r/SaaS by u/MonkDi 10mo ago I made a lot of mistakes with my first SaaS startup. I'm sharing them here along with the solutions I have in mind – are they correct? This is a longer post, but I believe in sharing experiences transparently. My first startup gave me grey hairs at 31, but I don’t regret the journey. Here I list the mistakes I made and possible solutions. Maybe it will help someone to avoid them, and I also'd be grateful if someone with more experience could tell me if the solutions I target are the right direction.
A year and a half ago, my partner Val and I launched [Aiter.io](http://Aiter.io), an AI MarTech startup. The premise was simple: generate ads, content, and strategy with a single click. We followed the classic MVP playbook, building and launching in just two weeks. It was functionally basic and, frankly, looked terrible. But it worked. We got our first positive feedback and early traction, so we decided to push forward. That’s where my long journey of pain, joy, and crucial lessons began.
# Mistake #1: We didn't implement signup and payments from Day 0 and lost out on 50,000 potential users.
Adding a simple email signup and basic Stripe integration is only 2-3 days of development. Yet we didn't do it, deciding our "lean" approach meant testing only the core hypothesis. This was a critical error in judgement.
A Fren
Open on Reddit r/SaaS by u/DenisYurchak 1y ago What nobody tells you about traction. Reaching 1,5k users changed my day-to-day life completely I’ve been building apps for 3 years little to no success. Recently, I launched my first successful startup. It is called Yadaphone**,** and it lets people make cheap international calls from the browser. In under 3 months, it reached 1500 users, 7 enterprise customers, and brought in $15,000 in revenue.
Before that, I thought I had a clear idea of how indie hacking works: you build something, launch it, get users, and continue doing the same stuff as at the start, but on a larger scale (and get $$$). That couldn’t be further from the truth. Here are the top problems I wish someone had warned me about.
**1. A lot of eyeballs are good, but be prepared, the sharks will come**
I posted about my app several times on Reddit and X. A few posts blew up, and it got featured on Product Hunt. Over a million people saw it. 50,000 visited the website. We got tons of sign-ups and sales. But along with the good users came fraudsters and hackers.
I spent several nights fighting them off live. Some were successful and we lost a bit of money to fraud. Others were dumb and we blocked them instantly. Lesson: if you’re even mildly successful, malicious users will show up. From day 1, implement ema
Open on Reddit r/SideProject by u/Mysterious_Yard_7803 4mo ago Built a system that finds validated startup problems from Reddit/HN complaints. Here's what it discovered this week i got tired of the startup idea loop.
you know the one. think of idea. research for hours. find competitors. get discouraged. repeat.
so i built something that flips it. instead of starting with ideas, it starts with real complaints.
scrapes reddit and hacker news daily. uses ai to identify posts where someone is describing a genuine problem. scores each one based on how painful it is, how frequently it comes up, and whether people indicate they'd pay for a solution.
this week's top 5 scoring problems:
1. browser-based data cleaning for healthcare compliance officers — they're spending 5 to 8 hours weekly on manual cleaning. pain score 8.5.
2. ai security scanning that actually handles mcp server compliance — infrastructure teams are doing this manually. pain score 8.5.
3. gdpr-compliant meeting assistant for european cross-border sales teams — existing tools don't handle eu specific requirements. pain score 8.5.
4. automated audit trail generation for ai model deployments — nobody's built this well yet. pain score 8.2.
