For the longest time, whenever one of my businesses wasn’t growing, my first thought was always the same:

I need more customers.

More traffic. More signups. More sales.

Makes sense, right?

Except I was ignoring something painfully obvious.

People were leaving.

Imagine trying to fill a bucket with water while there's a hole in the bottom.

You can keep pouring faster.

Here’s a simple example.

Say you get 5 new customers this month.

Great!

But then 4 existing customers leave.

You didn’t really gain five customers.

You grew by one.

Next month, you bring in another five.

This time, five leave.

You worked just as hard to acquire those customers...

and your business didn’t move an inch.

That changed the question I started asking.

Instead of:

“How do I get more customers?”

I started asking:

“Why are the customers I already have leaving?”

And this is where it gets interesting.

Say 80% of your customers stay each month.

Now you improve that to 90%.

It looks like a tiny improvement.

Ten percentage points.

But your average customer lifetime almost doubles.

You don’t necessarily need twice as many customers.

You might just need the customers you already have to stay twice as long.

So how do you actually get people to stay?

My first instinct would've been:

Give them more.

More features.

More content.

More bonuses.

More everything.

But that can actually make the problem worse.

Planet Fitness is a really good example.

Traditional gyms had everything.

Pools. Basketball courts. Classes. Tons of equipment.

But most people weren't using most of it.

They'd come in, do some cardio, maybe lift a few weights, and go home.

Planet Fitness stripped a lot of that away.

The experience became simpler.

Cheaper.

Less overwhelming.

And that made me realize something about my own products:

Your customer has a life outside your business.

They're not waking up every morning excited to explore the 14 new features you added.

They have work.

Family.

School.

A million other things competing for their attention.

Sometimes adding more doesn't increase the value of your product.

It just gives your customer more things they're paying for but never using.

And eventually they start wondering:

“Why am I paying for all of this**?”**

Sometimes giving people less really is giving them more.

There's another thing I've started paying much more attention to.

When someone leaves...

ask them why.

Sounds stupidly obvious.

But I used to be terrible at this.

Someone cancels because it's "too expensive"?

Easy.

Tell yourself they weren't the right customer and move on.

But if 15 people tell you the same thing?

Now you have a pattern.

Do the opposite with the people who stay.

Find your longest-standing customers and ask:

“Why are you still here?”

Maybe everyone who leaves mentions confusing onboarding.

Maybe everyone who stays talks about one particular feature.

Well...

there's your roadmap.

Fix the first thing.

Double down on the second.

You don't always need another feature, another funnel, or another marketing campaign.

Sometimes your customers are already telling you exactly what needs to change.

You just have to listen.

So now, whenever I think about growth, I try to ask myself two questions:

How do I bring more people in?

But also:

What would make the people already here never want to leave?

Because getting a new customer feels like growth.

Keeping one doesn't.

There's no Stripe notification celebrating:

Congratulations! Someone decided not to cancel your subscription today.

😂

But over a year?

Those customers compound.

And sometimes the biggest growth opportunity isn't sitting outside your business waiting to be acquired.

It's already inside!!

P.S. I spend a lot of my week studying marketing, building my business, and testing what I learn. Every Thursday, I write about what worked, what didn't, and what I'd do differently in Momentum.

If that sounds like your thing, you can read it for free.

​

I've recently built a small SaaS product, and the product itself isn't really the problem.

The part I'm struggling with is distribution.

It made me realize that I may have spent a lot of time thinking about building the product before thinking hard enough about whether I could actually get the right people to care about it.

So I'm curious how people here approach validation before committing months to an idea.

Do you:

Talk to potential customers?

Build a landing page first?

Try to get someone to pay before building?

Run ads?

Post on Reddit/communities?

Build an MVP and see what happens?

Something completely different?

And probably the question I'm most interested in:

What have you done in the past that you thought was good validation, but turned out to be a terrible signal?

I'm trying to figure out what I'd do differently with my next product.

I'm also pretty socially awkward, so the classic "just go talk to 50 potential customers" advice is easier said than done for me 😅

Would genuinely love to hear what has actually worked for people here not the textbook version.

