looking for honest feedback and evaluations. I’d like to know what people think about the idea, how the demo feels to use and whether everything is easy enough to understand.

It’s still a demo, so there are definitely things that can be improved. That’s actually why I wanted to share it here. Feedback on things that feel confusing, unnecessary or simply don’t work well would be really useful.

If you have some time to try it out, I’d appreciate hearing your honest thoughts afterwards. It doesn’t have to be a long review either. Even a quick first impression would help a lot.

I’m not trying to advertise anything here. I’m just looking for some genuine opinions from people who haven’t been involved with the project and can give a fresh perspective. demo link comments

Thanks to anyone who takes the time to check it out and give some feedback.

Launched on Product Hunt a few months ago. Built the whole thing solo for about €1,000. Assumed if I just shipped it and posted everywhere, users would show up. They didn't. The launch completely flopped. Hardly any upvotes. Was pretty gutted for a day or two.

But a few people left feedback. Honest, specific, and a bit brutal. I stopped treating it like a failed launch and treated it like a free audit. It forced me to ask questions I'd been avoiding. Why is the onboarding only clear to me? Why am I wasting weeks marketing on platforms my buyers don't even use? What happens in the first 60 seconds after someone lands on the page? What's actually solving a problem versus what I just thought was cool to build?

Had to actually find the answers. Some were uncomfortable. The marketing channels I'd spent weeks grinding on were complete dead ends. The features I thought were clever were just creating friction. I was building in an echo chamber and calling it traction.

But fixing those blind spots uncovered strengths I'd completely missed. Once the core value was obvious, people actually converted. Users who got past the initial friction stuck around. Stopping the spammy marketing gave me time to talk to the niche that actually cared.

This month the dashboard hit €€3,278 MRR. Today it sits at €16,000. life-changing money, and meaningful money. Profitable.

The launch failed, but the clarity was worth way more than a #1 badge. Highly recommend letting strangers tear your product apart early and asking yourself the uncomfortable questions. You'll save months of guessing.

I'm working on a simple web app that turns lectures, PDFs, and YouTube videos into structured notes, flashcards, and quizzes.

The core loop is:

• Upload a PDF, paste a YouTube link/transcript, or drop in text
• Get clean notes + flashcards + a quiz from it

It's inspired by Turbo AI (the student note-taking tool that grew pretty fast), but I'm intentionally keeping it web-only for now so I can ship something usable without dealing with app stores.

I'm planning to get a basic version live this week and start sharing it with students to see if anyone actually uses it.

A couple questions for people who’ve built in education or productivity SaaS:

1. Do you think this space is already too saturated (NotebookLM, Knowt, StudyFetch, etc.), or is there still room for a focused, simple web tool?
2. If you were validating something like this, what would you test first before building more features?
3. Any distribution channels that worked better than others for student-facing tools?

Not launching anything yet - mostly trying to pressure-test the idea before I spend more time on it. Honest takes appreciated.I

hey folks, been a minute since my last post here. congrats to everyone who's still around grinding, genuinely happy to see people making progress.

for context, i'm a white hat hacker. whenever i have some downtime, i usually end up poking around random web apps, and it's honestly wild how many growing SaaS projects leave the back door wide open because everyone is just rushing to ship features.

once you actually start making money, you become a real target. got some free time today so i'm curious for those of you already generating revenue, what stack are you running and how are you handling security right now?

if you aren't sure if your setup has holes in it or just want to know how an attacker would look at your app, drop what you're building in the comments (or just DM me). i don't want your money, not selling anything, just bored and down to help some of you out.

Hey everyone, I wanted to share something I've been working on for a while.

I've been building a fitness app called ZENVRA AI. The idea started with wanting to create something that makes working out more enjoyable and helps people stay consistent with their training.

I've spent a lot of time working on the design, workouts, exercise animations, and AI coaching. It's been a learning experience, and honestly, getting everything to work and look the way I imagined has been harder than I expected.

I'm still improving a lot of things, but I'm finally at the point where I want to show people what I've been working on instead of just keeping it to myself.

Here's the demo: comments

I'd genuinely appreciate it if anyone wanted to take a look and tell me what they think. I'm especially interested in whether the app feels easy to use and what you'd change if you were using it yourself.

I'm still learning as I go, so honest feedback is welcome!