5. browser extension that monitors saas subscription pricing changes — people getting silently charged more. pain score 7.9.
the common thread: all of the
Open on Reddit r/SideProject by u/Sad_Floor3490 4mo ago I built an exportable database of 100k+ user complaints from Reddit across 500+ niches i got tired of guessing what to build so i started scraping user complaints from reddit across every niche i could find
the database now has hundreds of thousands of complaints from posts and comments across 500+ niches. each one is categorized, analyzed, and broken down by pain point.
you can search any niche and instantly see what people are frustrated about. what tools they hate. what features they keep asking for. what they'd pay money for.
but here's the part i just shipped that i'm really excited about:
you can now export all of it as a json file and feed it directly into any ai model.
here's what i did:
1\\ searched product management complaints
2\\ exported everything as a json file
3\\ uploaded it to claude opus 4.6
4\\ asked it to analyze the top complaints and give me 10 detailed startup ideas
in seconds i got back 10+ ideas each with exact quotes from real users, pain point breakdowns, solution outlines, market sizing, monetization strategies, and the key features to build first.
every idea is backed by real people complaining about real problems. not some ai making stuff up.
you can ask it anything too. competitive ana
Open on Reddit r/SaaS by u/B3N0U 1mo ago i got permanently banned from the subreddit that was generating 80% of my leads. it was the best thing that happened to my SaaS. i'm going to tell you about the dumbest and most expensive marketing mistake i made this year. and why losing my best channel forced me to build something way more sustainable.
i run a LinkedIn automation API with my cofounder. We're at €3K MRR, two founders, zero ad spend. but 2 months ago we were at €105 MRR and i was doing something incredibly stupid.
the channel that was working too well
there's a big subreddit in the AI/automation space (200K+ weekly visitors) where my target audience hangs out. i started posting use cases. real stuff i was building, real problems i was solving, real results.
it worked insanely well:
one post hit 82 upvotes and 12.5K views
another hit 46 upvotes and 43K views
total: roughly 77K views across 5 posts
12+ qualified DM leads
several converted directly to paying customers
i was hooked. this one subreddit was generating most of my revenue. i thought i had found the cheat code.
the ban
then i got permanently banned. the mod message was long, detailed, and completely fair. they listed every reason:
every single one of my 5 posts was a sales funnel for my product. zero non promotional contribution.
i kept telling people to "DM me for the
Open on Reddit r/SaaS by u/Abject_Hovercraft528 4mo ago How I went from $0 to $1.2k MRR in 6 weeks using only organic Reddit engagement (No Ads) Most early-stage SaaS founders (myself included) make the mistake of thinking they need a massive ad budget or a 10k follower Twitter account to get those first 10-20 paying customers.
Six weeks ago, I had zero users. I decided to spend $0 on ads and instead focused entirely on high-intent Reddit conversations. Here is the process I used to hit $1.2k MRR manually before I started automating the workflow.
1. Keyword Listening > Spamming
Instead of posting 'Check out my tool' in every thread, I set up alerts for specific pain points. For example, if you’re building a CRM, don't look for 'CRM recommendations.' Look for people saying 'I hate \[Competitor\]' or 'How do I track X without a spreadsheet?' Helping someone solve a problem in the comments builds 10x more trust than a landing page link.
2. The 80/20 Value to Pitch Ratio
I followed a strict rule: 80% of my comment had to be actual advice that worked regardless of whether they used my tool. Only the last 20% was a “soft mention.”
Example:
“You can solve this manually first.
Ask them what they’re currently using and where it breaks down (spreadsheet? Notion? HubSpot?).
Offer a manual workaround.
Only after that
Open on Reddit r/dataanalysis by u/Due-Doughnut1818 4mo ago How I built my portfolio project Hi there
I recently finished a portfolio project and honestly, it took me a while to figure out how to build something like this.
At the beginning, I posted a question on this sub, and
\*\*broadstreet\_org\*\* replied with a prompt that helped me extract the main questions Product Managers usually care about. I used that as my starting point and built the whole project around answering those questions with data.
Here’s what I did step by step:
Generated a realistic dataset (and tried to make it as logical as possible).
Created the tables in SQL Server.
Used Python to handle the ETL process.
Did some EDA in SQL.
Defined KPIs based on PM-focused business questions.
Finally built the Power BI dashboard.
