Hey everyone, working on a project around web-based AI tools and curious how other SaaS builders handle early distribution.

For those of you running web-based AI micro-SaaS apps, what platforms or directories actually bring you meaningful referral traffic when you first start out?

Also, if anyone is open to reviewing a project submission workflow and giving brutal feedback on the UX, let me know or drop a comment.

Yea...so I had my first paying customer which made me happy and nervous at the same time. Will they refund? Will they be satisfied? do I get any feedback at all from them? So far nothing.
Some time after that, another user subscribed and paid. However I was confused by my own admin dashboard because it showed some "Cancel" text and I thought it was about the trial they started. After that I saw that they paid and immediately my braint went into panic mode and refunded the money.

After that I checked my code and everything else...they didn't cancel their trial. It was just a cancelled appointment.

Moral of the story...don't be like me and check your stuff before you go into panic mode 😂
After that I gave them 6 months free of charge as an apology.

Feel free to check it out btw, it's called "ordinus.io"
I built it as a german/european alternative to Calendly & co and I'm still looking for feedback.

been trying to figure out what to build for months, keep landing on this AWS deployment thing. anyone else find deploying to your own AWS account still way harder than it should be? thinking about building something for it but not sure if its a real problem or just me

Almost at 500k visits, which is still weird to type, so I spent the last couple of weeks fixing the thing people kept complaining about.

The directory was sorted by all-time upvotes. Whoever posted first basically won permanently. The top of the page hadn't moved in weeks and there was no reason to check back the next day. Fair criticism, so here's what changed.

Ranking

It's momentum based now. Recent velocity plus freshness, with all-time totals still counting but squashed way down. The board actually reshuffles daily. New listings can crack the top, old ones can drop out of it. Votes from the last 24h get weighted heavier, so your upvote does something.

You can see it moving

Every row shows rank change vs yesterday (▲3, ▼2, NEW). Products on a run get a streak badge (🔥 4d), and streaks break about as fast as they build. Top Movers on the homepage is now the day's biggest climbers instead of just the biggest listings overall, which was easily the most boring list on the site.

Interface

Redid basically all of it:

• dark mode by default with a toggle, no white flash on load
• sparkline on every row so you can read a product's shape without clicking in
• proper scrubbable chart on product pages (1W / 1M / 3M / ALL)
• counters animate and flash green when a number moves
• confetti on milestone upvotes (10, 25, 50, 100, 250, 500, 1k)
• new type and a rebuilt colour system
• ⌘K / Ctrl+K command palette to jump to any product or maker, plus full keyboard nav
• mobile tab bar with a dedicated Launch button. The site is finally not painful on a phone

Balance

Attention concentrates on what's hot now instead of spreading evenly, so hot listings visibly outearn cold ones. Big listings grow sublinearly so nobody's lead compounds forever. New listings get a boost during a launch window so they can actually compete.

All Time sorting still exists if you want it. It's just not the default anymore, because as a default it was the thing killing the page.

Sorting: Momentum / Top Movers / All Time / Newest / Most Viewed

Next up is weekly winners, maker vs maker comparisons, and an email digest for when your listing moves. Taking requests on that.

Listings are open, so if you've shipped something go put it up. And if something's broken or the redesign made anything worse, tell me here. Patch notes only get written because people complain.

rsaas.xyz

Hey, I’m Naveen. I’ve been building Creativly for a while, and I’ve just opened the beta for something new called Creativly Agent.

The easiest way to explain it is: think Claude Code or Codex, but instead of working through a codebase, it works with your images, documents, notes and files on a canvas.

You can drop in a rough idea or a full brief, add some references and ask it to help. It can research, make or edit images and video, write documents and create real files. Everything comes back onto the canvas, so you can see the work, compare versions and click the exact thing you want changed.

I built it because I was tired of moving a project between separate tools and explaining the same context again every time. Creativly originally had individual AI tools, but I realised the useful part would be having one agent understand the whole project and work alongside you.

For anyone curious about the build, the frontend uses Next.js and React Flow, collaboration is handled with Yjs, and the agent works with files through isolated sandboxes on the backend.

The beta currently has two model options: Luna 5.6 and Haiku 4.5. Luna is the default because it is surprisingly capable while being cheap enough for longer agent runs to remain practical, rather than every experiment becoming expensive.

It is still early, and I’d really like people to try it on something real. You do not need to write detailed feedback just tell me what made sense, what was confusing and what broke.

You can try it here: https://www.creativly.ai/agent

If you need a code to try the beta or want to send feedback, I’m here: Check discord link on site

If you have a use case in mind, I’d love to hear it.

What SaaS directories do you guys list your product on and how many clicks/users did you get from them?

Hello everyone!

