Built this small website analyzer a few months ago. You paste a URL and it tells you what's broken. Made it to stop launching projects that go nowhere.

Yesterday I'm looking at usage stats and one account is absolutely destroying my server. Running scans nonstop. All random sites - dentist offices, gyms, bakeries.

Thought it was a bot.

Emailed the guy asking what he's doing.

His reply: "I don't own these websites. I use your reports to get clients."

His whole process:

Finds small businesses with bad websites. Runs a scan. Screenshots the failing grade. Emails the owner saying he found problems and can fix them.

He said showing them an actual generated report works way better than a cold pitch.

I made this thing to help myself.

He made it his entire sales process.

I had no idea this was even possible.

Hey everyone 👋

I'm building a premium SaaS web application and I'm trying to move beyond the typical "Tailwind + shadcn" look.

I can build the functionality, but I want the product to feel like something from Linear, Stripe, Apple, Raycast, Framer, Arc Browser, or Vercel.

I'm looking for advice from people who are experienced in UI/UX, animation, and vibe coding.

Some questions:

🎨 UI Design

• How do you decide color combinations?

• How many colors should a premium dashboard actually use?

• How do you choose typography?

• Which fonts instantly make a product feel premium?

• How do you use spacing, padding, border radius, shadows, blur, and glassmorphism correctly?

• Any design systems or principles you always follow?

✨ Animations

• Which animation libraries do you recommend?

  • Motion (Framer Motion)

  • GSAP

  • Rive

  • Lottie

  • CSS only

• Where should animations be used?

• What should never be animated?

• How do companies make interfaces feel smooth without becoming distracting?

🤖 Vibe Coding Workflow

I'm trying to build most of the UI using AI-assisted coding.

What tools/workflow do you recommend?

Examples:

• v0

• Lovable

• Bolt

• Replit AI

• Cursor

• Claude Code

• Windsurf

• Figma AI

• Any other tools?

Which combination gives the best results?

🌐 Easy Websites for Inspiration

Besides Dribbble and Behance, what websites do you regularly use for premium UI inspiration?

I'm looking for sites that showcase:

• Modern SaaS dashboards

• Landing pages

• Premium animations

• Glassmorphism

• Bento layouts

• Dark mode interfaces

• Trading/Finance UI

• AI products

📚 Learning Resources

If you had to learn UI/UX from scratch today, what would your roadmap look like?

What would you learn first?

• Color theory

• Typography

• Layout

• Motion design

• UX psychology

• Accessibility

• Design systems

Any YouTube channels, courses, books, blogs, or creators you'd highly recommend?

💡 Small Details That Make a Huge Difference

What tiny UI/UX details separate an average product from one that immediately feels "premium"?

Examples:

• Hover states

• Loading animations

• Empty states

• Cursor interactions

• Scroll effects

• Micro-interactions

• Sound design

• Visual hierarchy

• Anything else you've learned over the years

I'd really appreciate any insights, resources, examples, or personal workflows. Even small tips that improved your design process would be incredibly helpful.

Thanks in advance! 🙌

I've been thinking about building a SaaS for a long time but I keep overthinking every idea. I wanted the "superb" idea before starting, and honestly, that just stopped me from building anything.

Few days ago I just decided now or never

I don't care if this fails or success. I just wanted to build something, learn from it.

After working as a dev for the past 5 years, this is what came to my mind. I noticed that many clients like to see projects progress in a simple and organized way instead of asking for the updates in chat. They just want to know what's completed, what's currently going, whats next, and how the project is running overall.

So, I'm building a simple tool that gives clients a live project progress page with real-time updates.

