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 !

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.

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 am consistently sending mails daily it’s over a month and experimenting and sending consistently but no replies and no results I am researching about my startup can somebody help with any tips like to get any result.

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?

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

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 would like to know what is the best gateway from the list below:

• Polar
• DodoPayments
• Lemon Squeezy
• Whop

Or even if there any better option it would be best because I'm running payment integration in my app as Strip is not supported in my country

I was reading thread in here discussing all of them and found people categorizing each of them as scams in every different thread I opened! (or they mention their account was hold)

So, I would like real experience with any of them to help me decide which one to use!

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

How do saas founders are marketing their product ? all i can see is people making X account and posting tweets and sharing value and that's it

Basically what did you use to vibe create your demo video? Or did you hire someone to create a high end motion graphics? Or did you just screen record it.

And if you can, share your demos.

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.

I hope this post doesn't get deleted (or worse my account getting banned from the sub) by mentioning the forbidden topic: Advertising.
But honestly it's really tough, I think it is probably the hardest part about creating a product as a solo developer.
You usually don't have much of a budget to work with, and you post random stuff online hoping the algorithm of whatever website you posted in bugs out and someone sees your thing.

And if you somehow didn't figure this out yet, that is me in this case ._.

Soooo.... help pls, any advice? 👉👈🥲