In March 2026, I decided to follow my own path (I will not advertising myself don't worry) and opened my company which builds strategies and AI flows of GTM and RevOps operations for B2B SaaS.

Ofc I showed my customers on my linkedin account. Bc of this "A LOT OF" GTM Engineers who doesn't care about a clear data come and try to pitch me. Instead of ignoring them, I kindly reply them. I got this message like 5 minutes ago. He/she says "Hi ....., Saw that we followed similar companies and thought there could be some overlap...."

Here's what happened in their funnel. They scraped a list, saw "SaaS" + "B2B" + "Series A-B" tags on my profile, and pattern matched me into their ICP.

Similar industry tag ≠ similar buyer.

We're not "doing the same job" just because we both say GTM on LinkedIn.

Wrong ICP = wasted sends
Wrong ICP = wrong signal in your data
Wrong ICP = your AI gets dumber, not smarter
Wrong ICP = wasted time

https://preview.redd.it/c0o83lyelooh1.png?width=411&format=png&auto=webp&s=1e98e5da01d7552457c847c7ea0e3987f60d5cc2

Wanted to share because marketing is hard and even harder when your budget is non-existent...

(Obviously the type/content of self-promotion you can post is going to dependent on the subreddit)

subreddit --- weekly visitors

• r/vibecoding — 422k
• r/saas — 211k
• r/founder — 56k
• r/buildinpublic — 46k
• r/chrome_extensions — 42k
• r/micro_saas — 41k
• r/appbusiness — 30k
• r/startupideas — 26k
• r/sideprojects — 20k
• r/imadethis — 18k
• r/appideas — 16k
• r/sideproject — 16k
• r/saasbuild — 15k
• r/saasdevelopers — 12k
• r/vibecodedevs — 10k
• r/startupsolofounder — 8.7k
• r/alphaandbetausers — 8.6k
• r/vibecodingcommunity — 6.2k
• r/solopreneur — 5.6k
• r/promotemyapp — 4.6k
• r/appbuilding — 4.6k
• r/webapps — 4.5k
• r/creativecoding — 4.4k
• r/indie_startups — 4k
• r/b2bsaas — 2.8k
• r/appdev — 2.7k
• r/projects — 2.6k
• r/saasmarketing — 2.5k
• r/saassoloprenurs — 2.3k
• r/startupaccelerators — 2.3k
• r/startups_promotion — 2k
• r/showmeyourapps — 2k
• r/appswebappsfullstack — 1.7k
• r/showmeyoursaas — 1.6k
• r/saasinvestors — 1.6k
• r/vibecodecamp — 1.5k
• r/nocodesaas — 1.3k
• r/aibuilders — 1.2k
• r/getstartups — 1.2k
• r/websitefeedback — 1.2k

I'm building a product, website, pitch deck all by myself and I'm not a creative person. I can choose a design but I can't imagine by myself. That's why I bought a design kit on Figma and trying to build my dashboard/website via claude + figma + design kit. But it still looks like AI Slope. How can I solve it?

Someone said in this group (I really don't remember who, I'm sorry)

Basically to build a business you have to do this:

1. Identify a need
2. Create a solution
3. Sell the solution

Agreed on all 3, but I'd add a 4th that's the reason the first 3 ever improve. Measure everything, and use AI to actually read what you measured.

Most founders collect data and never look at it. The bottleneck was never storage, it was that nobody had time to go through 400 replies or 60 ad variants. That part is now cheap. There's no excuse left.

Where this pays off fastest for me is creative. Not "which ad got more clicks". That tells you the result, not the reason. The useful question is which specific pain the creative names.

What I do: take every ad, landing headline and cold email that went out, and tag them by the pain being claimed. Not by channel, not by format. "You're losing hours to manual data entry" is one pain. "Your team is using 5 tools that don't talk" is another. Then look at reply and conversion rates grouped by pain instead of by creative.

The pattern that shows up almost every time: two or three pains carry everything, and they're rarely the ones the founder thinks are the selling point. The winning message is usually simpler and more boring than what the team wanted to say a specific, small, annoying task, not a vision.

