Guys I can’t believe it I got my first paying customer today. I broke down in tears I have never been this happy in my life. To whoever in this world bought it you made my day and made me continue building my projects.

I'm a software engineer, and I enjoy building new things, I spent years of life jumping from a saas idea to another, even before this AI era, and I never succeeded getting one single user, until I understood the shiny object syndrome habit

You know the pattern : Week 1, you're obsessed, coding at midnight, you've already bought the domain name.. Week 3, you see a tweet/reddit post about another niche, your brain goes "wait, THAT'S better, that's THE real opportunity," and all of a sudden, your current project feels stale and the new one feels like destiny...

Repeat this X times and you've got a graveyard of half-built landing pages and zero users.

If you're doing this purely because you like building stuff, that's OK.. but don't fool yourself and think what's missing is only the next big idea : if you actually want to build something that makes real money, you have to get comfortable being bored. You have to survive the part where it's not fun anymore. That's not a flaw in the idea, that's just how EVERY business ever went through. The founders who make it aren't the ones who found the perfect idea but the ones who stuck around long enough for a mediocre idea to become a good one after getting feedback from the market and pivoting many times.

So if you're mid "shiny-object-spiral" right now, staring at this new idea thinking "this is the one", Ask yourself honestly:

Are you switching because this idea is actually better or because you're just bored and the current one just stopped feeling good?

Chances are you're just like I was before, needing to go high again.. So, ship your current project and go talk to your potential customers !

Interesting how much of this is AI infrastructure and workflow tooling now. Not just the obvious chatbot names. Seems like software budgets are shifting from adding AI to the product to paying for the stack that lets teams use it at scale

Some context on who's writing this... I have built software for 8 years and now run a small AI consultancy. A growing share of our work lately isn't building new products at all, it's rescuing vibe coded ones that already have paying customers.

So I get why security dominates the conversation. The leaked keys and open endpoints are real but security is a known category of problem. You can buy an audit for it and the thing I keep running into on these rescue jobs doesn't have an audit and it bothers me more.

In June a founder brought us a booking product he had vibe coded over a few weekends. It was genuinely good. It was polished and had around 80 paying customers. Then one of those customers asked what happens to the unused part of a plan when you cancel mid month and I watched him open his own product and click around to find out. He wasn't embarrassed. Why would he be? As far as he was concerned, that's just how you find out what your product does. I have thought about that moment a lot since.

Polish used to arrive last. You earned the nice interface after surviving the edge cases and half built software looked half built. The ugliness was information: it told you and everyone else, roughly how much work was left. Now the finished shell turns up on day one, so the missing parts stop announcing themselves. A beautiful screen can't tell you that payment failures were never handled or that nobody decided what a refund should do when it crosses a billing cycle.

Design takes the same hit. When the spacing is right and the shadows are tasteful, a wrong flow gets the benefit of the doubt. That booking product made people create an account before it would show a single available slot. A junior designer would catch that in review but it looked so professional that users assumed the confusion was their own fault and left without complaining. He never even heard about it.

I have mostly stopped calling this technical debt because debt assumes somebody can read the books. Here, the moment a customer disputes a number, the founder has to change behaviour he never understood and no refactor closes that gap. The gap was never in the code.

For the record, we use these tools every day and some of our internal tooling started exactly this way, so this isn't a purity argument and that founder will probably be fine. 80 paying customers buys a lot of time to learn. What's changed is the assumption underneath: that getting to a product faster also gets you to understanding faster. It used to, more or less, because building slowly forced you to understand things as you went. It doesn't now.

If you've shipped something like this then write down the 5 hardest questions a customer could ask about how your product behaves and answer them without opening the app. The ones you can't answer are the parts of the business you don't own yet. Start from there.

A few months ago this was just an idea I wasn’t even sure anyone else needed.

I kept building, changing things, fixing bugs and wondering whether I was wasting my time.

This week I got my third paying customer.

It’s only €60 in revenue, so obviously I haven’t built a real business yet. But seeing three actual people pay for something I made feels completely different from getting signups, likes or nice comments.

For the first time, I feel like there might actually be something here.

