u/Username_TBD18

I've founded a competitive intelligence saas, and am looking to improve SEO by getting more backlinks.

I was wondering if being cited by Wikipedia helps with that?

Obviously, a month-old saas with no paying customers doesn't warrant an entry of its own, and I'm not talking about spamming loads of links back to my site wherever I can squeeze them in. I was just wondering about carefully located references where they genuinely add value (for example on a page about a particular company, I would add a comment, and a cited link back to a relevant report generated by my saas).

Is this worth the effort of researching and building these reference links? Or is it just something that would get ignored by search engines?

I’m not saying I have all the answers. I’m not saying I know it all - I’m still learning. I just thought it would be useful to share since we see a lot of the same questions behind asked again and again.

1. Don’t ask for ideas, find them and experience them. Only then will you know them well enough to build a solution. Vibe coding means that a lot of the people who used to be customers are now your competitors.

2. Validate before building. You don’t need to spend months trying to get people to fill in surveys or building a waitlist, but at least do some research to ascertain whether people need it and and willing to pay for it. And remember - pain doesn’t automatically mean a willingness to pay. This step is not just about validation, it’s the start of the marketing process and finding out how to position your product and finding your ICP. It’s tempting to skip it and get on with building something, but don’t.

3. Price for the customers you want. Poor people don’t have a lot of money to spend. For example:

Indie developer: I don’t have a budget so I’m going to use products that don’t charge or I’m going to build my own work around.

Also indie developer: why is no one paying for my product?

Even then, cheap prices often means you get cheap customers. The ones that constantly email you for support, or try and haggle a better deal, or leave you a bad review because it’s not free. Sometimes the customer is not wanted.

4. Building a small business is not easy work. It’s a knife fight. You have a hundred competitors, and you have to hustle to get one over on them. Don’t be unethical, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be ruthless.

5. Have no budget? That’s fine, but you’re going to have to replace it with time. Can’t afford a particular solution, you’ll have to do it manually. Can’t afford ads, you’ll have to rely on outreach and SEO, neither of which work quickly - they compound.

6. Don’t expect immediate success. “If you build it, they will come” only works if you’re Kevin Costner building a baseball pitch. Building a business is 20% building, 70% marketing and 10% rethinking your life.

7. Remember this exchange from The Princess Bride:

“Get used to disappointment”

“Okay”.

You will fail. You will get discouraged. You will wonder what the point of it is.

Treat it as a learning experience, not the end. Most people think in terms of winning and losing. Successful people think in terms of winning and learning.

8. Plan and prioritise. You don’t need to worry about taxation on foreign income, or whether to set up an LLc before you have any paying customers.

9. Vibe coding doesn’t automatically mean your product is ‘slop’. What makes it slop is being lazy and treating the first iteration as the final product. If you’re vibe coding, you need to take on a lot of the responsibility that a dev would do - architecture, security, UX etc. You don’t need to be an expert, but you need to have a proper product management mindset and know what questions to ask. Sometimes this comes after Point 7.

Does anyone else have any nuggets of wisdom to share?

Everyday I see more posts asking people what problems they’re struggling with, what solution they’re looking for etc etc.

Please, just stop.

I know. The advice is always ‘solve a problem that people will pay for’. It’s good advice, but it means something else now.

AI means it’s absurdly easy to create solutions to problems. Not necessarily solutions that will be massively popular, but enough to solve that frustrating issue or that annoying workaround.

Basically, people can solve their own problems. The key is to be able to solve it better than they could (better workflow design, better UX, whatever). If you don’t understand the problem then you won’t be able to solve it well enough.

Asking people what their problem is means you don’t have enough experience of the problem to solve it. Get out there and experience some problems yourself.

As the title says - does anybody know any good youtube channels or podcasts aimed at, or about, solo founders?

I’m building a competitor intelligence tool, aimed at mid-level Saas companies. I need to know what works better as a value prop: saving money or time?

I’ve done a rough estimate for both, which do you think works best?

Save your teams more than 100 hours of competitor research each year

Or

For a team tracking three competitors, Vallience could save around £3,000 - £6,000 in staff time each year.

I could use both but I think that might be overkill?

Does anyone know whether email or LinkedIn is the best for cold outreach (either one would be personalised, so the volume isn’t a factor).

I’m not looking for “both”. I want to make the most of my limited time, so would rather focus on the one that has the best return on time invested.

I'm building a competitor intelligence tool (to remain nameless to avoid the whole self-promotion hassle).

For those people that actively research and monitor the competitors of their companies, what sort of things do you look at?

For the tool I'm building, there are currently two tiers:
Free - uses a custom web searches to find evidence across the web
Portfolio - as above but also uses APIs for social media comments, reviews and recruitment data to go deeper and get richer data.

