u/Impressive_Wheel_877

Hey everyone, I’m Blake, founder of TranX. We’re building Alice, an AI growth agent for B2B SaaS.

I’m looking for a few founders who are open to a mutual design partner setup.

The idea is pretty simple. We try each other’s products, give honest feedback, and share what is actually working or not working.

I’m especially interested in founders building around:

• Outreach
• Lead generation
• UGC
• Content creation
• Founder-led growth

These areas are interesting to me because they could also complement what we are building.

But I’m not limiting it to those categories. If you are building something else and think Alice could be useful for your SaaS, I’m happy to explore working together.

What we are currently focused on is helping B2B SaaS teams understand how they are being discovered, especially through AI search, and measure whether that visibility is actually turning into traffic and users.

This is not a sales pitch. I’m mainly looking for founder-to-founder collaboration, product testing, honest feedback, and potentially ways we can help each other grow!

If you are interested, comment below or DM me with what you are building.

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

Checked where my search impressions come from last week. 83% are people typing my brand name. Strangers with the problem I solve literally cannot find me.

Guess what I spent the whole month on? Polishing my onboarding flow.. lol

The thing that snapped me out of it: a funnel leaks in order.

1. Discovery — can anyone find you?
2. Perceivability — do they get it and trust it?
3. Activation — do they stick?

A leak upstream makes everything below it unjudgeable. You can't evaluate a signup page nobody visits. So there's exactly one leak worth fixing at any moment: the first one. Everything below it isn't broken, it's untested.

I knew this. I still spent a month one layer too deep, because shipping activation tweaks feels like progress and writing content feels like homework. Got annoyed enough that I built a morning check into my own system, which layer is leaking, the number, one action. First morning it ran, it told me the thing at the top of this post. Rude, honestly.

So: which layer is your first leak  and how do you actually know?
Do you use any tools or systems to track and monitor your funnel?

I'm building a system that runs growth for B2B SaaS founders, so I look inside a lot of GA4 accounts. The same three bugs keep showing up, and they all hit the same place: the visitors who actually sign up.

The login bounce
Someone finds you on LinkedIn, likes what they see, clicks "Sign in with Google". On the way into your app they pass through Google's login page, and GA4 thinks that login page sent them to you. So LinkedIn gets zero credit for the signup, and "accounts.google.com" shows up in your reports looking like a marketing channel. It's your receptionist signing for every package until ops decides the receptionist is your biggest supplier. On one account I checked, a third of all visits had this.

The subdomain break
Your marketing site lives on www, your app lives on app. When a visitor crosses over, GA4 sometimes loses track of them and starts counting them as a brand-new visitor who came from nowhere. The giveaway: GA4 says people are "arriving" on your login page out of thin air. Nobody has ever typed your login URL.

The self-referral
Your own website listed as a place your traffic comes from. That's your own number showing up on caller ID. Investigate.

Quick way to check: in GA4, look at which pages people land on and where they supposedly came from, over the last month. Quick fix for the first one: GA4 Admin → Data streams → Configure tag settings → "List unwanted referrals" → add the login domains. Takes a minute. It only fixes the future though. The past stays wrong forever, which is very GA4 of it.

Which one bit you? And any tools that find these for you?

I spent my first few months as a founder heads-down: building a product I genuinely believe in and making the site around it sharp. It felt like real progress, even a little pride.

Then it sank in that almost nobody could find any of it. I'd built a good shop and opened it on a street with no foot traffic.

For a founder, building the product turned out to be the easy half. Distribution is the brutal one, and nobody hands you a playbook for it...

Three questions I've been obsessed with since:

1. Can people even find us? Are we showing up in Google, and now in AI answers like ChatGPT and Perplexity?
2. When they land, do they get it? Or do they bounce, and where?
3. If they don't sign up, why not?

Every one of these is answerable. That's not the problem. The problem is the answers are scattered across GSC, GA4, and a handful of other tools, and stitching them together for even one question eats half a day.

And the part that actually wears me down: even after all that digging, I'm often not sure the thing i picked to work on actually moves growth. You open GA4 for the tenth time that week hoping a number moved. It didn't. And you still can't tell if the three days you just spent even mattered. You can burn a week on something that was never the real bottleneck, and nothing tells you you guessed wrong.

So i started building a system for myself that pulls these sources together and, more importantly, tries to tell me which of the three is actually my bottleneck right now, then writes me the fix, so I stop grinding on the wrong one. Going down that rabbit hole I've made plenty of mistakes, and each time I teach the system the lesson so it catches that one for me next time. Built my own playbook along the way too.

Anyway, that's my rabbit hole.

Curious what yours looks like: which of the three hurts most right now, how much time does it eat, and what tools or playbooks actually help you?

An old joke about the guy searching for his keys under a streetlight.  Someone asks if that's where he dropped them. "no, but the light's better here." lol

that was me for about four months. i kept tuning the signup page, because i built it and i could change it that afternoon. the actual leak was two floors up, in the dark.

here's the order i check things in now, which is roughly the reverse of the order i used to:

1. can anyone find my site at all?
i look at: impressions + CTR in search console, traffic from AI tools, cost per visit on anything paid.
what got me: my site was basically invisible to ChatGPT and i had no clue. i'd built it on Lovable back when it shipped client-side rendered sites (think they've changed since), so the AI crawlers would fetch a page, get an empty div, and leave. google renders javascript so my rankings looked completely normal. the AI bots mostly don't. so i just didn't exist over there and nothing anywhere told me.