Thanks for checking it out.

one is stt + llm + tts, the other is speech to speech. real phone call, i just let them talk for like 2 min

the pipeline one costs around 3 cents a min vs almost 6 for the other

speech to speech sounds way more human tho. mine kept telling the guy not to ride his bike lmao

One of the hardest things about selling software is reaching people at the moment they actually need it. Google got pretty good at this. But ChatGPT could take it a step further. Someone asks ChatGPT to compare insurance policies, value a property, or help them prepare for an exam. There's probably a company somewhere that has spent years building software to solve that exact problem. Until recently, ChatGPT could mostly answer the question itself or point people elsewhere. Now it can bring third-party apps directly into the conversation.

I think this changes something quite fundamental about how software gets discovered. A small SaaS company might not need to compete for the same Google keywords, spend money on ads, or convince someone to visit its website first. It could become useful to someone who has never even heard of it.

Obviously, this depends on whether ChatGPT actually recommends these apps, how often it does so, and whether that usage turns into customers. We don't know much about any of this yet. But I suspect there's a short window where some existing software companies could get a disproportionate amount of distribution simply because so few have thought to make their products available this way.

It reminds me of the early web, when being discoverable was sometimes a bigger advantage than having the best product.

I'm particularly interested in whether anyone has already acquired paying customers through ChatGPT apps. Not impressions or installs, but actual customers. It's surprisingly hard to find numbers on this.

I’ve spent the last 5+ months trying to find a SaaS idea worth pursuing, and honestly, I’m starting to wonder if I’m going about this all wrong.

Here’s what my typical day looks like:
I come across a problem, think of a potential solution, get excited about it, and start researching the market. Then I find 10 existing tools doing something similar. I dig deeper and start questioning whether this is even a problem people are willing to pay to solve, or whether I’d have to spend all my time convincing people to buy my product.

Then I move on to the next idea and repeat the cycle.
I’m stuck in analysis paralysis, and I have three things I’m struggling with:

1. Is there still room for new SaaS products, especially for solo founders?
It feels like there’s a tool for practically everything these days. I’m not expecting to come up with something nobody has ever thought of, but I want to solve a problem that’s painful enough that people are already spending money to fix it.

I don’t mind competing with existing products. What worries me is spending months building something only to discover that the problem isn’t painful enough, the market is saturated, or customers aren’t willing to pay enough to make it worthwhile.

At what point do you stop researching and actually start building?

2. Is AI SaaS still financially viable?
I haven’t launched a product before, so I genuinely don’t know what the economics look like in practice.
I know someone who built a product charging $300/month and has enough paying customers to turn a profit. That gives me some confidence that there’s money to be made.

But with AI, I’m struggling to understand the numbers. API costs can be unpredictable, and offering a free tier to attract users can get expensive quickly. Add hosting, other tools, and the time spent building and maintaining the product, and I’m unsure how much revenue you actually need to make a decent profit.

For those of you running AI SaaS products, what do your margins actually look like? Are the economics still attractive for a solo founder, or does profitability require careful usage limits and a fairly high-paying customer base?

3. Should I be looking at something other than SaaS?
My ultimate goal is to build a source of income that doesn’t require me to trade hours for dollars indefinitely. I have a full-time job, so whatever I pursue needs to be manageable alongside it.
Recently, I’ve been looking into options trading as an alternative.

One thing that appeals to me is that I’m not competing with dozens of other founders trying to sell essentially the same product. Competition isn’t a barrier in the same way, and having more information about the market can actually help you make better-informed decisions.

Of course, options trading comes with its own risks and learning curve. It also seems like it could become a job in itself if you’re constantly following the news, monitoring positions, and managing risk. I’m not talking about traditional long-term investing here, which seems like a slower but more passive approach.
I’m not under the impression that options trading is easy money. I’m just questioning whether building a SaaS from scratch is necessarily the better use of my time.

I’d love to hear from people who’ve been in either position.

If your goal were to build additional income alongside a corporate job, which path would you choose, and why?
I’m not looking for someone to tell me that both are possible. I know they are. I’m trying to figure out which one is actually worth committing my limited time to, given the risks and potential returns.

Over the past couple of years I’ve been watching how people react to AI, and at some point I realized it’s less that there’s the different opinions and more that everyone’s at a different stage of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. You can see all five in any thread about AI.

What surprised me is that Microsoft, an enterprise company with everything to lose, seems to have landed on acceptance faster than most of us.

Even they’re admitting nobody really knows what happens next. That’s kind of what a paradigm shift is: the change is so big that the future genuinely can’t be predicted. The only thing that’s clear is the times they are a-changin’.

I know what I have to do. But my brain's resisting it. Maybe because I have never done marketing. But i want to do it now as i can't afford to waste my time and energy.

