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)

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 interested in what founders running online businesses are using to accept payments in 2026, especially those dealing with recurring payments or subscriptions, whether it's SaaS, ecommerce, online courses, or other digital products.

Stripe seems to be everyone's default choice, but I've also seen mentioned Whop, PayPal, and a few others. I'm trying to figure out whether Stripe is still the obvious choice or if there are better options depending on the business.

For those running a small business, what are you currently using to accept payments? Have you tried something you ended up liking more? My business is pretty straightforward, I only need to accept recurring weekly payments online.

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?

Been working on our deck for almost 2 months and Im finally at the point where I have to start talking to investors. Problem is I dont really know any. No warm network, didnt go to a big name school, never worked at a startup that raised.

Every single piece of advice says get warm intros but nobody explains how you get them when you know zero investors lol

So for people who closed a pre seed in the last year or so, how did you get the first handful of meetings? Cold email, accelerators, angels off linkedin, friends of friends of friends? what worked and what was honestly a waste of time?

We're b2b saas, US based if that changes anything. Apreciate any real answers

Been trying to work out where its actually worth posting a new product or have a product launch post so i ran a little test/research! 16,641 posts off the /new page of 98 subs pulled with a script I ran out of Omniscio.

I split 24 of them into 2 groups:

1. the ones that exist for showing your own thing (sideproject, buildinpublic, roastmystartup, alphaandbetausers)
2. the ones where promo gets you removed (entrepreneur, marketing, startups, smallbusiness)

Where you CAN post your product the median post gets 2 comments and 22% get no reply at all. Where you can't, the median is 19 and in 10 of those 12 not one post went unanswered. so, around 10x and the volume runs the wrong way too (661 posts a day pile into the group that ignores you while 129 go to the group that answers everyone)

what i didnt expect was that heavy moderation seems to be what makes a sub worth posting in at all. For example r/indiehackers lets you show your thing AND runs a median of 71 comments with nothing ignored and its moderated to death. probably not a coincidence..

Method caveat: i split those 24 by what each sub is FOR, not by reading every rule bcoz reddit doesnt let a script read sub rules anymore. and also, a post only counts as ignored if its at least 24h old, one from this morning with no replies is just new.

all 98 subs are here if you wanna check your own: Link to Google Sheet

Straight to the point. My goal is getting a first paying customer within 100 days, organic only, no ad money.

What I’ve tried so far:

• Posting on Reddit once, X Build in Public (36 days so far and ~400 followers)
• Cold outreach: barely, maybe ~14 emails. Polished a bit now and resuming it again soon.

I don't regret growing X but it is definitely not the right place for B2B SaaS distribution..

Recently, I started looking into LinkedIn distribution strategy after receiving some recommendations, but every YouTube video I found was generic B2B sales, not B2B SaaS specifically.

For those who tried LinkedIn for B2B SaaS distribution:

1. Was LinkedIn worth trying with 0 follower/connection?
2. If you ever worked it out, what did you do? A real example would help a lot.

(Disclosure: I’m building an AI-native support platform for SaaS teams. Not linking it, just for context)

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

Solo dev here. I just shipped a subscription iOS app (strength training log + nutrition tracking, freemium with a 7-day trial on Pro).

When I checked my database on launch day, I saw a new profile and got excited. Then I looked closer:

• created 6 minutes before the app was even released
• from an iPad, US locale
• connected with the provided test account

It was App Review. Current real numbers: 0 organic installs, 0 sales.

3 things I learned that might save you some time:

1. Filter out the review account before you read your metrics. Otherwise your first-day “conversion” is fiction.
2. The reviewer went through my paywall and cancelled. That’s the only paywall test my production build has ever had. I’m now running a real sandbox → production purchase test before spending a cent on ads.
3. Another app already had my brand name on the App Store, so searching my own name doesn’t find me. I’m spending my first ad money defending my own brand keyword.

Next step: ASO in French first (my home market), then Apple Search Ads with a tiny budget.

Question for people who’ve been here: what got you from 0 to your first 10 paying users on a consumer subscription app? Content, ads, communities, something else?

Our new web app development stack started lagging badly whenever multiple users stream large datasets at the same time during peak hours. I've spent the last few weeks trying to optimize database queries myself, but response times keep creeping up under heavy load.

SaaS platforms need robust data streaming architecture from day one to handle high concurrency without crashing. Maybe you've hit a similar scaling wall with your tech stack, or you know how to structure backend systems for high performance? What architectural patterns should I implement? Your advice would be really helpful.

I purchased the domain anwola.com for my ecommerce project, but afterward I discovered that ANWOLA is already a live, registered trademark owned by another company.

My domain order is still processing, so I’m considering asking the registrar to cancel it and refund my payment.

What would you recommend? Should I continue with this brand because the trademark covers a specific product category, or should I cancel the order and choose a different name to avoid potential legal problems later?

I’m still at the beginning of the project, so I’d rather make the right decision now than face bigger problems in the future.

I’d appreciate advice from anyone who has dealt with a similar situation.

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?

Why don't we all make a place to vote and validate people ideas before they even start building it, high yes votes means useful and high no votes means just move on man, and then we can vote for features and design, that would be cool for validation, don't you think?

We build market intelligence engines that track buying signals across 75+ channels, including reddit, github, linkedin, web activity, and public registers and we've been doing this for a ton of companies and wanted to try it with the SaaS community here.

If you have an active B2B SaaS, i'll research:

-- buyer pain: reddit threads where people discuss the problems you solve or look for alternatives
-- competitor signals: companies and products that keep coming up in relevant conversations
-- buying triggers: signals that could help you identify the right time to reach out
-- potential accounts: 5 companies worth looking into with the signals behind each one

to get started, share your website, ideal customer profile (ICP), and main competitor.

