u/KUSHGILIT

For the last few months I've been building a SaaS product as a solo developer.

I spent most of my time thinking about architecture, features, edge cases, browser extensions, monitoring infrastructure, and making sure everything worked.

Then I launched it.

And almost nobody used it.

The funny thing is that the technical problems were solvable. If something broke, I could fix it.

The distribution problems feel much harder.

Getting someone to visit a website is hard.

Getting them to sign up is harder.

Getting them to understand the product is harder still.

One tester recently pointed out an onboarding issue that seemed obvious in hindsight but I had completely missed because I knew the product too well.

It made me realize that building software and getting people to use software are two completely different skills.

For the developers here who have launched side projects or SaaS products:

What was the biggest thing you got wrong when trying to get your first users?sier than getting the first user.

Over the last few months I've been looking at how teams keep track of competitor pricing changes, feature launches, product updates, and messaging shifts.

What surprised me is that most solutions seem to stop at:

"Something changed."

That's it.

A CSS tweak, a layout change, a new feature launch, a pricing update — they all end up looking like another alert in a growing pile of alerts.

The result is that someone still has to investigate manually and figure out:

• What actually changed?
• Is it important?
• Does anyone on the team need to know about it?

Maybe I'm looking at the problem the wrong way, but it feels like we've gotten very good at detecting changes and not nearly as good at understanding them.

For teams that actively monitor competitors:

What's your current process?

Do you rely on tools, manual checks, internal reports, or something else?