You can check out the full project here:
\[PM Voice – SaaS Analysis Project\](https://github.com/Madian20/Portfolio\_Projects/blob/main/PMVoice%20-%20SaaS%20Analysis%20/READ\_ME.md)
I’d really appreciate any tips to make my next project better
Open on Reddit r/indiehackers by u/theblack5 6mo ago I Finally Launched Leado — Built After Missing Real Leads on Reddit A few months ago I discovered something by accident:
Reddit was sending me leads… and I wasn’t catching them.
Someone mentioned my product in a subreddit, people replied asking for details, and I only saw it *weeks* later.
That ended up becoming the spark for a new project.
I built [Leado](https://leado.co), an AI that tracks buying-intent posts on Reddit and drafts context-aware replies. Nothing “growth hacky,” just a way to not miss real conversations where people are actively searching for solutions.
Today it went live on two platforms:
**TinyLaunch:**
[https://www.tinylaunch.com/launch/7403](https://www.tinylaunch.com/launch/7403)
**Uneed:**
[https://www.uneed.best/tool/leado](https://www.uneed.best/tool/leado)
Posting here because IndieHackers is where the idea actually started and got a lot of support from the community. I kept seeing founders talk about missing customer signals, so I tried solving one of my own.
If you have a moment, I’d love:
• feedback on the product
• thoughts on the landing page
• suggestions for improving the launch
• honest critique on the idea itself
Happy to share any metrics or lessons once the launches settle.
Open on Reddit r/SaaS by u/Last_Inspector2515 3mo ago I scraped 7,000+ leads by stalking my competitors' LinkedIn posts — here's exactly how Not gonna lie, I felt a little weird about this strategy at first.
But the results were hard to argue with, so let me break it down.
# The problem I was trying to solve:
I needed leads — but I didn't want to spray and pray with cold outreach. Everyone's inbox is full of garbage DMs from people who clearly never looked at your profile. I wanted to reach people who were already interested in what I was selling, without paying for ads.
# The insight:
Every time an influencer or competitor in your niche posts on LinkedIn, hundreds of people engage with it. These aren't random people. They follow this space. They care about it. They've literally raised their hand and said "this is relevant to me."
That's a warm audience sitting right there in public — and almost nobody is targeting them.
# What I did:
I went through the LinkedIn posts of the top influencers and competitors in my niche — and scraped every single person who liked or commented on them.
Then I sent them connection requests with a short, relevant message.
No "I'd love to add you to my network." Actual context. Something like: "Saw you engaged with \[X's\] post on \[topic\] — I'm building something in that space, wo
Open on Reddit r/SaaS by u/PossibleFirm7095 4mo ago "How can I get my first 100?" Listen here. Takes a minute Ren, SaaS marketer.
Many of the SaaS founders here can build anything but freeze at selling.
So here's ONE method I personally used to generate 414 sign-ups and made 3,300 conversations with potential users in 3 weeks for s SaaS I worked on
You get to imagine how much feedback we had.
We made 55 users for our current [SaaS](https://researchphantom.com) in just 2 weeks.
Sold many other software; trading indicators, scrapers, and niche B2B tools using the same method.
So, for the right people and if done correctly, i know it can work.
Now, this is ONE method out of thousands and thousands of methods of getting users, it might work for you and it might not so to not waste your time, here's how to discover if it makes sense to you. (Dw, if it didn't fit your business, I will post other methods the next days)
**Q1:** Does your audience exist on Reddit?
Cool.
**Q2:** They have subs? they speak about being your audience or about the problem you solve?
Cool.
**Q3:** Are you okay with cold DMing people who need you?
Congrats, you too can find users using Reddit cold DMing.