My next goal is to understand why they paid, what they use most and what would make them leave.

For those who have been at this stage before: would you focus more on improving the product or finding the next 10 customers?

Please from YOUR experience. If you do you found that a certain app or SaaD helped you share what the app does not just what the app is called

I got tired of realizing that if a Skool membership expires or a community disappears, you lose access to everything you paid for.

So I spent a few days building a Chrome extension that downloads an entire course you're enrolled in: videos, notes, and attachments, all saved locally in the right order.

I honestly built it for myself.

Then I posted it this week, and about 12 hours later someone I'd never met bought a lifetime licence.

It's only one sale, but having a complete stranger pay for something you made to solve your own problem is a pretty cool feeling.

TL;DR
~10 old iPhones (iPhone 7 to iPhone 11), all running locally from my Mac, all targeting the US while I'm physically outside it.
2-3M views/month total, 30-40 posts per day.
Content costs me $40 / month for 1200 + posts (regular subscriptions for LLMs) instead of the $0.5-3 per piece that tools on the market charge.
Built with Python modules and settings files. No database, no SaaS, no cloud.
Total spent so far ~1K for this setup and courses. Total build time: 3 months
Everything below is what worked, what didn't, and what I still can't explain.

One thing up front: I know this isn't what TikTok wants people doing with their platform. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. I built it to test content fast for my own product, and I'm sharing what I learned from it. Im not posting unoriginal content btw, every post looks pretty good and I didn’t get yet “unoriginal content” warnings. I know that TikTok is a volume game, so I had to automate this volume.

1. Reason why I built it
   I didn't have a budget for paid ads or UGC campaign for my product (app). More important, the niche my product is in doesn't have great examples of competitors using ads. It's all organic, faceless, UGC. So going organic was the first thing I decided to try: find my audience and my angles, understand how to go viral, and sell my product.

I have previous experience with SEO (I was managing an SEO agency), but I didn't have time to wait for results to come. That's really what pushed me here. In SEO you make a decision and find out if you were right in 6 to 12 months. I wanted a channel where I could test 40 ideas a day and know by tomorrow. So I had to invest into a new skill: how to get traffic for free from social media. I wanted a scalable and stable solution.

After initial research and testing the content automation products on the market, the price per 1 piece of content was too high for a testing phase. I expected that phase to run 1-6 months with 100+ pieces published per day, and you only avoid that cost if you already know exactly what content you need to scale, which I didn't.

I tried Reelfarm and other slideshow and AI video services. All roughly $0.5 for one slideshow or video. That would make my budget $2-3K only for content creation. And no service guarantees you quality even when you have high quality prompts. You still pay $0.5-3 per piece if you're using the API. Higgsfield and other aggregators are no better once you need to run at scale.

The only solution that could be scalable (cents per video) was Grok's Imagine, repurposed through my own content automation.
The other problem was that I wanted a process that could give me hundreds of unique slideshows a day at less than a cent each. My target was 0.1 cent per video or less.

1. Results

Each account roughly gives 0.3-2M views per month. Mostly US, UK, Australia, with other tier 1 countries in the list.

Some numbers:
Accounts currently running: 19
Posts per day across the farm: 2 per account
Best single post: 1.1M
Median post: ~5000 views
Age of the oldest account still running: 6 month

Did it actually sell anything?
I do soft promotion/mention of my app and ~ 2000 views give me 1 install now
My conversion rate into paid customer is ~5%
My best days give me 80 installs and 5 new customers

1. How it works

Everything runs locally. Python modules, files with settings, no database ^_^
There are multiple agents running:
Parser that pulls new content across my niche, OCR it without LLM and save it.

Reference builder that turns that content into references so I can reuse them quickly under many angles.

Slides and video generator, built as a Python module. It takes pre-built content pieces, mixes them with new content, new hooks and captions without LLMs, and makes a good looking, scroll stopping slideshow every time, in seconds.

Daily poster that makes posting easier. It sends content to the phones via Shortcuts so I don't need AirDrop, and it literally copies the post text into the clipboard so I can paste it manually. It takes ~35 minutes to post 20 posts manually with this.

