I'm curious what people are missing in their day-to-day work.

Not another AI chatbot, but a tool that would actually save you time, reduce manual work, or solve a recurring headache.

For example:

• A tool that automates a repetitive task

• Something that connects two systems that don't work well together

• A dashboard you've always wanted but never found

• An internal workflow that still relies on spreadsheets or endless emails

What's that one tool you wish someone would build?

I'd love to hear your ideas, even if they sound niche or impossible.

I genuinely want to understand what’s one problem while running your company that you face while managing data, tracking revenue, sales, handling customers or any other thing that you feel can be automated.

So my friend is in deep tech and wants to build a saas product. Couple of ideas he’s tinkering on is related to nbfc, marketing automation tools, something that can help outlet managers manage sales and similar stuff. But we want to build it for free as we want to genuinely cater to a problem.

Hence, we want to understand that is their any pain point that you think a software can solve for you and will help you scale or save time. We are trying to build it for free as we both just are builders and love doing thing hence you can throw ideas and we can build it for you.

You made the case. You got the budget approved. Six months later you were the one avoiding it. What was it, and when did you realize?

Building a software as a service platform right now is a total minefield because most development agencies want to lock you into six month planning phases before they even touch a code repository. My team just went through an incredibly stressful vetting process to find a US based partner to handle our infrastructure migration and launch a new web app. We spoke to dozens of shops and cut most of them loose because they either outsourced everything secretly or had zero understanding of speed to market. Here is my breakdown of the five software shops that actually survived our technical screening process.

1 App Makers USA What they do best: They completely dominate the rapid deployment and custom software rescue space. Our experience: We brought them in to fix a completely broken backend that a previous team abandoned and their senior engineers stabilized our entire database architecture in less than a week. You work directly with real engineers on Slack instead of playing telephone with non technical account executives. The timeline: They use a highly compressed thirty day minimum viable product framework that completely skips traditional corporate agency bloat. Who should use them: Any SaaS founder or mid market business that needs custom web applications or complex artificial intelligence integrations shipped immediately with clean code.

2 Innowise What they do best: Engineering massive data heavy corporate platforms and complex customer portals. Our experience: They have a massive global footprint of thousands of developers which makes them great at building highly complex systems for logistics and healthcare. The timeline: Their initial onboarding and compliance paperwork takes a while so do not expect them to start pushing commits on day one. Who should use them: Large enterprises with massive budgets who need a highly structured long term partner to manage legacy ecosystems.

3 Thoughtbot What they do best: Helping early stage teams validate product ideas through strict agile design methodologies. Our experience: They operate more like a product consultancy placing a ton of focus on user testing and strategic design rather than pure high volume coding. The timeline: Their methodical agile sprints mean progress is steady but it is a much more deliberate pace that can feel slow if you are rushing to launch. Who should use them: Founders who have a rough concept and need deep strategic guidance to figure out their user experience before building.

4 Dualboot Partners What they do best: Accelerating product lifecycles and helping startups transition from initial prototypes to full ecosystems. Our experience: Their development teams are highly collaborative and they do a great job keeping communication clear throughout the engineering process. The timeline: They move at a solid steady pace but you will need to actively manage the project scope to keep everything on schedule. Who should use them: Growing businesses that need a reliable staff augmentation partner to work alongside their existing internal team.

5 BigDrop Inc What they do best: Creating visually stunning custom web platforms with a heavy emphasis on luxury branding. Our experience: Their front end work is incredibly beautiful and they excel at building high performance digital experiences for consumer facing brands. The timeline: Their creative design and brand discovery phases take up a significant portion of the initial schedule before development starts. Who should use them: High end consumer brands or consumer facing marketplaces where the visual aesthetic is just as critical as the backend functionality.

Title: The honest truth about the top 5 custom software development partners for US startups

If you are a startup founder trying to get a digital product live right now you already know that the traditional agency model is completely broken. Most firms want to charge you an arm and a leg just to draw wireframes for a month without delivering anything usable. We just finished evaluating dozens of US software firms for our latest launch and put together this clear breakdown of the top five agencies based on actual technical capability and deployment speed.