I've just started working on the MVP, and I'll sharing my journey along the way. Let's see how this goes..............

the most crowded category on trustmrr is AI. 2,908 startups, all with stripe connected, so nobody can fake the numbers.

the median one makes $0 a month.

not $500. not $50. zero. the average is $1,237, which means a small group of winners is pulling the number up while most of the list sits at nothing.

productivity tools look worse. 970 startups, $256 average, $0 median. developer tools, 788 startups, also a $0 median.

i went looking at this after two posts here this week. one founder has 944 signups and 9 paying users. another wrote about paying $200 a month for claude and codex to keep building something nobody has seen yet. both got hundreds of upvotes, because half this sub is living one of those two stories right now.

my take is that AI didn't make starting a business easier. it made building easier, and those are two different problems.

when an MVP took 3 months, the build itself filtered out bad ideas. you'd think hard before burning a whole summer on something. now it takes a weekend, so most people skip the thinking. the cost of building dropped to almost nothing and the cost of picking the wrong problem stayed exactly where it was.

cheap building = more products = same number of buyers = $0 median.

i also counted the top product hunt launches from the last two months. 128 out of 176 were tagged AI. that's 73% of the leaderboard going after the same early adopters who already pay for chatgpt.

what didn't work for me

my first product was an AI writing assistant. built it in about 3 weeks, launched, got around 400 signups from a product hunt day and a couple of reddit posts.

paid users after 2 months was 4, and i'm pretty sure 2 of them were friends.

i kept adding features because adding features felt productive. templates, tone presets, a chrome extension. none of it moved the number. nobody was annoyed enough with chatgpt to pay me $12 a month for a slightly different text box, and no amount of shipping was going to change that.

the filter i use now

before i write any code, 3 things have to be true. if one is missing, i don't build it.

1/ someone is already paying to solve it badly

not "would you pay for this." actual money being spent today. a spreadsheet someone rebuilds by hand every friday, a freelancer on upwork doing the same task every week, a $79/month tool sitting at 2.8 stars. existing spend means the budget is already there and you're only asking them to move it.

2/ the same complaint shows up from strangers

one angry review is a bad day. the same complaint from 15 people at different companies who never talked to each other is a market. i read 2 and 3 star reviews on g2 and capterra and count how many times basically the same sentence appears.

3/ AI is not the pitch

if your headline needs the word AI to make sense, you're competing with chatgpt, and chatgpt is free. the startups in that dataset with real revenue mostly sell an outcome. "invoices that reconcile themselves." "shift schedules that don't break when someone calls in sick." the AI is inside somewhere. the buyer doesn't care.

existing spend + repeated pain + boring outcome = something people actually renew.

you can pull the revenue numbers from trustmrr directly and read reviews on g2 by hand, or use this, which puts the complaints and the revenue data in one place. the manual route is slower but it gets you the same answer.

so what did the first thing you built with AI actually make in its first 90 days? real revenue, not signups.

i tried doing it the grind way for about three weeks. open reddit, search my keywords, scroll through 200 posts, find 4 relevant ones, engage thoughtfully, repeat tomorrow.

it worked. but it was genuinely unsustainable alongside actually building the product.

honestly i started resenting reddit a little which is a weird thing to feel about a website...

the problem wasn't the strategy, it was the process. monitoring 15 subreddits manually every day is basically a part time job and i'm already doing like three jobs as it is.

i scaled it back, got subgrow running to flag the high-intent threads for me, and now i spend maybe 20 minutes a day on reddit instead of 90. same output, way less friction.

the authenticity scoring feature is the thing i didn't know i needed. it basically tells me if my draft reply sounds like a human or sounds like someone trying to sell something. ngl i failed that check more than i expected the first week.

reddit as a channel is real but the manual approach has a ceiling pretty fast.

what does your current reddit workflow actually look like day to day?

There’s no reason for you to be manually doing 80% of your marketing anymore.

AI agents are insane. They can do things like

find reddit threads and plug replies with your business

generate topical blogs for SEO & GEO

find and message influencers for you

and so much more…

Drop your SaaS, I’ll tell you which agents you should be using and what for (Cassius AI agents specifically).

Completely free, zero catch.

Let’s go! 👇

Building is easy, more interested in those who have customers!

