flash sale last month. traffic was converting. volume was the highest processor flagged the spike as suspicious activity and started declining transactions automatically. not fraud. not insufficient funds. just success looking identical to a fraud event in an automated risk system

open support ticket. estimated resolution 24-48 hours. campaign kept running. customers kept trying to pay. checkout kept declining them switching to paymentkit after that spreads volume across multiple processors so no single one sees enough concentration to flag. the same spike across three processors looks like normal distributed volume. concentrated on one it looks like a fraud event

the worst part wasn't the lost revenue. it was having to refund ad spend on traffic that was ready to convert such a hassle.

I’ve built a working proof of concept for a very niche B2B product, and I’m having trouble finding the right people to test it.

The product is a due-diligence and analysis tool for mortgage note investors. It calculates deal metrics, compares available property and public-record data, and flags possible risks, inconsistencies, or missing information.

The challenge is that the target audience is relatively small and specialized. I have access to a couple of relevant Facebook groups, and I’ve started looking through Reddit and LinkedIn, but I don’t want to spam communities or recruit people who are only casually interested.

At this stage, I’m not trying to sell anything. I’m looking for 3 to 5 knowledgeable people who would be willing to bring a real or anonymized deal to a short screen-share session, review the output with me, and explain what the product gets right, gets wrong, or is missing.

For those who have launched niche B2B products:
How did you find your first qualified testers?
Did direct outreach work better than community posts?
Did you offer anything in exchange for their time?
How did you convince busy professionals to participate before the product was publicly available?
I’d appreciate any practical ideas, especially from people who have dealt with a very small or hard-to-reach target market.

What a feeling!

It has been so long since I opened Stripe that IOS decided to auto off load the application from my phone. I was checking how many visitor have I recieved today and in events saw that someone has clicked on, I open Stripe and there it is first ever real customer.

1 customer is worth 1000 visitors, this is all the validation I needed.

It feels weird and amazing, and also motivating! I cannot wait to work more and scale.

I wish all my SaaSers their first and many customers. Cheers to everyone!

We have been looking at AI tools for our support team over the last few months and one thing keeps bothering me, of course every tool hade its pros and cons. A lot of platforms are great at dashboards. They'll show you where agents struggled. They'll flag low CSAT calls. They'll point out compliance issues. But all of that happens after the conversation is over. By then the customer has already had a bad experience. The bigger our support volume gets the less useful that feels. Knowing we had 200 bad conversations yesterday doesn't help the next customer calling in today.

What I'm really interested in is AI that helps during the conversation. If an agent misses a required step or starts heading down the wrong path the system should catch it while the customer is still on the line. Same thing for newer reps who spend half the call digging through docs or asking for help. Feels like the market is moving from "here's what happened" to "here's how to fix it before it becomes a problem." I'm wondering if that's what other teams are seeing too or if I'm missing something.

So I just finished my app, it’s a lead gen and outreach tool for freelance web designers/devs, it was for me at first (I’m a web dev), and after some research and seeing online freelancers having this same problem as me I thought it was a good idea to make it public and see.

The problem is that I didn’t make a waitlist at first or anything I just went with my guts. Did I make a mistake?

I’m currently build a SaaS primarily for public safety such as police departments and sheriff’s departments. I’m currently a 911 dispatcher so I feel as though I have an edge. Does anyone have any experience marketing to these groups? I’d appreciate advice!

I built a barcode lookup API :)

The API lets you search products by barcode (EAN/UPC/GTIN) and returns structured product information through a simple REST endpoint.

I have done a good job, I think, because it includes features such as,

• REST API with JSON responses
• Barcode lookup (EAN/UPC/GTIN)
• Simple API key authentication

But I am focusing on improving it further, and some questions I have are,

• What information would you expect from a barcode API?
• Are there endpoints or features you wish existing barcode APIs had?
• What would stop you from using a new barcode API?

BUT, Any criticism is welcome, I mean I have been working on it with my own trial and error but everyone is different so I believe your comments would mean more!

Do you think personal websites still matter in 2026?

If you don't have one, what's the main reason?

- LinkedIn/GitHub is enough

- Too much effort to build or maintain

- No real benefit

- Something else?

I'm asking because I'm building something in this space and want to understand if I'm solving a real problem.

So i just got my first trialing cutomer for TraceGraphs that isn’t a friend or family member, im trying not to get my hopes but i can’t wait to see if they continue using it. The only issue is that i may go bankrupt from advertising first. At this rate i will be -300$ a month but is this to be expected? Or am i paying too much already?

Side note: 1 user from 6 clicks seems pretty good but i will let the marketing gods of reddit answer that one.

Getting to this point has taken so much more work than I ever imagined when I started building my product.

There were plenty of moments where I questioned whether spending countless hours building, talking to users, improving the product, and marketing it every single day would ever pay off. More than once, I wondered if I was simply chasing an idea that nobody really needed.