I know most people think it's a quick way to get banned but the issue is not reddit, it's how people
Open on Reddit r/Entrepreneur by u/W_E_B_D_E_V 1mo ago anthropic just made it possible to build AI workers in plain english anthropic released something recently called managed agents and I think the business side of the internet is missing out on it. All the coverage is from developers saying its not a big deal, which I get, they already build this stuff in code. For anyone who doesn't write code though this changes things
You describe what you want an AI worker to do in plain english and anthropic builds and hosts the whole thing for you in their cloud, without anything to maintain. And it costs eight cents an hour of runtime. I tried it yesterday and had a working agent in under four minutes
I tested it on content briefs because thats a workflow I know inside out. You take a keyword, go through the top google results, pull out the structure, figure out word counts, write an outline, hand it to a writer. Takes about 45 minutes if you're being thorough. I've done hundreds of these over the years so I figured I'd know right away if the output was any good
Went into the console, described what I wanted in one sentence, and it built the agent for me. Wrote the system prompt, picked the tools, everything. Connected it to notion with one click and press create
Gave it a real keyword and it spun up its o
Open on Reddit r/Entrepreneur by u/Afraid-Albatross812 2mo ago Building the tech was the easy part. The real problem is distributing in a zero trust environment. I've been working on a lead gen project lately, and I realized something pretty frustrating. Building the actual tech, the scraping pipeline, the LLM integration, took me a fraction of the time compared to figuring out how to actually distribute the thing.
Nowadays, the channels where we distribute our SaaS (in my case I'm in the Software as a Service world) are completely saturated. The barrier to entry dropped to zero, so everyone is coding clones in a weekend, pasting AI-generated replies, and using basic scrapers to spam DMs. Because of this, people's defenses are at 100%. It's a zero-trust environment. If you try to help someone but mention your tool, a story, almost anything, you're instantly treated like a bot trying to farm engagement.
Since my project is literally a tool to find leads on these platforms, I hit this wall from two sides at the same time. I had to learn how to get eyes on my own startup, but also had to completely rethink how the product itself should work. I realized that if my engine just scraped generic keywords to help users send automated DMs, I was just feeding the exact same problem (which reminded me a post I wrote on this sub about automation and g
Open on Reddit r/SaaS by u/GuidanceSelect7706 5mo ago I made a FREE tool that finds you Leads on Reddit
Built this simple tool that finds you Reddit posts where people are asking for stuff related to the product you describe.
Just enter your website url, or manually describe what you’ve built and it finds you recent (within last 2 weeks) posts asking for a product like yours.
No signup, 100% free.
Fastest way to:
- talk to your potential customers
- find relevant posts to your niche (product discovery)
- see feature requests
- analyse competitors
- validate demand for your product ideas
Here’s the link: [Free Reddit Leads Finder](https://leadverse.ai/tools/reddit-leads-finder)
Open on Reddit r/SaaS by u/Mysterious_Yard_7803 3mo ago i tracked 700+ complaint threads and found 5 phrases that almost perfectly predict whether someone will actually pay for software this started as a side experiment and turned into probably the most useful thing i've ever done for validating ideas.
i've been cataloguing complaints from reddit, hacker news, forums, anywhere people vent about tools they use or processes they hate. 700+ entries over the past 6 months. each one scored by pain level.
at some point i noticed something. certain phrases kept showing up in the threads that eventually led to real products people paid for. other threads had tons of upvotes but zero commercial potential. the language was different.
here are the 5 phrases that consistently predict willingness to pay.
phrase 1: "i've been doing this manually for \[time period\]"
this is the strongest one. when someone says they've been doing something manually for months or years, they've already built the workflow. they understand the value of having it automated. they don't need to be educated on why your tool exists. they've been waiting for it. i found 40+ threads with this exact phrasing and almost every one maps to a tool someone is already paying for.
phrase 2: "is there a cheaper alternative to \[expensive tool\]"
this tells you three things at once. the category is proven (s
alternatives to can't believe Open on Reddit r/smallbusiness by u/mo_ahnaf11 5mo ago Any business owners struggle with manual reddit oureach? basically the title, manual search through subreddits, keywords etc waste so much of my time daily, Are you guys using any tooling to get the most out of reddit?
i know so many people use reddit and 100% theres potential customers on this platform but how do i reach out to them without wasting hours every single day with almost 0 outreach?