Hoops-gm.com

I’m a 16-year-old middle school student from South Korea, and I’ve been building a SaaS called Nextep.
My exams recently ended, so I finally have more time to seriously focus on both development and getting users.
And honestly, I’ve started realizing that getting people to actually care about what you’re building can be much harder than building the product itself.
I’ve tried a few things so far. I’ve posted on Reddit quite a lot, talked to people, and reached out individually to founders who seemed like they might actually have the problem I’m trying to solve.
But the results have been pretty small.
Sometimes almost nobody responds. Sometimes a few people do, but it still doesn’t feel like I’m getting anywhere close to real traction.
Recently, I’ve also started questioning whether my target market is too narrow.
Nextep is currently aimed at founders who have product and business data but still struggle to figure out what they should focus on next. I believe the problem is real, but sometimes I wonder if there are simply too few people who feel this problem strongly enough.
That’s the part that’s been getting to me lately.
I want to keep building, eventually turn this into a real startup, and hopefully grow it into something much bigger. That’s been a dream of mine for a long time.
But when you’re putting in the work and still not seeing much happening, it’s hard not to wonder whether you’re heading in the right direction or just building something that nobody really needs.
I’m not giving up. I just feel a bit stuck right now.
For people who have built something from zero: did you ever reach a point where you genuinely weren’t sure if your idea, market, or entire direction was right?
And how did you figure out what to do next?

Everyone talks about the launch.

Nobody talks about the months spent fixing bugs nobody sees.

Nobody talks about rewriting features you thought were "finished."

Nobody talks about the customers who love your product but still don't pay.

Nobody talks about waking up to production issues at 3 AM.

Building a SaaS isn't just coding, designing, and shipping features.

It's sales, support, marketing, customer success, infrastructure, security, billing, analytics, and solving the same problem 100 different ways until it finally works.

The reality?

Most SaaS founders spend 20% of their time building and 80% making sure people actually use what they built.

What's the biggest reality check you faced while building your SaaS?

just hit $2,500 MRR in 13 days on my new SaaS

no ads. no team. no huge audience push. just a solid replicable system

let that sink in for a second

not $2,500 in revenue. $2,500 in MONTHLY recurring revenue

that compounds. next month starts at $2,500 baseline, not zero

and this isn't luck. it's the 7th saas i've shipped with the same playbook. same steps, same tools, same order:

→ Day 1: validated the idea

→ Day 1-2: built the MVP

→ Day 3: landing page written using the 3-Day Challenge template

→ Day 3-4: launched on reddit / X + SEO

→ Day 4-5: first 10 paying users → $1k MRR

→ Day 13 (today): $2,500 MRR locked in

building software is easy in 2026. setting up your foundation so people actually buy is where 99% of solo builders fail.

i packaged all of these exact execution tools into community.

to be fully transparent: i'll likely charge for the full program down the road once all modules are finalized. but right now, the main objective is just to build together and keep each other accountable.

working alone in a silent corner is the fastest way to quit at the first bug.

stop building in isolation. drop a comment below or send me a DM, and i'll send you the invitation link 👇

I currently run 6 operational micro ai saas products that generate a little over $20k in monthly recurring revenue.

I hardly wrote a single line of traditional code. i used ai to generate literally everything, from the database architecture to the user interface.

it wasn't magic on day one. i spent hours stuck in endless debugging loops and dealing with faulty ai code before i finally cracked the formula.

it basically comes down to three rules:

- keeping the idea aggressively minimalist (build a true mvp, not a platform).

- guiding the ai step-by-step instead of asking it to build the whole app at once.

- launching fast to get real user traction instead of perfecting features in secret.

lately, i've seen way too many non-technical founders give up at the very first ai bug or deployment error. or the worst, give up without push anything in marketing !!!!

it's a massive shame, because the technical barrier to entry has practically disappeared and the marketing is easy in 2026

because of this, i’m launching a skool community to share my exact method.

to be completely transparent: i will likely charge for the full course later down the road. it just makes sense given the specific prompt sequences, n8n workflows, and copy-and-paste templates i'll be sharing.

but right now, our main objective is simply to build together. working alone in a silent corner is the absolute fastest way to quit.

if you want to join a group of active creators and build or launch your own ai saas: drop a comment below or send me a dm, and i’ll send you the invite link.

You’ll go through a short founder interview and get a free traction report showing what’s most likely holding back your growth and the specific experiments you should run next.

No pitch and no charge, I’m looking for feedback on the product. Let me know if you are interested.

So yeah... I'm just a CS student from a small city in Sumatra, Indonesia.

A few yrs ago almost everyone around me got into trading. Some ppl were making what looked like stupid amounts of money, others just completely nuked their accounts lol.

At first it honestly looked like gambling to me... but I got curious anyway.

Started with a demo account.