2. do the people who land think it's for them?
i look at: visitor → signup rate, bounce by source.
what got me: broken tracking tags. some events firing twice, some not firing at all. so every "data-driven" decision i'd made for months was built on a number that wasn't real. i was also paying for ads bringing in people who were never going to buy, and the dashboard looked completely fine the whole time.

3. do the ones who sign up actually get anywhere?
i look at: activation rate, time to activation, trial → paid, day 7 retention.
being honest, i haven't been properly bitten by this one yet, not far enough along. but everyone i've talked to who is says the same thing: signups that never reach the moment that makes you worth paying for.

the order matters more than the list. i tuned a signup flow for weeks while nobody could find the site. polishing a room nobody walks into. felt extremely productive.

and i stopped reading raw numbers. "9% signup rate" on its own is like saying i ran a 9 minute mile. good? bad? depends entirely on whether i'm 12 or 45. 9% against a 3% category baseline is a win. 9% against 25% is where my whole problem lives.

curious which one bites hardest for people here. my guess is most of us are stuck on the first and completely convinced we're stuck on the second.

(i'm building something in this space now, so, biased. not linking it, the checklist above works fine without me. happy to share more)

I'm getting 0 in the AI Assistants default channel group for the month, while `sessionSource` for the same window clearly shows `chatgpt.com` and other sessions.

Before anyone asks: I know the channel launched May 13 2026 with no backfill , so I'm only looking at windows after that.

(Source: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9164320#05132026 )

So, for anyone who's checked their own property:

1. Are you seeing any sessions in that channel at all? Even a rough number helps.

2. If yes, does it roughly match what `sessionSource` shows for AI hosts, or is it a lot lower?

Mostly trying to work out whether my zero is normal or whether something's off on my end.

(I work on analytics tooling, which is why I'm chasing this, no link, just after real datapoints.)

We build in the AI-visibility space, and our scanner used to recommend llms.txt. After checking the evidence, we removed it from our own product. Why:

• Ahrefs analyzed 137k domains: 97% of llms.txt files never got a single request — from anything.
• Of the little traffic that existed, ~1% was AI retrieval bots. Mostly it's SEO audit tools reading them. The auditors are auditing each other.
• Google's Mueller, verbatim: "you can tell when you look at your server logs that they don't even check for it."

(Fairness: it's harmless to keep, and IDE/agent tooling does fetch it. Just don't expect citations from it.)

What actually has evidence behind it:

1. Server-rendered content — Vercel's crawler study confirmed no major AI crawler executes JavaScript. Client-side-only content doesn't exist to them.
2. Open crawler access — plenty of robots.txt files block GPTBot/ClaudeBot/PerplexityBot by accident via wildcard rules.
3. Structured Q&A schema — readable in the raw HTML they actually fetch.

Anyone got server logs showing real AI-bot hits on their llms.txt? Logs or it didn't happen.

(Disclosure: I build Alice, an AI growth agent, that's how I fell down this research hole. Not linking it.)

The hardest part of building isn't the building. It's that nobody uses the thing, and "get your first users" advice is mostly people selling courses about getting your first users.

So here's a straight proposal for a few of us building B2B SaaS (or close):

We become each other's first real users. Not "nice, following!" support. Actual use. I set up your product properly, use it for real, and send you the unfiltered "this confused me / this is broken / this is why I bounced" that you can't get from strangers. You do the same for mine.

Two things I think we all secretly need and rarely get:

1. Someone who'll actually onboard and tell you where they got lost.
2. Honest eyes from someone who's felt the exact pain of no users, so they won't sugarcoat it.

What I'm building is an AI growth agent (finds where your funnel is leaking users), so I can also give you a real read on your own signup funnel while I'm in there — free, whether or not we swap. Might as well be useful.

If you're building something and you're tired of feedback that isn't feedback: drop what you're working on below, one line on who it's for, and what you'd most want a fresh user to stress-test. I'll reply to everyone and we'll pair up.

Not fishing for customers here, and you don't need to be one of mine for this to be worth it. Worst case you get honest first-user feedback from someone who's felt the same pain. That's the whole deal.

I'll go first in the comments. 👇

I don't see many people post their actual weekly numbers review, just "track these 20 things" lists. So here's mine for our little B2B SaaS. Tear it apart, what would you cut, add, or care about more?

Split into 3 questions:

Can people find us?

• Impressions + CTR from Search Console. Are we showing up, do they click.
• How much traffic comes from ChatGPT/Perplexity referrals. Tiny right now but climbing, and honestly I can't tell if I'm even measuring it right.
• Cost per visit on paid. Quick gut check on spend.

Do they think it's for them?

• Visitor → signup rate. The one that pays rent.
• Bounce rate by source. Tells me which channels send tire-kickers.

Do they stick around?

• Activation rate + how long it takes them to get there.
• Trial → paid.
• Day 7 retention.

~8 things, once a week. I ignore a pile of vanity stuff (raw pageviews, lookin at you).

So for whoever else is wrestling their own growth numbers, founder, first marketer, team of one :-)

• Which of these matters most to you?
• What do you always check that I left out?
• What would you drop as noise?

Fair warning, I care about this way too much because it's kind of my job. Not selling anything, promise. Just want to know if my list is dumb.