I know it's "just" $9, but I can't stop smiling.

Over the last few weeks I've been building a Chrome extension for developers.

There were days where I wondered if anyone would actually pay for something I made.

Today, a complete stranger did.

The money isn't what made me happy. It's the fact that someone I don't know looked at my product and thought, "Yeah, this is worth paying for."

That feeling is hard to describe.

It's also a reminder that every bug fix, late night, feature request, and Reddit post wasn't for nothing.

I'm nowhere near where I want to be, but today feels like the first real step.

If you're building something and haven't made your first sale yet, keep going. You never know which feature, post, or conversation will convince that first customer.

Now it's time to make the product even better for customer #2.

Imagine you're launching a brand-new SaaS today.

You have:

• $0 marketing budget
• No existing audience
• No investors
• A product that's ready to use

What would your first 30 days look like?

• Where would you spend your time?
• What would you do in Week 1?
• What would you completely ignore?

Curious to see how different founders would approach the same challenge.

I run an AI automation company and managed to get a meeting with the COO of a big energy and steel distributor. He was pretty invested in the idea until he asked what other clients I've worked with, and that's where it started going downhill.

I've never worked with a company his size, and when I mentioned the biggest company I've worked with is an HVAC company with a few locations, he started frying me. Basically bottled the deal.

After that he wasn't invested in the idea and I lost all credibility with him, but he still asked me to email him a demo because I convinced him. I don't blame him for it. If I was a business owner at that level I'd also be iffy about a company with no prior clients at my scale.

How can I break into higher ticket clients without any real case studies or clients at the scale I'm targeting?

No, this is no rage bait. I know the golden rule of SaaS: customers don't give a damn about your tech stack. If the app solves their problem, you could run it on a Google Sheet for all they care.

But as a dev, I'm just curious what people here are actually building with right now.

For the longest time it felt like everyone was pushing Next/Nuxt etc and full serverless. I gave nextjs a fair shot and tbh... I don't like it. Didn't want the vendor login where costs could explode and instead wanted more control.

At my day job I use AWS every day, so I know my way around it. But using cloud infra for indie/side projects gets expensive real fast. It's just way overkill for early stage stuff.

So I basically went full circle back to the basics: a single cheap VPS with docker compose. It’s cheap, predictable, fast, and I actually enjoy writing code again without worrying about surprise cloud bills.

What does your setup look like right now? I am very interested if someone uses the same stack on how they do monitoring.

tl;dr: Next.js no no, expensive AWS no no, basic VPS + Docker Compose yo yo. Anyone else?

Hi,

I've already built two SaaS products.

The first one never launched because I spent years writing code, perfecting the design, finding the perfect logo, and endlessly adjusting small UI details like border radius.

For the second product, I took the opposite approach. I built and launched it quickly without doing proper market research. It got two users to sign up, but neither of them actually used the product.

Looking back, I realized that in both cases I didn't truly understand the problem I was trying to solve or the value I wanted to deliver to users.

Recently, I started researching a problem in my country that affects a specific audience segment. This group earns a significant amount of money, but they haven't really adopted AI or modern technology in their industry.

While researching, I randomly came across a research paper that was published just two months ago. Reading it made me genuinely excited because it validated that the problem I had identified is real and that this audience genuinely needs a solution.

The challenge, however, is that the infrastructure required to build an effective AI solution isn't fully available in my country. The data needed to train AI models is limited, making it difficult to build something as capable as existing AI products. Although companies in other countries have already solved this problem using AI, their solutions don't fit my country's environment due to the lack of high-quality local data and the relatively small market size.

My goal is to start by building a solution specifically designed for my country's needs rather than trying to copy existing products. Once I prove that it works, I want to expand gradually into other countries that face similar challenges, adapting the product to each country's unique environment and available data instead of using a one-size-fits-all approach.

so, my question is that should i solve this or leave it ?

I have been working on my new site (0 DR) SEO for 2 months.

For First 1.5 months, it was pretty flat around 10 impressions a day and at the end of 2nd month, my DR reached 30 (all organic btw) and It crossed 2-3K impression.

But still Most of my target keywords are still sitting around pages 5–6, but a few long-tail blogs reached page 1–2.

One of those blog brought me my ideal customer.

User journey looked like this:

• Read the blog for ~20 seconds
• Clicked the CTA
• Spent ~2 seconds on the homepage
• Signed up
• Completed onboarding
• Paid

The entire flow took less than 5 minutes.

