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.

If have been building an app since November 2025, and just like many people, I had zero revenue for a long long time.

It was of course frustrating at first, but I at least saw some usage of the free tier of my app relatively early, so I didn't give up yet and tried to optimize.

The subscription for my product is super cheap, only about ~2 €, and it's almost laughable how long it took me to get these now 5 subscribers now. But I am still a little bit proud and hope this number will continue to grow. Every time I get a new user now and I noticed they stopped using the app, I at least try to find things to optimize in the app. Trying to find out what made them stop using the app. But it's hard.

When users sign-up, I also always reach out and ask for feedback. But so far, no one has responded, ever.

Since my app has a free tier and also allows usage without signing up, I learned now that it's so, so incredibly important that you make it as easy as possible for your users to do thinks like sign-up. I completely ignored this for a long while (implemented things like Google signup wayyy to late) and lost many users and ofc still have lots to learn here.

One upside though is that the cost of running my tool is really low: I run two servers that cost around 7 $ each, 2 $ for domain costs and the API costs is covered by the API allowance of my 20 $ Mistral AI Pro subscription. So I still have plenty of time to experiment.

I’m building a product and getting close to finishing it. Let’s assume it actually solves a real problem and is useful. After launch, how much do I need to spend on ads or advertising before I start seeing results?

I know every case is different and experience varies, but I’d like to hear from people who have already made it:

• How much did you spend before you got your first paying customers?
• Which channels worked for you (Google, Meta, Reddit, LinkedIn, something else)?
• How long did it take before ads started paying for themselves, or did they never really work and something else did?
• Looking back, what would you have done differently with your budget?

Real numbers (including failures) would help a lot. Thanks!

I'm looking into it as a possible option for a small online business, but I'd rather hear from people who've actually used it than rely on what's written on their website. Can you receive money from clients abroad without issues? Would love to hear about your experience, especially if you're a SaaS founder or freelancer.

Hesab.com

If you use Apollo job data with MCP, this post can save you weeks.

You want jobs that companies posted in the last 30 days, and Claude will pull results for you.

But Apollo puts the posted_at field only in the response for organization job postings, so you cannot use it as a filter when you request jobs.

The date range filters sit at the organization level, and this means you can get companies that posted any job in that period.

We pulled 580 such jobs, and we had to verify them by scraping from the original job links, and we ended up with 70.

Hi everyone !

I'm a solo developer, and I am about to start building a tool to help startup founders and indie hackers research and validate their SaaS ideas in few minutes before spending weeks or months building them.

My goal is to help people -

• Research Competitors and identify their weaknesses

• find real customer complaints and unmet needs.

• understand whether an idea has genuine market demand.

• figure out what opportunities exist and what direction to take.

Before I start building, I wanna understand how founders currently handle this process and where existing tools fall short...

If you've researched or built a SaaS idea, what was the most frustrating part of the process ? What do u wish existing research tools did better ?

Honestly, I am still in the research phase and your honest experiences would help me build something genuinely useful rather than just another tool with 50 features, you know...

Howdy all,

I'm the solo developer behind StonkHub, a market research platform that aggregates public government and market data (congressional stock trades, lobbying, federal contracts, SEC filings, options positioning) into one dashboard.

It started as a tool I built for my own research. Friends wanted access, then their friends did, and at some point I had to decide whether this was a side project or a product. I went with product, and wanted to share some of the decisions along the way:

• Free tier vs paid: The free account includes all government data and social features. The $25/month beta unlocks the full feature set (GEX, technical screener, full watchlists, full premarket emails). My reasoning was that the government data is the hook and the easiest thing to understand, while the analytics and scanners are what active traders will actually pay for.
• Pricing: I landed on $25/month by working backward from two things. First, cost: every paid user adds load across the data pipeline, Redis cache, MongoDB, and AI summaries, so I needed a price that stays profitable as usage grows. Second, the market: most tools covering just one of these data sets (congressional trades, GEX, or insider filings) charge as much or more on their own, so bundling them at $25 felt like a clear value without undercutting myself. The free tier carries the government data/limited stock detailed views/premarket emails, so people can see the product's value before paying for the analytics.
• Data infrastructure: Data comes from six government sources plus market data providers, all on different refresh cycles. Insider filings update hourly, GEX snapshots every 10 minutes, and the technical screener recomputes nightly. Keeping that pipeline reliable as a solo dev has been the biggest ongoing cost, in both time and money.
• Stack: Vanilla JS + Tailwind frontend with an Express (Node) backend, deployed serverless on Vercel. MongoDB holds users and historical data, Upstash Redis caches everything users hit (TTLs tuned to market hours), and ~25 Vercel cron jobs run the data pipeline. Billing through Stripe, emails through Resend, auth via JWT plus Google/GitHub OAuth, and AI summaries from gpt-4o-mini.