Once you know which pain lands, creative production stops being guesswork. You're not writing 20 new ads hoping one hits, you're writing 20 variations of the one thing that already works. Same for cold email, same for the homepage.

Point 1 in your list is "identify a need." This is how you find out whether you actually identified it, or just decided it.

Note: GEO (LLM Visibility) is my fav these days to track. Bc AI really changes our consumer behaviors.

Well.... a lot of people say they are GTM Engineers, right? But I think they are missing something. GTM is about sales. Sales is about psychology. So I have a customer and they are building a regtech in Turkey. They are complaint and customer operations management system. They wanted to hire me to improve their sales. I checked their previous outbound strategies.

They just gave metrics and explain the product. In my opinion "FEAR" will be the most efficient way to sell this product. Why? Bc if a company does not use any GDPR complaint systems, they might get a a penalty and as you know those penalties are expensive. So built a slack app which gives you a report of their compliant results (in a public compliant website) as a report. This is my first time building a slack app. I know its a small project but I really enjoyed.

Here's the structure I want feedback on. I run my own GTM/RevOps consultancy for B2B SaaS companies (mostly international, Seed–Series B). I'm using it to bootstrap SemantiCAD (My New SaaS Project). It covers my costs while I build the startup, and I've been routing custom dev work through it to our engineers, which is already generating capital for the company before we've raised anything. I've also started training someone to run the consultancy day to day, with the goal of eventually stepping back and turning it into passive income.

Right now, the GTM time I put into SemantiCAD is really just founder time wearing two hats. I'm not pretending it's an arm's length client relationship yet. The actual test comes once the person I'm training takes over the consultancy: at that point SemantiCAD becomes a real client of the agency, run by someone else, not me marking my own homework. If that works, I never have to build a separate growth/sales team for the startup. The agency just becomes its growth function.

I'm not fully sure this is the smart structure or a distraction I'm rationalizing. So genuinely:

If you were in my position, what would you do the same? What would you do differently?

Happy to answer anything about the product, the raise, or the structure. Open book.

Question for freelancers/agencies who take on custom web app builds: how do you price hourly, day/rate, or fixed project fee? What are realistic current rates (junior/mid/senior split, backend vs frontend)? How does the process change when design is already done and out of scope?

Also curious how you factor in uncertainty when estimating especially for the line items you'd flag as "needs research first."

We're building SemantiCAD: you drop in a CAD file (STEP/DXF/DWG) and get back a costed production plan, BOM, cost breakdown, lead time in minutes instead of the 2-3 days it takes a senior estimator. Three cofounders, pre-revenue but converting our first design partners now in 1.5 months.

1. Our "demo files" were lying to us.
We built the first parser against clean CAD files. Then we got real production drawings from an actual shop and a huge chunk of them broke our extraction nested blocks, dimensions as raw text, tables that aren't tables, three languages in one drawing. If you're doing anything document/file based, get ugly real customer files before you build the happy path. Our whole architecture changed after the first batch of real files.

2. Competitors' weakness was a deployment question, not a feature question.
We spent weeks listing features to beat incumbents on. The actual wedge turned out to be that every competitor is cloud-only, and regulated manufacturers (defense, aerospace) literally cannot send drawings outside the building. We can run on-prem. That's not a feature, it's an architecture decision we happened to make early and it opens a segment nobody else can serve. Look for where your architecture accidentally unlocks a customer segment.

3. "Free pilot" gets you a yes and no urgency.
We offered free 30 day pilots on real RFQs. Getting shops to say yes was easy. Getting them to actually use it during the pilot was the hard part they're busy running a factory, and free things slide. What worked: running the pilot on RFQs they had to quote anyway that week, so using us wasn't extra work, it was the work. Tie your pilot to something already on their calendar.

4. Cold outreach worked better than "content" at our stage.
We're pre-brand. Nobody's Googling us. Direct outreach + relevant communities + our own network got every single early user. Content compounds, but it compounds from zero, and at 0 users you need conversations, not impressions. We'll do content when we have case studies worth writing about.

Happy to answer anything on selling technical software into conservative, relationship driven industries (manufacturing is not PLG). Also genuinely curious: anyone else here doing on-prem/self-hosted deployment for enterprise? Would love to compare notes on the ops overhead.

