r/startup by u/Finaler0795 4mo ago How do you actually find the first user who's willing to try your product and talk to you?( I will not promote) I’m not frustrated because people hate my product, I’m frustrated because no one is willing to actually spend a few minutes using it and give honest feedback.
Over the past few days, I’ve been actively trying to validate what I built:
* Posting on X
* Launching on Product Hunt
* DMing people who *might* have a need (indie hackers, founders, even some investors)
* Offering free pro access and clearly saying I’d iterate quickly based on their feedback
Still, almost no one was willing to truly try it.
Since I’m building a form tool, I created a survey asking potential beta users about their use cases and needs, and posted it to communities like SurveyExchange and SurveySwap.
What I got instead:
* Generic compliments with no substance
* Very few real clicks
* Clearly fake emails
* Zero people who actually cared about the problem
On X, direct outreach hasn’t been much better either, mostly polite replies, or complete silence.
So now I’m genuinely asking:
When you have no brand, no audience, and no social leverage,
**where do you actually find your first user who’s willing to communicate with you**?
If you’ve been through this stage,
**what channels or approaches actually wor
Open on Reddit r/SaaS by u/YaroslavMadvillain 1mo ago How to find real user problems for your SaaS? Im stuck and dont know where to look for real user problems. Browsing Reddit is fine, but how do I systematically find something relevant? What exactly should I look for in complaints or frequently asked questions? And how do I properly validate who to talk to, how many people, and what to ask so I don't get a "well, yeah, great"? Does anyone have a workflow from identifying pain points to first validating an idea? Right now, I feel like I'm either inventing problems or staring into space.
Open on Reddit r/smallbusiness by u/grey-slate 3mo ago Dear SEO company vultures — please stop emailing small businesses with your trash If you run a small business, you probably know exactly what I’m talking about.
Every single day my inbox gets flooded with emails like:
>I noticed your website is getting some traction recently...but
Or
>I noticed you have been optimizing your online presence but we can help do a no obligation audit to see where it can go even further
You didn’t “notice” anything.
You scraped a contact email from our website or a directory and blasted out the same template to thousands of businesses.
And somehow **no spam filter on earth seems capable of stopping this**. It’s a constant stream of the same message from different domains, different Gmail accounts, and slightly different wording.
Small business owners already spend half their day dealing with real operational problems. We don’t need a daily barrage of low-effort cold emails pretending to be personalized outreach.
If a business actually wants SEO services, they will go find a reputable firm.
Cold-emailing small businesses every day with fake “audits” isn’t marketing — it’s spam.
Please fuck right off. If you were good, we would have found you and hired you already.
Sincerely,
Every small business owner with an email inbox
Open on Reddit r/SaaS by u/CleverSquirrel_p 3mo ago My SaaS hit 500 paid users 🎉 Here's what actually worked vs what was a waste of time 8 months since launching my problem validation platform and I just crossed 140 paying customers. Went through plenty of failed marketing strategies after listening to random posts on Reddit to figure out what actually drives growth versus what just makes you "feel" busy (warning, there are a lot of b.s. strats out there)
What actually finally worked:
Discord and Slack communities (SUPER UNDERRATED). Joined 8-10 founder communities and became known for sharing validation insights. This is a super underrated method in my opinion that many sleep on. The heated conversations in the threads on the channels revealed exactly what entrepreneurs struggle with most. When someone posted about needing startup ideas, I'd DM directly offering to help (that's the best part of these communities). Much more personal than public posts and converted way better.
Twitter build-in-public content (posted about my progress). Shared actual user problems I found, demos of new features, and lessons learned. Nothing fancy, just authentic updates about the journey. Built a following of 0 - 9.8k people who actually care about SaaS. Several customers found me through viral tweets about failed startup ideas. T
Open on Reddit r/indiehackers by u/zulic 11mo ago I’ve launched 5 SaaS products and needed a better way to find leads - so I built this Hey everyone 👋
I’m a solo founder who’s launched 5 SaaS products (and working on more), and I kept running into the same two problems:
**1. Where do I find customers?**
**2. How do I market without spending all day on it?**
Tools like Brand24, Google Alerts, and others exist… but they’re either too expensive, limit how many keywords you can track, or just dump a **wall of junk mentions** on you. You end up wasting hours reading irrelevant stuff, trying to guess if it’s worth replying.