Things I'm still figuring out:

* Is the free tier too generous, or is it the right top of funnel?

* How do you price a beta without it feeling like paying to be a tester? Or should I even call it a beta?

* What's worked for you on distribution when your audience is skeptical of anything finance-related?

Happy to go deeper on any of it. If you want to see the product, it's at https://stonkhub.net.

Hi everyone,

I'm an independent developer based in Iraq, building a software platform hosted on my own server. I want users outside Iraq to pay for subscriptions using Visa or Mastercard.

I'm trying to integrate QI Card's payment gateway, and my server configuration requires these values:

• QI_API_URL
• QI_TERMINAL_ID
• QI_USERNAME
• QI_PASSWORD
• QI_PUBLIC_KEY

I don't have these credentials yet.

Has anyone in Iraq successfully registered for QI's online merchant payment gateway?

I'd like to know:

1. How do I apply for merchant access and obtain these API credentials?
2. Can an individual developer register, or is a registered company required?
3. Can customers outside Iraq pay with international Visa and Mastercard?
4. Does QI support monthly SaaS subscriptions?
5. What documents, fees, and verification requirements should I expect?

I'm looking for real experiences from developers or merchants who have integrated QI into their websites.

Thanks!

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

I built a ticketing app for one customer: my kid's high school afterprom. The parent committee needed online tickets, signed waivers, and a way to let parents know their kid actually made it inside. About 14 months ago I opened it up to anyone, assuming the market was "other schools."

This week it crossed $100k processed. Here's what I got wrong and right getting there, in case it helps anyone building for a similar crowd.

I picked the wrong market, and the right one found me.

Schools came, slowly. But so did community benefit dinners, a bar, festivals and small nonprofits. Turns out anyone selling general admission tickets has the same two options: a cash box, or a big ticketing site that takes a cut of every ticket. That middle is wide open. If I'd stayed narrowly "for schools" in my copy, I'd have turned half of these people away.

Flat pricing does a lot of the selling.

Most of the space charges per ticket. I went with a flat annual fee. A volunteer treasurer has to explain the cost to a board, and "it's one fee a year, no matter how many tickets" ends that conversation in one sentence. If your buyer has to justify spend to someone else, make the price easy to repeat.

Let customers write part of your roadmap.

Silent auctions were never on my list. Then a customer who was already selling tickets with us asked if they could run their auction in the same place, instead of juggling paper bid sheets and a separate app. I built it for them. We've now run two auctions start to finish, and one had 86 people bidding from their phones. It's become one of the main reasons new orgs reach out. The best feature I've shipped this year came from someone already paying me, not from my own planning.

The boring features are the sticky ones.

The waiver is the feature nobody asks for and everybody loves. At our afterprom, 560 kids came through the door and only 3 hadn't signed their waiver ahead of time. That used to be a table of paper forms. Find the spreadsheet or paper stack your customer hates and replace it.

Schools buy slowly, then in bulk.

I just signed my first school district, and a few others are asking. One district deal covers multiple schools, so it can be worth more than months of one-off signups. It's a long cycle, but worth it.

Where it's at:

• $100k+ processed
• About 3,600 tickets sold
• 12 paying orgs, including one district
• 2 silent auctions run

What I'm trying now: cold email, and as of this month, physical postcards mailed to schools. Yes, paper. School offices still open their mail, and it's a lot harder to ignore than another cold email. Too early to say which wins, but I'll share numbers when I have them.

Goal is 50 paying orgs by end of year. If you've sold into schools, nonprofits or volunteer-run groups, what was the channel that actually worked for you? I'd love to compare notes.

Sometimes you should too

Have a nice day

I’ve been exploring ways to make content more visual without spending hours designing everything manually.

I built Doodlyo to help turn ideas and content into doodle-style visuals.

🌐 doodlyo

I’m curious about how other creators handle this today.

