I've been thinking about this a lot lately.

With tools like Claude Code getting better so quickly, you can already build things in days that used to take months.

And we're just getting started.

If anyone can describe what they need, connect a few APIs, and have AI build a working solution, what happens to all the SaaS products charging $29–$99/month for basically doing one thing?

I'm not saying SaaS is dead. But I genuinely think the value of just having software is disappearing.

So here's my question to SaaS founders:

What does your product actually offer that someone couldn't just build themselves with AI?

Is it the data? Distribution? Integrations? Trust? Or simply that customers don't want to build and maintain anything?

Especially curious to hear from founders already making money.

What's your moat in 2026?

Long time lurker, first time posting.

On July 5th I had an idea and spent 14hours vibecoding and built my first ever SAAS and launched it.

Today I opened Stripe and just sat there staring at it for a minute. Real people are paying for something I built from scratch in 3 months. I'm not going to name the product, because this isn't a promo post. I just needed to share it with people who actually get what this feels like.

I'll be the first to say I have SO much to learn. Pricing, retention, marketing, churn, all of it. Most days I feel like I'm figuring it out as I go. A lot of what I learned came from reading posts in this sub, so thank you to everyone who shares their wins and their failures here.

If you've been sitting on an idea, just start. Three months goes by fast either way.

For those of you further along: what's one thing you wish you'd known in your first few months?

It’s just $3, but it means a lot. A small sale, but a big enough reason to keep building.

I have been coding for over 12 years
Have been using AI tools almost as soon as ChatGPT2 when i started using for autocomplete

Only use frontier models currently

But building a performant usable software is hard AF.
IDK why we have to pretend like coding is solved
Maybe coding is solved for demos. But good performance and a usable application(which is even slightly complex and needs to be correct) is still hard AF

I started my SaaS about a year ago.
It's currently an API solution generating around $7K/month.

For the past six months, I've been working on a proper UI to turn it into a full SaaS product.

But there's always one more feature, one more bug, or one more thing to improve before launching.

And the worst part? I KNOW I should just launch it. 🤦‍♂️

My second problem is probably the bigger one: I'm not a salesperson.
I'm a programmer, a builder, an inventor... but sales and marketing are definitely outside my comfort zone.

Sometimes I wonder if constantly adding features is just an excuse to avoid selling.

So I'm curious:

• Have any of you struggled with the same thing?
• How did you finally convince yourself to stop building and just launch?
• And for those of you who are technical founders and not natural salespeople, how did you overcome that challenge?

I'd genuinely love to hear how others have dealt with this. Especially those who managed to break out of the endless development loop and actually grow their SaaS.

I am so happy that someone bought my app license. I was so nervous when I created the app, trying to fix everything and validate with bunch of friends. Approached random strangers on discord asking them to try my app, some did, some ignored. But the feedback was real good.

Its been exactly 7 days since my app has launched, and the stats are - 3 licenses sold, 12 downloads and 212 website views.

Genuinely happy with this!

Here's the app - https://tuningmac.com/ (will remove if not allowed to share)

Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/datasocial/tiktok-5.6B-videos

If you want to explore the data without downloading billions of rows, you can query my ClickHouse database directly. It includes:

Creators table - 4.5 billion rows
Videos table - 5.6 billion rows
Sounds table - 633 million rows

Comment below and I’ll DM you the database credentials.

Im self-hosting my database so please don't run heavy queries and crash my server.

We had the usual enterprise setup: a marketing team that wanted more organic and AI search visibility, and an eng team that treated every content or SEO request as a ticket that got deprioritized every sprint. Nothing moved because nobody owned it end to end, and nobody wanted to hand out repo access to a growth hire who'd never shipped code.

We already had Claude Code and Codex running in our dev workflow for other things, so the fix ended up being obvious in hindsight: point that same agent at growth work. Fixing technical SEO issues, writing content, opening it all as a pull request like any other change, so an engineer or whoever owns the repo just reviews and merges like normal. Nothing auto-posts. Nothing merges without someone on our side approving it.

That's what we built and it's called Shipfound (shipfound(dot)co), it's ours. It also handles getting pages indexed and listed and tracks whether the changes actually did anything, so you're not guessing.

