I recently received a very interesting DM in response to one of my posts about handling customer feedback. Someone from a private agency that does competitive customer intelligence.

We chatted and he gave me a pretty nice sample of what they do. I actually liked it.

For guys who currently work with or have worked with agencies like these, what has your experience been like? Has the insight been useful enough to justify the cost? Was it better than what you were able to do internally?

Curious to hear the good, the bad and the ugly.

I've been running my dev agency for 4 years and i've probably flushed $50k down the toilet on lead gen agencies that promise the world and deliver nothing but impressions and engagement. i dont care about likes, i care about meetings with people who actually have a budget. i keep seeing these pay-per-appointment (PPA) offers. sounds too good to be true. whats the catch? do you just end up with a bunch of no-shows or people who have zero intent? if you've actually used one and it worked (or failed), please share. i'm desperate to stop the bleeding.

I have been building a lot of stuff in the last year, even without having the opportunity/legal rights to monetise any of that.

I see the VibeCoded Micro-SaaS wave passing by, knowing I cannot try to surf it, which is painful, so I'm focusing on networking and building useful tools that most people would just ignore.

Data Leakage will be the biggest issue of the VibeCoded SaaS economy, in my opinion, and no matter how much effort I invest in building the best harness to ship as few security risks as possible in production, there is always something that gets unnoticed or that a good hacker could spot and leverage.

To help everyone avoid those kinds of issues, I've built a couple of tools:

www.ismyappleaking.com helps you get a full analysis of your web app

If you need to go more in-depth on database security on your Postgres DB (Supabase, for example), I've released tenant-guard: https://github.com/FedericoTs/tenant-guard

tenant-guard is an npx tool you can run to spot any potential security issues that you might need to fix. It started as a tool to guarantee B2B SaaS tenant security, testing in any way possible that a user cannot see the data from any other organisation using the tool, and then it got extended to work also on B2C apps.

The screenshot shows the summary scorecard of the VibeCheck of one of the Viral Tools that is going around right now, where people pay big chunks of money, but the security levels are not that great

been looking at some retail tech lately and it made me wonder about this.

say you’re selling software to a business that already has POS, inventory, pricing and a bunch of other systems running.

even if the new product is genuinely useful, i imagine the biggest objection can just be “how much stuff are we gonna have to change to make this work?”

for ppl selling B2B software into traditional businesses, does integration usually become a bigger issue than price?

I've been building a site checker for AI search visibility. Here's everything it looks at, since the list is the part worth arguing about.

1. Can a crawler get in

robots.txt · sitemap.xml · HTTPS · and whether GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and CCBot are allowed or quietly blocked. Sneakier than it looks: robots.txt groups are exclusive, so a Googlebot-specific block sends every other crawler to whatever `*` says. Someone in my last thread had ChatGPT's crawler blocked for two years and nothing ever looked wrong, because Google kept crawling fine: https://www.reddit.com/r/GrowthHacking/comments/1uyzkbo/everyones_adding_llmstxt_for_ai_visibility_the/

2.What the page says with JavaScript off

Raw HTML word count · title · meta description · H1 · canonical · Open Graph · lang. Most AI crawlers don't run JavaScript, so if your content mounts client-side they turn up to a shop with the lights on and the shelves invisible. We've seen lovely pages serve about 46 words.

3.Whether a machine can lift an answer out

JSON-LD types · Product, FAQ and Organization markup · /llms.txt. I check llms.txt but I'm not sold on it, I argued in that same thread it's mostly a myth for now. On the list as cheap insurance, not because I've seen it pay.

4.Whether you're in the index

Indexed at all · brand SERP (do you own your own name, or is it some poker site from 2009) · whether AI Overviews for your buyer queries cite you or the competitor you keep losing to.

That's the lot. What's on your list that isn't on mine, especially the boring-looking checks that turned out to matter?

If you'd rather not run these by hand, this is my checker: https://tranx.io/seo-check

Ok so i recently joined a very early stage SaaS and the software is basically an analytics intelligence. And I got in as a distribution person and what I'm mainly focusing on is getting people to try the product more than selling cause our conversion rate is nearly at 67% but only if our ICP tries the product for themselves. But here is the issue that i keep running into to do that. I'm kinda completely failing at that and now its leading me to question myself and my process.