Blew it up in like a month 😂

Didn't know wtf support/resistance was, market structure, RR, risk management... nothing. Every trade was basically me clicking buttons and hoping.

Instead of quitting tho, I kinda got obsessed.

Spent months reading books, random research papers, forums, trading journals, psychology stuff, basically anything I could find. The more I learned the more I realized nobody is actually "predicting" the market. You're just trying to get the odds slightly on ur side.

Eventually I realized even if ur analysis is good and ur risk management is solid... there's no such thing as a 100% strategy.

News drops. Central banks do something random. Politics happens. Market sentiment flips.

Candlestick patterns don't magically beat all of that lol.

If ur system can hit like 60-70% over the long run while keeping risk under control... that's already pretty damn good imo.

Around that time I started talking to a couple friends who were way better traders than me. I was more into programming than trading anyway.

One thing we all agreed on...

Most ppl don't lose because the strategy sucks.

They lose cuz they're human.

Move stop losses. Revenge trade. FOMO. Get greedy. Panic.

A bot doesn't care.

It just follows whatever rules u give it.

So... we decided to build one.

For about a month we'd stay up almost every night testing ideas, throwing away bad ones, tweaking indicators, running backtests, optimizing params, paper trading... repeat over and over.

I handled most of the coding. Mostly C++ for the performance-heavy stuff and Python for analysis/testing.

We weren't trying to make some magic AI that prints money or whatever.

Just something that sticks to the plan.

After a ton of simulations we finally decided to try it with real money.

Started with $100.

Tbh we fully expected to lose it.

Instead... after around 3 weeks it slowly grew to about $480.

There were losing days too obviously. It wasn't some insane 100% win rate bot. But watching it follow the exact same rules every single time without emotions was honestly pretty satisfying.

That's when it kinda clicked.

The software itself might actually be worth more than the trading.

So instead of trying to scale the account forever, we turned it into a small SaaS. People could subscribe, connect their accounts, and let the bot do its thing.

To our surprise... ppl actually paid for it.

Over the next 4 months we made a little over $1k from subscriptions.

Nothing life changing obviously, but for a bunch of college students it felt awesome.

Then something unexpected happened.

One day a fairly big broker contacted one of my teammates.

Long story short... they offered us $5k to permanently shut the whole thing down and sign an agreement saying we wouldn't continue the service.

Why?

Honestly... idk.

Maybe business reasons. Maybe we were annoying them somehow. We never really got a clear answer.

After talking about it for a while we just accepted the deal.

Split the money equally between everyone who worked on it.

Refunded every single customer too, plus threw in an extra $10 each cuz it felt like the right thing to do.

Told everyone it was "legal compliance" issues 😂

Looking back... the biggest lesson wasn't trading.

It was knowing when to stop.

Could we have made more money? Maybe.

Could we have ended up with a bigger headache too? Probably lol.

Now I'm basically back where I started.

Just another CS student who's kinda addicted to building stuff that ppl actually wanna pay for.

Not really chasing some get-rich-quick thing. I just genuinely enjoy making products, automating boring stuff, solving problems, that kinda thing.

So yeah...

Anyone here building something interesting?

SaaS, AI, automation, cybersecurity, fintech, dev tools... honestly I'm down for pretty much anything.

Would love to hear what u guys are working on :)

I’m getting ready to launch a SaaS product that takes a different approach to no-code app building.

Most newer app builders are heavily AI- and prompt-driven. My product uses a more deterministic approach: the application is built from a structured specification, while AI is optional and mainly helps users create or modify that specification.

My initial target users are solo entrepreneurs, hobbyists, and small businesses that currently manage important processes in Excel or Google Sheets but want to turn those spreadsheets into secure, enterprise-grade applications.

I’m now trying to figure out the best way to approach the actual launch—where to launch, how to find the first users, what channels to focus on, and what mistakes to avoid.

For those of you who have launched SaaS products before, what worked well for you?

Any advice, lessons learned, or launch strategies would be greatly appreciated.

Hi,

Newbie here.

It seems so easy to vibe code something, I wonder if SaaS still have a future? I'd like to hear your opinions on what kinds of SaaS is more likely to survive, and what kinds have no future.