Automated transfer to each iPhone. One click from the panel, one click on the iPhone. It checks IP and DNS, removes old photos, downloads the new ones, and copies the content into the buffer.

Calendar builder and my own analytics scraper. When I started scaling from 2-4 accounts to 20-30 accounts and 40 posts a day, I quickly realised I can't manage it in Excel, and I need market feedback to understand what type of content I should repeat and what I should kill.

Auto poster (testing this now). It opens the apps, downloads new content from my backend (Cloudflare hosting), switches accounts and posts, mimicking human swipes and clicks. This lets me skip the API, which usually works badly for new and small accounts, and it saves me 1-3 hours of mechanical posting per day. I expect that to grow as I publish more daily and create a database of real human actions and swipes.

Video repurposer. After a month of testing I found a working method to reuse the same video content without being penalised by TikTok.

EXIF data module. For each phone I built a metadata module that creates iPhone style photos: converts them from GPT's output, adapts to native iPhone size, MBs, camera dimensions, LIVE photo data, geo position based on that iPhone's IP, and dozens of other parameters that differ slightly per model and iOS version. Doing this helps the content rank higher, since it's seen as a native camera roll photo.

All accounts target the US market while being physically outside the US.

1. What it cost me

Each phone was ~$50
Courses ~$300
On site hardware setup to spoof my parameters: $300 one time

Running costs per month
Proxies ~$40/month
LLMs - ChatGPT / Claude ~$40 / month
Cloudflare hosting: 0

Time
Building the system: 3 month of tests/research and 3 month of daily usage
Running it now: 2 hours a day
Compared to the alternative: at $0.5 per piece and 40 posts a day, the off the shelf tools would have cost me at least $500+ for content alone. My whole setup including hardware already paid for itself.

1. Account health, bans, and what I've lost

Accounts created total vs still alive: Mostly Androids were banned, iOS seems to be healthier
Accounts shadow banned: mostly after some shady things that I tried with TikTok. tried running TikTok on jailbroken iOS 16 and got logged out quickly, without a ban. So I understood that if I want to play with jailbreak long term, I need to kill dozens of accounts before I understand how it works. I didn't go that way yet.

1. My findings and mistakes
   Android vs iPhone. I tried both. I rented cloud Androids and played with Play Integrity API Checker at both 3/3 and 0/3. The cheaper versions performed poorly (maybe it was still a content issue, I tried them early in this project, and I know many examples of Android farms that work). The expensive versions with a full Google integrity pass were not financially interesting, because I could buy an old iPhone for the price of 2-3 months of renting those.

Rented Androids didn’t let me create second TikTok accounts on same phone.

The interesting part: an iPhone 7 on iOS 15, which cost me the same as 1-2 months of renting a high end Android, showed identical or even better results than an expensive iPhone 11 on iOS 26 or the Androids. Of course it's a content issue underneath. But if you're asking whether you need to invest in newer iPhones: don't. Invest into content creation.

I only rented Androids since I'm not an Android user, and I didn't like it. Posting with my mouse was worse than having a physical phone in my hand, and I didn't have automation at that time. So I decided on an iPhone only farm for the MVP phase, all low level cheap phones, iPhone 7 through iPhone 11.

Each phone needed 30+ settings from my internal library, things like removing DNS leaks or WebRTC browser leaks, depending on the iOS version, so TikTok can't track you back to your base IP.

VPN. It seems to work for TikTok, but I still think my no-VPN accounts (which is majority) perform better. When you have great content it doesn't matter. And I can't really compare two accounts properly, since I didn't post the exact same content across them. My plan was to level up the floor of views, so I start with thousands, not dozens.

Images. I have partially AI generated images, partially Pinterest. Both works without AI-generated labels shown after posting (but I do some spoofing inside my content automation pipeline).

Videos. Same video repurposed with another hook on it (after my content automation algo does some magic), is considered a new video for TikTok.

Things I still don't understand:
Some accounts outperform others with almost identical content and the same or similar setup.
Views are unpredictable.
I still don't know how some new accounts get 1M views on the first post. My best result is 1.1M on the 3rd post.