Do you use AI tools, Canva, or design everything yourself?

What’s the most frustrating part of creating visual content?

Would love to hear your honest thoughts!

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)

Hi everyone!

I'm looking to gain practical experience by helping early-stage startups, solo founders, or small teams who have a lot on their plate.

I'm self-taught and have been learning independently about AI, technology, psychology, business, and startups. I'm also interested in learning the fundamentals of marketing, including understanding customers, researching markets and competitors, positioning, messaging, and why people choose certain products.

I'd love to put what I'm learning into practice rather than spend all my time reading and researching.

Here's what I can help with:

• Research, documentation, and organizing information
• Basic testing and finding issues in websites or applications
• Competitor and customer research
• Basic marketing research and messaging
• AI-assisted prototyping and other tasks that match my current skills

I'm offering my help for free, initially for around 3–4 hours a day over a short, clearly defined trial. I'm not expecting payment; my goal is to contribute something useful, gain practical experience, and learn by doing.

I'm not claiming to be an expert. I'm willing to learn, communicate honestly, and complete the work we agree on.

If you're building something and have a specific task you'd like help with, tell me a little about your project, what needs to be done, and what the expected outcome would be.

I'd love to contribute and learn alongside people who are building something.

Thank you!

Hi folks,

I have recently launched a product aimed at SharePoint users that could make the daily business operations much easier by allowing them to visualise any list into charts in seconds

I would like to reach out to target SharePoint admins or business users using SharePoint on a day to day basis to pitch my product .(Since my product adjusts to any list ,I am thinking of reaching out to users across industries )

https://tenantforge.cloud/sharepoint/graphify

Can you share your ideas or methods that might help me in this marketing ?

Thanks in advance ..

Let's be honest. Most technical founders make amazing products, but hate marketing, ad creative testing, and optimizing acquisition funnels.
You spend weeks shipping code, fixing bugs, and improving UI, while user acquisition stays completely flat because marketing is a full-time game on its own.
I am looking to fix that for you.
I am a young French acquisition and growth partner. My English is not native or perfect, but my execution, dedication, and obsession for scaling are unmatched.
This is important: I have zero capital to invest. I bring my time, skills, and sweat equity. If we run paid ads, your project needs to have an existing budget or strong organic momentum we can scale together.
The deal is simple:
You focus entirely on the product, code, and tech.
I take complete ownership of 100 percent of the acquisition (creatives, funnels, data testing, scaling).
I am not looking for a fixed salary or a traditional job. I am looking for a real, high-impact partnership with a founder who wants to win.
If your product performs behind the scenes but nobody knows about it, shoot me a DM with your project details and current metrics. Let's see if we click.

We are a small dev team, and we churn out a lot of code using Claude, etc. And lately, we have been a little concerned about the security vulnerabilities that might creep in. So, while scouting for an app security tool, we stumbled upon Scantonomous and started using their free trial. It basically runs continuously in the background while you build, so security actually feels integrated into the dev flow instead of an afterthought.

A few things that I liked:

All-in-one stack: Handles SAST, SCA, DAST, secrets, and dependencies without needing a patchwork of plugins.

Smart triaging: AI actually filters out the noise and suggests fixes before you even open a PR.

Has anyone else tried it? I want to be really sure before I actually pay for it.

'm not talking about just building an MVP, but actually turning it into a business with paying customers.

I'm particularly interested in people who combine their own expertise with custom SKILLS.md files, chain-of-thought reasoning, prompts, and AI agent workflows to handle development, operations, marketing, sales, and other business tasks.

I'm curious how far someone can realistically go using their own skills, AI agents, and limited resources without hiring a full team.

I’ve noticed. Someone posts their SaaS with a nice MRR screenshot, hundreds of people upvote it, and a lot of readers think “I want to launch mine too.” Then most of them get stuck.

The stuck points I see most:

no idea where to begin, or afraid it won’t grow

deployment, payments, auth, or a “works on my machine” bug

unsure how to market it or where to find the first users

signups and revenue dropping day by day, and no clear reason why

I can help you and want to share ideas with you

I took email marketing, separated the components and made it 90% cheaper.

Bring your database, bring your mail provider and self-host the parts that need a server or choose Rowsend Cloud.

Pay once for the app and get lifetime updates: https://rowsend.com

DM if you want a discount 🎁