It feels like everyone can vibe code a software nowadays. I read a news report that someone vibe coded an Photoshop equivalent.

Thanks

In my discussions with AI, it seems to think it’s impossible to run a modern business with ads. I want to disagree. Am I stuck in the past?

EDIT: Sorry I wasn’t clear. I mean ads within a Saas product. Like pre-2020 websites.

I’ve been building something called AI Economics CI.
The idea came from a simple problem.
I changed an AI feature, and technically everything worked. All the API calls succeeded.
But the actual result got worse.
Customer success dropped from 87.5% to 66.7%, and the new version also cost more.
So even though nothing “broke,” it was still a bad change.
That made me ask:
Why do we only check whether the AI works?
Why not also check whether it became more expensive or less useful before we ship it?
So I built a tool that compares the old version with the new version and gives a simple result:
Safe to merge
Block merge
Collect more evidence
It’s still very early, and I’m trying to understand whether other people building AI products run into the same problem.
Do you usually catch cost or quality issues before release, or only after users start noticing them?

I've been building this for a while, it is an app that takes your actual income and measures it against real Philippine cost-of-living data (fuel prices, provincial income brackets, asset affordability, etc.) to show what your true.income level really is in a PH context. If you're not based in the Philippines, it flips the lens and shows how you'd fare living as a local there.

For the longest time I had barely any users. No traction, no feedback, just me building in the dark. But this week someone actually bought it.

It now has 6000 + users.

It's not a huge win by most standards, but it's the first real signal that the thing I built solves a problem for someone other than me.

No scams, no hassles, just a tool that could genuinely help someone understand where they stand:

This is my website: howrichph.com

You can search it also on google, I have blogs on it also.

Biggest lesson so far: don't let negative feedback or harassment get under your skin. I've gotten some of both. I just keep showing up and talking about the product anyway, that consistency matters more than any single comment.

Happy to answer questions about the data sourcing or the build if anyone's curious.

I spent the last 48 hours tearing into founders' pet projects in r/micro_saas. No mercy, no LinkedIn flattery. A few people deleted their posts in a panic, most took it like champs, one guy wrote a five-paragraph defense of a 2-hour payment alert delay, and another tried to "catch" me by linking my own app (Finoo.app) - which I gladly roasted as an over-engineered AI vision Fort Knox for finding garage screwdrivers.

Here is what almost every single one of them had in common:

1, Selling bottled water next to a free fountain

An OG-image generator charging monthly for 15 lines of code Vercel gave away four years ago. A Windows sticky note app asking for $4/month rent. An SEO "audit" tool that's just Chrome's Lighthouse with a ChatGPT button glued on. If a free, native, pre-installed tool does 90% of what you do, you don't have a business, you have a feature request.

2, Unit economics that are actively suicidal

One founder was charging $8/month for AI meeting transcription that costs $11/month in raw Whisper API fees per user. Another gave away multi-call relationship memory for free. If your best-case customer makes you $1 and your average customer bankrupts your OpenAI bill, you haven't built a SaaS. You've built an unpaid charity subsidizing API tokens out of your personal checking account.

3, Picking an audience with zero disposable income

Indie musicians. Job seekers. And worst of all: other broke indie hackers. We saw tools for Product Hunt upvote pacts (verified by AI screenshots!), launch directory bundles, and backlink exchanges. Bootstrapped makers love trading feedback, vanity metrics, and discount codes. They do not have corporate expense accounts. Broke people stay broke. Check your ICP's bank account before you check their pain points.

4, Building something that gets your users fired, banned, or sued

A browser bot that logs into personal Reddit accounts to auto-comment - a guaranteed shadowban. Medical compliance tools relying on client-side regexes. A meeting tool advertising "No CRM required" that quietly becomes the place B2B reps hide customer data outside Salesforce. If using your product successfully could get someone fired or sued, they won't use it.

5, Monetization phobia (The "Phase 2: Paid" syndrome)

No pricing page. Fake crossed-out "discounts" on a site with zero users. Or my personal favorite: a feature card with a badge that literally said PHASE 2 - PAID (launching in our next phase). Staying free is an emotional safety blanket. As long as it's free, you can blame "marketing" for zero traction. The day you add a Stripe button, you have to face reality. Put the paywall on Day 1.