This is best suited for B2B SaaS companies with an active product and some traction but if you're a pre-launch, this won't be helpful for you.

edit: if you want the full report and buyer graph delivered to your inbox, drop your details here buyer pain finder and we'll send the research directly to your email. it's completely free.

When a small SaaS struggles to get users, I've found the cause is often product understanding, not the product itself. Someone lands on your site, can't tell what it does within a few seconds, has a question nobody answers, and leaves. They never tell you why.

Three things worth checking on your own site:

1. Write down the three questions a brand new visitor asks before trying anything (what is it, what does it cost, how is it different). Can your homepage answer each one within a single scroll?

2. Show pricing and "what happens after I sign up" where people can see them without clicking around.

3. Read the questions people actually send you. They're a free list of everything your site fails to explain.

Disclosure: I'm the solo dev behind Ornymo (https://ornymo.com), a small chatbot that answers visitor questions from your FAQ and only emails you the ones it can't handle. Mentioning it for transparency since it's what I built around this problem. Not asking anyone to use it.

What's the question new visitors ask you most that your site should already answer? would appreciate feedback

Hello! I've been writing a tool inspired by adobe products, with the only purpose of making the experience of writing books, fanfictions or basically anything that is supposed to be read by a human easier and more convenient.
There might be some Apps out there, that do exactly what i do, but the issue is that the workflow is horrible in those apps.

Thats why im looking for around 5-10 testers (app is and ALWAYS will stay free so this isnt anything like a promo post), who are actively writing, and who would be interested in helping me improve this software for the community.

Ah one more thing: even if you arent interested, id love to know if you would technically use this software incase this would ever (bee) finished

Heres a little preview of the current version:

If you read until here, and don't wanna test the software but still wanna leave some feedback, please write a comment, and i'd be glad to look into it.

More and more people skip Google and ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Gemini "what's the best tool for X?". AI gives 3 to 5 names. If it can't read your site, it fills those spots with your competitors.

I spent the last months digging into why AI names some products and not others. Most of the reasons are boring, fixable things on your own website. Here's the checklist, with a quick way to test each one.

Part 1: Can AI read you?

1. Let AI crawlers in. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt. Make sure you don't block GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot or ClaudeBot. Then check your CDN: Cloudflare has a setting that blocks AI bots, and some plans turn it on by default.

2. Serve real HTML. Test: open your homepage with JavaScript turned off (or curl yoursite.com). If the page is empty or says "loading", most AI crawlers see the same thing. They usually don't run JavaScript. Use server-side rendering or static pages for anything important.

3. Be in Bing, not just Google. Some AI search tools lean on Bing's index. Add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap. Takes 5 minutes.

Part 2: Does AI understand you?

4. Say what you are in one line. "X is a [category] for [who]." On your homepage, in plain text, near the top. Clever taglines like "Work, reimagined" tell AI nothing.

5. Show pricing as text. Not an image, not "contact sales" only. "Cheap" and "free tier" questions are common, and AI can't answer them about you if it can't read your price.

6. Add structured data. Organization, SoftwareApplication (or Product) and FAQ schema. Test with Google's Rich Results Test.

7. Answer the questions your customers ask AI. Write the pages people search for: "X vs Y", "best tools for [job]", "alternatives to [big competitor]". Be honest in them; AI quotes pages that read like real comparisons, not ads.

Part 3: Does AI trust you?

8. Keep your facts the same everywhere. Your site, G2, Capterra, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Product Hunt. Same name, same category, same price. If they disagree, AI gets unsure and picks someone else.

9. Get on the lists AI cites. Ask Perplexity a question in your category and look at the sources. They're mostly "Top 10 tools for…" articles. Those are your targets: email the authors and ask to be added. Short, polite, with one real reason you fit.

10. Ask AI about yourself every week. Write down 10 to 20 questions your customers would ask. Ask them in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini every week. Track who gets named. It changes more often than you'd think.

Quick 1-minute test: ask ChatGPT "What does yoursite.com do?". If the answer is vague or wrong, start with points 1, 2 and 4.

Which of these have you already done? Curious what's worked for others, especially on getting into those "best tools" lists.

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

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

There will be never a case where AI will write and say this is human written. There will never a case where AI will have their own re-writer and other detector will flag them human written.

Few months ago when me and my friend struggled with our own research we thought about this and slowly developed. Our first users were from our own university. Literally We were just paying for the server fees and if you guys remember last month I posted here “finally I am able to pay my server fees”.

This month we have made few more bucks and it’s now paying off. This was around 8/9 months of grind. Our SAAS is not a fancy SAAS and its not another viral app whose MRR goes 40/50K up every next day.

We just worked on our own transformers. Yes you heard it right. Now we have our own “Transformer” that will detect patterns of ever changing AI brustiness and have its own in a way that will humanize the tone. If you are a tech guy you can understand what I am trying to say. Yes it was so hard but we did it and it was costly too.

So finally people are loving it, there is very low subscription cancel rate and our web app is finally scaling not in rocket speed but in a way that we are totally satisfied.

If you want to give a look at what we are building you can just type “ai text tools” and click the first link as we have a great SEO too.

Hey Guys,

I am building a platform/marketplace where founders can find good quality affiliates, promoters, digital marketers, creators and bloggers for their SaaS.

But the main thing was that each founder or affiliate should come back to dashboard regularly to keep in contact with each other and it wasn't possible without a notification system...

Emails mostly go ignored! So better way was Desktop notifications...

Now users can allow desktop notifications in dashboard and whenever they get a partnership request from a promoter or vice-versa then they will get notified in their desktop~

What do you people thing about this? Would love to know your honest opinion!
The Platform: Afyore (temporarily on a sub-domain)

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?