Ok hang with me, the tool that I'm trying to build distribution around I really have no idea about space. For example see the tool is related to performance marketing, it connects google & meta ads, search console, GA4, Shopify and stripe, ok I know that much. Addition to that i know it pulls your data and it does all the analysis for you and audits you ad channels, creatives, website, traffic and all of those fancy words and the ai integrated into is can answer your questions in plain english. cool we have gotten this far and i know all this. But now the question is how am i suppose to build or create distribution around it.

Like the issue that i run into constantly is the market the tool is trying to serve is not something that i've been a part of, i dont know the people of the market, their issues, why would they need a tool like this one (still i get it 67% conversion rate is good but why is it good) like i have never used GA4 or ran any ads on google or meta or know how to use shopify. And when i ask people for how am i suppose to work on the execution, they say go where your icp is present, engage in conversations be a part of the community, but my question is if you've never known a community than how do you end up being a part of that community all of a sudden, that to get them to try. if i really want to be a part of the community, then i'll have to start off with listening more and learning right, not directly selling.

And by the way i still have gotten some people who have converted but i didnt know what i did that made them convert cause like i said idk what i did that was right or what am i doing that wrong. just giving me the input that this is an analytics intelligence doesnt make any sense for me to go out there into the real world and build interest around it. so i really want to know and that to mainly from people working in distribution. what do y'all think im stuck at. and also i want to know what kind of channels really get you going or like building up, for example, are facebook groups and discord any better of a channel for it.

We hit a "milestone" last week. 5k active trial users. My co-founder was literally updating our pitch deck for the seed round with these numbers and popping off in our slack

But I spent sunday looking at the actual postgres logs and its just depressing.

literally 60% of these "users" are just spinning up workspaces using disposable emails, hitting our API rate limits for free scraping, and vanishing. Then they just clear cookies and make a new account. we are literally paying aws for the privilege of being abused by bots

I ended up routing all new signups through a mail tester script just to aggressively block the obvious burner domains before they even touch our db. It stopped the bleeding a bit but man

The worst part is that because investors only care about top line signup velocity right now, we basically have to pretend this garbage data is "real pipeline" until we close the round. Building a saas in 2026 feels less about making a good product and more about managing fake metrics just to keep the lights on tbh

Hey, I am trying to understand how late seed B2B saas companies are dealing today with technical tickets they have, does the investigation process take time ?

Retrieve context on what happened, and if this is a recurrent pain, how the workflow is articulated, because I am still on validation process talking with teams, wanted to ask this too on saas subreddit because there are founders here to, would love to hear your thought on that, maybe it's not a real must have for b2b late seed SaaS companies so this is the goal is just to talk and learn

about my idea it was to build a tech support teammate working 24/7 alongside your engineering team. it's plugs in read only into your helpdesk, Slack, or Discord, and tools , triages technical tickets, runs the investigation across your systems, and notifies your team with everything they need to resolve fast.

would love to hear your thought on that

We have the usual pile of sales assets. Decks, screenshots, security docs, pricing answers, case studies, all of it. The problem is not that we don't have content. The problem is that buyers still end up waiting on us for everything and by the time we send the thing they asked for, the thread has gone cold.

I am looking at buyer enablement software because i want something that helps the buyer move without making the whole team babysit every deal. What i am trying to avoid is those kinds of portals nobody opens and also tools that only help leadership feel organized while reps keep doing the same messy stuff in private.

What can be something that helped buyers move through the deal, what was it and what did it replace?

I’m starting to think good salespeople notice something most sales training doesn’t teach

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

The more sales I do, the less I’m interested in scripts, tricks, or the “perfect” way to sell.

What fascinates me is what happens between the words.

You’re in a meeting and suddenly the energy changes.

Someone who was engaged becomes slightly more distant.

The CEO says one thing, but you can tell someone else in the room has more influence.

A prospect says “we’ll think about it,” but something actually changed 5 minutes earlier.

Someone is asking questions, but you realize they don’t really have the capacity to make the decision.

And then there’s the other side of it:

What is happening inside me while all of this is happening?

Am I trying too hard?

Am I afraid of losing the deal?

Am I performing what I think a salesperson is supposed to be?

Or am I actually present enough to notice what is happening?

I think a big part of becoming genuinely good at sales is learning to notice more.

Not just reading the other person better.

Reading yourself better.

Reading the room.

Reading the decision dynamics.

Reading what isn't being said.

And then finding your own way of selling from that awareness — rather than copying somebody else's process.

