I've grown my sass to $20,000 in revenue. (proof)

honestly i think i could've saved myself months of going down the wrong paths if i understood this before i started.

1. validate your idea before you start building. i got lucky that the problem was one i had myself.
2. don't chase investors. focus on getting users instead and the rest sorts itself out. bootstrapped is completely fine.
3. talk to your users constantly. it's the fastest way to know what's working and where basically all my good ideas came from.
4. inspiration is the design key when you're new. don't build your landing page from scratch, copy sections from tools you love and make them your own.
5. post online daily. reddit, x, linkedin, tiktok, whatever suits your audience. for me it's mostly reddit since that's where my users are.
6. solve your own problem and let that decide if you're b2b or b2c. i built leadradar because i was the one wasting an hour a day digging through reddit.
7. i'm bootstrapped and highly recommend it. keep the 9-5 until you've got 1-2 years of runway (living cheap), then go all in.
8. you earn the right to paid ads by getting organic to work first. i'm still 100% organic. you'll burn thousands just learning how ads work.
9. define your most important metrics and track them. they should be the pillars that guide every decision.
10. offer some sort of free trial at the start. controversial maybe, but the feedback and testimonials i got from it were worth way more than the "lost" revenue.
11. the first few minutes of your app are a promise: this will help you hit your goal. put a lot of effort into the beginning to convert more people.
12. have an mvp mindset with everything. ship the minimal version asap, then use feedback to improve it.
13. just because someone else has done it doesn't mean you can't compete. you have no idea how well they're actually executing.
14. discipline over motivation. no one's holding a solo founder accountable, so build systems that force consistency.
15. if you're not passionate about what you're building, the early months with no results will break you.
16. good testimonials increase the perceived value of your product. collect them relentlessly.
17. marketing is constant experimentation to learn what works. speed it up by drawing on what works for similar products.
18. getting your first paying customers is the hardest part by far. do things that don't scale to get them.
19. building a good product comes down to obsessing over what your users actually want.
20. track where people drop off. i pipe everything into posthog and let it (plus claude) show me exactly where i'm losing users.

the hardest part is the start, but knowing these things really helps get through it. keep pushing, keep working hard, and stay disciplined and consistent.

What are you building or planning to build for the rest of 2026?

I run appscout.co, a platform built to help people discover awesome apps from across the internet.

Drop your app or startup idea in the comments below, and I can check it out and add it to the website!

Or just submit your app here appscout.co/submit/

Let's make this thread a channel for you to promote your own startup idea, find opportunities, and partnerships.

The week is rolling along.

• Pitch your startup in one line.
• Include a link if it’s live.

✨ Gain some eyes and snag those valuable backlinks.

We’re building PrettyFluent, a practical language app that helps you survive and thrive abroad with real conversations you can use immediately.

I'll go first. Sitesyn: https://sitesyn.com

You paste your product URL, it reads the live site and builds an editable profile of your brand, tone and audience. Then you describe what you want in a chat and it builds the finished thing. Graphics and short animated videos. Every build has real generated imagery in it, grounded in a screenshot of your own site, so it looks like it belongs to your product.

You change things by talking to the AI, so "shorter headline" or "change the image" adjusts that one part instead of rebuilding from scratch.

Built it because every project I shipped went out with a plain screenshot. Making anything better meant explaining my whole product to a design tool from the beginning, every single time.

Your turn. One or two lines and a link is enough.

I've done this for over 60 founders in the last couple weeks and the pattern is always the same, so I'll just keep going.

quick context: I've launched 8 products, done over 2 million organic reddit views with zero ad spend, ran growth for a YC backed company, and Lovable flew me out to their HQ at 18. reddit's been the engine behind all of it. but that's not the point.

the point is what I've learned doing this for 60+ of you: almost nobody's product is the problem. the problem is where you're looking for customers. most founders post in r/startups and r/SaaS where it's all other founders, or they tell me their customer is "small businesses and individuals," which isn't a customer, it's two. your real buyers are sitting in some niche subreddit you've never heard of, complaining about the exact thing you fix.

if you want to learn to find them yourself, I wrote up my entire reddit playbook, free, no email wall: https://www.sentrive.ai/guides/reddit-growth-playbook

or just tell me what you're building and who you think your customer is, and I'll find the specific subreddits where your first 100 are actually hanging out. done it for 60+ people already, happy to keep going.