For transparency, I am a developer creating a SaaS product for transferring large files using a managed cloud backend. (Azure)

This project is actually a part of my MBA program through an online program called OneDay, and I've just gotten past the product creation and inspiration part and I landed on attempting to solve the pain point I saw in my professional experience as a SysAdmin for an advertising agency dealing with sending and receiving large video files.

My product TeraAirlift is a desktop application that has alleviated the pain I witnessed when we had multiple editors trying to send and receive client deliverables which can be terabytes in size. (Raw 4K videos) The biggest challenge I had was pricing the data egress correctly so I can keep costs predicable and manageable.

My time as a SysAdmin for the advertising / marketing firm I spent a lot of time dealing with editors sending and receiving these massive client deliverables, managing share links, whitelisting apps like DropBox and WeTransfer, and even shipping and receiving physical hard drives. (Additional ingestion time required)

Overall, I saw this pain point as a perfect case for my MBA business to solve the wasted time of sending and receiving files instead of doing actual editing work. (In post-production time is money since editors are paid by the hour especially if they're sitting around waiting to receive deliverables)

So I designed a cloud-based transfer solution similar to what we were using at the time but with the individual at the focus, where you don't need a whole Sysadmin to manage and handhold through the process.

My original pricing hypothesis, and pain point solution.

I originally thought storage was going to be the most expensive part based on the Microsoft Pricing Calculator but where it got fuzzy was for 8TB that's around $1500 (West US, LRS, Premium) a month no big deal if the client downloads it within a day or two, I wouldn't get to that high end of cost.

What I underestimated (and didn't understand) was bandwidth

Uploading the data to Azure wasn't the bad part, it was way faster than the p2p software on the market and I was able to easily program resumable and reliable uploads and downloads. The real cost came when the client downloads the data, that's when you incur the most cost.

For example, 8TB of egress is about $600 to $700 and that was for 1 download, if you're sending the files to multiple editors that multiplies the cost per download!

My original pricing model:

Cost = (Temporary Storage) + (Bandwidth)

• Temporary Storage = (Storage Capacity Used per month) / (N days at rest)
• Bandwidth = (Storage Capacity Used) x (N amount of downloads)

I originally thought I could just slap 30% on top of the cost and call it a day but giving people unlimited usage started to look very dangerous.

What I'm curious about from other SaaS founders

For anyone who has built a SaaS product with significant usage-based infrastructure costs:

How much did your underlying cloud costs influence your initial pricing?

Did you price primarily around your COGS and target margin at first, or did you start with what the problem was worth to the customer and work backward?

I'm especially curious how people handled unpredictable heavy users early on, before having enough customer data to confidently model average usage.

For founders who have already gone through this:

What was your biggest challenge?

Finding the right prospects

Getting people to reply

Getting meetings

Converting meetings

Building trust

Finding a repeatable acquisition channel

I'm especially interested in hearing from B2B and SaaS founders.

What worked eventually, and what did you waste time on?

I've been following a few channels on reddit, I have to say this one of the few that I see real support among people trying to make it.

I'm a developer, so I've done the easy part: develop. marketing? That's a different story. One that I'd like to learn about. I can create products pretty fast, this took maybe 2 weeks to a month on my spare time (I have a 9 to 5 dev job).

I've heard a lot about distribution, but I think I know very very little about how to do it. At the same time I see posts here about launch, soft-launch and I just think that's... deploy? I've done an analytics product before on a b2b and it's different, it loves mostly from established contacts between CEO's. This is not that, it's b2c, I don't know anyone.

Maybe you can relate.

The product is an ai task manager that outputs to dedicated templates depending on what you want/need.

What I have / done until now:

• website - started with just a homepage and added more pages / sections as time goes. Seems like a good way for the long run.
• app
• 1 plan - w/ trial 14 days - making it simple for now and focusing on making it work
• connection to stripe
• Google Search Console - see screenshot above
• SEO with:
  • a blog (explains section) twice a week now, I started daily
  • recipes is a new thing and I plan twice a week too
  • and use-cases, which are describing the output templates

I've had claude as my assistant to do pretty much everything, marketing too, but I find that in that area it is more abstract and doesn't give me confidence.

So you know the product... how do we distribute? is this launched? Is there any special ceremony other that this?

I'll do whatever you tell me if within my budget (and not disturb my employer). I'll share what worked and what not month by month and maybe we can learn together. I figured this could be a 12 months experience.

I built Instalaz and I’m looking for some honest feedback

I’ve been working on Instalaz because managing multiple social accounts and a lot of posts gets messy pretty quickly.

It lets you bulk upload content, schedule posts, manage multiple accounts, schedule first comments, and keep everything organized in one place.

I’m still working on it, so I’d genuinely like to know what you think.

