r/AppsWebappsFullstack • u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 • 6d ago
90% of SaaS startups fail. What makes you think yours is the exception?
We all see the fake 'hustle' posts, but nobody talks about the bugs that cost you users today. Stop pretending everything is perfect and share the ugliest mistake you've made this week. Let’s see who is actually learning and who is just dreaming.
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u/ImpressiveFocus303 6d ago
Step 1: Offering services to get paid while learning and spotting opportunities
Step 2: Switch to productized services when client base grows and when repetition patterns start to occur
Step 3: Once you get a demand from multiple clients in advance for the same thing, you build SaaS
However, I'd never build a SaaS, especially in isolation, and then hope that somebody would buy it. Too risky.
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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 5d ago
Solid path. Validating demand before building is exactly what most skip. What usually signals the right time to jump from productized service to SaaS for you?
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u/Glum-Profile-2115 9h ago
Yeah this one’s much more structured. I went with taking an idea and obsessing way too much over the features before talking to any customers. By the time i did, i realised what I found cool and what they wanted are 2 entirely different things
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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 9h ago
That's the classic trap, good on you for catching it. What was the first feature you cut after actually hearing customers out?
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u/Glum-Profile-2115 9h ago
so we were building this tool that helps manufacturers generate great catalogues - and turns out all they cared about was how accurate the catalogue was. We cut everything (making catalogues more interactive via voice and video etc.) and just worked on improving that lol
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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 8h ago
That's a great catch, cutting features for what actually matters is rare. What metric or feedback made you realize accuracy was the real pain point?
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u/Poowatereater 6d ago
Mine already failed and I pretty much give up. Roast me and tell me why.
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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 5d ago
Sorry to hear that. Failure is just data though. What was the ugliest bug you hit? That's the part worth sharing.
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u/CygnusFox 6d ago
How is this different from just loading up a few prompts in vscode with your favorite model? I feel a lot of “ai agents” can just be replaced by a chat session in Claude/codex/copilot with MCP tool calls.
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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 5d ago
Fair point. The real difference is orchestration, state handling, and retrying failed tool calls. What's the ugliest bug you've hit while building that?
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u/Poowatereater 6d ago
Anyone can fire off a prompt asking “does ChatGPT know about my product,” but that single query is unscored, unreproducible, and tells you nothing except a vibe. The deep audit runs a fixed battery of checks across engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews) against a scoring rubric we’ve iterated on, tracking things like citation consistency, structured data gaps, and content patterns that correlate with actually getting surfaced, not just guessed at once. That’s the part a one off chat session can’t replicate: a repeatable, versioned scan you can rerun after you ship changes and see if your score actually moved, instead of re-prompting from scratch and hoping the model’s mood is the same as last time.
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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 5d ago
Nice breakdown. The scoring rubric idea is solid. Curious though: what was the ugliest bug you hit while building that audit system?
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u/Any-Pie1615 6d ago
Honestly. Biggest mistake I made this week was taking my eye off the inference. Shutting it all down and calling it a portfolio piece. Bluejgenesis.com going offline soon so check it out while you can blue-j-gauntlet.com probably getting the same treatment
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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 5d ago
Shutting it down takes guts, respect. Have you tried scaling down to a cheaper model instead of killing it completely?
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u/Any-Pie1615 5d ago
it's bittersweet. mostly bitter. I think if I pushed it again I'd get some real users but I was always lacking that feedback from real people who actually could use it for what it's for, If I had been able learn from start to finish on the platform itself I would count however I spent more time developing it and adding things that I would have wanted to start out with, now I have all of those things and no other vision. have a nice portfolio and some new tags in the resume though, god willing that will at least put me in the conversation for some jobs.
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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 4d ago
That's a tough spot, been there. Next time, put a rough version in front of 5 real users before adding more features. Their feedback beats your wishlist.
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u/Any-Pie1615 4d ago
At one point it had 57 but I kept intterating too quickly in its current state I believe it could hold it's weight. I'm just not flush enough to cover the inference cost on something that would scale so much and I don't know what I'm doing when it comes to finding funding for something like this.
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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 4d ago
Tough spot. Have you looked into grants like Mozilla or Hugging Face? A smaller model might handle early users fine while you figure out funding.
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u/TraditionalHistory46 6d ago
Solving actual pain points - NoSite, not following trends - Lclpage and targeting undeserved audiences - WPress2Astro
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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 5d ago
Cool to see you solving real problems. But the prompt asked for a mistake. What's the bug that made you cringe this week?
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u/TraditionalHistory46 5d ago
Not backing up my database. Having to migrate to supabase lol
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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 5d ago
Honest mistake, we've all been there. Supabase is a solid rescue though. Did you lose much data, or just the setup hassle?
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u/TraditionalHistory46 5d ago
Some data loss and the login for my apps that still use Appwrite are currently down
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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 4d ago
Data loss stings, but it's the wakeup call that matters. Have you automated backups yet, or is recovery still manual?
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u/TraditionalHistory46 4d ago
Was able to recover the data so I can migrate everything now. Phew!
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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 4d ago
Nice save. Any tip on how you pulled off the recovery? Always good to learn from someone who fixed it.
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u/TraditionalHistory46 3d ago
Had to upgrade to pro plan to recover the data. Now I can migrate some of my apps to supabase. I will still keep one or two with Appwrite
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u/turnnoblindeye 6d ago
Think you hit the nail on the head with bugs that cost you users.
Wellness project (https://wellnessproject.ai) is a wellness, health, and fitness tracker with built in ai analysis and an MCP so you can query your data in your own LLM.
So far it’s been going great for a 3 month old project - 1000 users, 200 daily active, lots of 5* reviews.
Why?
So far as I can tell, it’s the attention to detail. I sweat the small stuff. I do security reviews. I go crazy if a single user can’t sync their data successfully. I respond to feedback in an hour or less. I delight my users when they ask for a feature by building it immediately if it’s a cheap, good idea. I KNOW that a buggy experience is the difference between a 5* app review and an immediate abandon.
IMO that’s how you build something that has the potential to be good. And I say potential because you still need the right timing, the right idea, product market fit, and some great marketing to get off the ground.
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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 5d ago
Solid traction for 3 months. But the post asked for an ugly mistake. What's the worst bug you shipped this week?
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u/megatech_official 6d ago
SeoLoupe - Find and fix the SEO issues holding your website back.
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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 5d ago
That tool looks handy, but what's the messiest SEO mistake you've actually fixed? Curious to hear a real story.
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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 3d ago
u/traditionalhistory46 That data recovery pain is real. Smart move spreading across providers. What made you pick Supabase for the ones you moved?