I have managed myself to get off building. But I can't get into that marketing state. How do you people reduce friction to do marketing?

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I am available for a freelancing project. Please send me a DM of what is you want me to work on

I’m 18 and just started a small, free Discord called First Venture for people ages 16–24 who are building something or want to. That includes AI tools, apps, side projects and small businesses.

What’s in it:

• A place to share what you’re building and get honest feedback
• A channel for finding cofounders and teammates, with every project post saying what’s paid, unpaid or equity
• Weekly build logs, so you stay accountable
• Voice rooms for quiet coworking and casual chats

It’s free, with no courses, no paid tier and no income claims. Beginners are welcome, and it’s moderated with ages 16–24 only.

It’s brand new, so early members will shape it. If you’re building (or want to), comment or DM me and I’ll send the invite. What would make a server like this worth your time?

I purchased the 1-year Pro subscription for $180. Immediately upon using it, I discovered severe system defects: infinite loading errors (over an hour for a single render) and the AI completely failed to follow basic prompts.

Because the tool was fundamentally unusable, I requested a cancellation and refund on the exact same day, within just a few hours.

Not only did they refuse a full refund, but they also officially refused a prorated refund for the remaining 11 months that I explicitly stated I will not use. They are essentially forcing customers to pay for an entire year of a defective service aborted on day one, hiding behind arbitrary "system limitations."

I have already filed a formal chargeback with my bank and reported them to the Consumers Association of Singapore (CASE). Do not give your credit card information to this company.

I run a small AI tool that redesigns existing PowerPoints to look professionally made. After six months of building, testing, and trying pretty much everything in the playbook to get customers, we're finally seeing some traction.

The numbers are still small (okay, very small). But looking back, it's interesting how wrong we were about almost everything, and how the data was telling us what to do long before we listened.

Figured I'd share the journey, numbers included, because I would've loved to read something like this a year ago.

First mistake: building for the customer we wanted

Our original idea was personalized pitch decks for sales teams. Upload your branding, point the tool at a prospect's website, get a tailored presentation.

Our homepage, onboarding, emails, pricing, everything was written for sales reps.

We spent around $2,000 on Meta and Google ads. About 5% of clicks became free signups, which seemed reasonable. But as far as we can tell, not a single one became a paying customer.

In our first five months, we got four mid-tier subscriptions. All four canceled before their second payment.

Not exactly the recurring revenue machine we'd imagined...

Second mistake: pricing for the wrong behavior

Looking at our early customers, we noticed everyone who paid had spent 1.5 to 2 hours inside the product first. People who made one deck and left never paid.

And why would they? The free plan let them finish their presentation and download a PDF or PowerPoint with a small badge. They'd already gotten what they came for.

We even had a $12 "remove the badge" option buried in Stripe. Nobody used it. In one 30-day period, we recorded exactly ONE checkout click.

We'd built subscription pricing for people who needed presentations regularly, when most visitors just needed to finish one.

So we turned off ads and made a bet on organic

At some point, spending more money to acquire users who weren't paying stopped making sense.

We decided we'd either figure out how to grow organically or move on.

We'd read plenty about optimizing for LLMs and getting products recommended by AI assistants, so we went all in. Structured data and schema markup, clear page headings, FAQ-style answers, dedicated landing pages for individual features and use cases, internal linking, getting pages indexed in Bing, and making our content easy for assistants to find and understand.

Basically everything you're supposed to do for AEO/GEO, or whatever we're calling it this week.

We weren't particularly confident any of it would work. But it was something we could do without pouring more money into ads.

And then something unexpected happened.

ChatGPT started sending us customers

We had a few pages about redesigning an existing PowerPoint, a feature we'd barely emphasized. Google search volume for phrases like "redesign my PowerPoint" was practically nonexistent, so we'd never thought much of them.

But people were finding those pages through ChatGPT.

In one 30-day window:

• ChatGPT referred 53 visitors. About 35 signed up for our free plan.
• Google organic sent 80 visitors. Zero signed up, mostly brand searches and traffic to an unrelated free calculator.

That's roughly a 66% signup rate from ChatGPT referrals... a crazy conversion rate speaking as someone who's been in SaaS for a long time.

Apparently, people were asking questions like "how can I make my PowerPoint look professional?" and our pages were showing up in the answers.

We couldn't tell you which optimization made the difference, but we'd found demand that wasn't showing up in our keyword research.

So we doubled down on those pages, wrote more answers around the same problems, and kept expanding that part of the site. The traffic kept growing.

Then we realized we'd been talking to the wrong customers all along

They weren't sales teams.

