u/Pipe-Silly

Does anyone here build apps for kids and have paying customers?

I'd love to invite you to do a guest post for my Substack series, where founders share how they got their first paid customers and what they learned along the way.

If that sounds like you (or you know someone who'd be a great fit), I'd love to chat!

I am currently working on the marketing for my current product, Product B.

For my previous product, Product A, I failed to get any paid customers. But I did collect a lot of free users’ emails, around 300 people in total. The painful part is that I never really took care of that email list.

Now I am wondering: for Product B, does it make sense to slightly reintroduce myself to that previous email list and gently introduce what I am building now? I cut the list into very small batches and tested different subject lines, but honestly, none of them worked.

Has anyone tried this before?

When you write blog posts to drive traffic to your product, where do you usually distribute them besides publishing on platforms like Medium or Substack? Do you have any personal hacks or strategies that have worked well for you?

https://preview.redd.it/v87m0to7m47h1.jpg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d192712e26bb14bdd13ba0724be6653a719c0adf

I launched a product called IdeaGrit:

https://ideagrit.foundersailab.com

It is a tool for pressure-testing ideas and helping you find the right hard thing to commit to.

IdeaGrit gives you a structured workflow, an actionable roadmap, and a pre-mortem based on 6 failed products with similar ideas. It helps surface red flags early, before you spend too much time, money, and energy building in the wrong direction.

Over the past few months, I have been part of an accelerator hub and have spoken with many founders about what they are building. I carefully listened to their ideas, and I kept having the same gut feeling: some ideas are naturally very hard.

For example, if you are building any kind of platform, marketplace, or community-based app, it is usually very difficult. A community product does not depend on one person only. It depends on everyone interacting with everyone else. That is a very hard thing to create and sustain.

At first, I thought this was just my very personal two cents. Then the other day, I listened to Lenny’s Podcast, and the guest mentioned something similar: if you look back over the past 17 years, there have been very few truly successful new platform-based apps. Thread is a special case because it was built on top of Instagram.

In that kind of situation, it might be better to start smaller, maybe with a WhatsApp group, a newsletter, or a very focused community first, instead of building the full platform from day one.

The same applies to some financial products. Some ideas naturally depend on the founder’s network, structural support, trust, or regulation. For example, something like a personal finance purse sounds simple on the surface, but the difficulty may be much deeper than it first appears.

When I asked founders in the accelerator hub whether they had already talked to an LLM about their ideas, many confidently told me yes, and the AI said their idea was doable.

But general LLM chatbots are trained to be helpful, polite, supportive, and validating. That creates what researchers call AI sycophancy. In simple words, the AI often wants to encourage you, not challenge you hard enough.

That is why I built IdeaGrit.

The product has already been tested with around 50 founders, both in person and online. Almost everyone told me it surfaced something interesting, something they had not thought about deeply enough before.

Any ideas you think are naturally hard to build?

Hello community,

First-time founder here, and I am very new to email marketing. I am trying to understand the logic behind sending marketing email sequences.

My product is credit-based, and everything is saved in my Supabase database. For example, free users get 5 free credits after signing up.

My question is: what user behavior should trigger the first marketing email?

For example:

Should I send the first email after a new user signs up but does not use any of the 5 free credits?

Or should I wait until the user has used some of the free credits, then send a reminder to encourage them to finish testing the product?

And if they use up all their free credits, should I send another follow-up email nudging them to consider purchasing more credits?

I am also wondering what a healthy time gap should be between each marketing email. I do not want to sound too salesy, but I do want to give users a gentle nudge at the right moment.

Would really appreciate any advice from people who have done this before.

Hello community,

I recently started two new series and I am actively looking for guests to contribute guest posts.

I am specifically looking for people building apps, web apps, Chrome extensions, or other SaaS products that genuinely moved the needle and managed to get paid users. I would love to hear how you did it, what worked, and what you learned along the way.

I am equally curious about people who built products that failed and are willing to share the story as well. The cost of ignoring failure is becoming one.

If you have ever built a product, whether it gained paying users or failed at some point, and you would like to contribute a guest post, please let me know. I would genuinely love to hear your story.

Hello community,

I recently started two new series and I am actively looking for guests to contribute guest posts.

I am specifically looking for people building apps, web apps, Chrome extensions, or other SaaS products that genuinely moved the needle and managed to get paid users. I would love to hear how you did it, what worked, and what you learned along the way.

I am equally curious about people who built products that failed and are willing to share the story as well. The cost of ignoring failure is becoming one.

If you have ever built a product, whether it gained paying users or failed at some point, and you would like to contribute a guest post, please let me know. I would genuinely love to hear your story.

"They Moved the Needle" just sent out the first issue.

What’s a product you built that didn’t work out? Everyone shares what worked. I’m equally curious about what didn’t.

If you’ve built something that didn’t take off, would you mind

#1. sharing the product, and

#2. in one sentence, what it was and why you think it didn’t work?

Good ideas are often counterintuitive. I’m curious what bad ideas look like.

I got 50 new subscribers in the past month, which honestly surprised me.

Two traits that helped me the most on Substack are simple: being open-minded and staying curious.

When you stop being defensive about your ideas, something shifts. You start to notice that everyone around you has something valuable you don’t have. And that becomes an opportunity to learn, not a threat.

Recently, I started a series called They Moved the Needle. I’m specifically looking for people who have built apps or web apps and actually have paying users—no matter how small or early. I genuinely want to learn how they got there.

What surprised me is that many people reached out and wanted to contribute guest posts.

It made me realize something simple:

If I help them win, I also win.