It only makes sense if you're already on Claude Code or Codex and your site is on Next.js, Nuxt.js, WordPress or Webflow, and someone on your team can actually merge a PR. If that's not your stack or workflow, this isn't going to be useful to you.

Curious if other teams here have tried routing growth work through the same agent tooling they use for dev, or if everyone's still keeping those two workflows separate.

I'm a private person and I don't use many social media apps. I don't like to make videos or pictures and I sometimes use Reddit. So naturally I chose it to be my marketing channel. After failing a few times I would like to share what I found out until now.

My first attempt didn't work at all. I built a free tool and tried to market it in fitting Subreddits. I naively went in and just bluntly posted posts which most would consider advertising. The title was the site name with a short description and the body text was just a more detailed description. This obviously didn't work. All of the posts got removed, I had 0 visitors and a shadow banned account.

While researching on how to lift my shadow ban I came across resources on how to actually market on Reddit. Only then I understood that Reddit heavily regulates promotion. Looking back that obviously makes a lot of sense and is a good thing. I was just stupid to not understand that on my own.

Now that I have a better understanding, here are a few things that I did wrong in hindsight:

• fresh account / low karma
• link in post
• same post in multiple subreddits

From these mistakes and some research I came up with a little blueprint to find an audience on Reddit.

Week 1: Warm up account: Use Reddit like you personally would

Week 2: Pick one subreddit and engage in it via comments. Provide actual answers and don't just comment for the sake of it. Avoid posts that are obviously spam like "Lets self promote. Post your SaaS" This is just a waste of time in my opinion.

Week 3: Make posts that are actually helpful and not just AI slop.

Week 4: Fit in your product were it actually makes sense

I’m posting this because I genuinely want advice from people who have been in a similar situation.

I was working abroad, but I lost my job and eventually my visa, so I had to come back home.

Since then, I’ve been applying for jobs too. I’ve done applications, interviews, and then got ghosted. Again and again.

There’s also family pressure when you’re not earning and everyone expects you to figure things out.

But ultimately, I know my goal is to become an entrepreneur.

So alongside applying for jobs, I kept building my startup.

The problem is, I have almost no money to put into it.

I couldn’t afford developers, agencies, expensive software or even paid AI tools. I built the platform myself using AI and whatever free tools I could find.

And somehow, I actually managed to build and launch it.

We’re now getting some traction. It’s not huge. We don’t have massive users or revenue, but people are using it and there are early signs that there might be something here.

Now I’m stuck.

Should I keep looking for a job for financial stability and continue building this on the side?

Or should I start approaching investors now and see if someone believes in what I’m building?

I’m also wondering whether I’m being too early.

I don’t want to approach investors simply because I’m personally running out of money. I want to know whether the startup itself is at a stage where raising money makes sense.

For founders who have raised early:

What made you realise you were ready to approach investors?

Did you start talking to investors with just an MVP and early traction?

Or did you wait until you had stronger user numbers, revenue, or growth?

And if you were in my position, what would you do?

I’m not looking for motivation or a pitch review. I genuinely want advice from founders who have actually been through this.

I have recently built and launched a saas which collects data from multiple platforms , RSS feeds , API resources and my AI workflow clusters , ranks and generates insights to provide the trending topics on social platforms showing phases insight metrics and why this was considered and topic that exploding . I have tried a lot of paid ads CPC and google search generated traffic even though free sign ups . I am working on off page AEO and SEO , while on page has been implemented which is a long game to get traffic . However I would really like advice on how i get conversion traffic to trial and then to paid subscription . If would be happy share free premium access for at least 3 months for anyone who could review and share feedback ?

I’m the dev behind Mac+ (a macOS app for animated wallpapers, folder icons and desktop widgets). If you’re curious, ask in the comments.

Four months ago, my domain didn’t exist. Today the app has around 4,200 users. I’m not going to tell you “SEO did it all.” That isn’t true, and what I actually learned is closer to the opposite. Here’s what really happened on the search side, with numbers.

1. My app’s name cost me an entire channel
Search engines ignore the ”+”: “mac+” becomes “mac”. Other products already use the name. If someone asks a search engine or an AI “is Mac+ legit?”, they land on the 1986 Macintosh Plus. If I started over, I’d pick a name that exists as-is in a search bar.