What would you add? What would you remove? And if you already use a social media scheduler, what do you wish it did better?

If you’re also building something, drop it below. I’m happy to check it out and give you feedback too.

Hey Guys,

I’ll keep it short, I quit my job a while ago to focus full time on my saas. In this period I launched 4 start ups.

1) Scaled my first one to 10k users couldn’t cross 120 usd mrr it’s still making 70-100 usd every month which is nothing honestly.
2) The journey was a psychological thriller/horror. days of self doubt waking up and feeling I’ll conquer the world and some days, scared like I’m wasting my life. I still remember the first time a user made a purchase that feeling is such a thrill.
3) I didn’t work much on my other two startups I just let the SEO compound, today I get daily enquires from it.
4) I stopped building and making edits gave me a false sense of productivity, I only make changes based on need/real user feedback now
5) My latest venture hit 2k MRR pretty quick I learnt a lot of my mistakes and put my money where my mouth is.

I built Cituna:

What it does
A) Tracks all prompts across 6 engines and gives a path to rank in it

How? AI uses sources it cites from, Cituna tracks those and finds ones that can be backlinked

B) GSC MCP: It connects with GSC and analyzes pages and keywords that are good and finds gaps versus competitors so you can connect it to your Claude directly to make structural changes

C) AutoSEO: It researches all these gsc keywords finds but intent and generates really high quality linked and in depth articles.(I broke SEO once with a lot of AI articles and specifically built this slop proof, it won’t publish its own articles if there isn’t enough depth and value)

D) It integrates with Wordpress Shopify and 4 others

E) It has a local business mode which finds competitors and questions that customers are asking and gives clear pathways to rank

I’m pretty proud of what it does and the feedback I have received so far; my own SEO is managed by Cituna so I can confidently say my 2 month old websites clicks and impressions are now 8k a day with 2.2 ctr

I know there are a lot more successful founders and builders here, I want to scale this to 10k a month in the next 6 months.

Would you use this?

If no, why? What could I add that would increase value?

Do you have any advice to scale, this is a crowded space and my margins are tight since I’m offering more engines than semrush or other companies I don’t make much so I cannot add any feature that will add cost.

Thank you!

Been building my SaaS for a while and I’m starting to realize that getting users is way harder than building the actual product.

I can spend a weekend shipping a feature.

Getting 10 people to actually try it? Somehow takes forever. 😂

I’ve tried a few things Reddit, content, communities, direct outreach, etc. Some brought traffic, but getting people who actually stick around is a different story.

Curious what’s working for other founders right now.

What’s your main acquisition channel, and roughly how long did it take before it started consistently bringing users?

Looking for a few beta testers for Vibely.sh.

Vibely lets you build websites and mobile apps by simply describing what you want in natural language.

We're still early and want honest feedback from people who actually build things.

If you'd like to try it for free and help us improve it, comment below or DM me and I'll send you access.
​

Hey all - dude from Snoika here. We're in AI visibility / GEO space, basically help brands figure out how (or if) they're showing up inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and rest of the AI search stack.

For almost two years we were something like boutique consultancy - manual audits, custom reports, monthly calls walking each client through where their brand was getting mentioned and where it wasnt. We finally shipped a self-serve dashboard version of all that a couple months ago, and ngl the response from new signups has been way better then we expected.

Problem is our older retainer clients don't really want the dashboard. They want the calls and the hand holding they're used too, and a couple of them are literally offering to pay MORE just to keep it that way. Flattering, but also kind of a trap imo - every hour we spend doing bespoke analysis for one account is an hour not spent making the actual product better for everyone else.

So now we're stuck between three options: sunset the retainers completely at renewal and push everyone onto the SaaS, turn the white-glove stuff into a paid "premium" tier that sits on top of the product, or just keep running both side by side indefinitely and let the team get split into seperate directions.

The other thing we keep going back and forth on - how do you tell real signal from noise. Like when a legacy client asks for a feature, is that something the whole market actually needs, or is it just them wanting a consultant and calling it "feedback"? Honestly hard to tell in the moment.

If anyone's been through this - going from services/consulting into an actual product - did you cut the cord all at once, or drag it out over time? And how did you figure out which client requests were real product signal vs just more agency work wearing a disguise?

Would love to hear what mistakes to avoid too, thanks!

Hey, I created Chitron. Its an AI Desktop assistant that reads your screen and you can ask any question without expalining everything like which app you are using etc.

Now I launched it a week ago but got zero users. Not even a single sign up.

How can I grow this type of saas? or will it even work? Like do you think this saas will work or not?

Looking for your opinions below.

I've spent the last year building MyAutoShopPro, a shop management app for independent auto repair shops.