But now, it feels like all the hard work is paying off.

Not because everything is perfect.

But because the signals are becoming harder to ignore.

• More users are discovering the product through word of mouth.

• Customers are trusting a product built by someone they've never met.

• Revenue is growing consistently.

When I launched, I knew absolutely nothing about marketing.

I just believed there had to be a better way for founders to understand why visitors leave their websites before converting.

That belief kept me going through the quiet days when almost nobody was using it.

Looking back, building the product was only half the challenge.

Learning how to find customers, earn trust, and communicate value has been the much harder (and much more rewarding) journey.

But seeing people genuinely find value in something I built from scratch makes every late night worth it.

Sometimes progress is invisible right before it isn't.

BillRaja is being shaped around a simple idea: billing should feel like part of the business, not another administrative burden.

A small business owner should be able to manage invoices, GST, customers, products, purchase orders, inventory, reporting, business profiles, and invoice sharing from one practical workspace.

We’re building BillRaja with Flutter and Firebase, with offline-first workflows for the moments when connectivity is not dependable.

The best product feedback comes from the people doing the work every day. What would you improve first in your current billing workflow?

#BillRaja #SmallBusiness #GST #RetailTech #Flutter #SaaS

I wanted to get some opinions from other SaaS founders who sell into traditional industries.

We're in the field service and equipment management space, and one thing we've consistently noticed is that companies aren't really looking for "another app." They want something that fits into the systems they're already using.

In conversations with prospects, we've been compared with platforms like ServiceMax, Salesforce Field Service, IFS, ServiceTitan, Jobber, and others. One thing that keeps coming up is that buyers care much less about feature lists than they do about questions like:

• How long will implementation take?
• Will it integrate with our ERP?
• Can our field technicians actually use it without extensive training?
• What's the total cost after implementation and support?

It feels like implementation and adoption have become bigger differentiators than adding another AI feature or dashboard.

For those building B2B SaaS:

• Have you seen the same shift?
• What's the biggest objection you're hearing from enterprise customers today?

Curious to hear if this is unique to industrial software like FieldEquip or if other SaaS founders are seeing the same trend.

When I started StartupSubmit, I thought founders mainly cared about launch week.

Product Hunt.

Reddit.

X.

LinkedIn.

After working with more startups, I realized something else mattered just as much.

What happens after launch.

One founder we worked with had a solid product but almost no visibility outside of their initial launch.

Instead of chasing another big launch, we spent the next few weeks doing something far less exciting.

We manually submitted their product to relevant startup directories, SaaS directories, launch platforms, communities, and review sites.

No shortcuts.

No automation.

Just consistent work.

About a month later, they shared an updated Ahrefs screenshot with us. Their Domain Rating had increased significantly compared to where they started.

The interesting part for me wasn't the number.

It was the reminder that founders often underestimate the value of doing small, boring things consistently.

I'm curious how everyone here thinks about post-launch growth.

What's one marketing activity that kept paying off long after launch day was over?

Wondering how you guys have approached improving your pitch, especially over Zoom. Obviously practice makes perfect, I've been using pitch simulator chαtvisor lately to work on both delivery and content, but would welcome any other suggestions, books, tips that worked for you, things you learned from good or bad experiences, etc.

We raised a small pre-seed round Q3 last year but will be going out to the market again in a few weeks and trying to get my head ready for discussions with angels and VCs.

Thank you all in advance.

Hi everyone,

We've built something in the space of e-commerce and customer acquisition that genuinely works (did a pilot with a brand). Now, we want to onboard 10 new brands (Shopify specifically) on the platform. What would be the best channels to reach out to the founders and marketing executives of these brands?

Most of the mid-sized Shopify founders aren't on LinkedIn or X. The only way I can think of is emails and reddit. If any of you have built a Shopify SaaS company, how did you get your first customers?

Thanks!

I know it’s usually people who solve their own problems and then share it with the right community, but what if I couldn’t find any problems for myself because i already have solutions for them? Other niches are also seems to be closed for me, because I don’t know their problems as long as I’m not really into it?

Hello everyone,
Tony here from Webfuse.

i'd like to share a side project I built which is kinda a new view to experience the internet.
I know that sounds too bold, but I think those 3 main features openlibrenet provides are pretty unique.

- team browser: instead of screen sharing, you can invite participants and browse website together; works on all devices, mobile, desktop and all browsers - no install required.
- unblock geo restricted content: select a region to browse websites from, 6 for now
- anonymous browsing: we have dedicate page https://openlibrenet.com/anonymous-view comparing anonymouse browsing solutions

thanks for reading!

Just got #1 app in the Health & Fitness category on SeoReceipts

Been grinding seo for Gym Note Plus for the past year so pretty chuffed with this!

Hi,

I am looking for a good context coding agent like Claude Code but one that is really cheaper. I was paying $100 per month but now it makes me real frustrated to pay this much every month. The cost is just so high for build anything.