Take care "HUSTLERS"

For those of you doing GTM or RevOps as a service. How do you structure your pricing?

Trying to understand what actually works in practice:

• Monthly retainer, project-based fixed fee, or performance-based (per meeting / per SQL / % of pipeline)?
• Do you charge a separate setup/build fee for the initial infrastructure, then a smaller ongoing retainer?
• If you go performance-based, how do you handle attribution and clients who churn once the system is running?
• Roughly what ranges are you seeing for each model?

Curious what's held up over time vs. what looked good on paper but caused friction later. Thanks.

For those of you doing GTM or RevOps as a service. How do you structure your pricing?

Trying to understand what actually works in practice:

• Monthly retainer, project-based fixed fee, or performance-based (per meeting / per SQL / % of pipeline)?
• Do you charge a separate setup/build fee for the initial infrastructure, then a smaller ongoing retainer?
• If you go performance-based, how do you handle attribution and clients who churn once the system is running?
• Roughly what ranges are you seeing for each model?

Curious what's held up over time vs. what looked good on paper but caused friction later. Thanks.

I'm looking for people who talk about mechanical engineering problems bc I need people to consult about my new software. So who would you ask if you build a step to production plan AI?

Built a tool that turns CAD files into costed production plans. need a few fab shops to break it before launch

Hey, we are building a tool for make to order metal fab shops. You drop in a STEP, DXF, or DWG file and it gives you a BOM, a material cost estimate, and a lead time in a few minutes, instead of the usual manual quoting back and forth. It runs locally on your machine, so drawings never leave the building.

We're pre-launch and I'd rather find the rough edges now than after pricing and messaging are locked in. So I'm looking for a handful of shops willing to run it against real jobs and tell me honestly where it gets things wrong bad parsing, dumb cost assumptions, whatever.

Early users will haver discount for a while once we move to general pricing after launch. Not trying to make money off this group just trying to learn from people who'd actually use it before we scale.

Happy to answer questions in the comments if you're curious.

Small team, no recruiter. Every time we opened a role, the same thing happened: 200+ applications in the first week, and after a point it got overwhelming enough that we'd just set a cutoff and stop reading. Which always left the same nagging question. Who was sitting just below that line?

The deeper problem wasn't volume though. It was trust. A resume tells you what someone claims, and an interview tells you how well they perform in an interview. "Interview face" is a real thing we've hired people who nailed every conversation and then coasted. The worst hire isn't the one who fails the interview; it's the one who passes it and can't do the work.

We tried the usual fixes. Referrals first (great until the list runs dry and the role's still open). Spreadsheets + WhatsApp to track everything (fell apart by week two). A list of must-ask questions shared across the team (notes ended up in three places and nobody's head matched).

So we ended up building an internal system around one principle: don't let software judge candidates make your own judgment scale. Concretely:

• We write down what "excellent" looks like for the role once a real rubric, not keywords. Everything that comes in gets scored against our bar, with the reasoning written out, so we only read the top instead of choosing between reading everything and missing someone.
• Async structured interviews before any live call. Same deep questions for everyone, answers on record. Interview face is a one-time performance; it doesn't survive that format.
• One shared pipeline. Whoever's helping evaluate just thumbs up/down no logging into anything, no lost feedback.

Results after a few cycles: screening time collapsed, and more importantly the "did we just hire a good interviewer?" anxiety mostly went away, because every yes traces back to criteria we wrote ourselves.

We ended up turning this into an actual product because other founders kept asking about it but that's not the point of this post. The point is the principle transfers even if you do it with a doc and a form: define your bar explicitly before you open the role, and make everyone score against it. That alone fixed more than any tool we tried before.

Curious how others here handle the "can they do the work vs can they interview" problem take homes? Trials? Something else.

Hey, we are building a tool for make to order metal fab shops. You drop in a STEP, DXF, or DWG file and it gives you a BOM, a material cost estimate, and a lead time in a few minutes, instead of the usual manual quoting back and forth. It runs locally on your machine, so drawings never leave the building.