It then uses Al to comb through all that mass of unstructured data and interpret it. The AI doesn’t think of the answer, it just interprets all the data to give you a view of what’s happening.

I'm thinking of expanding it further to include web traffic and employee sentiment.

For anyone who researches competitors as part of their job:
What information genuinely affects a commercial decision?
What do existing tools fail to tell you?
Would an interpreted report be useful, or would you still prefer the raw evidence?
At what point does this become something more useful than doing the research yourself?

Is there anything else I'm missing, or you'd like to see? Is it a stupid idea?

Any feedback gratefully accepted, and any especially funny insults will get an upvote as well.

I've just launched my saas Vallience. I've got a full time job, an intense family life, and little free time.

When I saw Symphony by Wix I thought it would be really useful, so signed up. For those who don't know, its a new product by Wix with a team of 5 AI agents that promises to automate a lot of the stuff that goes into running a business, in particular email outreach.

I thought this sounded promising, and is exactly what i need right now to make the best of my limited time. I know many of you are in the same boat, so thought I would share my experience.

After a week of using it, I wouldn't recommend it.

One of the big selling points is the memory - you tell it something once, and it remembers. The problem is that it doesn't. You start a new chat and you'll have to remind it of something, and this uses up your credits. One simple issue in particular kept reoccurring.

In terms of the email outreach, it did reasonably well at identifying the companies and the people to contact. I drafted an email for initial outreach. Then, before it sent, the AI added "I'm Maestro, an AI Assistant working with Username_TBD18 and...", which damages credibility and is basically just advertising itself on my dime. I didn't even realise until one of the emails bounced back as undeliverable, and it certainly didn't tell me it had amended the approved draft.

On top of that, the widgets on the home screen have little configurability. One told me I had to complete my set up even though I already have, one kept telling me to get a Wix website, and tasks that had been completed still showed as outstanding (although that could be because of the memory issue) and you can't manually delete them.

This is both a review of the product - in case any of you were tempted - and also a lesson in launching a product before it was ready.

Hi

I’m just exploring an idea to do with competitor analysis - what they’re up to, what their web traffic is like, what customers say etc.

I was just curious how people do this? Is it a collection of manual searches and specialist tools? Do you not bother? Or is there a particular solution you favour?

Thanks in advance

A common way to start marketing a new startup is create a landing page with a waitlist.

One question is how you get people to notice it in the first place? SEO isn’t appropriate as it’s more a long term thing. Cold calling and email takes too much time away from the building for a solopreneur. Reddit is likely to get you banned for promotion.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Over the last few days I tested a number of the leading AI "idea validators" using exactly the same startup idea. I deliberately chose a flawed business idea in order to see how these validators would handle it: Pets.com.

For anyone unfamiliar, Pets.com became one of the most famous dot-com failures despite operating in a huge, growing market. Selling pet food online sounds sensible, but heavy logistics, thin margins and customer acquisition costs made the economics extremely difficult. It famously went bankrupt less than a year after its IPO, despite being back by Amazon.

In other words, it's a great stress test.

Here's what happened.

• IdeaProof: Scored it 73 out of 100
• ValidatorAI: scored it 78 out of 100
• Foundra: Scored it 62 out of 100
• Dimeadozen: Scored it 97 out of 100

There was a clear pattern.

Almost every tool agreed on three things:

• the market is huge
• people like convenience
• you should proceed to MVP

None of those statements are wrong., but I don't think they're the right question.

The problem with Pets.com wasn't that the market didn't exist. The problem was that customer behaviour and the unit economics made the business model fundamentally difficult to scale. That's a much harder thing for AI to reason about - a huge market doesn't automatically make a good business. People like the convenience that comes with getting bulky items delivered to their home, but that doesn't mean they want a separate subscription for it. They just buy it alongside their groceries.

The most interesting result actually came from a tool that I built myself while experimenting with this space.

Rather than trying to answer: "Is this a good idea?", it tries to answer: "What does the available market evidence actually support?"

Looking at customer discussions, complaints, reviews and competitor behaviour, the conclusion wasn't "don't build this." It was something closer to: "There may be an opportunity, but only in narrow niches where delivery reliability or specialist products materially change customer behaviour. A general national pet-food subscription business probably isn't where the evidence points." (I'M paraphrasing here, obviously).

That's a very different conclusion.

It also explicitly listed the evidence it couldn't find, such as willingness-to-pay data, retention rates and price elasticity, instead of pretending it knew the answer.

I realised something while building it.

Maybe founders don't actually need another idea validator; there are already dozens of those. What they need is market intelligence that helps them think differently. If every AI tells every founder to build the same "AI meal planner for dog owners" or "subscription niche marketplace", then AI isn't helping founders innovate—it's encouraging everyone to converge on the same ideas.