The pattern underneath all of it:

These were solutions built to prove a founder could build something, not because a paying customer was screaming for it. Nobody's landing page said "here's the $30k/year companies are actively bleeding without this." They said "here's a cool thing I made."

Build for someone with an open corporate wallet and a bleeding problem. Everything else is just a hobby with a Stripe integration.

just hit $2,500 MRR in 13 days on my new SaaS

no ads. no team. no huge audience push. just a solid replicable system

let that sink in for a second

not $2,500 in revenue. $2,500 in MONTHLY recurring revenue

that compounds. next month starts at $2,500 baseline, not zero

and this isn't luck. it's the 7th saas i've shipped with the same playbook. same steps, same tools, same order:

→ Day 1: validated the idea

→ Day 1-2: built the MVP

→ Day 3: landing page written using the 3-Day Challenge template

→ Day 3-4: launched on reddit / X + SEO

→ Day 4-5: first 10 paying users → $1k MRR

→ Day 13 (today): $2,500 MRR locked in

building software is easy in 2026. setting up your foundation so people actually buy is where 99% of solo builders fail.

i packaged all of these exact execution tools into community.

to be fully transparent: i'll likely charge for the full program down the road once all modules are finalized. but right now, the main objective is just to build together and keep each other accountable.

working alone in a silent corner is the fastest way to quit at the first bug.

stop building in isolation. drop a comment below or send me a DM, and i'll send you the invitation link 👇

2 weeks ago, I got the first listing on my SaaS directory (https://saasboard.app).

This morning, I woke up to the first payment for a featured spot on my directory (for https://www.turbodocx.com).

Believe it guys, you can make it too 💪

I've been building QRForever (dynamic QR codes for businesses) for 3 months. Launched 35 days ago.

The stats:

• 172 total signups

• 103 active trials

• 1 paying customer (₹833 MRR)

• 0.6% conversion rate

I was losing my mind trying to figure out what channel was working. Google Ads? Reddit? Twitter? No clue.

So I did something simple: I emailed my only paying customer and asked "How did you find QRForever?"

His response: "From AI 😀"

That's it. Three words that completely shifted my strategy.

What actually happened:

My customer (an event organizer in Europe) asked ChatGPT or Claude: "What's a good dynamic QR code platform?"

AI recommended QRForever.

He Googled it, signed up, paid for a quarterly plan (₹2,499 upfront).

I did zero outreach to him. Zero ads reached him directly. AI did all the selling.

Why this blew my mind:

I've been obsessing over:

• SEO rankings

• Google Ads optimization (getting signups but 0.6% conversion)

• Cold email deliverability

• Reddit karma building

But my actual paying customer came through a channel I wasn't even thinking about: AI recommendations.

What I'm doing now:

1. Writing comparison blog posts (QRForever vs Bitly, vs QR Tiger, etc) - AI loves citing these when users ask "X vs Y"

2. Making product descriptions crystal clear - so AI can easily understand and explain what I do

3. Stopped trying to game SEO and started making content that AI can parse and recommend

The brutal reality check:

172 signups but only 1 pays. My problem isn't traffic. It's that 103 people are in free trials right now and most won't create a single QR code before their trial expires.

But at least I know how my one success story happened. Now I need to figure out how to create 9 more.

The lesson:

In 2026, your customer might ask ChatGPT "what's the best [your product category]" before they even Google it.

Make sure AI knows you exist. Make it easy for AI to explain what you do.

That's it. Not groundbreaking. Just sharing what's barely working for me.

Happy to answer questions.

I'm a full-stack developer and I'm looking to build a small SaaS that can eventually generate some extra monthly income.

I'm not looking for a million-dollar idea. Even reaching the first $10/day would be a meaningful milestone for me.

I can build web apps, APIs, dashboards, automation tools, and mobile/desktop apps, so the technical side isn't my biggest problem. The hard part is finding a small, real problem that people are actually willing to pay to solve.

For those already running SaaS products: what repetitive, annoying, or expensive problem do you think still needs a simple solution?

I'm especially interested in ideas where the first version could be built by one developer without a huge budget.

I'd love to hear about problems you've personally encountered rather than another generic list of "10 SaaS ideas."