Open on Reddit r/SaaS by u/PhilosopherLeft6814 2mo ago I've been doing SEO professionally for 6 years. Last month I had to send an uncomfortable email to 3 of my longest clients. This is what I said I'm gonna try to keep this honest even if it makes me look bad. It will make me look bad. But whatever.
I've been doing SEO consulting since 2018. Mostly B2B SaaS clients, some ecom. Decent track record. I'm not a guru, never claimed to be, just someone who got good at a specific thing and built a small business around it.
Around October one of my oldest clients, I'll call him R, been working together nearly 4 years, messages me saying something like "hey traffic looks great but we've had almost no inbound leads for 6 weeks, pipeline is really dry, everything okay on your end?" He runs a mid-size HR tech company, been growing steadily, this kind of quiet streak was unusual for him.
My first instinct was seasonality. Then I pulled his dashboard and honestly the numbers gave me cover to believe that. Rankings solid, organic up 11% month on month, technical health clean. So I told him the SEO is working fine, this is probably a sales cycle thing or market timing, and we moved on.
I want to be clear about something: I wasn't lying to him. I genuinely believed that. That's almost the worse part of this story.
Two months later same pattern with a different client. SaaS tool for cons
Open on Reddit r/SaaS by u/Mysterious_Yard_7803 4mo ago I analyzed 4,000+ Reddit complaints and scored them by "pain level." Here's what the data shows about which problems are actually worth solving been working on a system that scrapes reddit and hacker news daily looking for real complaints that signal business opportunities.
after 3 months and 4,000+ posts analyzed, here's what surprised me.
the highest scoring problems aren't what you'd expect.
everyone's building ai writing tools, chatbots, and productivity apps. but the problems with the highest pain scores are in boring spaces.
healthcare compliance. security auditing. meeting localization for european teams. data cleaning for specific industries.
here's why:
the "boring" problems have 3 things going for them. first, the people experiencing them have real budgets. second, existing solutions are either enterprise priced or terrible. third, there's less competition because nobody thinks they're exciting enough to build.
some patterns i noticed:
problems where people describe spending specific hours per week on a manual task consistently score 8 plus out of 10. like "our compliance team wastes 8 hours per week auditing mcp servers" — that's a real post from a real person.
problems where the complaint appears across multiple subreddits independently are almost always worth investigating. if people in r/smallbusines
Open on Reddit r/SaaS by u/theblack5 7mo ago Are we seeing the end of broad ICPs? The shift to problem-first lead generation in B2B For years, B2B lead generation has been about defining an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and then blasting out content/outreach based on that. While still valuable, I'm seeing a significant shift towards a more 'problem-first' or 'intent-driven' approach, especially as the noise online gets louder.
Instead of just knowing *who* your customer is, the real gold is knowing *when* they are actively experiencing a problem that your solution addresses. This means less guessing and more listening. I've been diving deep into monitoring online discussions across various platforms, Reddit, Slack groups, specialized forums, where target audiences are openly talking about their challenges or seeking recommendations.
It's a more organic way to connect, but the challenge is scaling that listening without drowning in data. Tools that help identify these specific, high-intent conversations are becoming invaluable. I've found platforms like Leado.co particularly useful for this, as it sifts through the noise and presents actual conversations with context. Other tools like Awario or Brand24 offer broader social listening, which is great for brand mentions, but Leado.co focuses more on lead intent. E
Open on Reddit r/SaaS by u/PossibleFirm7095 5mo ago How to get 100 users/mo (not your shit avg post, you won't regret reading) Anyway, i'm Ren, a SaaS marketer. i generated 414 signups in 3 weeks doing 1 thing, and that's what i will explain in this post. but first of all, the self-promo section:
*"i'm working on something that helps SaaS founders find high-intent leads, score them based on buying intent, and convert them to your landing page without posting commenting, DMing or looking for the leads not even speaking to any of them. If this is something you're interested in and you have money but not time, Don't be shy; say hi."* self-promo end.