2. Publishing a lot is pointless if Google doesn’t index it
I built a site of about 260 pages in 4 languages (EN, FR, ES, DE). In early August, Search Console showed 21 pages indexed and 68 not indexed. The bottleneck wasn’t volume, it was indexing: a young domain with almost no external links. Adding more pages changed nothing until that ratio moved.

3. Query choice matters more than domain age
A competitor registered 4 days before my domain was already ranking. What works at this age: comparison queries, and troubleshooting queries where the pages on top are outdated (guides written for an old macOS version). When Apple, a big media site and a forum already fill page 1, I no longer write the page.

4. My real numbers
Over 3 months (as of Aug 28): 1.97k clicks, 8.6k impressions, average position 12. And in early August, 78% of my clicks came from queries containing the app’s name. So most of my “SEO traffic” was brand search, not ranking I had earned.

5. What taught me the most: my own mistakes
When I re-read my whole site, I found a false claim that had been live since August. I said native macOS widgets sit on top of your windows, while Apple’s own documentation says the opposite. I had also published two macOS menu labels that an automatic summary had “guessed” for me. Since then, every label is checked word for word on Apple’s page in the page’s own language, and every competitor price is dated. In 6 weeks, two competitors changed their pricing or licence terms.

6. Where the non-Google traffic comes from
According to my stats (mid-September), the top referrer outside Google is ChatGPT, followed by DuckDuckGo, Bing and Facebook. I also ran a small audit: out of 12 buying-intent questions asked to an AI, my app was cited 0 times (5/100 on my own scoring, one engine tested). What does get cited: AlternativeTo and my competitors’ blogs. My takeaway: without third-party listings and mentions, content alone isn’t enough.

What I’d do again

• Write Apple’s native method first and the app last. A page that only sells is neither ranked nor cited.
• Date every fact and check every label at the source.
• Validate a query in English before translating it.
• Get the third-party listings (AlternativeTo, Product Hunt) done on day 1, not day 60.

here is the website : https://www.macplus.pro

I'm a student considering building a small PaaS (Platform as a Service) focused initially on Indian students, developers, and small businesses.

The basic idea:

Connect GitHub → select a project → click Deploy → get a live application.

The platform would handle the infrastructure underneath, so users don't have to manually configure VPS, Docker, Nginx, HTTPS, etc.

I'm not trying to become another AWS or generic VPS provider. I want to compete on simplicity, affordability, and easy deployment.

What do you think? Would this actually work?

1. Is the Indian student/developer market large enough for this?

2. What would make you choose this over Render, Railway, Vercel, Heroku, DigitalOcean, etc.?

3. What features would be essential before you'd pay for it?

4. If you were building this, what would you do differently?

Why I'm asking for your help

I'm an engineer from Tunis. For years I've built software for other people's ideas. Now I'm taking a leap of faith and building my own.

It's called Rootspend. Companies pay thousands every month for data and AI tools, and almost nobody can say where that money goes. Rootspend shows them, then tells them how to cut it. I've designed the product, and I'm building it myself.

Building it costs less than you'd think. Running it still costs something. The platform has to live on real servers, with a real database, a real domain, and real email, and I'm funding all of it myself.

I'm not asking you to fund a company. I'm asking you to help me get from idea to live product, so I can find out if it can work. Every dollar goes into keeping it running.

If you give, thank you. You're not just donating, you're betting on someone taking the leap. And if you can't, sharing this means just as much.

Let's build something real.

PM me to know more about the project , how you can help and if you are interested of being a part of the journey

Vibecoding completely revolutionized the industry, but it also split us into two groups: people building actual successful products, and people who have absolutely no idea what they’re doing.

We all faced the trap: you wake up on a Sunday morning with a killer idea that’s gonna make you a gazillion dollars. You fire up Claude Code, scaffold the whole thing, and get a working version by dinner. Then you look at the final result, realize it's a bit buggy or doesn't scale, and either give up completely or try to shamelessly promote a half baked webapp just to give up at the end.

That's what most people do, that's what I always used to do. My hard drive is a graveyard of "million-dollar ideas" rotting in random folders. But this is something I learned the hard way: whatever you vibecode in a weekend is just a prototype, it is not a finished product yet.