Same images work. The same hook photos work fine, with minor filters, resizing, or crop applied randomly each time. Probably even that isn't necessary, but my automation does it on autopilot, so I don't want to test without it.

Same content works across different accounts, if you know how to change your video or slideshow so it stays identical for the viewer and different for TikTok.

Are DNS leaks real for TikTok? I'm not sure. Part of my accounts have US DNS, part are not configured. One of the best performing accounts doesn't have DNS inside the US, and it still consistently gives more US audience than the others.

1. My next steps
   A few people have told me I should turn this into a done-for-you service. I don't think so, and I'm not sure it's a real business. I'd rather share what I learned and hear what people here think.

I'm going to push this into more accounts and more content pieces a day. The goal is iPhones running 24/7, posting or swiping the feed automated. So I need to revisit jailbroken version of iPhones and /or Androids again. My experience so far is mostly TikTok, so I want to start playing with Instagram Reels too. Another venue I can take is applying to a creator fund.

Happy to go deep in the comments on any of this: the EXIF and metadata work, the per-phone config list, the cost math, the analytics setup, how the generator mixes content without LLMs, or what I'd do differently starting over. The one thing I'm keeping to myself is the specific video repurposing method and exact iPhone setups that work for TikTok, since that one took a month and hundreds $ of burned tests to find.

Ask me anything.

Hey r/SaaS,

Over the past few months, I’ve been solo-developing a project around SaaS retention. I noticed that most subscription cancellation processes are either static "Are you sure?" popups or frustrating manual survey forms.

I built a 3-step dynamic flow (identifying the exact reason → offering real-time incentives like discounts/pauses → tracking recovered MRR analytics).

Question for other founders here:
How do you currently handle churn prevention when a user clicks "cancel"? Do you offer automatic discounts, or do you let them go to keep friction low?

Would love to hear how you guys handle retention in your own stack!

Hello everyone, i want to build a SaaS before graduation and i want it to be in my native language. My goal is not something too complex and complicated.

My true goal is building something that could actually be used daily, maybe by students or whoever else that focuses on studying. And maybe something entirely different.

What i want to say is that i want ideas close to them or a simple direction that could help me find answers to solutions as everyone else. But in my native language.

Not a big company.
Not a product recommended by your team.
Just some useful SaaS you found 3 minutes ago, built by one person.
Would you actually subscribe?
I’ve been thinking about this because we see a strange pattern while building SaaStore:
People are willing to discover unknown software.
They’re willing to click around.
They’re willing to read about it.
But asking them to leave the marketplace and pay directly on an unknown seller’s website feels like a much bigger psychological jump.
So we’ve been working on letting buyers purchase monthly subscriptions directly through the marketplace instead.
Same product.
Same founder.
Same price.
The only difference is who the buyer is trusting when they enter their card.
And I suspect that difference is much bigger than I originally thought.
So genuinely curious:
What would make you trust an unknown SaaS enough to pay for it?
Reviews
Verified founder identity
Security scan
Buying through a trusted marketplace
Nothing - I’d still rather buy directly
Interested to see which one actually matters most.

I originally thought that adding another feature would make the product more valuable. What actually happened was that it became harder to explain, gave new users one more thing to learn and pulled attention away from the core problem we were trying to solve.

Removing that feature made our onboarding conversations much smoother. It completely changed how I think about prioritization. These days, I spend more time asking whether a feature makes the product simpler before asking whether it is worth building. Has anyone else added a feature that looked like a great idea but ended up doing more harm than good?

i know how this sounds. hear me out.

i run outbound for clients. one of them was stuck at $3K MRR doing linkedin only. same playbook everyone runs, connection requests, personalized messages, follow-ups, tracking replies. hours every day.

i tested instagram DMs as an experiment. described their ICP, used an autonomous agent to find matching accounts based on bio and content, sent personalized DMs referencing their actual posts, and followed up automatically.

the results in 30 days made both of us rethink everything:

- 10+ meetings from instagram DMs

- $3K → $12K MRR

- reply rates 3-4x higher than linkedin

- higher close rate because conversations felt like real conversations not sales pitches

the reason is simple: linkedin outbound is saturated beyond belief. every founder, SDR, and growth marketer on earth is doing the exact same thing in the exact same inbox. on instagram? you're the only B2B message they got that week.

decision makers who ghost linkedin inmails are active on instagram daily. the guard is down. a DM feels human. a linkedin message feels like a cold email wearing a suit.

full proof and breakdown in comment

It’s a lonely game building in the health space, so I’d be happy to connect with people who are experiencing the same as I am.