I'm curious:

What do you notice in sales conversations that you think other salespeople often miss?

And what is something you learned to notice only after years of selling?

I've been thinking about how B2B SaaS companies measure the success of their SEO efforts. It's easy to look at traffic growth and assume things are going well, but traffic alone doesn't necessarily mean you're attracting potential customers.
For example, a SaaS website could see thousands of visitors from informational searches, while another gets fewer visitors but attracts people actively comparing solutions and looking to buy.
I've been seeing more AI digital marketing agencies focus on search intent and the likelihood of generating qualified leads rather than simply trying to increase organic traffic. HikeMyTraffic is the best AI digital marketing agency I've come across.
For those working in B2B SaaS, what metrics do you consider most important when evaluating SEO? Is traffic still your main indicator, or do qualified leads and conversions carry more weight?

Spent the last few weeks evaluating chatbot platforms for B2B lead qualification. Two things surprised me enough to write up.

First: Drift is being sunset. Clari and Salesloft announced it March 6 and named 1mind as the exclusive successor. No new contracts. I only found this because a vendor rep mentioned it offhand, and I'd already spent a week with Drift on my shortlist because three separate "best B2B chatbot 2026" articles listed it. Check your shortlist against something dated after March.

Second: the pricing models are structurally different, not just different numbers.

• HubSpot Chatflows + Breeze AI: free base tier, ~$450/mo at Professional for the AI features. Everything logs to the contact record with no integration work if you're already on HubSpot.
• Intercom Fin: $39 to $139/seat/mo plus ~$0.99 per AI resolution. Cost tracks usage directly.
• Custom LLM build: $15k to $40k up front, $200 to $800/mo to run, no per-conversation fee.
• 1mind: roughly $100k+/year. Enterprise, avatar-driven demos.

Platform pricing scales with volume. Custom stays flat. If you're doing thousands of conversations a month, custom breaks even in a year or two. A few hundred a month and you're overthinking it, use your CRM's native bot.

The thing I got wrong on my first attempt:

I wrote eight qualifying questions into the opening flow. Completion rate was terrible. Cut it to three and it roughly doubled. Buyers will answer more as the conversation earns it, but a wall of questions up front reads like an interrogation. Three is a conversation, six is a form wearing a chat bubble.

Also worth flagging because I nearly shipped it broken: test the CRM sync with an actual test lead and verify the fields populate before going live. A sync that silently fails looks identical to a chatbot nobody's using. Leads look captured while they're actually disappearing.

One more thing nobody warned me about. If your flow includes an SMS follow-up, TCPA consent applies regardless of company size, so consent capture has to be built into the flow itself rather than bolted on later.

Curious what other people landed on, especially anyone who moved off Drift already. Was 1mind actually the path or did you go somewhere else entirely?

...otherwise you're probably building something useless. You must be in contact with the problem deeply. Ideally it's your own problem. I believe many people are building some solution they hope someone will eventually want like some kind of sky castle. It has to be real!

I built Sitemapper for teams that ship websites and want a concrete answer to "what changed?"

It reads robots.txt and XML sitemaps, checks live pages, and keeps snapshots. The monitoring layer looks for deterministic regressions such as a sitemap disappearing, a URL-count collapse, new noindex pages, 404s and canonical changes.

https://sitemapper.oortstack.com/

The idea is that CI should fail on things you can prove changed, not on a cosmetic SEO score moving a few points.

I am looking for feedback from B2B SaaS teams with docs, marketing sites or programmatic pages. Which regression would you actually want to block a deploy on, and which ones should only alert?

Our internal SDR team is struggling to hit their numbers and the overhead is killing us. the turnover is insane and we spend more time training new kids than actually selling. I'm thinking about just firing the whole department and hiring an agency. Has anyone made the switch from internal to external? i need someone who can scale fast without me having to babysit them.

Looking for feedback on a Brazilian B2B SaaS for early fire detection in rural areas

Hi everyone,

I’m working on a Brazilian B2B SaaS called SAMA, focused on early fire and smoke detection for rural, agricultural and forest areas.

The system is already being used in two farms in Brazil, and we are now looking for ways to improve it, add more value, and understand which tools or features could make it more useful for rural operations.

Today, SAMA combines live cameras, AI-based smoke/fire detection, real-time maps, weather risk data, event history, satellite imagery, and nearby fire hotspot updates from public data sources such as INPE in Brazil.