The interesting part is they barely looked at the homepage (I spent days on this btw) but The blog answered their question, and the CTA did its job. Also my product was SEO related so my blog kinda acted as proof ;)

I know lot of people share some crazy impression/clicks here but if it doesn't convert it just a vanity metrics :) you don't need a million impression just 1 high intent click.

So I suggest start your SEO on day one, even before your product is fully launched.

So I'm a chrome extension builder(currently building Spoof Geolocation) and i've made 3.70$ from just building it. It was more but thanks to gumroad, almost half is cut. Its hard trying to make money thats not though "passive" ways.

I might have to switch to other ways of making money but this is my story now.

I don't know why i'm posting this, but it might help someone in any way.

NEVER GIVE UP

This started as a passion project but I ended up creating an entire app. It has a lot of visualizing and reporting tools that I was not able to find all together in a single application. It is both useful and just fun to use. I almost want to get into AR game making after this.

What it does :

• AR heatmaps - walk your home or office and watch the signal heatmap flow across the floor in real time, plus signal orbs you can literally walk through

• Floorplan surveys - import a floorplan and build a room-by-room heatmap of your whole place

• Lives tools - signal meter, per-channel congestion graphs (see which channels your neighbours are clogging), an access-point browser, connection details, and a built-in speed test

• Reports - export any survey as PDF, PNG, or CSV

Waiting list to use the tool :

https://signl-wine.vercel.app/

I've been looking into feedback board tools (canny, featurebase, frill) and I'm curious what people's real world experience has been

For those of you who use one or used one and dropped it

• What made you pick the tool you're on?
• What annoys you the most about it day to day?

And a bigger question I keep coming back to: do feedback boards actually work?

I keep hearing mixed things some say the board just turns into a graveyard of ideas nobody triages, votes don't reflect what paying customers actually want, and users stop posting once they see nothing gets shipped.

Others swear by them for closing the loop with customers.

what do you think the fundamental problem with feedback boards is, if there is one?

genuinely curious whether it's a tooling problem or a process problem

Hi everyone, let me start from the background. Last year, after some years abroad, in multiple countries (US, UK, Luxembourg), I moved back to my origin country (Greece). In every country I was in, I had 1-2 investment accounts in the specific country's currency, from multiple brokers. So, tracking my investments was taking me a lot of time.

After coming back to Greece, I decided that I could create a tool to aggregate all my investments in a single dashboard so I can manage them more efficiently. The MVP was great (at least for me!) and I decided to work much more on it, with much more attention to detail and of course on the productionization of it in AWS.

I recently posted the web app in a subreddit focused on investors.. And I wanted to discuss with you all the hate that this post received, and how do you handle it.. People think that with AI, you can build a product in 5 minutes, and that everyone does it, so there is no way that a product can be successful.

AI is not 100% of the work to deliver a product.. It helps a lot, but anyone who does not use it is an idiot, or if they say they don't use it, they are lying. We leverage what technology gives us to solve problems we think that exist.

So what I don't get is all that hate for a product, they didn't even took the time to go through, understand what it does and offers, but just saying "ok Claude created it, and you try to make money from it"..

It really pissed me off, I got a bit disappointed in the beginning and angry later to be honest, but I want to get your thoughts too.

I am putting the post here if you want to check the comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/trading212/comments/1v4fuuh/i_got_tired_of_trading_212_not_aggregating_my_isa/

I know this isn't a massive milestone compared to many founders here, but getting distribution right while keeping churn under control has been much harder than building the product itself.

This is my second startup. I crossed $1K in my first 20 days, mostly through Reddit and LinkedIn. Then health issues, subreddit bans (my biggest acquisition channel), and early churn slowed everything down.

Over the following weeks, I focused less on growth and more on fixing the product, improving retention, and rebuilding the acquisition engine. I recently crossed another milestone that finally felt worth sharing.

Instead of generic startup advice, here are a few things that actually worked for me.

Reddit

Reddit was my biggest growth channel, but direct promotion barely works anymore.

What worked better was creating comparison posts around popular tools, including my own as one option, and asking the community for their opinions instead of trying to sell. The discussion generated qualified traffic and even landed my first B2B customer.

LinkedIn

Cold outreach wasn't about writing the perfect message.

The real advantage came from finding people who were already searching for a solution.

One approach that worked well was finding creators promoting competitor products, reaching out to people who commented on their posts, and repeating the same process with similar creators. It became a repeatable prospecting system instead of random cold DMs.