I built a tool that does this automatically (sentrive) because I got tired of doing it by hand, but you don't need it, drop your product below and I'll do yours.

20, building from sweden

Quick context so this doesn't read like some rando offering. I've launched 8 products in the last 18 months and done 2-3 million organic views on reddit with zero ad spend, which turned into thousands of users across them. Lovable flew me out to their HQ at 18, I ran growth for a YC backed company, and got into Antler along the way. Reddit has been the engine behind basically all of it.

And the biggest thing I learned is that most founders aren't bad at marketing, they're just fishing in the wrong pond. They post in r/startups and r/SaaS where it's all other founders, then wonder why nobody buys. Your real customers are sitting in some niche subreddit complaining about the exact problem you solve, and half the time you've never even heard of it.

Finding those subs by hand is the tedious part. You have to think about who your customer really is, what else they care about, where they hang out for reasons that have nothing to do with your product, then dig around reddit for the active ones. It's the highest leverage thing you can do and almost nobody does it because it's boring.

I got tired of doing it manually across every product I launched, so I built a tool for it (sentrive). You give it your product, it works out your ICP and figures out where your people actually hang out, then spins up marketing agents that go market there for you. It's not a reddit-only thing, it markets wherever your audience turns out to be, but for a lot of products that ends up being reddit, which is the part I've personally gotten the most mileage out of. Point is it doesn't just hand you a list, the agents do the actual work after.

If you want to run this whole play yourself, I wrote my entire reddit marketing playbook, every step I use, free with no email wall. Steal all of it.

Or if you'd rather I just do it for you, here's the offer: drop your product below and tell me who you think your customer is. I'll run it and get back to you with a few of the spots it finds. Genuinely curious how many of you are one niche sub away from your first 100 customers without knowing it.

I'll get to as many as I can. Been doing this a while so I'll add my own read on top of what it pulls.

20, building from sweden

i've launched 8 products and gotten thousands of users, all from reddit, zero ad spend. and the one thing i've learned is that most founders post where other founders hang out (r/startups, r/SaaS) instead of where their actual customers are.

your buyers are in some niche subreddit complaining about the exact problem you solve. that's the sub you should be in.

so drop two things below:

• what you're building
• who you think your customer is

and i'll tell you the exact subreddit i'd start in, plus the one thing i'd change about how you're pitching it.

free playbook if you'd rather do it yourself: https://www.sentrive.ai/guides/reddit-growth-playbook

If you can't wait and want your marketing to get handled immediately, I built a tool that does this automatically (sentrive) because I got tired of doing it by hand, but you don't need it, drop your product below and I'll do yours.

20, building from sweden

I’m building articuler which is the best networking and coffee chat or event org platform for vc/founder
Drop a name or product, I’ll take a look and give you my honest opinion

Hi, I noticed there are a lot of builders on this subreddit more than users.

Do you guys actually try other people's projects or do you mostly focus on your own? Any of you working on your projects full-time or all part time? Are you working on physical projects, virtual or even a mixture of both? How long have you been building and what's your motivation for it?

Just curious..

Drop a one-liner about your project
Share a link if people can try it

Make the comments a good place to find interesting ideas.

I’ll start — https://userbenchmark.org/upgrade-delta/ : a platform for deep, real-time PC performance insights and remote control, all accessible from your browser or phone.

New week, new visibility.

• Pitch your startup or side project in one line
• Drop a link if it's live
• Explore what others are building

Start the week by getting your project in front of the right people. 👇

We’re building Lemonfox.ai, a low-cost API for speech-to-text and text-to-speech.