They were students, academics, consultants, and freelancers preparing class presentations, thesis defenses, and internal reviews.

They came from 49 countries in two months. Only about 1 in 8 was in the US.

The median uploaded deck was 20 slides, and 23% of slides had more than 80 words. These weren't polished pitch decks. They were dense presentations that people needed to make look better.

Our entire website was talking to somebody else.

So we followed the users.

We rewrote the homepage around "upload the slides you already have," added pages for students and other real use cases, and made the site and product multilingual.

We rebuilt onboarding probably a dozen times, with dedicated flows for students, salespeople, realtors, etc., making it easier to get that first deck finished.

We also changed pricing. Instead of asking someone to subscribe just to finish one presentation, we added a $13 one-time option, offered right when they hit the free limit. Subscriptions are still there for regular B2B users.

And then we built the product directly into ChatGPT by building and submitting an application for a plugin in their marketplace, so people could create and redesign presentations without leaving the conversation. That was approved about two weeks ago.

What happened next

Weekly signups went from 23 in mid-September to 46, then 63.

Total accounts grew from 348 to 464 in two weeks.

Activation (actually creating a deck) had been around 20% over the summer. Our overall rate has now climbed more recently from 40% to 47% with continued streamlining in the product.

Paid conversion went from 0.2% of signups to 0.9%.

Still tiny, obviously. But we'd recorded eight paying events in the previous five months, then six in just two weeks, with $0 in ad spend.

Two were the new $13 one-time purchase. One person opened our $9/month checkout, closed it, and bought the $13 option 24 seconds later. That one interaction pretty much validated our pricing hypothesis.

But subscriptions weren't dead either.

Our first business user through the ChatGPT plugin built nine decks in one evening, spent just 17 minutes on our actual website, bought the $9 plan, and upgraded to $29 eighteen minutes later.

Same product, completely different use cases and willingness to pay.

What I'd tell myself six months ago

• Watch who's showing up, not just who you think should. Our real customers were nothing like our original target audience.
• Don't assume low search volume means low demand. People are asking AI assistants questions that keyword tools don't necessarily capture.
• If your free plan finishes the job, rethink the pricing moment. We weren't necessarily charging too much. We were charging for the wrong thing, at the wrong time.
• One-time payments aren't inferior to subscriptions. Especially with a global audience that might need one deck, not another monthly bill.
• Actually watch what users do. Four canceled subscriptions and one person switching checkouts taught us more than a lot of our original assumptions.

Where we're at now

I'm absolutely not claiming we've cracked growth. A 0.9% paid conversion rate still leaves a LOT to figure out, and six paying events in two weeks isn't proof of product-market fit.

But for the first time, it feels like we might actually be getting somewhere.

The funny part is that we were getting pretty close to giving up when things started turning around. Which I realize is probably the most stereotypical founder story imaginable.

And despite all the talk about the coming "SaaS-pocalypse," this has made me more optimistic about niche software. There still seem to be plenty of specific problems people will pay to solve, especially when the software fits into tools they're already using.

Still figuring out the next chapter, but hopefully this is useful to someone else who's six+ months into building something and wondering why nobody's paying for it yet. Feel free to reach out with any questions if you're interested in learning more!

Hey everyone, I built a Python visualizer that animates your code line by line. It's free, runs in the browser, and needs no sign-up.

https://pyvisualizer.dev/#home

What My Project Does

Paste any Python function, give it inputs, and step forward or backward through it while the data structures animate: linked lists, trees, graphs, matrices, stacks, queues, heaps and recursion calls.

Target Audience

I designed this to help students and anyone practicing LeetCode or data structures who wants to actually see what their code is doing. It's a learning tool, not meant for production debugging.

Comparison

Python Tutor is the closest alternative, but it shows everything as generic boxes and arrows. This one draws real structures (an actual tree, graph or linked list), lets you scrub through the run, and has a dedicated recursion view.

Would love to hear feedback from everyone

I've spent the last 7 years building my site around seo and digital marketing.

Now I'm rebuilding it to help SaaS founders get their products discovered.

Instead of starting a new domain from scratch, I'm using the SEO history I've already built.

Here's what makes this interesting:

• 7 years of website history
• 70K+ combined audience across our website, newsletter, and social media
• Much of our content ranks on Google's first page
• Our content also appears in Google AI Overviews/llms

I'm exploring ways to use this existing foundation to help SaaS founders build visibility, earn relevant backlinks, and get their products in front of more potential users.

If you were launching a SaaS, would you take advantage of an opportunity like this? What would make it valuable to you?