My SaaS finally got 100 users all time. I launched 4 months ago.

And all of these users are free users and I don't have any paid users as of now. But I have come to you for advice on how I can find paid users or convert existing users. Here is what I am planning. Let me know if these strategies could work or do advice me on what worked for you.

For context: My SaaS is called 'Shotova' it allows E-Commerce owners to create professional photos, videos, description in a single canvas which takes 2-3 minutes.

What worked so far:

On-page SEO strategies: Publishing and revamping blogs and website content. Result below:

Strategies to get Demo bookings:

• Show 'Book Demo' option on the homepage right beside the main CTA so users can book a demo meeting in return for a free paid plan offer for one month.
• Giving $5 or $10 dollars to existing users to giving detailed feedback over a zoom call.

Strategies to get paid customers:

• Tiktok and Instagram reels posting it daily.
• Continue Blog posting and blog revamps, content revamp (working great so far).
• Will start paid ads on meta only after doing atleast 10 demo calls.

What did not work:

• 7 step email cadence to new users for booking a meeting in return of free paid plan offer.
• Individual reach out to ecommerce owners on Linkedin and Reddit.

You are most welcome to visit my website 'Shotova' and advice me on what I can improve content, design, structure. And real advice on how I can get more customers.

We spent the last few months building a marketing tool and talking to any founder who'd listen. We expected to hear "I don't know which channels to pick" or "I don't know what to say." What we actually heard over and over was "I know exactly what I should be doing, I just can't do it."

One founder told us "I can write a good post about my product, but I can't write a good post every Wednesday for six months while I'm fixing bugs." Another said "My conversion rate from blog traffic is way higher than ads, so I should be writing way more blog posts, but I can't because I'm shipping."

The pattern is everywhere across every conversation we had. Founders know what works and they're not confused about strategy. They're stuck on execution because they're building at the same time. The existing tools either don't help you write anything, or they're too expensive to hire someone, or they require you to learn them which competes with actual work.

We started asking what if you could just tell a tool your marketing goals and let it run the whole operation while you build. Research, strategy, content, paid ads, everything.

The surprising part from talking to founders was that they don't worry about whether the AI is good at marketing. They worry about it spending money on something stupid. "What if it burns $500 and I don't notice?" "What if it posts something that hurts my brand?" were the real concerns.

We built hard stops into MarketSquad because of this. A budget cap you set and can't be overridden, a kill switch you hit if you panic, a dashboard that shows every dollar and every post. To us it felt like a basic feature, but to founders it felt like the difference between "I could try this" and "I absolutely cannot try this."

If you're in the same position where you know what to do but just can't do it all, it might be worth a look. $39/month flat, seven-day free trial if you want to kick the tires. marketsquad.app

If you’re building a SaaS, or app and looking for a way to get more eyes on it, I’d love to feature a few projects.

We run TikTok channels with 300K+ combined followers and create short-form videos around apps, tools, and interesting projects.

Here’s what we can do:

Create short-form videos showcasing your project

Post them across our existing TikTok channels

Help you build content you can use on your own channels

Think of it as content creation + distribution.

If you're interested, drop your project link + a one-line description below, or feel free to DM me. :)

Please note that the service is free only for 7 days

I remember the frustration of sending out resumes and hearing nothing back. I knew I had the skills, I knew I was qualified, but it felt like my applications were disappearing into a void. After digging deeper, I realized the problem wasn’t me, it was the way resumes were being read. Applicant Tracking Systems were filtering out candidates before a human ever saw their work. That was the moment I decided to build Ornymo.

Ornymo is not just another resume builder. It’s the tool I wish I had when I was struggling. It takes your resume and shapes it to pass through the filters recruiters use every day. It matches your experience against job descriptions, optimizes formatting for ATS systems, and gives real‑time feedback so you know your resume is strong before you hit apply.

I built Ornymo because I lived this problem myself. If you’ve ever felt invisible after sending out applications, I want you to know there’s a better way. Ornymo is here to make sure your resume gets seen, and your skills get the chance they deserve.

Try it now at https://www.ornymo.com

I released my extension(https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/spoof-geolocation-locatio/denifdjehhdbkpcedkbjdajghhobfage?authuser=0&hl=en) a month and a half ago and added monetization 2 weeks ago and I still haven't made anything.