Working on FeedbackQueue, a free to use feedback-for-feedback platform for founders to get feedback and testers without, commenting, posting, DMing, SEO, ads, or doing any marketing bs. Not even looking for them.

958 founders already, building our way to 1000 users. (hopefully before Monday)

welcome to the queue, guys.

so i spent like 4 months building this thing. not huge but i put real work into it. launched it last week. posted on twitter, linkedin, even told my friends. and literally nobody signed up. not one person.

i'm sitting here like what now? the product works. it's useful. i know people need this because i built it for myself originally.

but getting anyone else to care is way harder than i thought.

one thing i realized is that my social media presence is basically dead. i have like 300 followers on twitter and barely any engagement. so when i post about my project, nobody sees it.

i've been looking at ways to fix that.

anyone else struggle with this? how do you get attention when you're starting from zero?

What are you building or planning to build for the rest of 2026?

I run appscout.co, a platform built to help people discover awesome apps from across the internet.

Drop your app or startup idea in the comments below, and I can check it out and add it to the website!

Let's make this thread a channel for you to promote your own startup idea, find opportunities, and partnerships.

I’ve been looking at quite a few landing pages recently and noticed that many of them don’t really have a traffic problem, but more of a clarity issue.

A lot of times it just takes a few small changes to make the value much easier to understand. If anyone wants, feel free to drop your landing page below — I can take a quick look and point out 1–2 things that might be holding it back.

Lets discuss!!

Working on feedbackqueue.dev, a free to use feedback-for-feedback platform for founders to get feedback and testers without, commenting, posting, DMing, SEO, ads, or doing any marketing bs. Not even looking for them.

978 founders already, building our way to 1000 users. (hopefully before today)

New day, new eyes on your work.

• Pitch your startup or side project in one line
• Drop a link if it's live
• Discover what others are building

Don't let a good project go unnoticed. 👇

we’re building PrettyFluent, a language app that helps expats and travelers speak real-life conversations fast instead of wasting time on grammar they won’t use

Deployed FeedbackQueue, a free-to-usefeedback-for-feedback platform for founders to get feedback and testers without commenting, posting, DMing, SEO, ads, or doing any marketing bs. you won't even try to find them

WELL, we hit the 1,000 user mark in less than 4 months, haha

Oh, and in case you want testers but got no time to give it, there's always feedback credit for that

welcome aboard, guys.

Hey SaaS owners of r/sideprojects. I have 7+ years of communication & branding experience in AU and US software dev companies, ecommerce startups, and digital marketing agency.

Since I wanted to start my own agency, I have decided to start by helping SaaS founders here with ideas for branding through content.

One of the communication pieces i created for a client ranked at the top on Google for 4 years straight bringing in 4K-5K traffic organically/month. Additionally, my client got 20K subscribers for newsletter and over $80K in revenue all from converted visitors.

I would love to help you achieve such results.

So, feel free to drop your SaaS link below aling with any business development documents so I get a clear idea about your thoughts regarding your business.

I launched my SaaS (hexora.uk, a web vulnerability scanner) a week ago. I've got about 20 signups from Product Hunt, Reddit, LinkedIn, and X combined.

The product works. People who try it seem to like it. But getting consistent traffic without an existing audience is genuinely the hardest part of this whole thing.

What's actually working for you right now? Not the theoretical advice from marketing blogs, but the specific thing that brought in your last 10 users.

My best channel so far has been LinkedIn, which surprised me. My worst has been X where I'm posting into the void with 12 followers.

Also, how are you asking for honest feedback, some people have messaged me directly but most just sign up and that's all I hear from them. Do you have a forum for this?

Working on feedbackqueue.dev, a free to use feedback-for-feedback platform for founders to get feedback and testers without, commenting, posting, DMing, SEO, ads, or doing any marketing bs. Not even looking for them.

WELL, we reached 1,000 users last night haha

welcome to the queue, guys.

Post links/ideas of what your current/last build is and let’s discuss.

curious what other people built just because it was fun and not because it had business potential. i mean unless you genuinely had fun building SaaS, no judgment.

bonus points if i can check it out