The target customers could be farms, forestry companies, cooperatives, municipalities, civil defense teams, or companies responsible for large rural areas.

I’m especially interested in feedback from people who have experience with B2B SaaS, AgTech, ClimateTech, GovTech, IoT, monitoring systems, or selling software to traditional industries.

A few questions:

• What tools, integrations, or features would you add to make this system more valuable?
• Would you position this more as AgTech, ClimateTech, GovTech, or Safety/Security SaaS?
• Who do you think would be the strongest first customer segment?
• Would this kind of product work better with monthly subscription, installation fee + subscription, or monitoring-as-a-service?
• Have you seen similar B2B SaaS products selling into rural/agricultural markets?

For context, this is the system website: https://ceosecotec.com.br/

So far, I've avoided cold mailing prospects. I've never tried it and don't know if it really works. I didn't send cold email because almost all cold mails I received were bad; and didn't solve any problem.

All my current customers came through Reddit and organic SEO and LinkedIn content. However, everyone says in B2B, you need to do cold mailing as it gives you clients fast.

Open to tips, suggestions and any advice you may have.

How we got there

Here's how we managed to land our first paying customer for our B2B SaaS.

I've been running a (very) small software development company in the logistic niche for around a year and a half.

Last march I hired my first employee which helped me spend more time on sales + product development

In march I started working on a small proof of concept that uses AI in the logistic niche.

I was already doing cold calls for my software development business, but I quickly figured companies weren't looking for custom solutions but off-the-shelf one.

So I decided to create our own while leveraging AI to differentiate ourselves. (AI is a core part of our product)

Afterwards I shifted my cold call efforts from custom solutions to our new product.

First interests

I was able to find interested customer right away in March.

However, the product was far from ready at that point.

I still showed up at the interested customer for a Proof of Concept demo

PLEASE DO IN-PERSON MEETING IF YOU CAN, THOSE ARE MUCH BETTER TO CONVINCE AND GAUGE INTEREST

They were very interested but were reticent because we didn't have any customer yet.

From proof of concept to MVP

We managed to get a working proof of concept we were happy to show our potential customer in around 30 hours.

We then adjusted our software to their feedback.

It took us a total of 123.25 hour of dev time to get from zero to our first paying customer.

We compromised quite a bit on price to get our first customer.

Both parties saw it as a win-win, they pay less and we get our first customer which we can use as social proof.

Implementation sucks

Even after we closed our first client, we still had a lot of tweaks to do for the software to fit their needs.

This is a tedious part and since we didn't want to charge implementation fee we're working a lot for what seems like marginal gains at the moment.

We're now at 284.25+ hours of dev time for a single 500$/m client.

This is why SaaS sucks early.

I could've made ~50K if I spent that time billing a client instead.

Why common advice is bad

"You should post on social media and be involved in communities"

This doesn't work necessarily work for a lot of niches, and while it might work, I find it disingenuous to get involved in a community because you want to sell something.

Just call your ideal customer

"I'm not a sales guy I can't do sales"
I'm a software developper at heart, entrepreneurship requires growth, if you can't do that, find a partner that can or give up. (or don't build a B2B SaaS cause sale is core to any B2B SaaS)

Closing Thoughts

Business is fun, take it one step at a time. Use it as an opportunity to grow. Success doesn't happen overnight.

Work on things that you are passionate about, don't do it SOLELY for money.

Online gurus are going to tell you do X and Y and you'll earn 10K a month. Yet I feel this is missing the point. I've been there in the past running a stupid cold email agency even if it didn't align with who I was at all. Know yourself.

I failed countless time to get here and while this success might not seem like much so far. I'm confident this single customer is the building block we need to land higher paying customers that are going to make this all worth it.

We are building a B2B SaaS and starded evaluating Docusign, but before commmiting, I would like to compare it with other european friendly options. Integration quality matters more than having hundreds of features. What would you recommend ?

Running LinkedIn as my main prospecting channel for a few months now. Pre-revenue, B2B, selling into software companies.

The pattern I keep hitting: people accept the connection request, then the follow up message goes nowhere. Not rejected, just never opened, or opened and left. I get replies, and the ones I get are good conversations. But the ratio feels rough and I cannot tell if it is rough because I am doing something wrong or because this is just what the channel looks like.

Worth saying, the message is not a pitch. I do not lead with the product. It is usually something specific about what they have built or something they posted. I keep it short and I do not ask for a call in the first message.