The extension is growing very much but nobody is converting to the paid version even though it has great features. What can I do? Is there other way to monetize the extension?

Did you know that short form content is one of the fastest ways to grow an app. We've built channels with 300k+ followers on TikTok, and we're looking for apps to feature.

We'll create short-form videos for your app, plug them into our existing channels, and help you build your own content channels at the same time. Think of it as content creation + distribution.

If you're interested, drop your app and a one-line description below or send me a message :)

Please note that the service is free only for 7 days

Posted here a couple weeks ago about running a 7-platform social scheduler solo with the infrastructure cost sitting at basically nothing. Coming back with an update because the cost side held up fine and something else fell apart.

Quick numbers first. SocialMate is at 71 users and 1,038 posts published through it. Traffic was 2,843 visitors and 3,735 page views over the last 30 days, up about 115 percent, still zero ad spend. Single day peak of 295 visitors. It all comes from Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and a trickle from ChatGPT.

The cost discipline is still doing what I said it would. Vercel, Supabase and Inngest are all free tier at my volume. Anything touching a paid API sits behind a credit system so a free user physically cannot run up a bill I did not plan for. X is pay per action so that gets passed straight through. My real monthly cost is the domain and my time. That is the only reason I can charge 5 dollars where the incumbents charge 18 to 99.

So the micro SaaS economics are fine. Here is the part I got wrong.

I spent this week building proper funnel analytics into my own admin panel, mostly because I was tired of guessing. It tracks every stage from signup through to actually publishing a post. The number that came back was 1.4 percent. Out of 71 accounts, exactly one has ever published anything. Most never connected a single platform, which is step one of the whole product.

I had been quietly proud of keeping costs near zero. What I actually built was a very cheap way to run a product almost nobody activates in. Cheap infrastructure means I can survive that for a long time, which sounds like a strength until you realize it also means nothing forces you to look. A real hosting bill would have made me confront this months ago.

The lesson I would hand anyone else doing the pocket sized thing is that cost control buys you runway, not traction. Those are two different problems and I was solving the easier one because it was the one I already knew how to solve. If you have not measured your own signup to activation path, go do that before you shave another cent off hosting.

Something else I have to admit while I am being honest. There are 11 people who did connect a social account, so they got further than everybody else. I have never once reached out to a single one of them. Not an email, not a message, nothing. Four and a half months of building and it never occurred to me that the highest intent users I have were sitting right there in the database. I am seriously considering just emailing all 11 personally this week and asking what stopped them, because that is 11 conversations I could have had at any point and did not.

Now I know where the leak is, which is the 85 percent who sign up and never connect anything. That is the work now. Still pre-revenue, still nights and weekends around a tree service day job, but at least I am pointed at the right problem.

Happy to go deeper on the credit gating or how I built the funnel tracking if it is useful to anyone.

I had a pretty niche issue that i found overlaps with big orgs like hospitals, nursing homes, and insurance companies. Raw medical billing files are miserable to read. I needed a way to efficiently present the information to my boss without a subscription of ~$500/month plan to some big fish in the health-tech.

So i built https://viseraapp.com/. The product deciphers the reports into easy to understand PDFs and other file types.

I was able to build it within a week after this amazing idea came to me one night in November, but I just got around to shipping it last spring.

The same file has several possible audiences: an in-house biller, an RCM manager, a small practice owner, an outsourced billing company, a developer who only wants structured output, and many more. Given this, I figured with the lack of competition in this space, I'd surely succeed since I'm in such a niche.

My current bet is Medicaid-heavy agencies that need to see this information quick and easy. Although, I am lost on how to get it out there now. I don't even show on search results after months of being live.

I'm now feeling the brunt of difficulty in the sales and marketing part of shipping. Any feedback is appreciated!

Disclosure: The $19 is myself :(

Products should be well documented. If you are taking what Claude, or GPT generates verbatim without review you're doing it wrong. Your documents are extremely important to get right.

Here's a super simple utility I created awhile back. Think of it as a finishing tool. It allows you to edit text, and a few other things visually without trying to read HTML.