So I built **MentionMind** \- a system that tracks what people say across social media and websites… **but adds smart filtering and AI summaries to save your time.**
It’s not just another noisy alert tool - it’s more like a quiet assistant that runs in the background and shows you only high-quality, relevant mentions, based on your goals.
# Here’s what it does:
💸 **No subscription** \- one-time payment, because I hate monthly billing
🔍 **Unlimited keywords** \- no tracking limits
🔔 **Real-time alerts** \- see new mentions as they happen
🧠 **AI summaries + lead quality scoring** \- stop reading 20 tabs; know in seconds if a mention is worth your attention
💻 **Free API access** \- for b
Open on Reddit r/startup by u/EmilianoLGU 11mo ago I Launched 39 Startups Until One Made Me Millions. This Is What I Wish I Knew. **Most “founders” never launch anything.**
They build a project for months, never complete it and eventually scrap the product. Or launch it and get no customers.
**Startups are truthfully a numbers game.** Even the best founders have hit rates under 10%. Just look at founders like Peter Levels.
So how do you maximize your chances of success, the honest answer is to increase the number of startups you launch.
I’m going to get hate for this: but you should NOT spend hundreds of hours building a product… until you know for certain that there is demand.
You should launch with just a landing page.
Write a one pager on what you will build, and use a completely free UI library like Magic UI to build a landing page.
It should take you under a day.
Then what do you do?
Add a stripe checkout button and/or a book a demo button.
And then launch. Post everywhere about it(Reddit, X, LinkedIn, etc) and message anyone on the internet who has ever mentioned having the problem you are solving.
Launch and dedicate yourself to marketing and sales for 1 week straight.
If you can’t get signups or demo requests within 1 week of marketing it 24/7... KILL IT and START OVER.
Most “startups”
Open on Reddit r/microsaas by u/HowDoILive11 1mo ago How do you find boring problems that could become a Micro SaaS? I keep seeing people say the best micro saas ideas are usually boring problems and not out of the box idea (in most of the cases)
Which makes sense, but I’m still not clear on how people actually find those problems.
Like are you just hanging around niche communities or any platform until you see the same complaint again and again?
Talking to small business owners?
Checking bad reviews of existing tools?
I’m trying not to fall into the trap of building something just because it sounds cool and then nobody actually wants it.
For people here who found a real idea, where did it actually come from?
Open on Reddit r/B2BSaaS by u/kisumao 1mo ago Do SaaS directories actually work for lead gen or is it mostly a business for “submit your startup” tools? Serious question.
I keep seeing people recommend submitting SaaS products to dozens or even hundreds of directories.
But I honestly can’t tell if founders are actually getting customers from them or if the only people benefiting are the ones selling directory submission services/tools.
Most directories seem dead.
Low traffic.
AI generated listings.
No real community.
No intent.
And yet Twitter/X is full of posts like:
“Submitted to 120 directories”
“Boost your DR”
“Get backlinks fast”
So I’m curious about real experiences here:
1. Did directories bring you actual paying users?
2. Which directories were worth it?
3. Was it SEO value only or real conversions too?
4. Is manual outreach/content/community building simply a better use of time?
Feels like Product Hunt is still relevant, but the rest might just be an ecosystem selling shovels during a gold rush.
Open on Reddit r/Entrepreneur by u/rluna559 9mo ago Forced every engineer to take sales calls. They rewrote our entire platform in 2 weeks Our senior DevOps engineer thought I'd lost my mind. He didn't join a startup to do sales. So he promised me 5 calls and I guaranteed he'd never have to do it again. It was a bit of a back-and-forth but I strongly believe it fundamentally changed how we build products.