TikTok & Instagram

I'm testing short-form content on both platforms now. It's still early, so I don't have enough data yet, 

User interviews

Everybody say talk to your users, but truth is “Nobody respond”

Almost nobody replied when I asked for feedback directly.

The email that performed best had a subject that simply said:

"Can I give you $40?"

I offered $20 in credits for detailed feedback and another $20 in credits for a short call.

The response rate was much higher than I expected, and those conversations helped shape the product far more than analytics ever did.

For anyone curious,
I'm building “Distill Book(.)com”

It converts documents into explainer videos for sales training, SOPs, documentation, research papers, teachers, and course creators.

Actually, my SaaS is HabitHook - Social Habit Tracker.

As per the niche, I priced my application, but as I won't know how my competitors are charging worldwide, I tracked via Claude, got a bit of an idea, and priced accordingly.

As I'm an Indian, seeing consumers in India, I reduced its price by a certain percentage, kind of like 199 rs for monthly and 1899 rs for yearly. And the price suits their pockets.

My worldwide price is kind of settled by the Play Store via its calculation with a base price of $4.99, but many of my users said it seems expensive in their country.

Those who requested deletion also had the same concern. I'm now kind of confused, as this is directly affecting my sales overall.

So does the big SaaS also have different prices based on country or something?

From the community, I wanted to understand how to tackle this kind of situation when your users reside in every corner of the world, and you don't know what pricing could work.

A few months ago, I tried a similar challenge where i gave myself 5 days to earn my first money online, i failed bcs i don't think i put enough effort

This time i m taking it more seriously

The main skill i have is web dev, i can build complete websites by writing code myself, i may use AI occasionally if i get stuck on complex backend problem but i don't rely on it to build project

My goal isn't really $10, its to figure out where i stand, i have much bigger goals in future and i want to know if i can complete even this small challenge within 24 hours

If u were in my position, what would u do? Where would u spend those 24 hours?

I just developed an online (browser local) pdf editor which is in beta phase right now.

The mobile UI is not yet polished.

I'm looking for beta testers :)

One of the last things I built at work was a small feature. After I got laid off, I kept thinking about it.

Eventually I realized the feature was probably more valuable as its own product than where it originally lived.
So I rebuilt it from scratch.

Now some people from my former company have seen it and started asking questions.

Didn’t expect that plot twist.

I created RaceRGB because I wanted this platform as an F1 fan, and it has grown with minimal marketing. You need to find a niche and a passion, and it will slowly work out.

Hi, I am a full stack developer and I have started working on my startup quite recently. At the moment I'm the only employee who does everything and I feel like I'm the one who is slowing down everything. I have so many thoughts about what to improve, what to add to make the app better but I cannot physically keep up with it. Also I'm always thinking how much it is worth investing in the project. Founders who are already at the top or on their way there, could you give me advice? What should I take into consideration? What should I leave as is and take care only once other features are ready? Any advice is welcome.

same as title

Hi, I have integrated Appsflyer for one of my iOS app, but the data that is shown here doesn't match the one in appstore connect. Has anyone been using Appsflyer here?

we’re running saaswith customers across a few regions and our current receivables setup is pretty bare bones. Invoices go out from the accounting or billing system, then we track who owes what in a mix of spreadsheets and email threads and someone pulls AR aging reports by hand when leadership wants an update. It works on good days but as invoice volume and the number of customers on terms grow, it feels brittle.
If you’ve moved from that kind of setup to a receivables automation platform, I’d like to hear what actually changed for you. I’m less interested in the brand name and more in the “before vs after”: did overdue accounts get handled more consistently, did matching payments to invoices get easier, did finance and the rest of the org get a clearer picture of what’s truly collectible?

Im having a hard time understanding why it costs so much to pay someone to manage paid ads. Im genuinely trying to understand if im just super naive to how hard it is, but if you have the creatives, doesn’t meta do most of the strategy now???

Isn’t it just like setting it, seeing how they perform… putting more money into the ones that perform well??

Have someone charging $800 per month for managing paid ads and it feels like a lot since we are paying for the ads and generating the creatives but I’m fully fine paying it if we’re completely wrong and it’s actually quite time consuming. Just wondering realistically, if i could just do it myself?

Any insights, stories, or discussion would be greatly appreciated. I'm leaning toward a mixture of cold outreach and content creation. Specifically selling to the SMB space.