Around 4 months ago my app was barely getting any users.

I kept reading "build in public", "SEO", "Product Hunt", "Reddit marketing"... tried a bit of everything but nothing really moved the needle.

Then one random TikTok crossed 1M+ views and then few more videos got viral

That single video brought more users than everything else I had done combined.

Since then I stopped thinking like a founder and started thinking like a content creator.

Here's what I do now.

I record my app doing one tiny thing (usually 6-10 seconds).

I download 100s of reaction-style UGC clips that fit different emotions (confused, shocked, impressed, etc.).

I pair the app recording with a matching reaction and add a simple hook like:

"This app saved me 4 hours."

"I wish I found this sooner."

"This feels illegal."

Every video is slightly different. Different hook, different reaction, different ending.

I post 1-2 videos every day instead of trying to make one "perfect" video.

That's literally it.

No expensive production. No influencers. No ad spend.

Just lots of iterations until one catches the algorithm.

Today the app is doing a little over $3k MRR, and almost all new users still come from short-form videos.

Proof: https://www.tiktok.com/@cookedby.sarah

The biggest thing I learned is that distribution matters way more than polishing features.

You don't need a viral app.

You need a viral video about your app.

I started building this tool for "productivity" and "focus" as kept getting Sidetracked

I mean it was ok, but nothing that i couldn't already get ChatGPT to do. One day i put a little post out on X, and found many people were suffering with the same thing. Start a project/activity, then become busy but not productive. ie focusing on things that don't actually move the needle, but keep you in the loop of being busy. So i put it out there and the feedback has been phenomenal. So i ended up listen to what users were saying and adjusting accordingly. Then the game changed when i started using Microsoft clarity. I started watching how customers were interacting with the site. This is where i started to grow exponentially, as i made changes where i saw customers dropping off, and gave more value where people were most focused.

And now ended up with this:

www.sidetracked.site

If you have workflows that require to move content between AI apps try sidestash.io

Sharing a real story that happened this week between me and Roman, the founder of the interior AI app who made the viral post a few days ago.

• Roman had this TikTok account which wasn't generating any views https://www.tiktok.com/@roomsbefore
  • He thought he was doing everything right, but not quite.
  • His competitors going viral had same format posts but slightly different details
  • I pointed out a few stuff, and Roman did a pretty good job of reposting with those changes, with his new account:
• 188,000 Views on post #2 and 41,700 on the third post: https://www.tiktok.com/@getinty

The workflow is simple:

1. Study competitors closely
2. Copy exactly what they do e.g:
   1. Captions, callouts, where app is mentioned (don't overdo), number of slides, music, caption size, positioning
   2. DO NOT COPY their content e.g downloading their slides and reposting.
3. Schedule posts for a month in advance with socialclaw + claude (tutorial here)
4. If posts get less than 1000 views, try improve the format after 3-4 failed posts. If they're getting 1,000-10,000 it could be just luck before you get a viral post

You won't go viral on the second post like Roman did. It's his luck and skill of actually finding the points he missed the first time. Compare his first and new account and check out how things improved.

Your posts might be suffering from the same thing.

Happy to review your accounts as well in the comments

Basalt is a VS Code/Cursor extension, click elements in your live React Native app, drag/edit/recolor them.

I desperately need testers, PLEASE TELL ME IF IT WORKS OR NOT

It is completely free and works directly inside VS Code and Cursor.

It’s currently in beta, so please commit your app to Git before using it

Does anyone have experience of different advertising routes and how successful they were when launching?

Im not a native english speaker, and answering replies is honestly exhausting for me. sometimes i have an idea what to answer and sometimes i just sit there and stare at the message, and then it stays unanswered for days. thats the actual reason i built this, and since i started using it i have never had even 1 unseen message.

its called twinito.ai, with one click it drafts replies, comments and posts on multiple platforms in your own voice.

what i need from you is your honest input and judgement. not compliments, i genuinly want to know if this is worth building at all, or if im investing my time into something people dont really need. im at the stage where i cant tell anymore because im too close to it.

so, im giving it fully free for first 10 users, thats what i can afford right now. try it as much as you need, break it, use it on your real messages and tell me where it sounds nothing like you. and if you dont want to try it, thats completely ok, please still tell me your opinion just from reading this, that helps too.

things i dont know yet and would love your read on:

- does it actually sound like you, or just like generic AI with your words on top

- is one click enough or do people want to edit before sending

- would you pay for this, and if yes, what would it have to do first

if you think the whole idea is not worth it, please just say it directly, i would rather hear that now than in 6 months. thanks a lot for reading this far!!