The real value isn't telling founders what to build. It's giving them enough evidence to decide what not to build, where the hidden risks are, and where everyone else might be looking in the wrong place. Its about empowering them to innovate.

I'm curious what everyone else thinks. Has anyone here actually found an AI validator that changed their mind about a business idea for the better? Or do they mostly reinforce what you already wanted to hear?

Pricing should be simple. It’s not. It’s a matter of psychology and presentation than maths.

Price should be a proxy for value, but people are lousy at judging value. They generally need a comparison - either a direct competitor or previous experience or similar. Something that helps them decide ‘this is what is should cost’.

However, you arguably don’t want that, as it allows you more freedom around margin. You need to position your product in a way that removes their ability to judge that.

This is where I am now. I’ve created my product, but am establishing a new niche for it because there is no direct competitor - there are those that offer more in a bundle deal, or offer less, but nothing identical.

So how do you come up with pricing? I’m experimenting now by offering a limited time ‘early adopter’ offer, but how long should I make that limited time, and where do I go afterwards?

So you’ve shipped your product and now, just like everyone else you’ve realised you’ve done it the wrong way around and you now need to start marketing asap.

Organic social media content on umpteen different channels. Cold emails. Blog posts. Maybe paid ads.

Every day.

Then one day you realise that you’re spending 80% of your time on that activity, with the rest of the time just hitting refresh on your analytics.

Anyone else feel like this?

I’ve seen a lot of posts recently with people advertising their ‘AI co-founder’ or ‘AI idea validator’. Something that helps wannabe founders judge their idea and provide advice on getting it off the ground.

If you want to take advice from AI, that’s one thing. Selling AI advice is something completely different.

It’s a tempting niche - people used to spend a lot of money on business advisors/consultants and AI can do it all at a fraction of the cost, so why not?

The problem is that those business advisors came with something that AI doesn’t have: accountability. If your advisor gives you dodgy information that costs you money, you have a route to compensation, usually because the advisor had some sort of professional indemnity insurance. Boring, conventional, business stuff.

AI doesn’t come with this. If you sell your AI advice, then you’re the one in the line of fire if that advice isn’t any good.

So ask yourself: how did your AI bot arrive at its conclusion? How did it produce its advise? How did it calculate its score? Because if you can’t explain that, then you have no control over the ‘advice’ it’s giving to your customers.

Still, it’s not like AI ever hallucinates or tells you something that’s not true, right? So what could go wrong?

This is one of those things that the ‘Chase your dream’ crowd never talk about.

On holiday/vacation and still dealing with bugs.

Both the software kind and the ones you find crawling all over the balcony.

I’ve made some changes to the site.

One was simple - create a free snapshot of the full report so people can see the basic outcome of the market assessment, as an attempt to improve the sales funnel.

Others were for SEO/GEO reasons and as part of my strategy to forge a ‘thought leadership’ position in the market opportunity intelligence niche that I’m trying to create. I created machine-readable versions of some pages like pricing. I also created a content management system for blog posts and downloadable resources.

The first white paper has just been uploaded - ‘Market Intelligence for Founders’, available for free on the resources page of the site. Link is in the profile if anyone is interested.

It’s too early to see what, if any, impact any of these changes will have, but it’s definitely an improvement on what I’m offering.

Current metrics: 417 unique visitors. About 20% of visitors navigate to the input form, so the bounce rate is fairly low, there’s a lot of curiosity at least. Still no sales.

One interesting thing I’ve learned while building my startup is that your first idea of who the customer is often isn’t quite right.

I originally built my product assuming it was for people who had just come up with a startup idea and wanted to research whether it was worth pursuing.

After talking to founders, I’m starting to think that’s actually one of the hardest groups to sell to. When you’ve just had an idea, it’s easy to fall in love with it and assume it’ll be different. People who have had a ‘great’ business idea don’t immediately carry out a market assessment. They’re not the wrong customer, but they’re the probably not in the best mindset to sell a market research tool to even if it genuinely would benefit them.

The people who seem more likely to value market research are those making a significant decision:
deciding whether to pivot, choosing between two customer segments, entering a new market , preparing to spend money on development or getting ready to raise investment.

The common thread isn’t the *type* of founder—it’s the moment they’re in. They’re about to commit time or money, and they’re looking for evidence rather than opinions. I should be targeting an event, not a customer profile.

It’s made me rethink customer discovery. Instead of asking “Who is my ideal customer?”, I’m starting to ask “What event has just happened in their journey that makes this problem urgent?”

I’m curious whether anyone else has found their target audience shifted as they started talking to real users.