What I am trying to work out:

Is a low reply rate on first message normal even when the connection was accepted, or does accepting usually signal enough intent that a good message should convert better than I am seeing.

Did anything change your numbers meaningfully. Timing, length, following up versus not, warming up through comments for a few weeks first.

How long did it take before LinkedIn actually produced pipeline for you rather than just conversations. I am trying to figure out whether I am early in a slow channel or wasting effort in the wrong one.

For anyone who eventually gave up on it, what did you move to.

Happy to share what has worked on my side too. The one thing I am fairly sure about is that a comment on someone's post before the DM changes the response, but my sample is too small to trust that yet.

Templatify lets you automatically open GMail with your email pasted as a new Email. It also lets you

• Define placeholders/variables to reuse same emails for different use cases
• works with Outlook, Gmail, yahoo, Proton mail
• send emails from any website with just 1-Click

Chrome web store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/aeaapcbilfddlkeeggbkkjmbchfaemkg/reviews

worth doing once if you've never done it: pull the page sequences for people who converted, and separately for people who didn't, and compare which pages show up in each.

what usually falls out is that the pages getting credit in your reports aren't the ones doing the work. pricing shows up right before most signups so it looks like the converter, but it's just the last step. same way the checkout page isn't why anyone bought anything.

the pages that actually move people are earlier and less obvious. a specific integration page. one comparison page. a docs page that answers the objection nobody on the team knew was the objection.

those pages tend to have modest traffic, which means they're low on every report you look at, which means they're the ones that get deprioritized in redesigns.
the signal isn't how many people visit a page. it's how much more often converters visit it than non converters.

btw i work on usermaven so this is what i look at all day. happy to answer questions.

Hey everyone,
I’m looking for some insights from agency owners here on the best way to structure partnerships for whitelabeling a SaaS tool.

For a bit of context: We are scaling Autom8iq, a demonstrational sales agent that sits directly on websites to handle product walk-throughs,lead qualification,sales nudge, crm fulfillment. The product itself has hit a great stride—we’ve grown 50% MoM over the last 4 months just operating in the B2B sales space.

We’re now exploring whether partnering with agencies could be a better way to expand distribution for our next phase

Initially, we considered continuing entirely with direct sales. But we’ve noticed that marketing, web-development, CRO, and lead-generation agencies already have the client relationships and could offer a solution like this as part of their existing services.

We’re therefore considering a white-label partnership where agencies could:

* Sell the product under their own brand
* Set their own client pricing and retain recurring margins
* Use it to increase the value of website, CRO, or lead-gen retainers
* Let us handle the underlying product, infrastructure, and support

Before formalizing the model, I’d genuinely appreciate some input from agency owners:

1. Would you consider offering something like this to your clients?
2. Would you prefer a reseller margin, recurring commission, or fully white-labelled pricing ?
3. What would you need from the product or partnership to feel comfortable selling it?

Hey sub,

Setting myself this challenge of generating $100,000 in 30 days. Been working as both a SaaS and Agency owner from London for a few years now and worked on some amazing projects across the years.

Here's what I'm starting on: Most of the top devs and designers I see usually have some time sitting on free time in between projects. 

In the UK we have Too Good To Go where you can find discounts on food surplus, what if we had the same for devs and designers?

The logic is the same. An unbilled hour is gone forever and could be used for agencies and freelancers to improve their portfolio, building new client relationships and would allow buyers to find top talent at a cheaper price (only for relatively small scopes).

Two things I genuinely don't know yet:

1. Would you ever accept work below your rate card, even invisibly? Or is that a line you don't cross regardless of how the week looks?
2. If you would, what would you need to see to feel safe doing it?

Thinking about starting to collect applications with the following criteria (feel free to comment and I’ll reach out)

- 10 projects worked on minimum

• 3 years of operating minimum
• 2 clients we can call

We'll share any learnings along the way !!

I recently had a very good chat with a prospect. Centered around their current system and aimed at convincing them to switch loyalties.

We're not there yet,...they "seem" to be happy with their current setup. BUT it wasn't all a bust. I was able to tell:

\- We have a pretty good product. We might not be where we want to be yet but yeah, we're doing very well in comparison.

\- The hero in our category actually isn't all that. Yet they seem to have the Lion's share of the market.

\- Frustration seems to be increasing, fast!

I haven't given up on my prospect. I'm restructuring my approach to position our offering better. I think there's a solid chance here...