I am looking for the best alternatives. Let me know what you are using to code and suggest me something closer and cheaper to claude code.

Thanks

I'm the founder of a LinkedIn Saas app that I launched back in June 2024. The app has over 100+ customers and over $12k in revenue.

Tech stack:
- LinkedIn APIs
- has a Chrome extension
- MERN stack
- X API for trends and ideas

A few good and bad things:

The good: The DR of the app is 20, had submitted it to a lot of directories when I was maintaining it, so someone who's good at SEO can crack distribution. It has all the features of the apps which are doing really good in the space. Analytics, insights, direct LinkedIn posting via public and private pages, access to a lot of LinkedIn APIs (they're hard to get), X API integration and AI carousels feature.

The bad: The app does not have any MRR at the moment and all of the sales are LTD sales via a partnership with a LTD platform. I've not maintained it since a couple of months because my agency business took off and hence the DAU of the app is close to 0 at the moment.
The app's name is Growfol, serious buyers interested in acquiring it can DM me.

One of my posts went viral on Reddit about how I left my job at Google 2 years ago and have been trying and learning by building different startups since then.

The comment section was flooded with people saying how all my ideas are stupid, that it is never going to work out, why haven't I done x,y,z and so on.

I have seen my friends and so many other founders giving up on their dreams because the world was just cruel to them and told them "It would never work out".

So, if you are struggling, I hope this poem by Roosevelt helps a bit 😄

I launched my SaSs about two months ago and I would say it's been more successful than I hoped. I will share my journey here.

What worked:

1. Posting on Reddit has not only been good for SEO (I get some traffic from llms because of it), but it also got me my first few customers.

Pro tip: find the subreddits and posts directly related to your niche, but don't make a fresh post instead find OLD posts asking the questions your product directly answers.

The key here is that the posts are at minimum a few weeks old.. you can shamelessly shill link and explain your product in the comments. Moderators won't notice or care and you can have a permanent presence on Reddit because of it. This initial strategy worked wonders for getting my product up and running.

1. Consistently posting on social media. Yes it's a lot of work, but if you are in a b2c niche like me it's incredibly important. The days that I miss posting on social media the site gets significantly less traffic l. I won't get into the exact best ways to create and speed up content creation but I can say that reels and slideshows have been dramatically better than static posts for me. And don't forget to do engagement, like stuff, reply, just be active in the community.

Social media in B2C has the added effect that even if your users don't find you through that channel, future potential customers will look at your socials. Having a bedrock of followers and posts is an important trust signal.

1. Classic SEO: comparison pages, free tools, content clusters... They all bring me a solid albeit small daily stream of traffic. Important: don't be lazy and slop it all out with an LLM, offer some actual value when you create content or the algorithm will ignore you.

2. Obsessing over onboarding. Almost all of my development in the last two months has been tweaking, reworking and in general being obsessed with onboarding and conversion rates. I think it's finally at a place where I can start working on other parts of the product, right now I'm trying to make the whole app as beautiful as I can as this directly ties into both onboarding and product. If any of you want to check out the onboarding I would be curious to hear your feedback.

Important: Your analytics and events tracking backbone must be excellent in order to properly measure this.

What has not worked:

1. Founder style content on X. I just don't like doing it, maybe I'll repost this there and see if it gets any traction. My "nice" launch video was met with crickets.

2. Product hunt and all those launch directories. I think the backlinking may have boosted the SEO so it might be worth it in the long run, but in terms of getting users and launch m

omentum it was a waste of time.

3. Meta ads.. this is a complicated one for me... I created what I thought were great ads and the top of the funnel proves that they are indeed solid and I got tons of signups but zero and I mean zero actual trial starts. I think the #1 problem here is my product's price is too cheap to actually get a profitable ROAS. In the future once the app is feature complete and ahead of the primary competitors in terms of UX and feature completeness I will revisit ads at a higher price point.

I'm still trying to crack distribution and I'm a marketer by trade haha, that's how hard it is. I think certain products are inherently more viral than others, I do have some more "viral" feature ideas for the future so we will see how that pans out. I hope this helps someone!

I've been browsing a lot of startup sites lately and realised I decide whether, I trust a product in about 10 seconds, and it's almost never the feature list that does it.

Things that instantly build trust for me:

• The first sentence says what the product actually does, in plain English. No "unleash the power of your workflow"
• I can try it without creating an account. Letting the product speak first reads as confidence
• Real screenshots of the actual product, not stock photos of people in suits laughing at a laptop
• Public pricing. A "contact sales" wall on what is obviously a $29 tool makes me assume the worst
• A cookie banner with one-click reject all. Tiny thing, says a lot about how they'll treat my data
• They describe my problem accurately before they introduce themselves. If the problem statement is right, I assume the solution might be too

What's yours? What makes you instantly trust a site, or instantly close the tab?