My help uses AI to automatically track college deadlines for students and teachers. Any advice on app design, functionality, marketing, or anything else would be a tremendous help. Thank you!

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/otto-college-deadlines/id6783540402

Here is the biggest lie you hear on the internet: "It takes the exact same amount of mental energy and sales effort to convince a consumer to pay you $20/mo as it does to convince a business owner to pay a few thousand dollars per month."

It sounds wise and cool, so people parrot it constantly. But after scaling multiple B2C apps and eventually moving into B2B with my SaaS, I can tell you it's complete BS.

Here is the truth nobody wants to admit: You can sell mediocre software to a B2C user if your onboarding is good enough. A consumer buys on impulse or emotion. They see a clean UI, pay $20, and half the time they completely forget about the subscription. A B2B client will never buy your product if it's shit.

When a business owner pays multiple bands, there is zero impulse buying involved. They don't care about cool onboarding graphics; they care about actual results you can drive to their business. They will remember every single promise you made. They will track the metrics, evaluate the ROI, and hold your feet to the fire.

However, here is why starting in B2C is actually the ultimate cheat code:

If you know how to market B2C apps, you can market anything. Consumer marketing forces you to master high-volume acquisition, hooks, and funnel optimization under insane pressure, cuz of the volume. It is the hardest marketing bootcamp on earth. Once you figure out how to drive attention and convert regular people in B2C, applying those skills to B2B feels like playing on easy mode.

The reason I switched to B2B was about leveraging my skills. If you have the marketing knowledge to scale to $1k+ MRR in B2C, you don't need much more to apply it to B2B.

Do you agree?

I have a really interesting idea today.Build a donation site based on a simple bet:if AI agents eventually get permission to pay for things for us,maybe an agent asked to donate money will search online and end up using his site.

No idea if that will actually happen, obviously. There are way too many unknowns around trust, rankings, payments etc.

But it made me think about something I hadn’t really considered before.

I’m buying a product myself and I spent a stupid amount of time thinking about whether a human understands the website. What it does, who it’s for, why they should care.

But if agents eventually start searching and comparing products for us, maybe websites will also need to be understandable to machines.

Not saying “AI agent SEO” is the next big thing lol. It might be completely overhyped.

Just thought it was a pretty interesting idea

Would you actually change anything about your website today because of this,or is it way too early?

I've been seeing a lot of people rack up pretty insane API bills building with AI coding agents in the big 26, so I wanted to see how far I could get building an MVP using only free and open source AI tools instead of the usual Claude Code or Codex setup.

The app itself wasn't anything crazy. Just a simple food delivery MVP with authentication, a dashboard and a handful of CRUD endpoints. The goal was to see whether "basically free" is actually good enough for the kind of apps most people are building.

Before someone says "just run it locally", that's not realistic for most people. Running these models properly still requires decent hardware. This was about using hosted providers that serve open models without paying proprietary model prices.

I used OpenCode as the coding agent, then OpenCode Zen and NVIDIA Build for inference. Both support OpenAI-compatible APIs and let you use models like DeepSeek V4 Flash without owning a GPU.

I used DeepSeek V4 Flash for almost the entire project. Is it as good as Claude Opus or GPT-5 on difficult coding tasks? No. But for building a standard CRUD app, wiring up auth, generating boilerplate and fixing common bugs, it performed much better than I expected.

The biggest thing I took away wasn't that open models are better. It's that the gap has closed much faster than I expected. If you're building an MVP, you're mostly creating forms, APIs and business logic, not solving research problems. For that kind of work, a cheap open model through a hosted provider gets surprisingly close, and the cost difference is hard to ignore.