u/ThaneBerkeley

I recently started collecting soccer cards.. never too late, right?

I tried a few apps to keep track of my collection, but none really worked for me. They often couldn’t find the exact card, even when I could find it on eBay myself. With all the different parallels, colours, numbered cards, autographs and sets, soccer cards seem especially difficult.

So I took some grouped photos of my collection and used AI to turn them into an overview with the player, set, parallel, serial number and an estimated range. It isn’t perfect yet and the info still need to be checked, but I was surprised by how extremely well it managed to identify from just a few photos.

I’m thinking about developing this into a proper app for myself, with things like individual card scans, automatic updates, history and alerts when a card changes a lot.

Does anyone else have the same problem? And if you used an app like this, what would be the most important feature for you?

I’m shaking.

For more than 2 years we've been working on our SaaS pretty much every single day.

And for a long time, it felt like we were doing a lot without really seeing the result.

Improving the product.
Writing blog posts.
Working on SEO and AI search visibility.
Submitting to directories.
Reaching out to affiliates.
Improving landing pages.
Fixing onboarding.
Talking to users.
Building new features.
Going back and improving old ones.

Nothing individually felt like the thing that suddenly changed everything.

But over the last few months, we've started seeing something different.

New (paying) users are coming in much more consistently, including on days where we're not actively pushing anything.

It finally feels like all those small things we've been stacking for the last 2 years are starting to grow.

We're nowhere near where we want to be yet, but seeing transactions coming in almost every day is a pretty great feeling after spending so long wondering if all the work would eventually pay off.

I think one of the biggest things I've learned is that SaaS growth can be incredibly delayed.

You publish a blog today.
Improve a page tomorrow.
Get listed somewhere next week.
Contact an affiliate a month later.

At the time, almost nothing happens.

Then at some point, all those tiny distribution channels start working together.

Still a lot to improve, but for the first time it feels less like we're trying to find traction and more like we're trying to build on traction.

For anyone who's been grinding away at their SaaS for a long time without seeing much movement, sometimes it really does just take longer than you hoped.

We're not using Stripe because of obvious reasons. So this is a screenshot of our own analytics/admin panel, excluding refunds.

I just launched Timegeist, a time tracker I wanted to make genuinely useful for solo founders and freelancers.

When you work alone, every tool seems to want another monthly subscription. Time tracking is useful, especially when that time eventually needs to become an invoice, but I don’t think you should have to pay just to complete that basic workflow.

So the Free plan isn’t a trial and doesn’t require a card. It includes:

• timer and manual logging
• clients, projects, tags and track time on tasks
• tasks list + kanban board
• OSX app
• iOS and Android app - about to submit, so coming soon
• reports and PDF/CSV exports
• calendar proposals
• 10 optional AI uses a month
• 3 branded invoices a month (incl. recurring invoices)

There are paid plans, so I’m not pretending the entire product is free. Pro is for people who need more AI usage, want to use MCP, unlimited invoices and their own branding. Team is for collaboration, roles and shared reporting.

But the basic idea is this: if you’re working solo with a few clients, you should be able to keep using Timegeist without paying.

Timegeist: https://timegeist.ai

I’d be interested to hear whether this covers the real solo workflow, or if there’s something obvious missing.

Fable has been something magical for me and my projects. In a few days it massively improved one of my products.. not just technically, but UX-wise. It proposed and fixed things Opus 4.8 or GPT 5.5 wouldn't catch in a lifetime.

I'm crying my eyeballs out.

I run two SaaS already. Both pay their hosting, one pays more than that. I just spent six months building a third, and I'm sitting here trying to figure out why I can't bring myself to post about it.

For two years I've been heads-down. Nights, weekends, full days when I should have been with friends or just resting. Two SaaS at the same time is a lot.

Building a third on top of that was the year my social life basically ended. There are people I cancelled on, conversations I let drop, friends I stopped calling back. I owe a lot of apologies and a lot of catch-up coffees.

The third one is an AI tool for corporate social media: upload brand docs, the AI learns your voice, generates posts/images, publishes them across 13+ platforms. I planned for 30 days. It took six months.

Here's what I built into it before getting a single paying user:

• AI content generation with brand voice matching
• An AI chat assistant with 21 tools (analytics, scheduling, brand knowledge, post creation, confirmations for risky actions)
• Autopilot mode that posts on its own using an AI-generated content strategy
• Brand knowledge extraction across 9 categories from PDFs, websites, text
• Daily industry intelligence pulled from a live data source
• Multi-platform publishing across 13 platforms
• Content calendar, approval queue, campaigns, social inbox
• Per-channel Stripe billing, monthly and annual
• Multi-tenant org switching, team invites, 2FA
• Weekly "learn from top posts" job that feeds back into generation

I typed that list out and felt sick.

I didn't do this on the other two. Those I shipped lean and learned in public. This one I just kept building. "Just one more feature." For months.

Here's the strange part: this one feels different in a way the other two never did. I use it myself. The AI does work I used to hate doing by hand.

I'm also tired in a way I haven't been before. Whatever happens next with this product, I'm taking my evenings back. Calling the people I drifted from. Saying yes to plans without doing the guilty math in my head about hours lost on a dev branch.

So if you've been here, two real questions:

1. When you've built something that meant more to you than your other products, did you actually launch it differently? Or did you launch it the same and let the result speak?
2. Has anyone here shipped lean on early products and then accidentally overbuilt the one that "felt different"? Did it work out, or did you have to cut it back?

Roast the list (and the SaaS). I think I can take it. The SaaS: FlyingToast.