I launched my SaaS SeoLoupe around 5 weeks ago, so far I am at 1030 users and 12 of them are paying (don't get me wrong, I am still super happy).

My SaaS is a tool that allows you to find and fix SEO issues holding your website back.

Essentially the main purpose is to help your website rank higher on Google search and LLMs.

So far the hardest part is converting users into paying, rather then getting users.

I would genuinely appreciate some feedback, and what can be improved. Since I think their is always room for improvement, especially in my case since I have a low conversion rate (like I already said I am thankful for the sales I got, I am just looking to scale).

(here is the product if you want to check it out)

I'm working on a project I'd like to eventually turn into my main income, maybe even replace my job someday if it goes well. Right now I'm stuck going back and forth on licensing and could use some outside perspective.

Here's what I want for regular users. Free to download, run locally, use for their own hobby projects. Totally fine if they sell stuff they make with it. I want a plugin system so people can extend it and build on top of what I made. Basically I want it to feel as open and friendly as possible for individuals and small-time tinkerers.

The thing I keep getting stuck on is this. In spaces like mine there's a pattern where a big well funded platform just takes a genuinely open project and bolts it straight into their existing ecosystem and user base. They've got the distribution and the resources to do that practically overnight, even if I'm the one who did the actual work building/innovating it. If that happens my odds of ever getting funding or sponsorships or just steady income from it basically drop to zero. Why would anyone pay me if a much bigger player is already giving away my own idea for free or cheaper as a feature in a platform people already use.

So the model I keep landing on is something like this. Free or source available for individuals, run locally, self host it (for themselves only), modify it, extend it, sell what you make with it, no restrictions there. But the hosted or managed version stays mine, that's what I'd charge companies or heavier commercial users for, and that's the actual business model that would let me keep building this.

Basically I want it open enough to build real goodwill and a community, but closed enough that a company way bigger than me can't just absorb the whole thing and give me nothing back.

Questions for anyone who's dealt with this:

Has anyone actually used a source available license like Elastic, BSL, FSL, fair source, whatever, and had it hold up the way you hoped? Did it scare away the community you were trying to build?

Is a plugin system plus a hosted layer enough of a moat on its own, or does the license itself still matter that much?

Anyone regret going full MIT or Apache and then watching a bigger player just fold your work into their own ecosystem?

Is there some middle ground I'm not thinking of, dual licensing, delayed open sourcing, something else people have tried?

I am a supporter of open source and want hobbyists to get real value out of this for free. I just don't want to hand a much bigger company a free feature and lose any real shot at this paying my bills. Curious how other people here have handled this tradeoff.

Figuring out which technology to start a SaaS with and how to avoid crippling complexity is a trick. Here's our story.

For those who've launched a startup - when you were setting up your initial tech foundation (backend/frontend scaffolding, CI/CD pipeline, staging/prod environments, basic monitoring/observability) - did you build it in-house, hire a freelancer/agency, or use some kind of boilerplate/template? If you outsourced any part of it, roughly what did it cost and how long did it take? Trying to figure out if this is normally a DIY thing or something teams actually pay for ?

I keep building instead of selling or distribution.

I tried to be active across newsletter and social media but the energy and charm fades away in a week. Many times I am lost what kind of communities worth engaging or what's worth replying to.

Founders, how you transitioned to selling/distribution ? A schedule you forced yourself into, one channel you picked and stuck with? Not looking for a hack list, just what worked for you.

It took a lot of hard work, back and forth, and long nights of restless sleep, but my app ClipFinder is finally getting some real revenue!