We're pre-launch and I'd rather find the rough edges now than after pricing and messaging are locked in. So I'm looking for a handful of shops willing to run it against real jobs and tell me honestly where it gets things wrong bad parsing, dumb cost assumptions, whatever.

Early users are locked in at 50% off for a once we move to general pricing after launch. Not trying to make money off this group just trying to learn from people who'd actually use it before we scale.

Happy to answer questions in the comments if you're curious.

Small team, no recruiter. Every time we opened a role, the same thing happened: 200+ applications in the first week, and after a point it got overwhelming enough that we'd just set a cutoff and stop reading. Which always left the same nagging question. Who was sitting just below that line?

The deeper problem wasn't volume though. It was trust. A resume tells you what someone claims, and an interview tells you how well they perform in an interview. "Interview face" is a real thing we've hired people who nailed every conversation and then coasted. The worst hire isn't the one who fails the interview; it's the one who passes it and can't do the work.

We tried the usual fixes. Referrals first (great until the list runs dry and the role's still open). Spreadsheets + WhatsApp to track everything (fell apart by week two). A list of must-ask questions shared across the team (notes ended up in three places and nobody's head matched).

So we ended up building an internal system around one principle: don't let software judge candidates make your own judgment scale. Concretely:

• We write down what "excellent" looks like for the role once a real rubric, not keywords. Everything that comes in gets scored against our bar, with the reasoning written out, so we only read the top instead of choosing between reading everything and missing someone.
• Async structured interviews before any live call. Same deep questions for everyone, answers on record. Interview face is a one-time performance; it doesn't survive that format.
• One shared pipeline. Whoever's helping evaluate just thumbs up/down no logging into anything, no lost feedback.

Results after a few cycles: screening time collapsed, and more importantly the "did we just hire a good interviewer?" anxiety mostly went away, because every yes traces back to criteria we wrote ourselves.

We ended up turning this into an actual product because other founders kept asking about it but that's not the point of this post. The point is the principle transfers even if you do it with a doc and a form: define your bar explicitly before you open the role, and make everyone score against it. That alone fixed more than any tool we tried before.

Curious how others here handle the "can they do the work vs can they interview" problem take homes? Trials? Something else.

Not a startup. Not disrupting anything. Just a small tool that solved a real annoyance.

My dad runs a construction/site business and tracked who owes what the way a lot of small business owners do a messy notebook plus a few Excel files that never agreed with each other. Every month there'd be an argument about whether a subcontractor was paid or not.

So I built basically a "I DON'T HAVE A NAME" ledger for his job sites. What it does:

• Add contacts (subcontractors, suppliers, workers) per site
• Log debits/credits as money goes out and comes in
• See a running balance per person and per site at a glance
• That's genuinely it

Stack, for anyone curious:

• Next.js (deployed on Vercel)
• Supabase (Postgres) for the DB + auth

I know this is trivial compared to what people ship here. No AI, no fancy dashboard, no real-time anything. But my dad actually opens it every day and stopped keeping the notebook which honestly feels like a bigger win than most "clever" things I've built.

Happy to answer questions on the Supabase setup or how I kept it simple enough that a non-technical person would actually use it. And open to feedback on what dumb but useful thing I should add next.

Not a startup. Not disrupting anything. Just a small tool that solved a real annoyance.

My dad runs a construction/site business and tracked who owes what the way a lot of small business owners do a messy notebook plus a few Excel files that never agreed with each other. Every month there'd be an argument about whether a subcontractor was paid or not.

So I built basically a "I DON'T HAVE A NAME" ledger for his job sites. What it does:

• Add contacts (subcontractors, suppliers, workers) per site
• Log debits/credits as money goes out and comes in
• See a running balance per person and per site at a glance
• That's genuinely it

Stack, for anyone curious:

• Next.js (deployed on Vercel)
• Supabase (Postgres) for the DB + auth

I know this is trivial compared to what people ship here. No AI, no fancy dashboard, no real-time anything. But my dad actually opens it every day and stopped keeping the notebook which honestly feels like a bigger win than most "clever" things I've built.

Happy to answer questions on the Supabase setup or how I kept it simple enough that a non-technical person would actually use it. And open to feedback on what dumb but useful thing I should add next.