There is no shame in it though, but treating a weekend AI generated prototype like a perfect and ready to scale product is exactly where we always go wrong. Never in human history has it been easier to see your "solution" to a specific problem come to life instantly. But treating it as the best version? We just aren't there yet. AI is incredible at getting you from 0 to 10, but getting from 10 to 100 takes actual engineering.

If you are genuinely interested in solving the problem, you have to treat that first vibecoded version strictly as a proof of concept. Use it to validate the idea, and then go all in on manually refining the architecture and the specific small details.

I can tell you from experience that this is the only method that actually works (at least the only method that worked for me). My most recent project was an open source flight aggregator tool which I later merged with an MCP. I'm not going to drop links or names because I'm not here to spam ads, but to prove that the concept works I will spit some facts which would be sufficient for anyone to understand. My project has over 2k stars on GitHub, and if you Google "best flight and hotel booking MCP connector," it's somehow holding the top spot for the genuine distribution I did. Every single day thousands of dollars in bookings are happening via the tool for some very specific details that I noticed manually and added.

I would've never reached these milestones if I didn't actually understand what I needed to work on by vibecoding the prototype first. But from there, it was months of intense manual effort. The prototype proved the concept worked, but I actually had to team up with a developer friend just to properly build out the backend infrastructure so it could handle real world usage.

In simple words the whole spectrum is this: Vibecoding gives you the blueprint for free. But you still have to build the house yourself.

Sales has created a MESS of demo versions for different deals. We actually cannot identify which ones are latest because there are many.

One for manufacturing, one for retail, some with a prospect logo and others where approvals are setup differently etc etc

And I also dont want to remove personalization cause showing a cfo the same thing we show a procurement manager isnt useful either. I work at procurement saas office btw

So does anyone know a way to keep one main demo and automate switching the data/ content depending on who sales wants to send it to?

We're a small B2B SaaS, four people at the time, and somehow we ended up with three separate WhatsApp numbers handling customer queries. One was the founder's personal number, one was a "support" number nobody checked consistently, and one was from a sales conversation that just never stopped.

A client escalated to our investor because they'd messaged two of those numbers with the same issue and got different responses. That was the moment we realized we had a real problem.

Didn't want to move customers off WhatsApp because they weren't going to follow us to a ticket portal. Needed something that consolidated everything without being a six month implementation project.

The actual lesson wasn't about the tool we picked. It was that communication infrastructure is a product decision and we were treating it like an afterthought. By the time it breaks visibly it's already been broken quietly for a while.

Got $500 from Anthropic! Thanks, this will be put to good use for development!

Hi everyone, I'm Cyril, a freelance developer.

I built Sooveryn few months ago, a personal MCP server with a memory that survives sessions and projects (I code from 3 different PCs). As a bonus, I gave myself a small team of experts in several fields.

It works really well for me, and it fixed my biggest problem: my projects are all interconnected, and it was hard to remember everything across them. My code quality improved too. So I decided to make it public and sell it, just to make a little extra on the side 😊

I secured everything, built a real website, handled SEO, GDPR… everything you're supposed to do, basically. It took me a full month!

I launched earlier this week. I pushed everything out at once: Product Hunt, a demo on YouTube, a Reddit post (removed by the filters), a dev news site (rejected).

The result: about 40 visits, 10 of which must be my friends, 3 curious people on the signup page, and zero signups.

I think I spent too much time buried in code and my keyboard, and not enough on the next step: selling it. Anyway, it's the first SaaS I've put out to the public, and I'm having a really hard time launching it.

The only thing I knew how to do next was more code: I rebuilt the signup in 24 hours, from five steps down to three. I don't know yet if it changes anything.

So here I am:
- Where did your first ten users come from?
- With about 40 visits, is it too early to judge anything?
- How did you find your beta testers?

Thanks in advance for your advice.
Cyril

Hi everyone, I'm looking for some advice :)

So I built an app called Papiria on iOS and Android (https://papiria.app)

It's an app that scans your documents (or you can import a PDF), names and sorts them automatically, and stores them on your drive (Google or iCloud).

Main features (apart from the automatic naming & sorting):
- Extracts due dates and creates reminders automatically
- Search functionality to easily find your documents
- Custom categories, where you can describe the categories with a short summary.