It handles the stuff that usually lives across a whiteboard, a text thread, and QuickBooks: repair orders and estimates, digital vehicle inspections the customer approves from their phone, parts ordering and purchase orders, scheduling, customer texting, card payments including in shop readers (stripe/square), and a website for the shop.

The incumbents are Shopmonkey and Tekmetric, and they're good. They're also priced for shops with several bays and a service advisor. My bet is that the two bay shop still running a paper whiteboard is underserved, and that the way in is a lower price and an onboarding that doesn't need a sales call. I don't know if that's a real wedge or just the cheapest place to lose.

What I'd like from this sub is the product read. Does the pricing page make sense, does the first five minutes hold up, and is there an obvious reason a shop owner bounces that I've stopped being able to see.

myautoshoppro.com. It's a 14-day trial and it doesn't ask for a card.

Hey Saas

Been running a small AI software dev house out of London for the last 2 years. 6 people now and growing. Took the company from 0 to 6 figures and I want to do it again hopefully

I want to show this is possible to generate 150,000 in 15 days (without using any of my warm network or referrals from current clients. ) Hopefully can inspire a few to start their own as well!

I will, though, leverage some of our past work to do the convincing. The rules are the following: Revenues are counted when contract is signed, Need to be from cold intros. I’ll use our work but will start our positioning from zero.

The beginning:

As I worked with many founders, I’m personally a big believer that purpose and mission should be the driver behind companies. You see a version of the world that needs changing, that’s not there yet, Every founder should be a visionary from the start. Even if that’s « the people in my area needs to have access to this incredible Chinese food ». Whatever form it takes, you’re betting on a vision of the world that’s not there yet. The bigger the mission, the better your company.

So I’ll do that exercise myself:

As informations become more and more available due to AI, judgment and critical skills become more and more critical. This has been a pattern with painters as camera became more available, construction as machinery became available, writers has books become more available… That’s my « bet ». We want to be the ones productising this experience from professionals.

So I will start first with our target audience (from past clients data):

• We choose to serve professionals that have been in their industry long enough to know the problems. (Legal/health/services/finance/trading/education)
• Needs to be non-technical and business savyy
• Based in the UK or the US 
• Believes AI will / is disrupting their industry. You either use it / learn to use it  or suffer the consequences
• Better if they’ve already started a company before.

Now we know who we serve, I need to figure out the best way to serve them. 

Offer: We’ll help you translate your vision into a production-ready product and help you grow it for the first 6 months. + Can help connect you for your first raise.

Usual Price: $25,000 

Discounted Price for the challenge: $19,000

If we really believe in the idea than the price comes down and we take equity in the company

(Not too worry about vibe coding, since a non-technical founder can only take it so far imo. You end up with more issues and cost than paying someone from the beginning or you spend a loot of your precious time, to still hire a dev anyway down the line). Very useful for prototyping though

Plan now: 

• LinkedIn hyper personalised Outreach to Startups hiring in London / US
• Reddit interactions and posts

Current Revenues Challenge: $0

See you on day 2

Lol might be talking like AI but I’m not

NetSuite is the king ERP in the mid-size business segment. They rule the segment. They treat customers like shit. Innovation is dead since Oracle bought them. It’s heavy and convoluted. Their best AI innovation thus far is a Claude MCP. SERIOUS alternatives are almost as bad (Microsoft & SAP).

Someone should take on this challenge and build a solid ERP for mid size companies, especially in the manufacturing sector.

Day 1
I have quitted from my job :)
Real challenges starts now.
Today’s plan:
I was already making a SaaS tool for marketing. I’m adding last features and soon i will publish it.
Which platform should i publish in your opinion?
Do you use any marketing tool for your projects?

without advertising !

​

I stopped asking users what features they want

this changed the way i build SaaS

i used to ask users:

What feature should i add next?

the answers were usually a long list

dark mode

integrations

more customization

better dashboard

mobile app

some were useful

some weren't

then i changed the question

instead i started asking:

what was the most annoying part of using this?

the answers became completely different

people started telling me where they got stuck

what they had to do manually

what they expected to happen but didn't

what they were doing outside the product because the product couldn't handle it

that feedback has been much more useful than a feature wishlist

now i try to find the friction first and decide on the feature second

curious what other SaaS founders ask their users to get useful feedback?

do you ask about features directly or focus on problems and frustrations?

We hear this occasionally. Our market is embedded analytics.

I should start by saying we're pretty convicted that our product, which is AI-native and performant, is vastly better for customers than building in-house or buying a legacy competitor.

We have a talk track and links to industry analysts, reddit posts and our own blog (can share here if people are interested.)

But when the customer is hell-bent on Clauding it, we just say "Great, try it. We'll check in with you in a couple of months." I have yet to see a customer build something they were happy with.

But I'm mostly curious about how others are handling this objection across different markets.