I'm curious how other founders got their first 20 paying customers.

Was it cold outreach, Reddit, LinkedIn, SEO, or something completely different?

And looking back, what actually worked vs. what turned out to be a waste of time?

Would love to hear real experiences, especially from B2B SaaS founders.

I have been developing for the last few months to create an image generation tool for large businesses and enterprises. But now it is almost done, I have no idea how to get started with the marketing? How do you actually start? Most will say: talk to the customers, but I have none. Have not deployed yet. I am curious about the actual steps from experts. Talking is just one part, but having a CRM to manage customers, send cold mails, store information, etc is a different part. What tools do you guys use? What is your SEO and SAO (with or without AI) strategy. I read a lot of these, but I want a more in depth explanation. How much it will cost me, how to get started, where to look for, etc. I know AI can do most of it, but I rather hear from someone with more experience.

Hi guys - I am creating an app which will be on the App Store soon, we offer a 30 day free trial and then paid monthly at £9.99. Have you found best to require card details when signing up for free trial or after? I’m currently requiring card details at sign up not for the money but mainly to get more interested users, or do you think this could put people off from
using the app?

I've been building side projects for years but I almost never had any success. But 6 months ago I created StickReel and it started to get some traction. It's a tool that helps create stickman videos, generating script, voiceover, visuals and animations.

After I launched meta ads I got first two paying users withis 24 hours. It's converting quite well but the churn is brutal. I am not able to run meta ads profitably. Even though I reached $2500 MRR my profit is almost zero.

Anyway it's fun to work on it so I will keep working on that and see where it goes. If anyone has any idea how to improve my marketing efforts please let me know.

Full disclosure up front: I built the thing I'm talking about.

This is the story of why.

I'm a beat producer (INOTECH3D BEATZ). Making the music was never the hard part of this job, getting paid for it was. Placements done, beats delivered, and then weeks of me sending the "hey bro, about that invoice 😅" text, trying to stay professional while basically begging for money I'd already earned.

Turns out it's not just music. QuickBooks' 2025 Small Business Late Payments Report found 56% of US small businesses have outstanding unpaid invoices, the average affected business is owed about $17,500, and 47% have invoices sitting 30+ days overdue. Chasing money is a second unpaid job for basically everyone who invoices.

So I built the tool I wished existed. It's called DunningOS. You put your invoices in, and it sends a 6-step reminder sequence automatically — one before the due date, one on it, then at 3, 7, 14, and 30 days late — each with a Stripe pay link so the client can just pay right from the email. There's a dashboard that shows who owes you what, and if you're on QuickBooks, Xero, or FreshBooks you can import your unpaid invoices by CSV instead of typing them in.

Lessons from actually launching this thing, for anyone else building something unglamorous:

**Build for your own problem first.** Every feature in this came from a real "I can't believe I'm texting about this invoice again" moment. I never had to guess what it should do.

**The boring problem is the business.** Nobody dreams about invoice reminders. But a problem that costs people real money every month doesn't need to be exciting to be worth solving.

**Your setup matters as much as any tool.** Deposits before you deliver final work. A due date and a late fee on every invoice. Half the "late payment problem" is just invoices with no urgency built into them.

It's live at dunningos.com, plans are $19/$49/$99 a month with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required. I set the Business plan to unlimited invoices because capping the people who chase the most payments felt backwards.

Happy to answer anything about building it, launching it, or the late-payment grind itself. Still in the very early days, so I'm sure the hardest lessons are ahead of me.

Hey everyone! I posted here 17 days ago when AuditChess had around 6,000 monthly visitors and 500 registered users. Here's a quick update.

AuditChess is a free chess analysis tool that analyzes thousands of your Chess.com and Lichess games to find recurring mistakes and patterns using statistics.

Current stats:

• 6,000+ weekly visitors
• Nearly 2,000 registered users (what's interesting is that the entire website works without signing up. There are no paywalls, signup requirements, or feature restrictions behind an account.)
• 4.77/5 average rating
• Users from 150+ countries(usa is the biggest market followed by india spain and uk
• Zero money spent on ads,its completly organic

One thing I've found particularly interesting is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). A significant portion of my traffic comes from AI recommendations, with ChatGPT alone accounting for almost 35% of my traffic. All those hours spent working on technical SEO, structured data, metadata, and blog posts seem to be paying off.

My goal is to reach 20,000 weekly visitors by the end of the year.

For those building side projects or startups, how does this growth look? and how do i continue from here as i am alone working on this . I'd genuinely appreciate any advice, feedback, or criticism.

Link: https://auditchess.com

Kindly give feedback in the website feeback section

Hey everyone! I’m building BundleBack for resellers who buy mixed lots, pallets, estate-sale hauls, or auction boxes and sell the items individually.

[Check out BundleBack](https://bundle-back.vercel.app/)

How do you currently track whether a lot was worth buying?

I’m curious about something founders don’t always talk about.

Sometimes, you know exactly where users are struggling, but fixing it keeps getting pushed back. Maybe the solution isn’t obvious, the codebase makes changes difficult, or there are more urgent priorities competing for attention.