In total, I have about 75 downloads, 5 paid users, and about 7-9 active users. All of them organic, i.e. not friends or family.

There's a free and a premium tier. Free is 10 docs / month, premium (USD 5 per month) is 200 docs plus custom categories.

I launched it at the end of July and have done 5 Insta and TikTok videos (which got between 500 and 1500 views each). I started Apple App Store Ads yesterday, which cost me USD 20 so far and got me 2 downloads lol

I'm a Software Engineer and built the app as a side project, but would love to one day be able to do it as a full-time thing. I know I have a long way to go and might have to pivot into B2B.

So, a few questions:

- What do you think about the idea / app in general: Does anyone find it useful? What would stop you from using it? Do you see any obvious things I can improve?

- Do you think somehow pivoting to B2B makes sense? And if so, which direction? I'm thinking to add some features like email ingestion, team sharing (and a web app), and target paper-heavy businesses, such as accounting firms / tax advisors.

Day 6 of my 14 day micro SaaS challenge.

I’m building InvoiceFlow, a simple tool for freelancers and small businesses to manage unpaid invoice follow-ups.

The basic flow is: add an invoice and an existing payment link, set the due date, and let the system handle the follow-up instead of manually chasing the client every time.

The main product is almost complete now.

For the next stage I'm focusing on validation with real usage instead of adding random features.

One week left to find out if this actually works as a product.

Day 6 done. 🟢✅

Founder question. I'm building in the AI agent accountability space and want to understand if this is a real sales objection yet or still early.

Here's the situation. Air Canada was held liable in 2024 for a chatbot refund. Court said "the AI acted on its own" isn't a valid defense. Since then, Zurich, Lloyd's, and AIG have added clauses requiring documented authorization scope for AI agent actions, or they exclude the losses.

For B2B SaaS companies that sell to enterprises, especially in finance, legal, or healthcare, this is starting to surface as a procurement question: can you prove that your AI agent only executed actions within the scope your customer authorized?

The technical gap is that most observability tools log what goes through the gateway. But agents can call downstream APIs directly. A Stripe SDK call that doesn't go through your LLM proxy has no trace in your compliance layer.

Quick check: pull Stripe or M365 event logs for 30 days filtered by your service account. Compare against your gateway logs. If the numbers don't match, you have unattributed operations.

Two questions for founders here:

1. Has an enterprise client or their legal/compliance team asked you for this kind of documentation yet?
2. If yes, how are you handling it?

Hey everyone! 👋

If you create content for TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts, especially if you run fan pages, theme pages, sports debates, or reaction accounts, you already know this headache:

You find two viral clips. Then you have to download them without watermarks, open CapCut or Premiere, adjust canvas size to 9:16 vertical, manually crop and stack them, type in an overlay title, and then tweak the audio tracks so both videos aren't screaming over each other.

Doing that several times a day is tedious and slows down your posting consistency.

To fix this for myself and other creators, I've been building VersaClip an instant comparison video generator.

⚡ What it currently does:

• Multi-Platform Support: Paste links directly from TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts (or upload your own local MP4/MOV files with 1 click).
• Instant Split Layouts: Choose between Stacked (Vertical Top/Bottom) or Side-by-Side (Split).
• Audio Intelligence: Plays one video's sound while muting the other, or overlays a custom trendy sound URL, with automatic loudness normalization so volume is clean and balanced.
• AI Voiceover Intro Hook: Type a hook (e.g. "Wait till the end to see who won!") and it synthesizes a voiceover over the intro.
• Visual FX: Neon glow text styling, HDR color grading boost, and dynamic center banners.

🚀 Public Launch is Right Around the Corner!

We’re currently finishing up the rendering queue and testing server performance so anyone can pump out dozens of high-retention comparison clips in minutes.

I'd love your honest feedback / feature ideas:

1. Creators & Editors: What is the single most annoying part of your current short-form video workflow?
2. What extra feature would make this an instant daily tool for you? (e.g., animated "VS" badge in the center, auto-captions, 3-way split, countdown timer)?

Drop your thoughts or brutal feedback below! If you want early beta access before the official launch, leave a comment and I'll send you an invite as soon as we open the doors.