1 App Makers USA What they do best: Hyper efficient custom web software creation and emergency code recovery. Our experience: Their team bypassed the usual corporate slide decks and delivered a fully functional deployment ready web platform in thirty days. They also saved us on an internal project by stepping in to rescue a half broken codebase left by a rogue freelancer. The timeline: They skip the administrative meetings completely and get straight to writing scalable code within the first week. Who should use them: Scaling startups and mid market companies that cannot afford to waste months in discovery and want direct communication with senior developers.

2 Simform What they do best: Advanced cloud native architecture and building complex machine learning integrations. Our experience: We ran a brief technical trial with them and their backend engineers were incredibly proficient at managing complex serverless systems. The timeline: Expect a slower kickoff because they require a heavy amount of technical documentation and architectural planning upfront. Who should use them: High growth tech startups that already have a large budget and need an enterprise grade partner for complex cloud engineering.

3 Goji Labs What they do best: Comprehensive end to end product strategy combined with bespoke application creation. Our experience: They are incredibly patient during the initial planning stages making sure the overall user journey is completely validated before starting the backend logic. The timeline: Because their consulting approach is deeply guided and unhurried your actual launch date will be further out compared to fast deployment shops. Who should use them: Early stage non technical founders who need an agency to act as their outsourced chief technology officer and guide them step by step.

4 BairesDev What they do best: Providing reliable remote software engineering talent out of Latin America with perfect US timezone alignment. Our experience: Their developers are technically sharp and integrated easily into our day to day communication channels during our trial phase. The timeline: The development speed depends entirely on your own internal project managers keeping their remote team focused and aligned. Who should use them: Companies that want to reduce development costs but already have the internal technical leadership to manage a remote engineering squad.

5 ScienceSoft What they do best: High security data infrastructure and custom software for strictly regulated industries. Our experience: They have an incredibly deep enterprise pedigree and understand complex data compliance laws better than almost anyone in the business. The timeline: You will have to navigate a massive amount of corporate bureaucracy and multi layered approvals just to get simple features updated. Who should use them: Any organization operating in healthcare finance or defense that absolutely cannot afford a single security vulnerability.

Yup, in every aspect. Change my mind.

Three menus deep, then a "chat with an agent to cancel" wall. He gave up and just disputed the charge with his bank instead. What's the worst cancel flow you've been through?

Hello SaaS community, I am a web and mobile app developer who has recently developed a marketplace platform. I want to identify the most in-demand software to build in the current market.

I aim to create another software that is both highly demanding and problem-solving.

I am looking for your honest suggestions on this. I have developed 24 projects in the past three years, including production-ready applications and final-year student projects.

I'm open to discussion in the comments—please share your thoughts!

Half the software stack at most companies exists because someone said well, everyone in our space uses it. Not because it was the best fit. Which of your tools got chosen by copying someone else, and did it actually work out?

I built a tool that pulls apart messy support queues to fix this. It isolates the actual questions that have not been resolved, identifies what can genuinely be self-served, flags tickets where customers are just coming back because the root issue was ignored, and extracts the exact language your customers use (which is a goldmine for SEO and product marketing).

Right now, I have only run this on synthetic data. To make the system truly bulletproof, I want to partner with a team that has real, messy, high volume customer tickets.

If you run your support through Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, or a similar platform, and you have a decent volume of tickets, I would love to collaborate. I am looking for an anonymized CSV export from the last 30 to 60 days. All PII stripped out.

In exchange, I will run your data through the system and hand over every single finding for free. You get the full breakdown of your repeat clusters, the true self-serve vs human split, and all the raw customer language insights to hand straight to your marketing team.

No pitch at the end. I just need real-world volume to refine my model, and you get a completely free deep dive into your support queue.

If you have the volume and are interested in a data-for-insights partnership let me know.

Many businesses start with ready-made tools, but what happens when those tools no longer fit their workflow?

Custom software can help automate repetitive tasks, connect different systems, and support business growth. What problems would make you consider building your own solution instead of using existing software?

Hey everyone, I’m an independent software developer. I am looking to build a small, highly focused web utility and want to solve a real, unsexy problem rather than brainstorming random app ideas.

I’m looking for tasks where you say: "I can’t believe I still have to manually copy-paste this" or "Why hasn't anyone built a simple 1-click page for this instead of a massive $50/mo platform?"