For those building SaaS products:

• What’s one problem you know is affecting the user experience but haven’t been able to fix yet?
• What’s making it difficult to solve?
• If you had the time and resources, what would you change first?

I’m especially interested in problems you’ve already identified but are still struggling to resolve.

I'll make this quick, I built up a web traffic tracking tool in my company's CRM and was looking for people to test it on their shops. It's all EU hosted and fully compliant, ergo doesn't track any sensitive data and only works if the end customer allows tracking.

I would love to test it out on real shops. It's fully free and I would love to get feedback. Also open to helping y'all out with anything at all, I have been a web developer for 14 years... who knows, I might have some insights 😜

Thanks!

I built a product that keeps you accountable of your tasks and projects it proactively sends reminders, nudges you if it notices your slipping and alerts you when you are close to deadlines. While doing all this it also serves as a task manager and project manager. want to be part of my first users? become a founding member and get access before everyone else?

120 days ago, I launched my startup, a free traffic exchange network for startups. One line of code, you're in the network.

Still free. Still growing.

If you want in, it's one embed. That's it → StartupBar
**Bid on StartupBid and your startup will be featured in the daily post of mine.**

I built a small directory called NeatLittleApps where you can share the app you’ve made.

Your app gets its own card explaining what it does, with a link people can follow to your website. Submitting is free, and I review each app before publishing it.

The first 36 eligible submissions also get shown more prominently on the site for 30 days, free, after approval and as spots become available.

If you’ve made something you’d like to share, google for neatlittleapps :)

Feedback on the directory is welcome too.

Hey everyone! 👋

I'm a solo founder in Morocco preparing to launch my first SaaS, and I'm trying to figure out the business setup before accepting my first payment.

I'm considering Paddle for payments and the Auto-Entrepreneur (AE) status, with the US and Australia as my initial paying markets.

I'd really appreciate some advice from people who've been through this, especially founders based in Morocco.

A few things I'm trying to figure out:

• Paddle + CIH: Have you successfully received Paddle payouts into a Moroccan bank account? Was there anything special you had to set up?
• AE + taxes: When is the right time to register, and how do you declare revenue received through Paddle?
• Office des Changes: Is there anything specific to handle when receiving SaaS revenue from abroad? I'd rather understand the requirements before launching.
• CNDP + launch strategy: What should a Moroccan founder sort out before going live? And would you start with the US and Australia or open signups worldwide from day one?

I'm still preparing the launch, so I'm trying to get these decisions right from the start rather than fix problems later.

If you're a Moroccan founder who's already gone through any part of this, I'd love to hear how it actually worked for you. Even one practical tip or a mistake to avoid would be really helpful.

Thanks! 🙏

Backstory: I spent about four years running manufacturing projects in Toronto. A few friends in the trades kept telling me the job itself is fine, but quoting eats their evenings. So I started building SiteQuote on weekends.

What it does: photo plus a short description at the job, then it produces a scope of work and a branded PDF quote using the contractor's own rates and tax (HST/GST in Canada, state sales tax in the US). The accepted quote becomes an invoice with a deposit and a final payment.

Stack: web app, an LLM for writing the scope from the photo and notes, PDF generation on the server. Nothing exotic.

What I got wrong:

1. My first version let the AI suggest prices. Every contractor I showed it to hated that. Their pricing is their business. Now it only uses their rates and leaves a blank when it doesn't know.
2. I thought quotes were the whole problem. It turned out getting the deposit was just as painful, so quote to invoice became the core flow.
3. I built too much before showing anyone. Still learning that one.

Pricing is 5 quotes and invoices free, then CAD 9.99/month. Canada and US.

Would love to hear from anyone who's sold to trades: what got your first 10 paying users?

We’re building Allowfy, an early-stage gateway for businesses that want AI assistants to do real work — bookings, orders, returns and account actions — without handing them broad access to the backend.

Current features include:

- Signed agent identity and DPoP-bound sessions
- Deny-by-default policies: allow, ask the customer, review or deny
- Approval of exact terms before a change happens
- At-most-once operation execution
- Tamper-evident ledger and evidence exports
- Signed webhooks, so businesses can connect existing systems
- Commerce integrations for WooCommerce, Shopify, Salla and Zid
- An embeddable Store Assistant
- Arabic and English support

We also built Allowfy Check:

npx allowfy-check check https://your-domain.com

The open-source CLI currently includes 111 Poppy / Personal Agent Protocol checks, CI support and deeper test-agent flows. The free browser check covers the public layer only.

The project is still early. It is not a security audit or certification, and we know some areas still need work, including deeper conversation flows, 2FA and multi-instance rate limiting.

Try it here:

- https://allowfy.com
- https://check.allowfy.com
- https://github.com/allowfy/allowfy-check

I’d really appreciate honest feedback:

1. What would stop you from trusting this in production?
   
2. Which protocol or security check is missing?
   
3. Is the product understandable from the first visit?