Okay, let's make this as short as possible for the dopamine junkie pigeons out there. (Ofc I'm lying)
#**Inbound vs. Outbound:**
nothing fancy; inbound leads come to you, but outbound, you go to them. Posting? inbound. SEO? inbound. Cold emailing? outbound. Cold outreach? outbound. cold calling? outbound. if they initiate first, it's inbound; if you initiate first, it's outbound.
#**Why SaaS need outbound more than inbound in the early stages:**
Short answer: bcs you suck. You're still new with a vibecoded landing page, so why would they even trust you? and how will you even rank on google when it takes at least 2-3 years just to see nice, reliable results
Open on Reddit r/smallbusiness by u/Helpful_Ad3036 5mo ago Best payroll software? I'm 8 months into my first business with actual employees (we're at 5 people now) and payroll is so much more complicated than I thought. We've been using a payroll software that my original accountant recommended, but I swear every pay period something there is slightly wrong and I have no idea why.
Last time, someone's state tax withholding was calculated wrong and I spent the longest time on hold with support trying to fix it, since they didn’t give us a designated AM. Then this week I tried to adding a new hire to the system, our benefits and payroll system, but made a mistake entering the info so the info is now wrong in both systems and I need to go manually fix both, just getting to be a pain.
Is there a payroll software out there that’s worth it? Ideally one that can run payroll fast, is compliant, runs calculations on it’s own, and has good support. I don't have time to become a payroll expert I just need something that works. Appreciate any input here.
Open on Reddit r/LLM_Marketing by u/Rastikm123 2mo ago Best tools for Reddit monitoring in 2026 Been testing a few ways to track Reddit and honestly most setups still kinda suck.
Right now it feels like:
* manual: Reddit search, Google `site:reddit.com`
* semi-tools: GummySearch, F5Bot, Brand24
* custom: Reddit API + Python + LLM summaries
Biggest issue I keep seeing:
most tools track posts… but the real value is in **comments**.
That’s where:
* real opinions are
* product comparisons happen
* and what LLMs actually pick up
A lot of AI tools also summarize things, but the output is often too generic to be actually useful.
Curious what people here are using.
Anything that actually gives **signal over noise** long-term?
Open on Reddit r/Entrepreneur by u/delta_echo_007 3mo ago Typeform is getting expensive. I'm building an alternative - what would make you switch. Hi people,
i am building an alternative to typeform SAAS,
not just "cheaper Typeform" but something that actually solves the stuff they don't
Typeform has proved to be giving less value and charge more for the same recently. can u guys give me ur expectations of features and what are expectations from an alternative of Typeform.
In recent conversations on reddit i have come accross these value gaps
\- Response quality filters before they hit your CRM (picking out bots who fills form in seconds compared to real humans filling forms)
\- Partial response intelligence (intelligence from partially filled forms to know where the form is broken and users leave the form unfilled)
\- Real attribution tracking (tracking response came from which platform)
I'm curious
👉 what would make you switch from Typeform ?
👉 what frustrates you the most about it right now ?
👉 what's missing that no one is building ?
Open on Reddit r/smallbusiness by u/WhoIsThisPal 3mo ago which software I should consider buying for payroll. I am running a small business with around 20 employees at the moment. any ideas would be appreciated Hey guys, I am looking to buy a software for payroll, but have no idea which one to choose. Every time I search for best payroll or something, I get articles where I get no value, only fluff. I mean, who is writing these things, and why don't they offer something we can actually make a decision on?
someone suggested bamboo and gusto, but I am skepticak because aren't they like giant names? what if I am unable to pay the fee or it just gets more and more quarterly...
Plis help
Open on Reddit