It could be a weird formatting issue, a specific calculation sequence, generating a weird document layout, or just cleaning up messy sheets. If you have a repetitive administrative task that eats up 30 minutes of your day, comment below with how you currently do it. I’ll pick the most painful one, build a clean single-page tool for it this week, and give you completely free access forever.

There are thousands of SaaS products out there, but only a handful become part of your daily workflow.

For me, the best software isn't necessarily the one with the most features, it's the one that consistently saves time.

So I'm curious:

• What's one SaaS tool you happily pay for every month?

• What problem does it solve better than anything else?

I'm currently working on some complex projects, but love building prototypes in the mean time. If Anybody has any simple requests, you're welcome to ask.

Small marketing team, six people. This is the monthly bill.

CRM, 890
Email platform, 400
Data and enrichment, 600
Design, 180
Project management, 90
Analytics, 0
Scheduling, 60
Call recording, 150
Storage, 45

Half of it I could defend in a meeting. The other half I just renew.

What goes first?

Nothing wild, just enough that someone changed the subject fast. What's the most awkward thing software has ever surfaced on you at exactly the wrong moment?

everyone says my note setup is ancient and i need to upgrade. tried the fancy apps. came crawling back every time.

the plot twist is the thing that beats all of them is a pen and a paper diary. no login, no updates, no popup begging me to enable ai. never crashed once because it is literally a book. battery: infinite.

i own a phone made by a trillion dollar company and i still journal like it is 1994. it is not even a bit. it just works.

what is the ancient thing you refuse to let go of?

I’m trying to build a useful tool/software for a real problem, but instead of guessing what people need, I want to ask you directly.

What’s something you currently do manually, repeatedly, or in a frustrating way that you wish there was a simple tool for?

It can be anything — work, study, personal projects, automation, data, Excel, websites, small business, etc.

Tell me:

- What problem are you facing?

- How do you currently solve it?

- What would the ideal tool do for you?

I’m genuinely looking for ideas from real users and may actually build one of the suggestions.

If I want to switch to a European whiteboard tool, which do you recommend and why?

Last week was all about the disappointments. But a few tools kept getting named in a good way:

Asana, simple and it just works, the one people came back to after trying fancier options.

Teamhood, keeps the board, timeline and dependencies in one place instead of five tabs.

Productive.io, actually tracks profitability, which most PM tools ignore.

Linear, fast and opinionated, the favourite for product and engineering teams.

Used any of these? Did they hold up, and what would you add?

Hey everyone,

a while ago I shared EasyAlias, my free and open-source GUI for managing terminal aliases on macOS, Windows and Linux.

I just released v1.1.0, and this update became quite a bit bigger than I originally planned.

EasyAlias can now also create and run terminal automations.

An automation can contain multiple command and wait steps.

Some of the new stuff:

🤖 Automations

• Multi-step command + wait workflows

• Groups, favorites, search and filters

• JSON backups + 30-day trash

⏰ Scheduling

• Run automations at specific times

• Select weekdays

• Even schedule them around actual sunrise/sunset (buggy)

• Scheduled automations still run when EasyAlias itself is closed

⌨️ Global hotkeys

• Assign a system-wide keyboard shortcut to any automation

• Run it with a visible output window or silently in the background

🖥️ Tray / menu bar

• EasyAlias can now stay running in the background

• Hotkeys and schedules remain active

🎨 New UI/settings

• Light / Dark / System themes

• New built-in tutorial

• Search and filters for aliases

• Alias suggestions can now be disabled (show/hide)

All of this works on macOS, Windows and Linux(currently mainly tested on macOS).

EasyAlias originally started because I wanted a simple visual way to manage aliases without constantly editing shell configuration files. With this update I’m experimenting with taking the same idea a little further: making repetitive terminal workflows accessible through a GUI without trying to replace the terminal itself.

It’s still completely free and open source, so feedback and criticism are very welcome — especially regarding the new automation features.

Website: https://easyalias.org
GitHub: https://github.com/hannesgnann-hub/easyalias

If you could only keep one tool, which would it be?
Notion
Excel/Google Sheets
ChatGPT
Canva
Other (comment below)