When I sat in on the calls, I observed a few things:
\- Seeing them explain why our competitor's platform was "too complex for non-technical users."
\- Seeing them assure the customer that the continuous monitoring was actually working (We had beautiful logs and metrics. But what they wanted was a green checkmark.)
\- Seeing them respond when customers asked "Can someone just do this for me?"
Most of our team are backend engineers too and I think this fundamentally made them better product designers. At the end of it, they were sketching a completely different architecture without my "PMing". Because they finally understood who was actually using our product.
The rewrite took 2 weeks. We removed 60% of features. Added a simple progress bar. Built Slack integration for questions. Created "done-for-you" workflows.
Our support tickets dropped 70%.
The biggest problem with most engineers is actually over-en
Open on Reddit r/startup by u/Shot-Fly-6980 10mo ago Struggling to Find People to Talk to for Problem/Solution Validation How do I find people to talk to to validate a problem?
I've sent 100+ DMs to product managers and project managers by manually searching through subreddits; I'm left with a sub-20% response rate and 1 person who truly articulated their desired solution.
The pain is something that everyone faces on some level; however, I'm trying to find those who experience this as a hair-on-fire pain. Rewind AI attempted to solve this pain, but they approached it by *recording* everything on your screen—a huge privacy concern.
I wish to find 30-50 people who are willing to articulate their pain, current tools & workarounds, etc. Has anyone ever struggled with this? How did you overcome it?
I'd love to hear what you guys have to say!
Open on Reddit r/SaaS by u/homeskillet1991 3mo ago I hate sales calls, so I built an AI to book meetings for me. Would you pay $497/mo for this? I **hate** sales calls, so I built an AI to book meetings for me. Would you pay $497/mo for this?
**Real talk:** I'm good at building systems, terrible at selling.
I started freelancing last year and realized the problem most of us have isn't finding leads — it's the soul-crushing grind of cold outreach. I'd rather spend 40 hours coding a scraper than 1 hour on a discovery call.
So I built an AI system to do it for me. It worked. 8 meetings booked in 30 days without touching the phone.
Now I'm wondering: would other people actually pay for this?
**Here's what it does:**
• You fill out a 10-min form: "Who's your dream client? What problem do you solve?"
• AI scrapes your ideal customers (LinkedIn, email databases, etc.)
• Sends personalized outreach that sounds human, not robotic
• Tracks replies and sends you Slack notifications when someone's interested
• You respond to hot leads and book meetings with THEM
**Here's what it DOESN'T do:**
• Weekly strategy calls with me
• "Dedicated account manager"
• Hand-holding
You literally never talk to me. Fill out a form, approve your templates (or let AI auto-approve), check your dashboard once a day. That's it.
Open on Reddit r/smallbusiness by u/Gaogaocute 6mo ago For those building niche ideas: what part is hardest—design, sample making, or finding people who actually care? Hey everyone —
I’m reaching out to creators, makers, hardware builders, designers, and anyone trying to turn an idea into something real.
Over the past few months, I’ve been talking with different creators, and one thing keeps coming up:
# “The idea isn’t the problem — everything after the idea is the nightmare.”
So I wanted to open a real conversation here.
For you personally:
# 1️⃣ What’s the hardest part of bringing your project to life?
* Getting a prototype made?
* Finding someone who can do reliable small-batch manufacturing?
* Cost of materials / samples?
* Not knowing where to find early supporters?
* Or just feeling like no one will take your idea seriously unless it’s already big?
# 2️⃣ What’s the part you wish someone could help with?
* Technical support?
* Better pricing for low-volume production?
* A place to gather the first 20–50 early adopters?
* Guidance on packaging / shipping / scaling?
# 3️⃣ If you could wave a magic wand and fix ONE thing in the creation → prototype → launch process… what would it be?
I’m asking because I’m genuinely curious how different creators experience the journey.
Some people say *funding isn’t the problem* — the real
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